More than any other writer of British India, Rudyard
Kipling epitomises what Trinh-Minh-ha called “both-in-one insider/outsider
tendencies”, the perspective which makes his work straddle between different
and multiple allegiances. Born in Bombay, a white, pro-imperialist yet at the
same time sceptical of imperial designs, Kipling registers ambivalence in his
writings which provides crucial insights on the cross-cultural encounter
between the colonizers and the colonized. This paper investigates the role of
censorship in Kipling’s short stories in epitomising this highly fraught
terrain of colonial encounter. If writing is unspeakably concerned with
portraying truth, his Indian short stories (1880-1902) reveal an ambiguous
space of vitalizing his writing as symbolic of being a hybrid object of
interracial origins. Concerned overtly with power and identity, these stories
encompass an ideologically contested embodiment of an imperial critique.
This paper attempts to examine the relationship
between writing, agency and the body and how language or words define and shape
the world. How words in their remoteness and abstractness connotes the material
world in all its complexity. Moving beyond the inescapable perspective of
Kipling as a children’s writer, his stories signify an agency and political
responsibility through the contours of the body and their conflicting
relationship with censorship, prohibition and retribution. His stories embody a
pluralistic account of the negotiation and transaction that took place on
account of the colonial encounter, one which enables to examine how the
transmutation of language sought to recover a world in all its myriad
complexity. This paper in reading the words on the page argue for a nuanced
account of the relationship between writing, body and political responsibility,
to propose a profoundly complex articulation of a writer’s concern with
language and the networks of power.
Ms. Indrani Das Gupta is a Research Scholar with the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, India. She may be contacted at ranid66@ymail.com.
Ms. Indrani Das Gupta is a Research Scholar with the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, India. She may be contacted at ranid66@ymail.com.