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206 Chapter 6 The Engineers’ Revenge, the Age of Kali Kipling’s Bridges and the End of Jungles “The Bridge-Builders”: Taming the River Far from the cantonment garden was an India that was just as important to the construction of Kipling’s Anglo-Indian homeliness: the India of immense engineering feats, particularly railway bridges and dams. These edifices were necessarily large in order to span rivers that dwarfed anything in Europe, and they seemed to require a new vocabulary of awe. As we will see in Kipling’s “The Bridge-Builders,” colonial reason holds sway in the form of engineering that principally intrudes upon the lair of that sleeping giant of a river, the Ganges . This story, which has attracted scholarly attention from various disciplines and is often judged to be one of his best, was originally published in 1893 and included in Kipling’s 1898 collection The Day’s Work.1 It recounts the Public Works Department’s completion of a great bridge in northern India that would soon bear “the first train-load of soldiers.” Part of the story is based on Kipling’s 1887 article for the Civil and Military Gazette on a new Sutlej River bridge. James Richard Bell, the living model for Findlayson, the story’s chief engineer, later said that the tale was “a farrago of bridge-building stories told to R. K. at various times.”2 In “The Bridge-Builders” (hereafter BB), Kipling itemizes the bridge’s epic proportions in celebration of the genius of its two long-suffering engineers and their trusty Indian assistant. But magnificent and sturdy as this engineering wonder is, it barely survives the sudden onslaught of a rain-gorged river in full flood. Kipling devotes a significant portion of the story—fifteen of forty pages—to Chief Engineer Findlayson’s opiate dream, in which Hindu gods and river creatures debate the dangers and virtues of the bridge.3 The extra-human council shows, on one level, that this engineering marvel of the British Raj com- the engineers’ revenge, the age of kali 207 mands the attention of even natural and spiritual elements that normally elude European perception. As Michael Adas puts it, “The railway bridge itself, spanning the mighty Ganges, which for millennia had been one of the main sources of Indian civilization, symbolizes the British capacity to reshape the Indian environment in order to increase its productivity.”4 This is certainly one irrefutable reading of the tale. On another level, however, the dream, by deferring to certain features of the romanticism and jungle imagery I have been examining, presents a view of industry as out of sync with the land. Whereas the bridge will surely “facilitate the movement of travelers and products for market,” the narrative suggests that it will also destroy the elemental world of which Kipling wrote so lovingly in other short stories and in Kim—a world of magic and nature.5 The tale is thus yet another example of Anglo-Indian ambivalence, the bridge itself a symbol of connection as well as transgression. For reshaping the Indian environment necessarily means destroying something in the process. Kipling immediately introduces us to Chief Engineer Findlayson, whose “years of disappointment and danger” are seemingly behind him. Enticed by the possibility of further rewards (he expected the title of Commander of the Indian Empire), and relying on his quintessential English resourcefulness and determination , Findlayson heroically tries to tame the Ganges River’s awful force by bridging it. Crucially, Findlayson’s idea of home, an issue typically built into colonial narratives tied to innate Englishness, proves to also be invested in the Indian landscape he loves. Home, for Findlayson, thus proves to be simultaneously “out there” and “here,” generating a cognitive split that is realized in his hallucinogenic dream that Peroo, the culturally hybrid (and equally intrepid) Indian assistant, facilitates and that forms the heart of the tale. Kipling also introduces us to the bridge itself, and to its work crew, a description worth quoting at length since it is a good example of Kipling’s wonderfully detailed prose as well as an important contrast to later parts of the story: Findlayson, C.E. [Chief Engineer], sat in his trolley on a construction-line that ran along one of the main revetments—the huge stone-faced banks that flared away north and south for three miles on either side of the river—and permitted himself to think of the end. With its approaches, his work was one...

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