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3 Conversions and Reversions Kipling and the missionaries A famous man responds to an invitation to send a message of support to a conference on foreign missions. The date is 16 October 1895. Dear Sir, I am in receipt of your very courteous favour of the 11th: inst: To tell the honest truth, no letter that I could write would in any way assist your cause for my views on foreign missions are not such as would be accepted by any conference. It is my fortune to have been born and to a large extent brought up among those whom white men call ‘heathen’; and while I recognize the paramount duty of every white man to follow the teachings of his creed and conscience as ‘a debtor to do the whole law,’ it seems to me cruel that white men, whose governments are armed with the most murderous weapons known to science, should amaze and confound their fellow creatures with a doctrine of salvation imperfectly understood by themselves and a code of ethics foreign to the climate and instincts of those races whose most cherished customs they outrage and whose gods they insult. This is a matter that has been very near to my heart and I thank you for having afforded me an opportunity to testify. Very sincerely yours Rudyard Kipling1 Why did Kipling dislike missionaries? One kind of answer to this question is provided by David Gilmour: Kipling’s attitudes to religious missionaries were 1. Written from Naulakha, Vermont. Gillespie was secretary to the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the USA. Rudyard Kipling, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, 3 vols., ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Macmillan, 1990) I: 205–06. P023-052 08/4/23, 16:09 23 24 Eastern Figures inherited from his father Lockwood Kipling, who ‘used to scoff at “warm evangelical gush” and “the pernicious nonsense purveyed by the ecclesiastical wind-baggeries”’.2 But if we investigate further the figure of the missionary in Kipling’s writing, we will be led inevitably to consider also that other figure, the convert, for they constitute each other; missionaries make converts, but the idea or hope of a convert brought the missionary into being, and into the field, in the first place. A debate and drama about mission and conversion is one of the keys to the whole project of the European empires in the East, as well as a crucial and ever-present theme in Kipling’s writing, from the earliest Indian fiction to the stories about St Paul in his last collection of tales, ‘The Manner of Men’ and ‘The Church that was at Antioch’ in Limits and Renewals (1932). The convert is different from the missionary, not in an opposite way, but as an interlocutor, though not an equal one. And as the Western missionary speaks to and about actual and potential converts, he or she is involved in another conversation too, sometimes a fractious one, with a different kind of Westerner, one who, like Kipling himself, is skeptical about conversion or hostile to it. The dramatis personae of conversion and reversion include the missionary, the pagan, the convert, the anti-missionary, and the apostate. The story, or the first part of the story, begins at the beginning of Plain Tales from the Hills, Kipling’s first book of stories. He opened that volume with ‘Lispeth’, a tale that had first appeared in the Civil and Military Gazette in November 1886. The story takes place in the Kotgarh Valley at the foot of the Himalayas, and tells of a Hill-girl who is brought up in the household of the English missionary chaplain, is disappointed in her love for a handsome English globetrotter, and returns in the end to her own people and religion. The pattern of conversion and reversion, the boundary that is crossed and recrossed, was one that interested Kipling extremely throughout his career. It provides the structure for many of his narratives, with particularly intricate variations in his Indian novel Kim, a story in which Lispeth the Hill-girl, later in life, puts in an appearance as the Woman of Shamlegh, who has no love for Sahibs. When Lispeth’s parents die in a cholera epidemic, the child is taken into the Mission household and grows up as ‘half servant, half companion’ to the Chaplain’s wife. The ‘child of nature’, in the missionary formula, has become by baptism a ‘child of grace’. Hybrid in status, she is unsettling...

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