Kipling & the Native-Born

ELT 47 : 1 2004 Russia in 1812. "Ithuriel's sword" (596:16) refers to an angel in Paradise Lost (1667) who searched for Satan armed with a spear that exposed deceit. "Have done the state some service" (232:14 up) quotes Othello, 1604 (5.2.338), "the plot thickens" (498:13-14 up) is from the Duke of Buckingham's The Rehearsal (1663), "a world before the flood" (149:7-8 up), echoing Genesis 6:4, quotes Dryden's "Epistle to Congreve" (1693): "the giant race before the flood." "Junius' letters" (67:10 up) were mysteriously anonymous letters, published in 1769-72, that bitterly attacked the British government. "Beyond the dreams of avarice" (569:last-570:l) quotes Samuel Johnson (April 4,1781) in Boswell's Li/è (1791). "Less than fifteen years ago the whole Soudan was just one pigstye of blood and butchery and fire" (162:16-17) refers to the Mahdi revolt that lasted until 1898. Kipling's lines: "The sons of the Suburbs were carefully bred / And quite unaccustomed to strife" (399:2-3 up) echo the anonymous, undated and popular "Abdullah Bulbul Amir": "The sons of the prophet are brave men and bold, / And quite unaccustomed to fear." And the passage "I associated . . . wayside temple" (583:8-12), in his revealing letter of October 22, 1919 to the French critic André Chevrillon about his early life, reappears on the first pages oÃ- Something of Myself (1937). These additional annotations illuminate Kipling's method and ideas. He confessed that he habitually stuffed into his letters, "unbeknownst, all manner of allusions and references and cross-references that really don't show up at all unless you hold the texture at a certain angle." JEFFREY MEYERS ________________ Berkeley, California Kipling & the Native-Born John McBratney. Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space: Rudyard Kipling's Fiction of the Native-Bom. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. xxvii + 224pp. $39.95 JOHN MCBRATNEYS PURPOSE in this fine critical text is to examine "a figure [in Kipling's imperial fiction] who is neither clearly European nor non-European and who, because of his unusual, inbetween status, has received scant critical attention." By this, he means principally the white Creole, born in the sub-continent, who is "a product of British and Indian influences." For McBratney, this figure demonstrates a crucial fault-line in Kipling's thinking about empire. On the one hand, the latter characteristically reinforces the dominant "typological " strains of Victorian raciology (of the imprint of which on 100 BOOK REVIEWS Kipling's thinking McBratney provides an assured account), displaying a tendency to think in essentialist and hierarchical ways about cultural identity. On the other, however, Kipling also elaborates an ethnographic conception of identity which corresponds to the model of "selffashioning " soon to be inaugurated by figures like Malinowski. McBratney argues persuasively that this conflict is played out most intensely, and with the greatest cultural/political stakes, in the figure of the "native-born." In a text distinguished by an adroit and reliable use of a variety of cultural theories, it is McBratney's recourse to anthropology which provides his main conceptual scaffolding and which produces many of his best insights. In this regard, Victor Turner's work on liminality provides the major interpretative grid. McBratney argues that throughout his Indian writing, Kipling is concerned with constructing "felicitous spaces" in which "the [Creole] initiate is stripped of his normal identity and assumes a 'betwixt and between' selfhood in a setting of egalitarian 'communitas' with other initiates. Within these liminal spaces ostensibly free of invidious racial distinctions, the native-born strives to perform unorthodox, cross-cultural identities." In doing so, "the nativeborn " attempts to "fulfill the two roles Kipling had in mind for him: to serve the Empire with unprecedented ability and to perform a novel kind of [cosmopolitan] imperial citizenship." The application of Turner's theory, in particular, enables McBratney to conduct a rigorous and largely convincing argument about the importance of Kipling's fictions of "the native-born" to his imperial writing more generally, which he demonstrates to be a consistent concern from the mid-1880s until the years immediately preceding World War One. He tracks the figure of the native-born from...