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2 Hinterland Hunter in the grass: A Kipling story How should we enter the Hinterland? Step by step, circumspectly, if at all. An unsigned story entitled ‘Bubbling Well Road’, just 1500 words long, appeared in the Civil and Military Gazette, an English-language newspaper published in Lahore in British India, on 18 January 1888. It begins with a geographical orientation. ‘Look out on a large scale map the place where the Chenab river falls into the Indus fifteen miles or so above the hamlet of Chachuran.’1 The tale that follows is a first-personal narrative about an unpleasant experience that befalls an Englishman when he enters a patch of tall junglegrass , at a place called Arti-Goth, with the intention of shooting some wild pig for sport. We will follow this man, step by step. The story-teller does not give his name. Although we know that the author of this story was the Gazette’s precocious assistant editor, the twenty-two-year-old Rudyard Kipling, it would be reckless as well as confusing to name the narrator Kipling. But he must have a name, so I shall call him Hunter. ‘Five miles west of Chachuran lies Bubbling Well Road’, Hunter continues, establishing his story’s credentials by embedding it in a verifiable geography and in the normal tense for non-fictional description or topography.2 Realism often establishes a shared epistemological regime with the map, the almanac and the calendar. ‘Five miles west of Chachuran,’ he repeats, ‘is a patch of the plumed jungle grass, that turns over in silver when the wind blows, from ten to twenty feet high and from three to four miles square’ (266). Hunter has the naturalist’s 1. Rudyard Kipling, Life’s Handicap [1891], ed. A. O. J. Cockshutt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 266. Page references in the text are to this edition. 2. Kipling’s Arti-Goth road is not to be confused with (but may be named after) the more famous Bubbling Well Road which ran through the International Settlement in Shanghai. P009-022 08/4/23, 16:08 9 10 Eastern Figures eye, he pays attention too to the aesthetics of the patch of tall grass, but he also takes note of its dimensions, much as a surveyor might appraise a piece of land. Pausing to explain that a gosain or priest lives in the middle of the patch, a sinister one-eyed figure of great age and feral habits, Hunter recounts how one day he decided to enter the grass with his gun and his dog, because local villagers told him that a sounder or herd of wild pig had been seen to go in there. ‘To enter jungle-grass is always an unwise proceeding, but I went, partly because I knew nothing of pig-hunting, and partly because the villagers said that the big boar of the sounder owned foot long tushes [tusks]. Therefore I wished to shoot him, in order to produce the tushes in after years, and say that I had ridden him down in fair chase’ (266). He enters the tall grass, in other words, because he is inexperienced, ignorant, vain and dishonest, in a quest for a sporting trophy which he wants to pass off in later years as the product of his bravery and skill; for killing a wild pig with a double-barrelled rifle is less risky and glamorous than pursuing it on horseback and spearing it — the sport of pig-sticking, particularly enjoyed by military sportsmen in British India. Hunter as narrator casts himself then in the role of the aspiring miles gloriosus, the boastful soldier who is really a coward, and prepares readers to see him humiliated and punished for this unsportsmanlike action. (Horseback sports are for the equestrian classes, which probably makes Hunter a class imposter too.) It seems we are in for a comedy of self-deprecation. Hunter takes his gun and enters into the hot, close patch, accompanied only by his dog, who is called Mr Wardle after the sporting gentleman in The Pickwick Papers. But once man and dog are in the interior, things start to go wrong, in a manner familiar from more heroic explorer narratives. The dog can negotiate the thick grass tolerably easily, ‘but I had to force my way,’ says Hunter, ‘and in twenty minutes was as completely lost as though I had been in the heart of Central Africa’ (266). Readers of this story in the Gazette would have...

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