Kipling's Scriptural Paradoxes for Imperial Children

Who shall doubt . . .[T]hat Joseph's sudden riseTo Comptroller of SuppliesWas a fraud of monstrous sizeOn King Pharaoh's swart Civilians?Thus the artless songs I singDo not deal with anythingNew or never said before.As it was in the beginningIs to-day official sinning,And shall be for evermore.

(Kipling, Verse 4)

What should be the reader's attitude toward the racist, irreverent speaker of Rudyard Kipling's "A General Summary" (quoted above), who, in a parody of the Anglican liturgy, derides the British government's "official sinning," "the swart [non-Caucasian] Civilians," and the biblical account of Joseph? In 1886, Andrew Lang recommended these verses to the Radicals (qtd. in Green 34). In 1891, he praised Kipling's eye for the "seamy," self-destructive side of imperialism: "When our empire has followed that of the Moguls, future generations will learn from Mr. Kipling's works what India was under English sway" (qtd. in Gilbert 2). In another religiously flavored critique, one of the voices in Kipling's poem "What the People Said" comments of Mogul and British alike that "God raiseth them up and driveth them forth" (Verse 66). We see from this reference, as we do from the example of Lang, who prefaces his 1891 remarks with John 3:8, that references to God and the Bible were still one common way of discussing major historical concerns. But in Kipling's works, for his own ecumenical purposes, the author parodies and subverts the usual practice, not merely in the multilayered complexities and contradictions of "seamy" adult works but also in equally paradoxical ones for children: The Jungle Books (1894), Kim (1901), Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), and Rewards and Fairies (1910).

The problem is how to reconcile Kipling as subversive with his other reputation as supporter of empire. According to C. S. Lewis in a lecture of 1948, "The earliest generation of Kipling's readers regarded him as the mouthpiece of patriotism and imperialism" (qtd. in Gilbert 101). This claim ignores the contrary views of Lang and many Anglo-Indians, including one who described Kipling as "a subversive pamphleteer given to criticising his betters" (qtd. in Wilson 112). Nonetheless, only recently have such books as Sadrah Kemp's Kipling's Hidden Narratives (1988) and Zohreh Sullivan's Narratives of Empire (1993) acknowledged how fully Kipling represented both the carnivalesque and the authoritarian forces within colonialism. These critics deconstruct him into an author of self-contradiction and incertitude, leading to "impasse" (Sullivan 126).

Actually, however, the binary impulses toward egalitarianism and authoritarian hierarchy do not cancel each other. Rather, they cooperate (as Homi Bhabha theorizes) in "a negotiation (not a negation) of oppositional and antagonistic elements" (22). As Frantz Fanon remarks in The Wretched of the Earth, the colonial discourse could be "Manichean . . . [denouncing the local culture and] paint[ing] the native as a . . . quintessence of evil"(33).¹ Maintenance of empire, however, required not merely colonists as "Manichean" inquisitors but also as self-sacrificing, parental figures, such as W. E. Gladstone, who was perceived as dropping vague hints about future home-rule (Parry 11). Without each other, subversion brings dissolution and authoritarian order implosion. Between the two comes the dull, moderate prose of official, monologic discourse, trying to maintain balance and status quo within the empire.

In a different but related manner, Kipling too is paradoxical: he does not blend but juxtaposes binary opposites. Among his models for this antithesis was the Bible itself. Virtually all studies note Kipling's nearly ubiquitous interweaving of scriptural allusion with his own text, but he also learned from the Bible the conjunction of seeming contradictions. Proverbs 26:4-5, for instance, advises both "Answer not a fool according to his folly" and "Answer a fool according to his folly." Isaiah 2:4 speaks of beating "swords into plowshares," and Joel 3:10 urges, "Beat your plowshares into swords." In recommending to a rich man that he "sell that thou hast, and give it to the poor" (Matt. 19:21), Jesus deems salvation for the wealthy to be as unlikely as it is...