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Kipling’s Diasporic Identity
This page last updated 17 June 2007
This essay will focus on the notion of Diasporas, in relation to
Rudyard Kipling and specifically regarding ‘Lispeth’ and ‘Kidnapped’
from Plain Tales from the Hills. By focusing on this notion I will try
to read Kipling’s short stories against the grain and so show their
potential hybridity, but also their limitations.
Diasporas is seen as ‘the voluntary or forcible movement of peoples
from their homelands into new regions’ and as such it ‘is a central
historical fact of colonisation’ (Key Concepts, 68-9). Generally a
diasporic identity is attributed to the colonised subject, such as the
Africans affected by the slave trade or Indians under British imperial
rule. However, I will suggest that the coloniser is not only the
subject enforcing the development of Diasporas, but that he or she also
becomes an object affected by the ideologies concerning diasporic
development.
In this case I would argue that Kipling developed a diasporic
identity due to his position within the British imperial enterprise.
Born in India in 1865, Kipling was received into the influential
Anglo-Indian middle class. In line with British superiority, Kipling
was sent to Britain before his sixth birthday to receive his formal
education, in 1878 he entered a public school in North Devon, and in
1882 he returned to India to take up a position as a trainee
journalist. In consequence, Kipling trained as an imperial subject
within the discourse of the British Empire; the discourse he later used
to describe and represent India and her subjects.
This causes problems of discursive representation and linguistic
hybridity, manifested in a sense of in-between ness that can be located
throughout Kipling’s writing, as exemplified in ‘Lispeth’. The
character of Lispeth is a product developed at Chinua Achebe’s cultural
crossroads (PSR, 143) as an amalgamation of Christian classicism and
the savage Hill-woman. In effect, Lispeth’s Otherness excludes her from
either society: ‘Her own people hated her because she had, they said,
become a white woman and washed herself daily; and the Chaplain’s wife
did not know what to do with her’ (PTH, 7-8). Ironically, Lispeth is
positioned superficially in both cultures, since she is always seen as
the construct of the dominant cultures counterpart. For example, to the
Chaplain’s wife Lispeth will always at heart be an infidel (PTH,11).
This notion is supported by the texts discourse, which represents
Lispeth as a child; emotively and linguistically. In consequence, it is
probably no coincidence that Lispeth’s christened name; Elizabeth is
reduced to the childish lisp of Lispeth in the Hill, or pahari,
pronunciation (PTH, 7). Her childish identity is developed through the
exaggerated and naïve feelings she holds for the Englishman, who by
mocking her feelings expresses his superiority: ‘he found it very
pleasant to talk to Lispeth, and walk with Lispeth, and say nice things
to her, and call her pet names while he was getting strong enough to go
away. It meant nothing at all to him, and everything in the world to
Lispeth’ (PTH, 9).
This quotation shows the limitations of hybridity in Kipling’s
text; he does not allow for a development of cultural exchange between
English and Indian society. Therefore Lispeth has to revert back to her
past as a Hill-woman, an inevitability which has been implied
throughout the story by statements such as: ‘it takes a great deal of
Christianity to wipe out uncivilised Eastern instincts’ and notions of
biological savagery (PTH, 9).
‘Kidnapped’ develops this theme further by introducing a fear of
miscegenation. However feigned or real this notion is it plays on a
number of racial stereotypes, suggesting the incompatibility of an
interracial union. Although, Miss Castries seems to be of Spanish
birth; she has a Spanish complexion and her middle name is Saulez (PTH,
98-9), Kipling does not support a union between two colonising races.
Instead he advocates Peythroppe’s marriage to ‘a sweet pink-and-white
maiden, on the Government House List’ (PTH, 101). The impropriety of
the union is shown by Peythroppe’s infliction of madness, which seems
to be a result of his connection to Miss Castries and her family.
Kipling even implies Peythroppe’s destruction and hellish descent: ‘you
cannot account for the mania except under a theory directly
contradicting the one about the Place wherein marriages are made’ (PTH,
99).
To prevent racial hybridity Kipling suggests the establishment of a
Matrimonial Department under the management of the Director General of
Education (PTH, 101). This is a new form of hegemonic control where
British and English subjects are educated to consent to the boundaries
of their own culture.
However, the inconsistencies and disruptions in the text suggest
that Kipling cannot be read as a straightforward racist, I would argue
that this is denied by his participation in the diasporic movements
generated by colonialism in which he developed his own distinctive
style which both preserve and often extend and develop originary
cultures (Key Concepts, 70). Therefore there is a lack of unity in
Kipling, at times even the feeling of superficiality, as in ‘Lispeth’.
By lying to Lispeth the Chaplain and his wife become a metaphor for the
corruption in Anglo-Indian society, which Lispeth seems to escape by
going back to her own people (PTH, 11).
In contrast, by disrupting the pastoral image of innocence, implied
by life as a Hill-woman, with the depiction of Lispeth’s violent
husband the story is further complicated. Kipling’s social critique is
thus a double edged sword, which uses the voice of the irrational, such
as Mrs Hauksbee in ‘Kidnapped’. This woman, the most wonderful in India
(PTH, 99), becomes a symbol of the strength of the unconventional as
she interferes in Anglo-Indian society. However the strength of Mrs
Hauksbee’s depiction is also its weakness, since she becomes a figure
of fun who speaks with the lash of her riding whip between her teeth
(PTH, 99).
There is thus a sense of hybridity in many of Kipling’s characters
as he seems to realize the interdependence and the mutual construction
of the subjectivities of the colonizer and the colonized (Key Concepts,
118). The next step for Kipling would have been to create a creolized
version of his writing; to have modified and let himself be modified by
indigenous cultures, which he came into contact with (Key Concepts,
70). There is a slight attempt at such a project by the usage of Indian
terms, expressions and names. However, this is not extended and one
could argue that Kipling expands his mastery over the colonized by
using indigenous expressions to write his representation of their
story.
The limitation to Kipling’s diasporic identity is then that he
fails to question essentialist models, indeed he seems to enforce ‘the
ideology of a unified, ‘natural’ cultural norm’ (Key Concepts, 70)
instead of interrogating it. This norm establishes British culture
firmly at the centre, while Indian culture finds itself displaced at
the margins. In consequence Kipling can feel free to write about and
represent India since at the centre he has acquired discursive
dominance. By occupying this position Kipling might have felt a sense
of obligation towards his readership, after all he was writing within
the empire for the empire.
I would thus suggest that Kipling’s diasporic identity enabled him
to comment and criticise British and Indian society simultaneously.
Therefore, Kipling can open ‘Kidnapped’: ‘We are a high-caste and
enlightened race, and infant-marriage is very shocking, and the
consequences are sometimes peculiar; but, nevertheless, the Hindu
notion – which is the Continental notion, which is the aboriginal
notion – of arranging marriages irrespective of the personal
inclinations of the married, is sound’ (PTH, 97). However the textual
hybridity of this process shows, as stated by Robert Young ‘that we are
still locked into parts of the ideological network of a culture that we
think and presume that we have surpassed’ (Young, 159).
Works Cited
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies. The Key Concepts. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
Kipling, Rudyard. Plain Tales from the Hills. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.
Young, Robert. ‘The Cultural Politics of Hybridity.’ The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffths and Helen Tiffin. 2nd ed. Oxford: Routledge, 2006. 158-162.
By Rebecka Gronstedt.
This project was completed under the direction of Dr Leon Litvack as a requirement for the MA degree in Modern Literary Studies in the School of English at the Queen's University of Belfast. The site is evolving and will include contributions from future generations of MA students on other writers and themes.
Email Dr Litvack with your comments: L.Litvack at qub.ac.uk
