Comment

East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet, said Rudyard — though he did go on in the same verse to insist that all longitudinous divisions disappear when two strong men from opposite ends of the earth, stand face to face. Clear testimony then, that Kipling believed that strength of character and moral qualities, rather than race, defined the man. The same conviction comes through the undeservedly infamous Gunga Din, who is, in the final lines of the poem, acknowledged, despite the disparity of rank between the narrator and the bhisti, as a superior being:

“Though I’ve belted you and flayed you, By the livin’ Gawd that made you, You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!”

There are good arguments for not turning ‘Kipling’s House’ in Mumbai into a Rudyard Kipling museum, but characterising Kipling, one of the most subtle writers in the language, as an anti-Indian ‘racist’ is not one of them. I am sure the diligent reader/researcher can find sentences and phrases in Kipling’s work which elide in meaning from being proudly imperialist to some slur against ‘race’. He does refer to ‘Lesser breeds without the Law’ (“Ho Ho!” as a friend of mine says) and in the great allegory of the Jungle Books are featured the chattering Bandar Log, the monkey folk who live without the disciplines of the wolf pack. But all of it, abuse and allegory weighed within his entire sensibility, can be seen as a worship of order, discipline, truth and Christian virtue without too much turning of the other cheek rather than reprehensible, rank racism.

Yes, there are arguments for not having a museum dedicated to Rudyard Kipling in the dilapidated and soon-to-be-renewed house in Mumbai. That India has nothing and no one from its British colonial past to celebrate is, again, not one of them.

In my boyhood there was a great move to remove the statues of the Raj, of kings, queens (just The One actually), viceroys and generals who could boast of some cruel conquest of Indian territory,that stood in our town squares and replace them with figures of national importance and pride. It was well and publicly done, though never with the symbolic rejoicing and hubris which accompanied the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s colossus in Baghdad, or the tearing down of Stalin’s statues in Prague and Budapest (I presume this happened in the unsuccessful Hungarian revolution and know that it happened after the Berlin wall fell).

Statues are and always have been important in a country in which deity has been, for thousands of years, depicted in statuesque form. Museums, the preservation of the archaeological past, the respect for civilisations that once flourished on our soil and are now one with Nineveh and Tyre, are, if we are to be honest, the bequest of the British Raj. There is no evidence that the Muslim and Mughal rulers went out of their way to preserve works of the
Hindu and Buddhist past.

The political considerations that allow the Muslim heritage of the country to fall into desuetude is also a disgrace. The Taj and Humayun’s tomb are, largely through the funding and agency of international foundations, well preserved. But what of the heritage of Sufi Delhi, of Amir Khusrau or Mirza Ghalib whose relics one has to wade through slums to get to?

The Kipling house in Mumbai is to be turned into a gallery of contemporary art. Fair enough. Rudyard Kipling may have been born there and lived there till he was four. The fact should be commemorated on the site. He didn’t write anything there though the impulse to observe and to narrate must have begun then. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, an artist and a principal of Mumbai’s celebrated JJ school of Art did live and work there and his memory and legacy should certainly be pronounced and celebrated at least in part of the new museum.