Nandi Bhatia
To read ... major works of the imperial period retrospectively is to be obligated to read them in the light of decolonization. To do so is neither to slight their great esthetic force, nor to treat them reductively as imperialist propaganda. It is a Blurb read them stripped of their countless affiliations with those facts of power which inform and enable them, to interpret them as if the many inscriptions of race and class in the text were not there at all.[2]
To say that Rudyard Kipling's Kim[3] can be interpreted as a project that articulates the "hegemonic" relations between the colonizer and the colonized during British imperial rule in India is to repeat what critics have said about Kipling's novel. Numerous studies, including Edward Said's analysis "Kim, the Pleasures of Imperialism," have shown Kipling's contribution to the "invention of traditions" and the "Orientalized India of the [imperialist] imagination" through significant moments in the novel.[4] Said's deconstruction of Kipling's novel explores how Kim embodies the absolute divisions between white and non white that existed in India and elsewhere at a time when the dominantly white Christian countries of Europe controlled approximately 85 percent of the world's surface.[5] These same critics have, however, overlooked some of the seemingly insignificant moments which, I believe, are rather significant to Kipling's larger project of representing imperial authority in India. One such aspect of the novel is manifested in Kipling's portrayal of babu Hurree Chander Mookerjee, a native employee in the British administration to whom even Said's detailed essay devotes only a paragraph, calling the babu's presence a "small practical device" used by Kipling to represent imperial authority.[6]
For Kipling, who believed that it was India's destiny to be ruled by England, it was necessary to stress the superiority of the white man whose mission was to rule the dark and inferior races. Kipling conveys this message about the "white man's burden" by locating the educated Hurree babu in a position that is subordinate to Kim. Kipling constructs babu Hurree Chander's subordinacy by creating what Jacques Derrida calls "binary oppositions" or well-schooled dichotomies through which a whole hierarchy of meanings may be constructed. These hierarchies are created by privileging one principle, the "self" over its opposite or its "Other."[7] Through a similar system of binary oppositions between the ruler and the ruled, Kipling creates unequal dichotomies in which the former becomes the privileged signifier, i.e., the "self" and the latter its "Other" in opposition to whom the self asserts its own privileged position. Kim belongs to the class of the rulers and the babu occupies the position of the "Other." Both products of a colonial upbringing, in a colonized society, Kim becomes the authoritative principle and the babu his excluded opposite. The babu, in other words, is Kim's anti-self to whom Kipling assigns a negative value in relation to Kim, the sahib. Kipling frames the babu in "a relationship of power, of domination, [and] of varying degrees of a complex hegemony" with Kim, through which he constantly reiterates what Said suggests as, "European superiority over Oriental backwardness."[8]
Kim, who grows up as an orphan in India and is in no way different from an Indian except for his racial heritage, eventually becomes a Sahib by virtue of what, in a Derridean deconstructive reading, we might say "ceaselessly shutting out this other or opposite, defining himself in antithesis to it ...."[9] The babu's presence in the novel is, thus, more than a "small practical device." For Kipling's imperialist ideology, it is a narrative strategy to represent Kim's authority over the native inhabitants of the colony. The importance of this essay lies in the way Kipling, in his novel, projects Babu Hurree Chander with powerful ramifications about the colonial power-dynamics within a particular historical milieu.
Before I explicate further, I find it necessary to discuss the baggage attached to the term "babu" during the time of British rule in India. The Hindustani term "babu" referred to an educated urban gentleman. Used with respect at first, it soon acquired a pejorative connotation for the educated Indian who desperately attempted to acquire the manners and customs of the colonial officials. In The Making of an `Indian' Art, Tapati Guha-Thakurta reveals how often the figure of "Calcutta's degenerate babus" appeared in Kalighat art. The most recurrent of the satirical images portrayed in this genre of Bengali art during the nineteenth century was that of "the Bengali babu as a fop, a dandy and a dissolute womanizer.... the symbol of the westernized, dissipated nouveau-riche...."[10] According to Hobson-Jobson, a dictionary of Anglo-Indian terms and phrases, a "baboo" is a term which among Anglo-Indians is
often used with a slight savour of disparagement, as characterizing a superficially cultivated, but too effeminate, Bengali.... The word has come often to signify `a native clerk who writes English.'[11]
Such stereotypes of the babu, as Purnima Bose argues, emerged out of colonial racial attitudes about the Bengalis, who as a highly educated community, challenged British representations of Indians. Because of their defiance of colonial rulers,
the western educated Bengalis were dismissed as comic imitations of westerners. They were virulently caricatured in the figure of the Bengali Babu: a small dark-skinned, effeminate intellectual who had an imperfect command on English.[12]
This image is reiterated in Plain Tales From the Raj, where former colonial officials recall that it "was the fashion to denigrate the babu type:
`We used to make fun of them ... because they were interpreting rules which we made.' Babu jokes, based on the English language either wrongly or over-effusively applied, were a constant source of amusements for all `Anglo-India.' Coupled with the denigration of the babu was a traditional distrust of the Bengali--'litigious, very fond of an argument'--who was frequently seen as a trouble maker: `He doesn't appeal to many British people in the same way as the very much more manly, direct type from upper India.'[13]
The descriptions and definitions above show the ways in which the stereotype of the Bengali babu had been created and acquired a pejorative connotation. This image permitted the circulation of stereotypes about the educated Indian intellectuals and the term used homogeneously to apply to doctors, journalists and clerks in other works of colonial discourse. In Orwell's Burmese Days, English officials constantly refer to the Indian Doctor Veeraswamy as the despicable babu. A book about Indian journalism, authored by an Englishman and published in London in the late nineteenth century, carried the title Babu English as `Tis Writ Being Curiosities of Indian Journalism. Such stereotypes of the babu carried on after the empire and became the subject of numerous cartoons. So strong was their impact that my highly anglicized tenth grade school teacher always corrected the students' English in class by chastising us with the phrase: "Girls, don't speak babu English."
The questions that these babu stereotypes provoke are: why did colonial officials make fun of the babu? why does Kipling perpetuate the myth of the babu further? In other words, why is the babu the target of Kipling's jokes; why not the other Indians in the novel such as the Lama or the horse trader Mahbub Ali? It is significant that Hurree babu is an intellectual. He is an anthropologist who is also well-versed in English literature, in the art of mensuration, and unlike Mahbub Ali, can read maps. He embodies all that Western liberal learning at this time stands for. He knows that there were "marks to be gained by due attention to Latin and Wordsworth's Excursion. French, too, was vital," and that a "man might go far ... by strict attention to plays called Lear and Julius Caesar."[14] Hurree babu is perfectly capable of educating his countrymen about British rule. Because of his education in the British curriculum, he is equipped with the bicultural knowledge to communicate on both sides of the divide--the British colonial officials on one side and the Indians who had no direct dealing with their colonial rulers, on the other. Kipling wrote Kim at a time of rising Indian nationalism, a time when the relationship between the empire and colony had started to change, when British rule was being overtly questioned. Important changes had taken place in the national and political fabric of India following the mutiny of 1857. The Congress Party was formed in 1885. A large part of nationalistic resistance arose from the educated section of the Indians, from people like Hurree Babu, who with their close encounters with British administrators were more fully aware of British ways. The educated babu Hurree Chander thus represents a threat to the colonial presence. Kipling perhaps recognized this threat. Therefore, to relegate the educated babu to a subordinate position is for Kipling a historical necessity in order to ward off any obstacles to the empire. The Lama on the other hand, is hardly to be feared. Although he is learned man, he is sympathetic to the British mission and actually expedites Kim's transformation into a sahib by paying for Kim's education. Kim's business, he tells the boy "was to get all the wisdom of the Sahibs...."[15] Hence, it is not surprising that we find Kipling's imperialistic beliefs incorporated into the energy of creating babu jokes in the novel.
Kipling relegates the babu to an inferior position through various situations, encounters and descriptions. This is how Kipling introduces the Hurree Babu in the novel: "At the end of that time entered a hulking, obese Babu whose stockinged legs shook with fat, ...."[16] Following this description Kipling always describes the babu's appearance as shabby, his voice "oily," his mouth stuffed with pan and betel and his English distorted. Throughout the narrative, Kipling makes fun of Hurree Babu's "orotund verbosity," ridicules his incorrect grammar and finds his accent abominable, which he emphasizes in the exaggeratedly misspelled words that the babu uses: Onlee instead of "only," allso instead of "also," opeenion instead of "opinion," quiett instead of "quiet" and so forth.[17] Evidently, it is Kipling's way of maintaining the babu's subservience by painting the picture of a silly Bengali babu who apes the Englishman with his broken English. If he can't speak like the colonizers, he can never be one of them. (It is important to note here that English being the language of the colonizer became a signifier of power and authority. The language connotes authority and legitimizes ruling class power in India even today).
However, nothing brings this point home more powerfully than a comparison between Kim's and the babu's educational backgrounds. Both Kim and Hurree Chander share an interesting commonalty in their education. They are both products of the British system. While Kim receives his formal education at St. Xavier's in Lucknow, babu Hurree Chander holds a Master's degree from Calcutta University. Being a native working for the British administrator colonel Creighton requires him to be well-versed in English as well as Hindustani. Hurree's English education, thus, makes him bicultural. Since the babu's bicultural education grants him access to both cultures, Kipling carefully hybridizes Kim's education, systematically providing him with a skillful knowledge of the Indian culture as well as a formal British education.
From the beginning we see Kim learning about diverse Indian ways through his friendship with Mahbub Ali for whom he "executed commissions by night on the crowded housetops," his travels with the holy Lama, and interaction with the natives during his travels. Mahbub Ali initiates Kim into the "great game" of the secret service. The spiritual Lama provides him with a sense of maturity and shows him "other and better desires upon the road [than to be King]." Lurgan, the antique dealer of Simla, trains Kim in various memory games and prepares him for espionage work. And Kim's own curiosity for learning, keen sense of observation and spirit of adventure instill in him, what Robert Moss calls, the qualities of "self-reliance" and "resourcefulness."[18] By learning to manipulate people to his own advantage, Kim manages to earn his living and procure food for the Lama and himself. His early exposure to natives and their customs teaches him the subtleties of Indian life: he knows the "breed" of farmers of the land; he understands the distinctions of caste and realizes that the Lama is the "most holy of holy men" because he is "above all castes." Kim learns about the "many-armed and malignant" Hindu Gods who need to be left alone; is "careful not to irritate ... [a Sikh] for his temper is short and his arm quick"; wonders "since when the hill-asses (Paharis) owned all Hindustan"; knows that even Rajahs of "good Rajput blood ... sell the more comely of their womenfolk for gain."
Kim's grasp of Indian life teaches him to process the native culture whereby he knows its strengths and weaknesses; to react with cleverness when the situation demands, appropriate the useful and dismiss the rest. For instance, Kim wears his Indian clothes to merge with the natives "when there ... [is] business or frolic afoot."[19] So well-versed is he with the Indian ethos that when the need arises, he even learns to "think" [let alone speak] in the vernacular. Kim's knowledge of the various Indian dialects is particularly useful. It provides him with the ability to translate and overcome the tremendous handicap that colonial rulers felt in their inability to translate for which they had to depend on the "unreliable" natives. In this way, Kim's ability to translate represents the colonizer's acquisition of a highly useful device for the Empire.[20]
To master only a knowledge of the native culture, however, is not sufficient for the sahib. Therefore, at the moment when the educated babu appears in the novel, displaying his knowledge of English and discussing the advantages of Western education, Kim is sent off to St. Xavier's in Lucknow for a formal British education. Despite the boy's disinterest in school, a strict academic curriculum--an aspect of learning that was an indispensable part of every well-bred Englishman's training and essential for governing the empire through formal rules--is imposed on Kim.
St. Xavier's, which aimed primarily at the children of the Anglo-Indian servants, becomes the perfect place for Kim. For, as Moss says, the boys at the school, besides learning mathematics and trigonometry, were
shaped by direct contact with the joys and dangers of the Indian Frontier ... [Here] the Anglo-Indians ... [learn to] carry on the heroic, day to day business of maintaining the Empire.[21]
In this school, where "every tale was ... mixed with quaint reflections, borrowed ... from native foster-mothers, and turns of speech that showed that they had been instantly translated from the vernacular," Kim is trained to process the native culture. This arrangement of Kim's education is Kipling's way of providing Kim with the necessary tools for his imperial enterprise. For, a bicultural knowledge authorizes him to manipulate and control this "manifestly different [Indian] world"[22] which, as Colonel Creighton communicates, is important for a sahib:
thou are a Sahib and the son of a Sahib. Therefore, do not at any time be led to contemn [sic] the black men. I have known boys newly entered into the service of the Government who feigned not to understand the talk or customs of black men. Their pay was cut for ignorance. There is no sin so great as ignorance. Remember this."[23]
Although Kim's knowledge and understanding of the native culture is Kipling's strategy to position Kim's superiority, he makes it seem like a "natural" acquisition for a precocious boy whose spirit for adventure motivates him in the pursuit of knowledge. Hence, Kim's ability to understand the natives and assimilate with them endears him to one and all who call him "little friend of the world."
By contrast, the qualified and competent bicultural babu is despised, parodied and constantly made fun of by Kipling. While Kim's Anglo-Indian education makes him rational, clever and well-quipped to "some day ... command the natives," the babu's education is subjected to ridicule. Kipling portrays him as a clownish, ignorant hakim trying to impress the natives by giving them medicines (such as "arplan from China that makes a man renew his youth and astonish his household; Saffron from Kashmir, and the best Salep of Kabul")[24] and even printing his papers in "Angrezi,25 telling what things he has done for weak-backed men and slack women."[26]
Kipling's framing of Kim and the babu in such oppositional positions is crucial to the power-relations within which his narrative operates. The highly opinionated and contentious babu contrasts with the amiable and likable Kim who is well-suited to one day command natives such as the babu himself. By making the babu ridiculous despite his intelligence and qualifications, Kipling strives to show that the Oriental is inherently inferior and even his education cannot bring him at par with the colonizer. Hence, as opposed to Kim's education that is favourable to the empire, Kipling dismisses the babu's knowledge of anthropology, medicine, English and Western training as a "monstrous hybridism of East and West."[27] His education does not make him Kim's equal but his "Other," reducing him to a representative of the class of the native elite who were used as "interpreters between ... [the British] and the millions whom [they] ... govern[ed]."[28] It does not allow him the status of a sahib, but relegates him to the position of an ally to support the rulers in maintaining control over the masses. The babu, thus, is assigned, in Gramscian terms, within a class of educated people that the British controlled by manipulation via the assertion of "intellectual and moral leadership" instead of direct military coercion, in order to secure their consent for cultural domination.[29] And indeed Kipling succeeds. For, he even supplants the babu's own consciousness with an image of himself that has been constructed by Kipling. Hurree babu describes himself to Kim in precisely the way that Kipling would want him described: "I am only Babu showing off my English to you. All we Babus talk English to show off."[30] Such self-representation by Hurree babu represents a negation of the Indian intellectual, presented through a direct antithesis to the "high" standards that the colonizers' language upholds. Cultural hegemony, as Said says, functions from "the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all non-European peoples and cultures."[31] Kipling reiterates European superiority over the so-called native backwardness by manipulating the babu into believing and living his inferiority.
However, there is more at stake for Kipling to ridicule the babu. It is well to remember that the babu knows how to survey maps and locate the strategic importance of various geographical sites. At a time when Britain was competing with Russia to establish her own supremacy as a superpower, it is Hurree babu and not Kim who is able to foil the Russian intruders' attempt to negotiate a diplomatic agreement with the Afghan kings; and again Hurree babu is the one who manages to obtain the maps from the Russian spies.[32] It is the babu who educates Kim on the importance of maps and "the art of science and mensuration [which was] ... more important than Wordsworth or the eminent authors Burke and Hare ...."[33] For this knowledge, Kipling dislikes the babu. Because it is an instance of the colonized teaching the colonizer about the geographical territory that the colonizers have set out to conquer, which represents a reversal of the colonial power-dynamics.
In one sense Hurree babu fulfills here the function that underlay the colonial motive of enforcing an Anglicized education on the natives. This function, as Gauri Vishwanathan in her study on the politics of educational and cultural policy on India, points out, was to educate a segment of the traditional ruling class of Indians "to support them in maintaining control of the natives under the guise of a liberal education."[34] The support would be provided by having the educated Indians interpret the native culture for the administrators in a language that belonged to the rulers. That these motives formed the basis of an Anglicized education policy for the Indian colony is evident in the infamous claim that Macaulay made in his "Minute on Indian Education:"
It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreted between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.[35]
With his knowledge of anthropology, of maps, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, mensuration, etc., the babu becomes a Macaulayan interpreter for Kim in the novel.
However, because of his knowledge and educational acumen, the babu can also become a deterrent to Kipling's imperialist ideology and a threat to the Raj. Therefore, Hurree babu becomes an instrument of fear for the rulers--knowledge of the colonizer can well become an instrument for the educated Indian to lash back at the latter. For Hurree babu is in every sense a brown sahib who, as Hurree babu himself tells Kim, is "a teacher of the alphabet.... [and has] learned all the wisdom of the Sahibs."[36] And like a sahib, Hurree babu helps Kim in the "great game." But for Kipling, such knowledge is also dangerous. Besides undermining Kim's authority, it also threatens the colonial presence in India through potential attacks on the rulers in their own language. Hurree Chander's knowledge can thus prove detrimental to the Raj. According to Ashis Nandy, Kipling recognized in utter disgust that if the colonizers could make use of the Orientals for more effective administration, then even the Indians "could use the Occident for their own purposes."[37] He was aware that even the "crafty babus" knew how to use the white man. The full implications of what Nandy says, are discernible, as Nandy himself realized, most vividly in the following description by Duncan M. Derrett:
It was supposed, and the author of this paper used to suppose along with his elders and betters, that Indians had learnt English ways and values as they had learnt the English language, and that, as a race of would-be-parrots they "have done remarkably well ...." One perceived with pained surprise the conflict between profession and performance. Indians trained almost exclusively in Western arts and sciences reacted as irredeemable orientals in any crisis. They enforced this feeling again and again by their lack of confidence when faced with a new problem, their pathetic desire for foreign advice (which they would shelve when they had paid for it), and their "going through the motions" like a tight-rope walker who walks his rope for the sake of walking it, or like a somnambulist, avoiding desperate accidents but unable to say why .... Very late in the day the present writer woke up to what he believes to be the fact, namely that Indian tradition has been "in charge" throughout, and that English ideas and English ways, like the English language, have been used for Indian purposes. That, in fact, it is the British who were manipulated, the British who were the silly somnambulists. My Indian brother is not a brown Englishman, he is an Indian who has learned to move around in my drawing room, and will move around in it so long as it suits him for his own purposes. And when he adopts my ideas he does so to suit himself, and retains them so far and as long as it suits him.[38]
Hence, Kipling makes it his mission to locate authority in Kim and assign a new subject-position to his "Other." Clearly a bright man, the babu is, therefore, portrayed, in Said's words, as
almost always funny, or gauche, or somehow caricatural not because he is incompetent or inept in his work--on the contrary he is exactly the opposite--but because he is not white ....[39]
These antithetical yet unequal constructions of Kim and the babu produce an uneven exchange of what Said in Orientalism calls the political (imperial), intellectual (through Kim's education), cultural (portrayed in Kim's superior tastes and values) and moral power (with ideas about what Kim can understand and do better than the babu). Indeed, if Kipling believed, as he argued, that East and West can never meet in India, then he makes sure that in Kim they don't. Despite the similarities that exist between Kim and Hurree babu, there exists a huge gulf between the two that cannot only never be bridged, but one which renders the native to a position of subordinacy.
Interestingly, however, to represent Kim's authority Kipling needs the educated babu. Only by virtue of defining himself in antithesis to this educated Other can Kipling assert Kim's authority. Hence, even as he spurns him, the babu becomes indispensable to his narrative. As an Other, he embodies the image of what Kim as an Englishman can and never will/should be. In this sense the babu becomes a reminder of what Kim is and ought to remain--a sahib who must "never forget that ... [he] is a sahib; and that some day ... [he] will command natives."
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------. "Minute on Indian Education," Selected Writings. Edited by John Clive. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.
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------. "Kim, The Pleasures of Imperialism," Raritan, 7(1987): 27-74.
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