The Empire Writes Back

1
The Empire Writes Back

• Introduction
• The Fiction of Empire
• Rudyard Kipling, Kim

2

• If you were a writer in England in the 19th
  century, would be the relationship between your
  writing and the British empire?
• Would empire play a role in your writing?

3
The Fiction of Empire

• writing can justify the empire
• How can fiction be a justification for empire?

4
Justifying the Empire

• Rudyard Kipling, Kim

5
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

• Anglo-Indian (Englishman living in India)
• The Jungle Book (1894)
• The White Man's Burden (1899) the white man has
  to civilize the native
• Kipling as a proponent of empire
• but Kipling "introduced" India to British readers

6
Kim (1901)

• He sat, in defiance of municipal orders,
  astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform
  opposite the old Ajaib-Gher the Wonder House,
  as the native call the Lahore museum. There was
  some justification for Kim he had kicked Lala
  Dinanath's boy off the trunnions since the
  English held the Punjab and Kim was English. (7)

7
Images of Mastery

• colonialism as a little boy's command over India
• literal command he is playfully sitting on a
  canon ? military power as an offhand reference
• colonialism as a game
• he is in cultural command of India

8

• Though he was burned black as any native though
  he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his
  mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain singsong
  though he consorted on terms of perfect equality
  with the small boys of the bazaar Kim was white
  a poor white of the very poorest. (7)

9

• His nickname through the wards was 'Little
  Friend of all the World'. Kim found it easier to
  slip into Hindu or Muhammadan garb when engaged
  on certain businesses. Sometimes there was food
  in the house, more often there was not, and then
  Kim was out again to eat with his native friends.

10
The colonizer as the better Indian

• Lahore museum British collection of Indian
  artifacts
• to the natives, the museum is a "wonder house"
• Indians cannot appreciate their own culture the
  British have to explain it to them

11
Kim as colonizer

• the colonizer as native
• the colonizer as friend
• the colonizer as the better Indian (Lahore
  museum)
• the colonizer can keep India together the
  natives cannot understand each other (Kim as
  translator)

12
The Fiction of Empire

• Kim is a novel about a little boy whom we
  identify with
• Kim is the hero of Kipling's novel
• ?the novel has a political undercurrent the
  natives are childlike cannot appreciate their
  own culture, cannot govern or represent
  themselves

13
The Fiction of Empire

• we must resist the fiction of empire
• we must look for the hidden political information
• Kim is not only a story about a British boy in
  India
• postcolonial fiction as the other side of the
  fiction of empire

14
The Fiction of Empire

• 1) writing as justification the cement of the
  empire
• 2) writing as fictional information about the
  empire bringing the empire into your living room
• 3) the empire as trivial information in imperial
  British fiction
• 4) metaphor the empire is necessary for the
  colonies they cannot govern themselves

15
Paradox The Fiction of Empire

• writing cements empire the colonies have to be
  governed, they cannot govern themselves (divide
  and rule) (a)
• the fictional empire is itself a fiction this
  India does not exist (b)

16
Divide and Rule

• Why did India not fight the British as a united
  country?

17
Indian Unity

• until the Indian decolonization movement in the
  20th century (Gandhi), there was no unified India
• there was a multiplicity of languages, castes,
  religions political units, kingdoms
• divide and rule the British strengthened
  India's internal divisions
• the fiction of empire without the British,
  "India" would disintegrate

18
The Fiction of Empire

• the empire needs the fiction of empire those at
  home know why empire is necessary (a)
• the fiction of empire creates a reality which
  does not exist (b)
• need for "postcolonial" intervention
• setting the fiction of empire straight