Debalina > Recent Status Updates

So many utterances of "... the natives..." and "... the niggers ...".

Kim is sad now. I am eager to see what his transformation is going to be and what his choices will be at the book draws to a close much later. Will he still be as native as he is now, one that drew my Rusty to him and his quest, or will he end up as a British gentleman as Kipling did?

I truly wonder...

The narrator is good with emotions and having that drama in his voice pertaining to that time, but I do not like or understand that he chose to pronounce many Indian words as British person would, not like the characters who live there, even though his roots and upbrining is Indian. In those bits, it seems very caricaturish, as if he is playing into colonial stereotypical fantasy.

"...; and if there were any doubt it needed only to watch the wives comparing, brown arm against brown arm, the newly purchased dull glass bracelets that come from the North-West."

लाख़ की चूड़ीयाँ?
(Bangles of "laakh"?)

The sad description of an imperialist of colonial India. Should I be angry or should I be heartbroken?

"No 'native training' can quench' the white man's horror' of the serpent."

~ a romanticising narrator on his own subject that he is romanticising about.

So, quite inherent was the brand of racism of the less biased, much younger and inquisitive Kipling. I guess the inquisitive angle was the reason behind his fame among those inherently racist, as was thy Western world then, still is, but in a more nuanced manner.

Rusty somewhere forgave his Kipling for "the white man's burden". I cam try to understand him. Forgiving him is not my domain. Criticising him can be. I might be keeping a list of lines that are very explicitly racist.

Reading it was difficult. But it is my favourite Rusty’s favourite book perhaps. This book has had so much influence on my dearest Ruskin Bond. So I had to give it as many honest efforts as it demanded. Only the second big one worked. It is now picking up on me.