“A Very Entertaining Book”: The Ventriloquism of Rudyard Kipling’s The Eyes of Asia

Zoheb Mashiur

FULL TEXT

ABSTRACT (en)

This article is a critical comparison between the text of letters written by Indian soldiers on the Western Front of World War I, and the text of Rudyard Kipling’s The Eyes of Asia. The deployment of Indian soldiers by the British Empire to the Western Front produced controversy, anxiety, and excitement among European observers. Indian soldiers were depicted in a range of representations that reflected a discursive tension between loyal, heroic warriors, and racialized primitives. A number of British authors wrote stories from the perspectives of Indian soldiers built to assuage Western anxieties over the presence of non-white colonial soldiers in Europe. The concept of ventriloquism is used to read these works as reproductions of the imperialist “discourse of the master” through the purported voice of the Indian soldier. The Eyes of Asia, a quartet of short stories by Rudyard Kipling, is the chosen case study for this critical analysis. The Eyes of Asia was a commissioned work of British military propaganda using an archive of letters written by Indian soldiers, gathered by British censors, and provided to Kipling. By comparing Kipling’s stories written from the perspectives of fictional Indian soldiers against the letters by real Indians, the article reveals how Kipling manipulated the voices of Indian soldiers to produce a caricature of their testimony that conformed to British expectations of the men of the Indian army.

KEYWORDS (en)

Rudyard Kipling; The Eyes of Asia; India, World War I; colonial soldiers; subaltern speech; ventriloquism; Andrew Hill; Senko Maynard

DOI

https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2021.61.6

REFERENCES

Braybon, Gail. Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914-18. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003.

Buck, Claire. Conceiving Strangeness in British First World War Writing. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Das, Santanu. India, Empire and First World War Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Das, Santanu. “Indian Sepoy Experience in Europe, 1914-18: Archive, Language, and Feeling.” Twentieth Century British History 25, no. 3 (September 2014): 391-417.

Das, Santanu. “Indians at Home, Mesopotamia and France, 1914-18: Towards an Intimate History.” In Race, Empire and First World War Writing, edited by Santanu Das, 70-89. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Das, Santanu. “Reframing Life/War ‘Writing’: Objects, Letters and Songs of Indian Soldiers, 1914-1918.” Textual Practice 29, no. 7 (November 2015): 1265-87.

Das, Santanu. “The Singing Subaltern,” Parallax 17, no. 3 (August 2011): 4-18.

Das, Santanu. “Writing Empire, Fighting War: India, Great Britain and the First World War.” In India in Britain: South Asian Networks and Connections, 1858-1950, edited by Susheila Nasta, 28-45. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

DeGeorges, Thomas. “Still Behind Enemy Lines? Algerian and Tunisian Veterans after the World Wars.” In The World in World Wars: Experiences, Perceptions and Perspectives from Africa and Asia, edited by Heike Liebau, Katrin Bromber, Katharina Lange, Djala Hamzah, and Ravi Ahuja, 519-46. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2010.

Di Costanzo, Thierry. “Memory and History of the Great(er) War and India: From a National-Imperial to a More Global Perspective.” E-Rea 14, no. 2 (June 2017). DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.5844.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Ginio, Ruth. “African Silences: Negotiating the Story of France’s Colonial Soldiers, 1914-2009.” In Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, edited by Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio, and Jay Winter, 138-52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Grimshaw, Captain “Roly.” “Experiences of Ram Singh, Dafadar of Horse: An Echo of 1914.” In Captain “Roly” Grimshaw, Indian Cavalry Officer 1914-15, edited by J.H. Wakefield and C.J.M. Weippert. Tunbridge Wells: D.J. Costello, 1986.

Hartigan, John. “Volunteering in the First World War: The Birmingham Experience, August 1914 – May 1915.” Midland History 24, no. 1 (June 1999): 167-86.

Hill, Andrew. “The BBC Empire Service: The Voice, the Discourse of the Master and Ventriloquism,” South Asian Diaspora 2, no. 1 (March 2010): 25-38.

Kipling, Rudyard. The Eyes of Asia. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1918.

Kipling, Rudyard. The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, vol. 4, 1911-1919. Edited by Thomas Pinney. London: Macmillan, 1999.

Kipling, Rudyard. The New Army in Training (1915). Glasgow: Good Press, 2019.

Koller, Christian. “The Recruitment of Colonial Troops in Africa and Asia and Their Deployment in Europe during the First World War.” Immigrants & Minorities 26, no. 1-2 (March 2008): 111-33.

Leenders, Karen. “Rudyard Kipling and the Indian Corps.” The Kipling Journal 90, no. 365 (September 2016): 48-59.

MacMunn, George Fletcher, Sir. The Martial Races of India. London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co., 1933.

Markovits, Claude. “Indian Soldiers’ Experiences in France during World War I: Seeing Europe from the Rear of the Front.” In The World in World Wars, edited by Heike Liebau, Katrin Bromber, Katharina Lange, Djala Hamzah, and Ravi Ahuja, 27-53. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2010.

Maynard, Senko K. “Textual Ventriloquism: Quotation and the Assumed Community Voice in Japanese Newspaper Columns.” Poetics 24, no. 6 (July 1997): 379-92.

McLain, Robert. Gender and Violence in British India: The Road to Amritsar 1914- 1919. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Merrick, Jane, and Kashmira Gander. “Special Report: The Centenary of WWI – ‘Tommies and Tariqs Fought Side by Side.’” The Independent, 23 June 2013. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/special-report-thecentenary-of-wwi-tommies-and-tariqs-fought-side-by-side-8669758.html.

Morton-Jack, George. The Indian Army on the Western Front: India’s Expeditionary Force to France and Belgium in the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Mundy, Talbot. Hira Singh: When India Came to Fight in Flanders. Indianapolis: The Bobbs Merill Company, 1918.

Omissi, David, ed. Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914-18. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.

Prakash, Gyan. “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 2 (April 1990): 383-408.

Raimbault, Élodie. “Conflating Points of View on Europe in The Eyes of Asia: Kipling’s Fiction of Reverse Orientalism.” The Kipling Journal 91, no. 369 (2017): 23-28.

Richards, David Alan. “Kipling and the Great War Propagandists.” The Kipling Journal 91, no. 369 (2017): 17-22.

Singh, Gajendra. The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

Streets, Heather. Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.

Wagner, Kim A. The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010.