A reader of nineteenth century Anglo-Indian literature walks through London with a difficult author and a shelf of farm pages
Monday, The Difficult Author
I have been reading Rudyard Kipling again, which is a bit like inviting an uncle to dinner who is brilliant, charming and impossible. I put my thoughts into a long piece, Kipling from Bombay to Stockholm. He was born in Bombay in 1865, rose to enormous fame as a writer of stories, verse and children’s books, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, travelling to Stockholm to collect it.
His reputation fell sharply after the First World War, and it has been argued over ever since. Admirers point to his craft, his ear for speech and the sheer energy of his storytelling. Critics point to his support for empire and to the attitudes in his work about the peoples of India and Africa. A fair reader keeps both facts in the same hand and does not pretend that either cancels the other.
Plain Tales and Kim
Plain Tales from the Hills are short stories of Anglo-Indian life, written when Kipling was young and working as a journalist. They are quick, sharp and often cynical. Kim is a longer novel about an orphan boy in India, rich in colour and movement, and widely admired for its portrait of a crowded and vivid country, though debated for the viewpoint of its author. I will not quote either. Readers can find them in any library and judge for themselves.
The poem usually summed up as the White Man’s Burden is the lightning rod. Some read it as an earnest call to colonial duty. Others read it as a warning, or as an uneasy mix. What no one disputes is that it became a slogan for the people who argued for empire and a target for the people who argued against it.
Tuesday, The Farm Shelf
From India to the English countryside is a short step in my head. For my daily dose of soil I read the milk pages at dairyherd.org, the beef pages at ranchbeefcattle.org, the machinery at tractorequipment.org and the calendar at cropcalendar.org.
The finances are at farmmoney.org and smallfarminfo.org. The jobs are at agjobscareers.org. The shows are at fairandrodeo.org. The overview is ruralfarm.org, and the safety pointers are at farmssafety.org. Nineteenth century readers of colonial novels often had a farmer in the family, and the farm pages remind me what the money and the mud were for.
Wednesday, Stockpile Advice
The government published advice on household preparedness, and I made a diary of it in Three days of tinned peaches. The guidance suggests keeping a few days of supplies at home, which supporters call sensible and critics call alarming. As a literature person I pointed out that the Victorians kept pantries and nobody called it a strategy.
Thursday, A Boiler
The London Prat offered a domestic note with First-Time Buyers Swap Rent for Boiler Repairs. Housing policy divides parties and households, and the one point of consensus is that a broken boiler in winter is a national emergency.
Friday, The Library
I spent Friday in the library with a stack of Victorian periodicals, the kind that carry reviews of novels, travel notes from distant colonies and advertisements for remedies for nearly everything. Reading old periodicals is the surest way to understand an age, because they show what people thought was ordinary. The news is often wrong, the ads are often wonderful and the letters to the editor are always spirited.
I came home with ink on my cuffs and a very strong opinion about the semicolon.
Saturday, Reading Kipling Fairly
The test for a fair reader of Kipling is whether she can admire a sentence while disagreeing with the sentiment. Many of his short stories are masterly in construction. They begin quickly, use dialogue to reveal character and end with a twist or a hush. The poems, with their strong rhythms, were made to be recited aloud, and generations of schoolchildren did so. At the same time, the imperial assumptions that run through much of his work are rightly questioned today, and any classroom discussion should say so plainly.
Teachers differ on whether to include him in a syllabus. Some argue that he should be taught because he shows how empire was justified to its supporters. Others argue that limited teaching time should be spent on writers from the colonised countries themselves. A sensible department does both, if the timetable allows.
Sunday, The Bombay Connection
Bombay, now Mumbai, looms large in the story of his early life. He spent his first years there, was sent to England for schooling, and returned to India as a young journalist. That divided upbringing shaped the way he wrote about both places. He could see England as an outsider and India as a native speaker of its streets, and the double vision gave him material that few of his contemporaries had.
I like to imagine him, notebook in hand, on a crowded platform, collecting speech like coins. Whatever one thinks of the use he put it to, the habit of listening is one that every writer can admire.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, The Daily Mash keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/