Let’s talk about Rudyard Kipling and the poem the white man’s burden. Kipling probably more than any other author shaped the way that the British saw India and understood India. Kipling himself was Anglo Indian which means that he was born in India, but his parents were British he was raised sort of going back and forth between Britain and India a lot of his schooling was done in Britain but whenever he could he came back to India because he preferred India to Britain.
He became famous at quite a young age for his stories about India so other than the white man’s burden probably one of his most famous by war what put him in the hearts of America was his text the Jungle Book it may be the most famous because Disney made a film about it but Kipling stories about the angle of Indians and about Indian nobility Indian working classes and so on and so on really shaped the way that the British understood India and understood themselves as the colonizers of India.
Kipling is complex in the way that he presents Indians in his in his stories because one of the problems with a lot of Victorian writers who write about the colonies for an example people like H rider Haggard who wrote King Solomon’s Mines. For instance, one of the problems with a lot of Victorians who write stories about the colonies of any country not only those trying to colonize India, is they have a tendency to present colonized subjects very racistly.
That is the simple way to say it they’re presented as these sort of savages they’re presented as some unappreciative a threat to Western civilization whatever it is or a threat to civil civilizing efforts and things like this and Kipling sometimes falls into this trap but he’s much more balanced he’s much more fair in his depiction of colonized peoples of Indians. Both Indian ruling class and of the Indian working-class men a lot of other colonial writers are the white man’s burden is something of an exception to this.
The white man’s burden is a major problem for anyone who wants to see Kipling in a positive light today because we live in a post-colonial era, so we live in an era in which people have identified a lot of negative characteristics of colonialism and it’s no longer like imperialism. They also believe that imperialism is no longer thought to be a good thing is in fact thought to be and I think this as well imperialism is in fact thought to be sort of terribly oppressive of colonial people’s and an attempt to erase colonized cultures. Kipling’s poem says almost the exact opposite, so Kipling spends a lot of time in this poem chronicling or suggesting all the things that colonizers do on behalf of the colonized so he’s talking about stopping these local conflicts between different Prince’s. so I mean India had been sort of divided up into a number of different principalities ruled over by various local rulers were frequently at war with one another in Africa different tribes different clans and things like this waged war against one another for control of territory and resources and things like this and so Kipling says colonization puts a stop to that this would be starting in lines 1830 on line 18 or 17 don’t give you the beginning of that stanza “take up the white men’s Burton the savage Wars of peace fill full the mouths of famine and bid the sickness cease and when your goal is nearest the end for others sought watch slow than heathen folly bring all your hope to nought” This is actually a really good sort of overview of the entire message of the poem which is that colonization brings all these benefits to you and these are local wars you give them better methods of Agriculture and things along those lines and this ends famine. You bring the medicine and when you’re trying to do all these beneficial things for the people that you’ve colonized they come along with their terrible mistakes and stupidity and ruin it all for you. One of the most important components of this poem is the way that Kipling characterizes colonized peoples because he’s continuously talking about them being distrustful and them being angry with them and resisting colonialism.
He says this is one of these sort of infamous phrases this is line eight he characterizes colonized peoples as “half devil and half child” so I mean again this is this is a major problem for anyone who wants to be a fan of Rudyard Kipling today because in the Victorian era it was okay to be racist about the way that you presented colonized people in India and Africa and the Caribbean. Today we’re not okay with that back to its almost “half devil and half child” because it’s based in racism and it’s based in this sort of colonial sense of British superiority so this is a problem for modern readers in a way that it wasn’t necessarily a problem for Victorian readers and of course what Kipling’s poems are ignores is all the damage that colonization actually did to the cultures that had been colonized. India for instance when the British first arrived India had a great infrastructure they had a certain degree of manufacturing they had political stability India was probably a better developed when the British first arrived then Britain was but the British destroyed all of that infrastructure as part of the colonization attempts because what they really wanted out of India was cotton spices opium and tea.
With this the British destroyed what was basically a thriving industrial subcontinent and turned it into sort of agricultural plantation essentially and then they tried to rebuild a new infrastructure that would let them dominate India. I mean Kipling has little to say about the negative effects of colonization he in fact contends that colonization is manly and wise in the last stanza. This is a problematic poem for modern readers but again this is also characteristic of Victorian attitudes toward the Empire and toward their role as imperialists they wanted to believe and in many cases I’m sure they probably did believe genuinely that by colonizing these other nations these other regions they were benefiting people and they were doing they were doing the right thing to help them out and to civilize them which is according to Kipling link the white man’s burden.
References
Order an Essay Now & Get These Features For Free:
Turnitin Report
Formatting
Title Page
Citation
Outline
