Alexander the Great-in Carnehan's words, that 'they think they're related to us English.'
The story resumes two years later, on another baking night, when 'what was left of a man' appears in the newspaper office, a 'ragwrapped, whining cripple' whom the narrator eventually recognizes as Peachy Carnehan. 'Crowned kings we was,' Peachy says, and tells his story, a cautionary tale of what happens when an empire is all that «Recessional» feared it might be. With twenty smuggled Martini rifles, the conquest of Kafiristan is easy. They pick out 'twenty good men and -632- shows them how to click off a rifle, and form fours, and advance in line,' and are soon spoken of as gods, the sons of Alexander. But as a late-Victorian story of imperial conquest, 'The Man Who Would be King' is also inevitably about the dynamics of the racial difference that underlies that conquest. The Kafiristanis, Peachy says, are 'fair men… with yellow hair.' And Dravot declares that 'These men aren't niggers. They're English… They're the lost tribes, or something like it, and they've grown to be English.' Lost white tribes at the heart of the unknown figured heavily in the mythology of empire, for they marked the land as the white man's after all; in actual fact, the people of Kafiristan resemble those of North India. But in saying that the people have «grown» to be English, Dravot has in mind the way they take to military drill as much as their fair skin, thereby suggesting that «Englishness» may be an acquired characteristic, a matter of culture, not color.
That suggestion is underlined by one of their most «English» characteristics-the fact that they know the rudiments of Masonic ritual; what confirms Carnehan's and Dravot's new status as gods, in fact, is their superior mastery of the 'Craft.' Kipling himself had been initiated into a multiracial Lodge in Lahore, and Freemasonry stood for him as a prime example of the place he imagined in 'The Ballad of East and West' where 'two strong men stand face to face' in a way that cancels the difference between 'East… West… Border… Breed… [and] Birth.' Yet the Kafiristanis remain Asian, even if they are also Masons and Englishmen-'other,' and yet not, in a way that begs the question of the basis of British rule. Does it depend on the superior discipline of British culture? But the story shows how culture can be acquired. On the color of their skin? Not in Kafiristan-which makes one think, whatever Kipling's intentions, that in India it might be. Or does it rest, perhaps, on those twenty Martini rifles?
But we cannot see Kafiristan in isolation from India. Kipling sets Carnehan and Dravot's eventual disaster against a frame tale of life in a stable British India, and yet their adventures in Kafiristan implicitly challenge that stability. If they are gods, one remembers that Indian servants in other stories call their masters 'Heaven-born.' In particular, Kafiristan serves as a trope for an issue Kipling could not squarely face-the Anglicization of India, T. B. Macaulay's plan to create, through education, 'a class… Indian in blood and color, but English in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.' Kipling's belief in both an essential India and an essential England made him-like most servants of the Raj-contemptuous -633- of such cultural hybrids. But 'The Man Who Would be King' nevertheless suggests that a subject people might someday learn to use the master's tools against him-'form fours'-as indeed the Indian National Congress would do with English liberalism and legal procedure.
The crisis for Carnehan and Dravot comes when their subjects realize they are indeed men, not gods. Dravot decides that he wants a wife. But the woman he is offered bites his cheek, and the blood proves that the two men are mortal. Dravot is killed outright; Carnehan is first crucified and then taken down so he can limp home and tell the story. Sexual desire across racial lines always ends unhappily in Kipling. For that desire blurs the barrier between the races that the Raj insisted on maintaining: the juxtaposition of dark skin and light underlines the difference between them, while suggesting either that difference doesn't matter or that it is, indeed, a positive attraction. But there is a more complicated reason for the disaster. Kipling implies that the two men-and Dravot especially-have broken 'the Law.' In the story that term refers specifically to Masonic ritual; Peachy worries that they don't have the authority to conduct the ceremonies they use to cement their power. Yet the concept of 'the Law' is crucial to Kipling's work as a whole. It figures in The Jungle Books, in Kim, and most famously in the fear expressed in «Recessional» that, 'drunk with sight of power,' the English might become as one with the 'lesser breeds without the Law'-without a coherent code of conduct to which the self and its desires remain firmly subordinate. In acting on his sexual desire Dravot breaks the «Contrack» he and Carnehan have signed: 'You and me will not, while this matter is being settled, look at… any woman black, white or brown, so as to get mixed up… harmful.' But of course they have broken another sort of Law as well.
What «redeems» the robbery of empire, says Conrad's Marlow in Heart of Darkness (1902), is 'the idea only'; another name, perhaps, for 'the Law.' But Kipling's freebooters are without an «idea» to justify their conquest; they have no goal beyond their own personal power and wealth. 'This business is our Fifty-Seven,' Carnehan says when their own mortality is discovered. It is an allusion to the Indian Army's revolt in 1857, a warning of what the British might once again face if they forgot the Law. And that parallel makes us ask if there is, in fact, any difference between the Raj and what these two men have done; makes us ask if the «Law» is ever any more than what Marlow calls a 'sentimental pretence.' Perhaps we can hear it too as a warning about the temp- 634- tations of an African empire. In 1885 the Berlin Conference had divided the continent among the European powers. Leopold of Belgium was given the Congo as his private estate.
'We all came out from under Gogol's 'Overcoat, ' Dostoevsky said of the Russian writers of his generation. Much the same can be said of Kipling's importance for the literature of empire. He was not the first British fiction writer to deal with imperialism, or with India, and his work owes a great deal in particular to the tradition of the adventure novel, which for English writers has always had an imperial subtext. But before Kipling imperialism per se had largely been the province of the historian, not the novelist. None of his predecessors had placed either its administration, its ideology, or its subject peoples so explicitly at the center of their work. And all the vast literature of colonialism that followed, even or especially by those who wrote in reaction to him, is to be found somewhere on the Grand Trunk Road he built with the books from Plain Tales from the Hills (1885) to Kim (1901) — not only the work of major English successors like Forster or Paul Scott, or the Malaysian stories of a lesser figure like Somerset Maugham, but the Indian novel in English as well. What else is Salman Rushdie's catalog of the subcontinent's marvels in
From Kerala, a boy who had the ability of stepping into mirrors and re-emerging through any reflective surface in the land… from Kashmir… a blue-eyed child of whose original sex I was never certain, since by immersing herself in water he (or she) could alter it as she (or he) pleased… at Budge-Budge outside Calcutta a sharp-tongued girl whose words already had the power of inflicting physical wounds… a boy who could eat metal and a girl whose fingers were so green that she could grow prize aubergines in the Thar desert…
What else but a fantastically stepped-up revision of Kim's entry into that great highway of Indian life?
… new people and new sights at every stride-castes he knew and castes that were altogether out of his experience… a troop of long-haired, strong-scented Sansis with baskets of lizards and other unclean food on their backs… an Akali, a wild-eyed, wild-haired Sikh devotee… A little later a marriage procession would stride into the Grand Trunk with music and shoutings, and a smell of marigold and jasmine stronger even than the reek of the dust… [a] moneylender… native soldiers on leave, rejoicing to be rid of their breeches and puttees… [a] seller of Ganges water. -635-
This chapter will chart what Sara Suleri has called 'the rhetoric of English India' as it develops in the work of Kipling and his heirs. For Paul Scott India provided the mausoleum for 'the last two great senses of public duty we [British] had as a people… the sense of duty that was part and parcel of having an empire'-the duty, once having taken possession of India, to govern it responsibly and well-'and the sense of duty so many of us felt that to get rid of it was the liberal human thing to do.' In literary terms the first approximates to Kipling and the second to Forster. Yet the dichotomy between them no longer seems so clear. They disagree as to what ought to be done about imperialism, but the rhetoric through which each writer depicts India is many ways the same. Both, for example, see the Raj as outside history; both are subject to what the historian Francis Hutchins calls 'the illusion of permanence' on which the Raj depended. Nevertheless, Scott's distinction between those 'two great senses of public duty' remains a good one, and his own achievement in The Raj Quartet (1966–1975) lay in synthesizing the work of his predecessors to show how those duties came inevitably into conflict.
From Scott the rhetoric of English India leads to the work of the two major novelists of the Indian diaspora, Rushdie and the Trinidadian Hindu V. S. Naipaul; a brief comparison of their work will provide this chapter's conclusion. Other important novels have of course emerged from England's engagement with empire in other parts of the globe. One thinks especially of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), and Timothy Mo's historical novel about the founding of Hong Kong, An Insular
