The Meaning of Things: Kipling’s Formative Journey ‘Home’ in 1889 and the Late Victorian Imperial Tour

Colonizing Cynicism in the Works of Rudyard Kipling

“…The Hadendoa is immune to British signification for another reason: he does not speak English, and certainly not the accented English spoken by the speaker of the poem. Bubb (2016) underlines this by remarking that -Kipling's notions of otherhood and brotherhood turn out to be quite specifically demarcated and justified, and the latter is founded on place, lineage and-most importantly-language‖ (379). In -Fuzzy-Wuzzy,‖ any speech act by the speaker is doomed to fail in any meaningful act of mutual signification.…”

“…On the one hand is the direction Rushdie calls -Ruddy Baba,‖ Kipling's keen interest in and fondness for the colonized, especially Indians, and his sympathy for their suffering under the often racist and brutal policies of the British Empire. Writers, including Mark Paffard (1989), Corinne Fowler (2007), David Sergeant (2013), and Alexander Bubb (2016), have identified ambivalences towards the empire in his work, suggesting that such stories and poems challenge contemporary modes of thinking about colonization by creating zones where the stark racial divides on which the colony depends are blurred, exposed as permeable, and transgressed. On the other hand is the colonizing vision of -Kipling Sahib,‖ the heavily stereotyped representation of the colonized in his work where, most tellingly, no space is ever opened for the prospect that the colony should or even could come to an end.…”