WHITENESS, MISCEGENATION, AND ANTI-COLONIAL REBELLION IN RUDYARD KIPLING’STHE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING

Abstract

In 1827, Josiah Harlan, a Quaker from Chester County, Pennsylvania, set up camp just south of the border of the Punjab region of India. He rummaged up a ragtag army of Muslim, Hindu, Afghan, and Akali Sikh mercenaries, and with Old Glory flying above him, he and his army started their journey, along with a caravan of saddle horses, camels, carriage cattle, and a royal mace bearer to announce the coming of the would-be American king. With Alexander the Great's march through the same lands twenty-one centuries earlier very much on his mind (Macintyre 40), Harlan set out – under the auspices of restoring the exiled Afghan monarch Shah Shujah to the throne – determined to win power and fame for himself. Disguising himself as a Muslim holy man and at times using brute force, he crossed the Afghan border and ultimately became the Prince of Ghor under secret treaty (227). By 1839, loyal not to Shah Shujah but to his enemy, Dost Mohammed Khan, Harlan returned to his Kabul home to find that the British had seized his property “by right of conquest” (252). Harlan left Kabul, fully intending to return and reclaim his princely title. Once back in the United States, Harlan proposed various schemes to the U.S. government (for which he would be the emissary, of course), including an Afghanistan-U.S. camel trade and grape trade, neither of which succeeded. Harlan penned a memoir that the British lambasted – unsurprisingly, for it sharply criticized the British presence in Afghanistan. In 1862, at the age of sixty-two, with no formal rank or U.S. military experience, Harlan became the colonel of Harlan's Light Cavalry, fighting on the side of the Union in the Civil War (Macintyre 275). Too weak to perform his duties, he left the army the same year, wandered the U.S. aimlessly, and died in 1871, buried “after a funeral without mourners” (286).

Colonizing Cynicism in the Works of Rudyard Kipling

“…Perhaps just as tellingly, when the woman Dravot seeks to marry bites him, it is represented as an attack upon his beard: -She shuts her eyes, gives a bit of a squeak, and down goes her face in the side of Dan's flaming red beard‖ (184). As Mondal (2014) illustrates, this attack is not the act of desperation of a frightened and superstitious girl, the way Carnehan represents it, but rather the carefully planned and executed first blow of a rebellion. Through this act, the young woman targets the very thing that forms the center of the colonizing regime, the repressed body which holds within it the key to power.…”

“…To subordinate one race over the other, the colonizers must signify bodily differences, as we have seen, and in this act the red blood of Dravot illustrates this.This is not to say that the priests require this to be shown that Dravot is not a god. Mondal (2014) demonstrates that, as illustrated by the warning from -Billy Fish‖ well before the uprising, the rebellion was already in the works (741). The young woman also exchanges glances with the priests as she approaches with the wedding procession, suggesting their arrangement.…”

“…SharleenMondal (2014) examines the novella in terms of British race theory and identifies this representational error as a -slippage,‖ one that exposes the inability of the colonial imagination to represent something that is simultaneously white-the most important signifier of the colonizer-and a colonized subject. She explores this failure in terms of the bodies of the characters themselves and the threat of miscegenation, itself an ever-present danger to the totality of the colonial distinction between ruler and ruled.…”