The Allegations Against Kipling and the New Searchlight
Rudyard Kipling is not very fortunate to attract the favour of critics regarding his views of Imperialism. His critics seem to be prejudiced to a great extent in evaluating his ideas. Almost all critics, oriental and occidental, tend to condemn Kipling’s obsession to what they call Jingoism. It is no less pleasant to see any researcher trying to blur out the one-eyed evaluation of kipling’s works and throw a new light on his ideas from a very different standpoint. We can be thankful to Mr. Mohammad Shahinoor Rahman for undertaking the responsibility of doing that. Our discussion will be limited on Mr. Rahman’s paper entitled: Rudyard Kipling: His Vision of Indo-British Brotherhood.
Surely, it is not very easy to cure the jaundiced eye of the critics, but Mr. Rahman’s effort has been outstanding in putting forward a new question whether the concurrent critics are wronged by their reading of Kipling’s works or not. At the outset Mr. Rahman has pointed his arrow to pierce through the nature of the prejudice against Kipling and the cause behind. He has shown with astounding argument how the quotation that excites the severe criticism becomes a misquotation while the reading of the total piece simply gives the very opposite idea. Mr. Rahman is quite right to deduce that the lines that follow the utterance,
‘East is East and West is West and the twain shall never
meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at god’s great judgement Seat;’
--very aptly nullify the primary effect of the couplet. Thus the futility of the rude criticism exposes itself. It is made clear by the explanation of Mr. Rahman that Rudyard Kipling in reality wanted a kind of union between the peoples of two different races, namely, the Indians and the British. Since the language, social custom, culture etc. were different, the Indo-British brotherhood was not so easy to achieve. Brotherhood or union was possible at the moment...