“Empire writing invariably attacks the colonial enterprise in one way or another.” To what extent does your reading of your three chosen texts support or challenge this view?
Rudyard Kipling’s imperial writing was often seemingly ambiguous in terms of what he truly thought, with many claiming that his attitudes were racist. In truth, as the statement suggests, Kipling’s poetry often did attack colonial enterprise in one way or the other, whether being critical on the very reasoning behind colonialism or questioning the ways in which colonisation was being carried out. Kipling, born in Bombay in British India in 1865 was born right in the “jewel” of the British Empire. The British Raj began in 1858, under the proclaimed Empress of India, Queen Victoria. In the 19th century it was the belief of many in Britain that it was partly their duty to impose their own “superior” culture on those they believed to be far less civilised and often too un-usual to understand. One motive was religion, with Christianity and colonialism often going hand in hand, often to the revolt of the Indian people. Kipling expresses the misunderstanding of the Indian people by the British in many poems.
No better does Kipling demonstrate this misjudgment and perhaps ignorance than in his poem “We and They”, written in 1926. The poem is written not from Kipling’s own perspective, rather from the perspective of the British, which was often naive. The very title of the poem “We and They” sets the tone, making the immediate separation between “We”, the British and “They” the indigenous Indians. Kipling gives the British perspective a childish feel as well, as in the first verse he refers to “Father and Mother, and, me”, giving the tone an almost innocent and inexperienced quality. Many of the things that Kipling makes a likening to in the different cultures seem rather ignorant and damning, only focusing on the exterior of the Indian people and not taking the time to examine their...