halls of mirrors: mimicry and ambivalence in kiplings boer

Halls of Mirrors:

Mimicry and Ambivalence in

Kiplings Boer War Short Stories

P H I L I P H O L D E N

T J L H E W H I T E P E O P L E , " wrote Leonard Woolf of his experiences

in colonial Jaffna, were " i n many ways astonishingly like characters in a K i p l i n g story. I could never make up my m i n d whether Kip l ing had moulded his characters accurately in the image of Anglo-Indian society or whether we were moulding our characters accurately i n the image of a K i p l i n g story" (46). W o o l f s observations on the reciprocal relationship between literary and social constructions of reality have resonances in contemporary colonial discourse analysis. If Anglo-Indian social identity is merely performative, a mould ing of character after fictional scripts, then the epistemological basis of colonial rule, with its essentialist division between rul ing and subject races, is challenged. H o m i Bhabha's work sees all colonial discourse as marked by an effort to manage this contradiction, as an ambivalent reinscription of the colonizer's identity which attempts to abject, but is paradoxically predicated upon, the figure of the colonized. Bui ld ing u p o n Bhabha's work, Kaja Silverman and Parama Roy have investigated the epistemological underpinnings of texts which might seem initially to challenge imperial binarisms, incidents of "double mimesis" (Silverman 299) in which the colonial observer "assumes the posture of authenticity and seeks to displace the native informant" (Roy 186). Exploits of cultural transvestism by men such as T. E. Lawrence and Richard Burton thus emerge not as transgressions of discursive boundaries, but rather as constituting a "rearguard action" (Roy 196) against the epistemological threat of mimicry by the colonized. Burton's and Lawrence's reverse mimicry is made possible, in this reading, by the Englishmen's deeply-rooted

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conviction of absolute cultural difference from their protocolonial subjects.

Colonial discourse analysis has been enormously helpful in defining the ideological and discursive frames within which texts are written. The technologies of post-Enlightenment rationality used by colonial writers, such as ethnography, philology, and archaeology, can no longer constitute themselves as empirical or neutral, but are bound up with, in Edward Said's words, a "Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority" (3) over the colony. The psychoanalytic framework i n which theorists such as Bhabha, Roy, and Silverman themselves work, however, still maintains a position of neutrality and empiricism: psychoanalysis does not provide a critique of itself. Psychoanalytic critiques of colonialism, of course, do not begin with Bhabha; most psychoanalytically-informed postcolonial discourse analysis acknowledges a debt to Frantz Fanon. Yet Fanon's position as a writer is very different from that of a postcolonial critic at the end of the century. Writ ing as part of a revolutionary struggle in the 1950s, Fanon uses psychoanalysis to denaturalize "race" and replace it with a historically constructed "nation," employing psychoanalytic categories to stress the universality of nationalist struggles against colonialism. We now live in a postcolonial world haunted by the failures of many anticolonial nationalist projects, and this may cause us to question the initially enabling collapse of historically contingent situations into psychic struggles.

The ambivalence which Bhabha identifies as characteristic of "colonial . . . disavowal" ("Signs Taken for Wonders" 175), for instance, arises from a basic contradiction in colonialism itself. European powers proclaimed their right to colonize because of their civilized status, a status achieved through a practice of the universal Enlightenment values of the Rights of M a n . The practice of colonialism, however, resulted in a refusal to apply these universal values to the colonized. Anticolonial movements of native intellectuals were fully aware of and skillfully exploited this contradiction, demanding their rights i n the language of nineteenth-century European nationalism. 1 A reworking of Bhabha's theoretical model in historiographie, 2 rather than merely psychic, terminology, and a placing of termino-

K I P L I N G ' S B O E R W A R S T O R I E S 93

logy such as ambivalence, mimicry, and hybridity within a precise historical context 3 may thus prove to have more analytical purchase.

Rephrasing Bhabha's psychic categories as historiographie ones is more than a matter of terminology, since it enables precise, historicized readings of a colonial text's production and reception. First, such rephrasing answers Robert Young's objection concerning the retrospective nature of Bhabha's critique, his question whether ambivalence and hybridity, "these apparently seditious undoings[,] in fact remain unconscious for both colonizer and colonized" (152) or whether they are consciously exploited by the colonized. The answer seems to be that they are consciously exploited but not as psychic categories. Moreover, a specific historical location of the categories deals with a further difficulty in postcolonial theory's accounts of colonial discourse which several commentators have noted. Bhabha's representation of colonial discourse in terms of psvehic universals encourages its own binary opposition. Critics may either epiphanically celebrate the end of colonialism from a position of privileged postcoloniality, 4 or may mourn colonialism's continued psychic domination. What we are not provided with is a vision of the possibility of evolution and change.

A reading inspired by Roy and Bhabha can thus successfully open up fissures in the colonial text, but it can do little to exploit such fissures. Texts are set free of historical moorings and become examples of "the teleology of a bourgeois (and colonizing) modernity" (Roy 210), not historically contingent illustrations of how such a modernity was contested and developed. In the analysis which follows, I use the concept of "double mimesis" to open up the fissures i n Rudyard Kipl ing's Boer War stories, but also to illustrate how an exploitation of those fissures necessitates a historically nuanced reading which views psychic elements within colonial texts as specific responses to historically contingent situations. Such a reading leads to an understanding of how colonial discourse develops, of how it may be contested within the colonial state, and how the categories which it utilizes may have a surprising longevity in the postcolonial world.


* * *

Mimicry, ambivalence, and even double mimesis are of course key features of Kipling's work. In Kim, the "Wonder House" in Lahore imposes its explanatory frame upon India; its curator, giving his spectacles to the lama, bestows upon h i m the gift of sight, of seeing his own culture through the more powerful lens of British science (59). Kim's cultural mobility, his ability to imitate Indians, is fine-tuned through the scientific instruments of the Indian Survey: his mastery of these instruments and the resultant transparency of all India to h i m defend against the threat of native mimesis. The Indian mimic man i n Kim, Hurree Chunder, in contrast, can imitate successfully only other Asiatics: his impersonation of Englishness, symbolized by his hope of becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society, Creighton intimates, is "curious" ( 2 2 2 ). Hurree has the knowledge but not the necessary technologies of control. His language is uncontrolled polymorphous babble, English public school slang juxtaposed, often in the same sentence, with elaborately formal diction, i n sharp contrast to the terse, c l ipped instructions of Creighton.

Kipling's Boer War stories are more directly implicated within the politics of colonial governance than Kim. The author's visits to South Africa, his personal friendship with men such as Ceci l Rhodes, and his experience on the staff of the Friend of the Free State i n Bloemfontein all contributed to a harsh critique of the manner in which the war was conducted. Seeing in the War the chance of "immense gain both to the land and the Empire" (Letters 3.12), 5 K i p l i n g felt that gentlemanly British notions of fair play in what should be a total war only prolonged the conflict. Stories such as "The Way that H e Took" and "The Outsider" use the perspective of outsiders to critique the values of the class that conducts the war. They are perhaps rather shrill in tone: Thomas Pinney notes that for the first time the "hortatory, scolding, even Cassandra-like tone in much of this work began to grate on some of Kipling's public" (Kipl ing, Letters 3.6).

However, two of Kipl ing's Boer War stories, "A Sahib's War" and "The Comprehension of Private Copper," seem more ambivalent i n tone and more amenable to a reading indebted to Bhabha and Roy. In these stories, Kipl ing's rearguard action


against the threat of mimicry seems less successful than it is in fcim, turning into a full-scale conflict which threatens to overwhelm the narrative. In the first, "A Sahib's War," double mimesis is extended to ventriloquism. Published in December 1901, "A Sahib's War" is narrated i n its entirety by a Sikh, U m r Singh, serving in an Indian cavalry regiment. T o l d to a presumably sympathetic, entirely invisible, Punjabi-speaking Englishman on a train to Stellenbosch, " A Sahib's War" recounts an intimate homosocial relationship between U m r Singh and his young officer, Walter C o r b y n / K u r b a n Sahib. The relationship has commenced in India where Corbyn, chi ld of the local Deputy Commissioner, has grown up watching U m r Singh's cavalry regiment on the parade ground. Like K i p l i n g himself d id , Corbyn has returned to England for a public school education, but unlike K i p l i n g , has, upon his return to India, gained an intimate reacquaintance with U m r Singh and Punjabi culture. Together, Corbyn and U m r Singh come to South Africa. B o u n d to keep out of the fighting by Corbyn's insistence that the war is "a Sahib's war," U m r Singh serves as his orderly. They j o i n a Canadian cavalry regiment and Kurban is eventually ki l led i n a Boer ambush.

The story is elaborately framed as an ethnographic spectacle: apart from the appraising eye of the invisible Englishman, the reader also encounters a series of footnotes and parenthetical definitions which attempt to interpret U m r Singh's story in English terms: "jemadar of saises" (86) is glossed as "head-groom," "Yunasbagh" is interpreted as "Johannesburg" (80), while "a Sahib called Eger Sahib" is speculatively but correctly named as "Edgar?" [8o]). H As readers, we thus know the events U m r Singh describes better than he can know them himself. Discourse and story work i n harmony here, since the central insistence of " A Sahib's War" is that there is a penumbral , incomprehensible, yet incommensurably sacred code of ethics which marks out English masculinity as unique, a code from which Indians are permanently excluded. After Corbyn is kil led, U m r Singh and his comrade-in-arms Sikandar K h a n resolve to hang the members of the Boer family responsible. They are prevented by the apparition of Corbyn's ghost which mutters "this is a Sahib's War": uncomprehending, yet moved, they feel themselves released from their vow of revenge. 7


The second short story, "The Comprehension of Private Copper," was written later in the conflict, and represents a hardening of Kipling's views. Mimicry i n this story operates at two levels. It is narrated i n the third person, but focalized entirely through the consciousness of Private A l f Copper, the son of "a Southdown shepherd" (159) now on active service in South Africa. Straying beyond his regiment's camp, the English soldier is captured by an "intimate enemy," a self-styled "Transvaal Burgher" whose father has been betrayed by the British. The man talks with an upper-class British accent, and smokes choicest tobacco while he patronizes the "poor Tommy": he indulges in an imitation of Englishness which gives h i m class-based power. Occasional hints i n the man's speech, however, remind Copper of "pukka bazar chee-chee" ( 168), and his "dark face, the plover's-egg-tinted eyeballs and the thin excited hands" (166) recall the "saddle-coloured son of a local hotel-keeper" (166) whom Copper has encountered i n Umbal la , India. Turning the tables on his captor and taking h i m prisoner, Copper examines the man's fingernails for evidence of racial difference: he can detect none but the suspicion remains. W h e n Copper returns to camp, the prisoner's nerve fails and he starts "kicking, swearing, weeping and fluttering all together" (172). Private Copper's colleagues, however, are more interested in the copy of Jerrold's Weekly which the man is carrying and which they read in defiance of the censorship of news imposed by their officers.

In both stories then mimesis introduces anxiety regarding Englishness, particularly regarding the connection between Englishness and masculinity, a connection which founds nineteenth-century imperial narratives. Victorian masculinity, Herbert Sussman has recently written, might be theorized as a series of Foucauldian "technologies of the s e l f ( 11 ) in which a stable subjectivity is formed through certain disciplinary techniques. The Victorian middle classes viewed manliness as the proper management of "an innate, distinctively male energy" (10)—Kingsley's manly thumos—and expressed this manliness in a series of technological metaphors concerned with the harnessing of natural energy. Such a harnessing, however, could not be too excessive, in that it should channel but not stop up the


flow of pr imordial male energy (3). In die fictional representation of Empire , the dialectic of natural forces versus artificial control was played out on a larger scale. O n one hand, characters such as Haggard's Alan Quartermain, or their historical equivalents—Stamford Raffles, George G o r d o n , Robert C l ive—were celebrated as operating in a masculine, primitive environment infused with the regenerative possibilities of primordial masculinity. O n the other, their success was glossed as being achieved through the utilization of scientific principles and of self-control. Imperial adventure narratives are also tightly controlled i n nar-ratological terms, often contained within elaborate frame narratives, beginning with a voyage out and ending with a return home. From these narratives, English masculinity emerges regenerated and yet b o u n d by stronger harnesses.

Bhabha's notion of ambivalence helps to extend this analysis to Kipling's stories and to locate fissures within their presentation of colonial masculinity. Given the importance of English masculinity in the imperial adventure story, the invisibility of English men in both of Kipling's short stories is surprising. In " A Sahib's War," "Sahibs" do possess scientific detachment, a rationalizing gaze which is at once both penetrating and panoptic —"the Sahib looks too closely. . . . [T]he Sahib has sharp eyes" (78-79). The two representative Engl ishmen i n the short story, however, are invisible. We perceive the lieutenant on the train only through U m r Singh's reactions to h i m , while Corbyn himself is surrounded by a halo of saintliness that dazzles the investigator. The elaborate code of conduct which harnesses the forces of masculinity so successfully in nineteenth-century adventure narratives may, the trajectory of the story suggests, have little relevance in the present. Corbyn admits privately that the English code of practice in the War is unworkable and that "we should have loosed the Sikhs and the Gurkhas" on the Boers (8g). The inscription on his grave, "si monumentum requiris cir-cumspice," reprises that on Wren's i n St. Paul's Cathedral and makes pretensions towards heroic imperial grandeur but, U m r Singh remarks, is i n "jest," because the surrounding landscape is "empty" (102).

English manhood in "A Sahib's War" seems similarly empty. Kurban Sahib is physically almost invisible and subordinated in


his relationship to the older Sikh, whom he addresses as "father" in private (80). Corbyn's masculinity is expressed only insofar as he identifies with Sikh martiality: he is, U m r Singh remarks, "a Sikh at heart" (80). English identification with other nominally martial peoples such as Sikhs, Pathans, and Gurkhas is a common feature of colonial fiction. In Corbyn's case, however, English masculinity seems drained of pr imordia l male energy, submerged beneath other, more primal masculinities. Kurban is insubstantial, seen only as a ghost appearing to U m r Singh and Sikandar Khan, as Christ to Thomas, his hand held to a wound in his side yet, unlike Christ, making a meaningless sacrifice in a minor skirmish of a futile war. L ike the actions of a ventriloquist's puppet then U m r Singh's narrative pulls our attention away from the speaking subject: i f we turn to look at Englishness, we find only an absence, a series of prohibitions or restraints.

English masculinity as expressed through imperial adventure is also thrown into question i n "The Comprehension of Private Copper." What enrages Copper so much about his captor is paradoxically his successful impersonation of upper-class Englishness. Copper's "intimate enemy" speaks " i n precisely the same offensive accent that the young squire of Wi lmington had used fifteen years ago when he caught and kicked A l f Copper, a rabbit in each pocket, out of the ditches of Cuckmere" (160). In part, of course, the story represents Kipl ing's growing disenchantment with the English establishment at home, the "flannelled fools" of "The Islanders." Yet it is also important to emphasize that the administrative services of most British colonies were largely staffed by middle class men who often expressed their responsibilities in terms of those of British aristocrats: the Residency became a manor house, the District a feudal domain. Copper's interlocutor's impersonation of aristocratic English masculinity thus suggests ultimately that such masculinity, foundational both to the maintenance of colonial communities and the effect of adventure narratives, is nothing more than a repetitious performance. Yet Copper's own response suggests that a glance elsewhere — to the "primitive" masculinity of the working-class British T o m m i e s — i s also for K i p l i n g problematic.


A reading of this k i n d then opens up fissures in Kipling's texts and reveals their epistemological contradictions. If not historically located, however, fissures remain merely fissures; having shown how the colonial text unravels, the critic turns her back. In a recent article, Catherine H a l l argues that "new notions of twenty-first century British cultural identity" (69-70) may be realized by a reinvestigation of how colonial "interdependence and mutuality as well as patterns of domination and subordination" (69) have historically structured British identity. " M e n were made white by the Empire ," H a l l notes, " in a way that was never articulated 'at home'"(76): the task of the cultural critic is thus to make this articulation, to discover the manner in which metropolitan and colonial discourses were mutually reliant. Kipling's stories do contain significant refusals to see which are directly a result of imperial polemics: his mystification of Englishness as a spiritual call ing i n " A Sahib's War" and his celebration of a brutalized, working class masculinity i n "The Comprehension of Private Copper" are written after the British forces began indiscriminate burning of Boer farmsteads i n late 1900 (James 203). Yet the anxiety and ambivalence i n the stories about the imbricated concepts of class, masculinity, race, and nation, the way Englishness itself is imagined in the stories, can be related to a specific contemporaneous issue: the fear of racial degeneration.

Theories of racial degeneration date back to the middle of the nineteenth century: Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius was published as early as 1869, Max Nordau's Degeneration i n 1895. They were given a new impetus dur ing the Boer War, however, by the high rate of rejection of potential recruits for military service. O f the 12,000 men who volunteered in Manchester, 8,000 failed a basic test of physical condit ion and only 1,200 were eventually accepted for recruitment (James 222). The poor physical condition of the troops seemed a fulfillment of Galton's prophecies concerning "race suicide" and genetic degeneration. Galton had argued that the fertility of the "abler classes" was decl ining, and that the English race would thus degenerate over generations as the progeny of the "improvident and unambitious" mult ipl ied. If corrective measures were not applied, this would lead to imperial decline, since the "races best fitted to play their part on the stage


of life" would be "crowded out by the incompetent, the ail ing, and the desponding" (343). In 1900, "the spectacle of Boer armies resisting an Imperial Army which had conquered half the world" produced an "extraordinary panic . . . within the educated classes" (Nye 65): Galton's predictions, it seemed, were coming tme.

Galton's views, of course, were not uncontested at the time of the Boer War, nor is it certain that K i p l i n g would have supported them, although many colonial officials and writers clearly d i d . 8

The issue of degeneration, however, formed a basic grammar through which issues of nationalism, class, masculinity, and race might be discussed — a l ink ing clearly shown by Galton's original name for what later became eugenics, the science of race improvement, "viriculture" (Soloway 63). Britain in the 1890s and early 1900s was losing its once supreme position in international trade to a rapidly expanding Germany and calls were made for increased national efficiency. At the same time, the issue of class became important. The electoral reforms of the nineteenth century had culminated i n the granting of the vote to mral householders in 1884, but some 40 percent of men and all women remained unable to vote: a widening of the franchise seemed inevitable, but this was accompanied by middle class anxieties about the fitness of working class voters to make policy decisions. 5'

The discourse of degeneration provided a way of l i n k i n g these seemingly disparate issues. While the genetic foundations of decline were subject to much dispute—the Government's Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, set up in response to post-Boer War anxiety, avoided the word "degenerat ion" to emphasize that it reserved judgement on this p o i n t — t h e facts of decline themselves were rarely questioned. Perceived racial decline was a response to and a way of conceptualizing "concern about the economy and Britain's status as an imperial power" (Berridge 217), and sutured these sources of insecurity neatly to the issue of class. Somewhat surprisingly, few commentators argued that Britain's aristocracy were an example of eugenics at w o r k , 1 0 most instead producing blueprints for a future utopia based upon positive selection of "measurable he-


reditary qualities" contributing to "civic worth" (Soloway 65). Eugenics and racial regeneration thus emerge as very much middle-class projects, balanced between the poles of aristocratic decadence and proletarian degeneracy. The idea was to bolster middle-class English values against the internal threat of universal suffrage and the external ones of imperial and economic competition.

Kipling's own personal history as a middle-class Anglo-Indian and his development of a populist imperial literary vision to appeal to a middle class audience at home indicate that his fiction manages many of the contradictions which contributed to social anxiety about degeneration. " A Sahib's War," indeed, is clearly marked by eugenicist discourse. The ventriloquized narrative subscribes to the nineteenth-century hierarchy of races, which underlies Galton's theories of race suicide. U m r Singh tells the lieutenant who denies h i m access to the railway carriage not to "herd me with these black Kaffirs. I am a Sikh" (77). Later he reminisces on his arrival i n South Africa with Corbyn:

Kurban Sahib appointed me to the command . . . of certain woolly ones—Hubshis—whose touch and shadow are pollution. They were enormous eaters; sleeping on their bellies; laughing without cause; wholly like animals. Some were called Fingoes, and some, I think, Red Kaffirs, but the were all Kaffirs—filth unspeakable. (84-85)

"Hubshi" has already been glossed as "nigger" (82): through the ventriloquized voice of U m r Singh the hierarchy of races is presented as a universal norm. Singh's Kaffirs are governed wholly by appetite and inhabit a world of pre-Symbolic babble and laughter, poles removed from the elaborate, transcendent Symbolic code which governs the conduct of the Sahib.

Against the background of a hierarchy of races, K i p l i n g then proceeds to demonize the Boers as racially degenerate. In "A Sahib's War," the Boer family who provides cover for the ambush exhibits the features of Nordau's degenerate types:

There was . . . an old man with a white beard and a wart upon the left side of his neck; and a fat woman with the eyes of a swine and the jowl of a swine; and a tall young man deprived of understanding. His head was hairless, no larger than an orange, and the pits of his nostrils were eaten away by a disease. He laughed and slavered and he sported sportively before Kurban Sahib. ( 9 2 )


Here imbecility and physical degeneration are l inked to moral deficiency. Reminiscing about Johannesburg on his first visit to South Africa in 1898, K i p l i n g noted that "the white man there is slave to the Boer" {Letters 2: 337). The implication here seems clear: the hierarchy of races may be revised or even overturned by climatic or moral influences. In Transvaal and the Orange Free State, the descendants of Dutch settlers have degenerated to the point at which they are no longer white.

The degeneration of the Boers is further emphasized by the conflation of their Protestantism with Islam. U m r Singh's contemptuous comments about Sikandar Khan's faith relate religion to ethnicity and thus universalize the hierarchy of races. "The Koran" is seen as an open text, subject to arbitrary interpretation by a man who holds it to be "his Book" (86). Yet in Stellenbosch U m r Singh encounters "many mullahs (priests) . . . [who] preached the Jehad against us" (85). In drawing together Boer and Islamic men of G o d , K i p l i n g is here drawing upon a European tradition of Islam as a decadent or degenerate Christianity, a "repetitious pseudo-incarnation" of a "great original" (Said 62).

Kipling's various levels of mimicry i n "The Comprehension of Private Copper" also register the threat of degeneration, although in a more complex manner than "A Sahib's War." Copper's captor, we have seen, is marked by the suspicion of miscegenation: his skin and eyes are dark, and his speech bears a "cl ipped cadence" which stirs in Copper "vague memories of Umbal la" (160). His panic when the realization of his capture sinks i n (172) seems a crudely racist reversion to type: again, Boers are associated with racial admixture and degeneracy. Yet the association Kipl ing's short story makes between the English "squire" and the Boer points the finger of degeneration closer home. Watching his comrades fighting to read the newspaper, Copper makes a remark to his prisoner which shows an awareness of the discourse of degeneration:

"They're only po-ah Tommies," said Copper, apologetically, to the prisoner. "Po-ah, unedicated khakis. They don't know what they're fightin' for. They're lookin' for what the diseased, lying, drinkin' white stuff they come from is sayin' about 'em!" (170)


Anxieties regarding degeneration, we have seen, largely focused upon the conditions of the working class i n cities, the class from which the "Tommies" originate. Through mockery, the Tommies reject ettgenicist classifications of themselves as degenerate: there is a suggestion that the possibility for the future of empire may lie in their regeneration on the frontier, through the creation of a new masculinity which does not stop at gentlemanly niceties. Yet the Tommies are shown to be dr inking and lying, if not diseased; they scarcely seem unproblematic representatives of a new masculine national order.

The contradictory nature of Kipling's critique can, I think, be understood by a return to eugenics' roots as a middle-class concept, based upon a notion of meritocracy. Although expressing itself through scientific discourse, as we have seen, eugenics and its associated rhetoric of degeneration and regeneration were based upon the management of class and the protection of class interests in a period of change. Class, notes Richard Solway, was so much part of the mental furniture of eugenicists that when deciding upon desirable characteristics which should be transmitted to the next generation, they

consciously and unconsciously attached to it projective qualitative concepts of social and moral value, fitness and unfitness, or worthiness and unworthiness. These concepts often said more about the men and women sharing them than thev did about objective reality.

( 0 2 )

Eugenics thus forms a rearguard action against threats to middle class predominance, and K i p l i n g acts out this rearguard action upon the terrain of Empire .

A reading which locates the presence of discourses of degeneration in Kipling's short stories can explore further the invisibility of middle class, masculine values noted earlier, and the ambivalence which surrounds the performance of English masculinity. For revitalization and regeneration of the English nation, K i p l i n g need look not at the English Sahib himself but elsewhere. In "A Sahib's War," Sikhs and Pathans are contrasted to Corbyn's Englishness: continuously active, they seem to represent the potential for racial regeneration through a return to a primal masculine energy. T h e i r worlds are completely mas-


culine and public, cut off from the nominally private and feminized world of the home. Sikandar Khan is discovered i n South Africa by Corbyn and U m r Singh; his family background is not mentioned. Even U m r Singh, whom the story describes in much greater detail, tells of his own origins only i n terms of his father's martial exploits. In contrast, the two Engl ishmen i n the short story are much more closely associated with femininity and the private world of women. The nameless Sahib to whom U m r Singh talks i n the carriage mentions his "Surtee" nurse (78), while U m r recalls Kurban as a chi ld "sitting upon a wall by the parade-ground with his ayah" (79) and upon his death finding silk handkerchiefs "given to h i m by a certain woman" (101) among his belongings.

Yet if the figures of the Sikh and Pathan represent a primal masculinity i n "A Sahib's War," they clearly need management by the code of manliness personified by Kurban Sahib; his prohibition of their attempted revenge murders of the Boer family clearly shows this governing function. In themselves, they seem to have no regenerative function: English masculinity speaks to the reader through the ventriloquized voice of U m r Singh but the movement of the puppet fails to animate the puppeteer. In "The Comprehension of Private Copper," the working class masculinity of Copper and his fellow soldiers is more vital than the pretentious mimicry of the Boer, yet it is scarcely a substitute for the codes of manliness which enable imperial governance. The ending of "The Comprehension of Private Copper," i n which the British soldiers consume bootlegged alcohol, indicates incomprehension rather than comprehension, degeneration rather than regeneration.

Kipling's hope for the regeneration of imperial manliness in these stories seems to lie not i n the working class nor i n martial subject races, but i n the new chi ldren of Empire , Canadians and Australians. Canada impressed K i p l i n g as a frontier society in which nonetheless there was a stress upon "Safety, Law, H o n o u r and Obedience" in contrast to the "brutal decivilization" of the U S {Something of Myself 116). In letters at the time of the war in South Africa, K i p l i n g praised the deeds of troops from Australia and Canada, dominions which produced "a man who has been


born i n a big country and not sent to school between fences" (Letters 3:16). In his story "The Way H e Took," the Boer commandos are fearful of "an incomprehensible animal from a place called Australia across the southern seas who played what they knew of the war-game to k i l l " (War Stories 136).

Australia and Canada thus h o l d out the hope, for K i p l i n g , of racial and masculine revitalization. In " A Sahib's War," Kurban and U m r Singh are adopted by a troop of rugged Australian cavalry, who are "hot and angry, waging war as war" (87). Sikandar Khan, himself a Pathan, swears that a Pathan is "a babe" beside an Australian (87). The Australian Durro Muts and the Canadian troops whom U m r Singh also mentions approvingly are a "hard-bitten," exclusively male "congregation" (86), l iving a wholly masculine, frontier lifestyle. In "The Comprehension of Private Copper," Copper's captive turns away from the brawling English soldiers:

The prisoner set down his tin of coffee and stared helplessly round the circle.

"I—I don't understand them." The Canadian sergeant, picking his teeth with a thorn, nodded

sympathetically. "If it comes to that, we don't in my country." (170-71)

Canadians and Australians apprehend neither Kipling's brutalized English working class i n "The Comprehension of Private Copper," nor the penumbral vision of chivalric English masculinity i n " A Sahib's War." They stand aside, torchbearers perhaps for an expanded England which has moved beyond the shores of an island, fulfi l l ing J o h n Seelye's vision of England as a world state.

K i p l i n g attempts to manage these contradictions in a third story written about the same time, "The Army of a D r e a m . " 1 1

Sitting i n comfort i n a L o n d o n club, the narrator meets 'Boy' Bayley, an o ld acquaintance who is now commander of an "Imperial Guard Battalion." H e takes the narrator across the road from the club to the "vast four-storied pile" of his barracks. The narrator then enters a re-made society i n which everything is focused towards efficiency and preparation for defence. Women are regulated to a subordinate role, while all men participate i n


militias from boyhood onwards. Mi l i t ia and full-time regiments spend time conducting competitive war-games in specially designated "Military Areas"; some of these are in Britain but "the real working Areas are in India, Africa, and Australia, and so on" (248). The militarized society which K i p l i n g envisages is egalit a r i a n — the Guard is "allowed to fill up half our commissioned list from the ranks direct" ( 2 7 8 ) — a n d its efficiency, sober uniforms, and lack of class divisions are reminiscent of Cromwell's New M o d e l Army. This vision, however, cannot be sustained: the story ends when the narrator recollects the war in South Africa. His interlocutor, he remembers, is dead, and looking directly at h i m he notices "the three-day-old wound on his left side," which he last saw when Bayley's body was brought back to camp. The dream ends, replaced with the reality of the club.

Crisis can, it seems, be managed only by fantasy. Roy's use of the word "rearguard action" to describe the uses of double mimesis implies stability, the detachment of a small cultural task force to neutralize a perceived threat which, i f quickly dealt with, has little potential to disturb the larger army of the nation. Kipling's various uses of mimicry and ambivalence in the two short stories discussed at length above to paper over the crisis provoked by the spectre of racial degeneration seem —just like the ambush of the Durro Mutts by the B o e r s — n o t merely a series of containable local actions but rather a series of skirmishes which are inextricably l inked to a larger struggle. Kipl ing's double mimesis in "A Sahib's War," and his ambivalent constructions of class and race i n "The Comprehension of Private Copper," do not proceed directly from a psychic problem of "colonial masculinity" but are rather an attempt to manage a specific discursive crisis at a particular historical moment.

Such a reading does not lead to a jettisoning of the tools provided by Bhabha or Roy but rather, initially, to a more specific insight. U m r Singh's ventriloquized voice speaks from a position of primal manliness in need of the restraining technologies of English masculinity, yet the personifications of these technologies, Corbyn and the anonymous lieutenant on the train, are never looked at directly. With English manliness numinously blurred, anxieties about racial and cultural identity are displaced


onto a series of racially degenerate (Boers, "Kaffirs") and regenerate (Canadian, Australian) types. The almost successful impersonation of aristocratic English masculinity by the racially ambiguous "Transvaal burgher" in "The Comprehension of Private Copper" interjects doubts about the status of values associated with Englishness, doubts which Copper's cheerfully degenerate working-class masculinity does little to dispell. Caught in a hall of reflecting mirrors, we cannot distinguish original from fake: turning from the ventriloquist's dummy to the puppeteer himself, we find h i m strangely, surprisingly-absent. Far from constituting a successful rearguard action, Kipling's stories generate a series of unanswerable questions: like the Canadian sergeant, readers find it progressively more difficult to comprehend what Kipling's construction of imperial, middle-class masculinity is all about.

As the analysis above demonstrates, the fissures opened up by deconstructive, psychoanalytic analysis of the type advocated by Bhabha and Roy need to be supplemented with an understanding of the historical contingency of conflicts and ambiguities which are more than merely psychic. I am not here making a simple binarism between history and theory, or rejecting theoretical models because of their lack of historical specificity, but rather pointing to the fact that a historically nuanced reading using postcolonial theory may paradoxically enable wider application. The management of class, race, and gender through the scientized mechanism of eugenics, for example, does not end in the 1900S, but has a lineage that extends into the postcolonial world. Eugenics and the discourse of racial degeneration d i d not die in the pyre of the holocaust but continue to re-emerge as techniques of management of national contradictions in the postcolonial state. In the 1980s, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who probably read Rudyard K i p l i n g as a student at Raffles Institution i n the late 1930s, and who became a leading anti-colonialist nationalist, instituted eugenicist policies i n the Republic of Singapore. ' 2 Specific exploration of the fissures that colonial discourse analysis opens up, then, enables a genealogy of colonialism and of colonialism's place within modernity. It also enables an understanding of the profound and paradoxical interdependency of the colonial and postcolonial worlds.


N O T E S

1 See P r a k a s h f o r a c o g e n t s u m m a r y o f this process .

2 B h a b h a d o e s address s p e c i f i c h i s t o r i c a l s i t u a t i o n s . M a n y o f h i s ar t i c les , however , f o l l o w a d i s t i n c t p a t t e r n o f analys is . T h e y b e g i n w i t h a s p e c i f i c h i s t o r i c a l i n c i d e n t , o f t e n r e p r e s e n t e d by a s i n g l e text , a n d t h e n m o v e to a g e n e r a l i z e d analysis o f c o l o n i a l p s y c h i c c a t e g o r i e s b a s e d u p o n this r e a d i n g . T h e text b e c o m e s a n e x a m -

E le o f t h e p s y c h i c c o n f l i c t s d e s c r i b e d , b u t o f t e n its h i s t o r i c a l c o n t e x t v a n i s h e s o r e c o m e s p e r i p h e r a l .

3 M y c o n c e r n h e r e is n o t to a t t e m p t to w r i t e a g e n e a l o g y o f t h e o r i g i n s o f B h a b h a ' s t e r m i n o l o g y w i t h i n c o l o n i a l d i s c o u r s e , as R o b e r t Y o u n g a t t e m p t s w i t h t h e t e r m " h y b r i d i t y " i n Colonial Desire. R a t h e r , I w i s h to i d e n t i f y t h e s p e c i f i c ways i n w h i c h m i m i c r y a n d a m b i v a l e n c e w e r e a r t i c u l a t e d b o t h c o n s c i o u s l y a n d u n c o n s c i o u s l y i n c o l o n i a l d i s c o u r s e at p r e c i s e h i s t o r i c a l m o m e n t s .

4 A n e x a m p l e o f this is C h r i s t o p h e r L a n e ' s c a l l to " d e c o d e these c o n d e n s e d m e a n i n g s a n d to u n r a v e l t h e i r d r i v e s i f we i n t e n d to s h a t t e r B r i t a i n ' s c o l o n i a l legacy, o n c e a n d f o r a l l " ( 13), a c a l l w h i c h is, to be c h a r i t a b l e , U t o p i a n . E l l a S h o h a t p r o v i d e s a c l e a r c r i t i q u e o f s u c h " c e l e b r a t o r y c l e a r i n g o f a c o n c e p t u a l space" ( 1 0 6 ) .

5 I n a le t ter to W i l l i a m C h a r l e s S c u l l y , 14 F e b . 1 9 0 0 .

6 T h e catalyst f o r t h e B o e r W a r was t h e d e a t h o f B r i t i s h w o r k m a n T o m E d g a r at the h a n d s o f t h e J o h a n n e s b u r g p o l i c e i n 1 8 9 8 , a n d the s u b s e q u e n t a c q u i t t a l o f the p o l i c e m a n r e s p o n s i b l e by a B o e r j u r y ( H a v e l y 16-18) .

7 M y i n i t i a l i n t e r e s t i n this s h o r t s tory was s p a r k e d by t e a c h i n g it i n the O p e n U n i v e r s i t y C o u r s e A Z S 3 1 9 , L i t e r a t u r e i n the M o d e r n W o r l d . I n t h e c o u r s e g u i d e , C i c e l y P a l s e r H a v e l y r e a d s t h e story i n terms o f p o s t - A l t h u s s e r i a n n o t i o n s o f i d e o l o g y a n d notes its M a c h e r e y a n s i lences r e g a r d i n g C o r b y n .

8 H u g h C l i f f o r d , f o r i n s t a n c e , w h o was b o t h a p o p u l a r w r i t e r a n d a successful c o l o n i a l a d m i n i s t r a t o r , w r o t e a d m i r i n g l y to G a l t o n a n d c o m m e n d e d h i m f o r his " g e n i u s " ( G a l t o n P a p e r s , U n i v e r s i t y C o l l e g e L o n d o n , L e t t e r f r o m S i r H u g h C l i f f o r d , 14 J a n . 1 9 0 9 ) .

9 F o r a d i s c u s s i o n o f t h e g r a d u a l w i d e n i n g o f t h e f r a n c h i s e , see T h a n e 4 4 - 4 5 .

1 0 O n e o f the few was W . C. D . W h e t m a n . See S o l o w a y 75 .

1 1 I a m g r a t e f u l to ARIEL'S a n o n y m o u s r e v i e w e r f o r b r i n g i n g this story to m y a t t e n t i o n .

1 2 See H e n g a n d D e v a n f o r a d i s c u s s i o n a n d t h e o r i z a t i o n o f L e e ' s e u g e n i c i s t views

a n d p o l i c i e s .

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1 9 9 ° -

halls of mirrors: mimicry and ambivalence in kiplings boer

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