Week before last, students at Manchester University made headlines for scrubbing Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem If from a wall in a university building. Kipling, they claim, represents “the opposite of liberation, empowerment, and human rights”.
Student grandstanding and attempts to erase controversial figures from campuses are nothing new — and Kipling has long been controversial. To many he remains — rightly or wrongly — the “jingo imperialist” of George Orwell’s phrase, synonymous with Britain’s colonial past.
Yet, in some ways, this is a departure from previous practice. If is a far cry from poems such as The White Man’s Burden, an unambiguous call for imperial expansion. A staple of funeral readings and best-man speeches, it is routinely voted Britain’s favourite poem. Taking the form of an exchange of advice from father to son, the poem abounds with Victorian stoicism — but imperial bigotry is nowhere to be seen.
The sanitising of school and university curricula, and the introduction of “trigger warnings” to accompany academic texts, represent a milder form of this impulse. However, censoring material that is, in itself, inoffensive, on the basis that its author may have been “offensive” elsewhere, represents the hardening of an already illiberal stance.
Are we now to empathise less with the heartbreaking My Boy Jack, written after the death of Kipling’s only son in the trenches? Should we feel guilty for enjoying The Jungle Book, and the Disney adaptation that practically every child in the English-speaking world has seen?
If applied to other writers, with William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe this would not just mean throwing out controversial plays like The Taming of the Shrew and The Jew of Malta, but Hamlet and Doctor Faustus to boot. Few great men live lives of blameless purity — by this logic Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela and even Martin Luther King would be excised from the annals of history.
There are other ironies at work here, too. In assessing his work by modern, “PC” standards, the students are guilty of precisely the same offence they attribute to Kipling — imposing the values of one culture on to another. Judging Kipling’s work by his life also represents a decidedly traditionalist form of literary criticism. Surely a good relativist would eschew biographical readings and read only the text on the page?
Yet, divorcing Kipling from his context would also miss the point. He was, undoubtedly, a man of his time and his work exudes authenticity as well as contradiction. While poems such as The White Man’s Burden may be tricky to square with modern sensibilities, it is also hard to see how anyone could cast Kipling as a mere imperialist if they had read Kim, his masterly and multi-faceted portrayal of the British Raj.
We need only turn to Kipling himself to be reminded of the importance of context. Take his much-quoted maxim, “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”. Though often used as a byword for colonial backwardness, reading the quote in full reveals a far more complex picture: “But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, /When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!”
As ever, there is more to Kipling than meets the eye.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2018
