ABSTRACT
If ‘Letters of Marque’ delineates a troubled meditation on narrative and cultural authority, Kipling’s exploration of British India’s urban spaces, notably the city of Calcutta, produces a companion travelogue of cultural coherence under threat. Kipling’s ‘City of Dreadful Night’ (Kipling, 1919b) is structured around the metaphor of the distorted mirror. The narrative offers Calcutta as a poor mimesis of the imperial city of London and satirises the cultured and civilised life that it seems to offer. Englishmen wear black frockcoats and top hats in the intense heat of the Indian sunshine; they keep palatial residences on ‘Chowringhi’ road and employ ‘natives’ as concierges. In addition, Bengalis, attired in formal English clothes, engage in parliamentary debates over the Calcutta Municipal Bill and turn democracy into linguistic farce. All the while, the real Calcutta that is associated with
disease, pollution, gambling dens and native brothels, carries on as of old. Producing Calcutta as a bastardised version of her imperial and metropolitan counterpart allows the narrator to undermine the status of the AngloIndian city: despite all the effort and care taken, Calcutta simply appears as a surreal and absurd imitation of London. Yet compared with the gothic mode of his short fiction or travel writing, Kipling’s ‘City of Dreadful Night’ moves into a new key in its unconscious foregrounding of the hybrid interlocutory spaces between metropolitan imperial subject and colonial identities. In this and in Kipling’s other ‘urban’ writings, we have an unwilling recognition of cultural difference in the same time and place as the production of a secure and culturally uncontaminated British colonial identity. Despite the geo-politics of the colonial city, the assertion of an Anglo cultural identity-and its corresponding myths of cultural origination-takes place as a struggle against all things Indian. Despite nostalgia, the dual ancestry of the AngloIndian city makes it impossible for the colonial text to return to an original moment of Englishness. The city as both textual and cultural space is produced in a founding moment of instability and ambivalence. Its ambivalence, as Bhabha has pointed out, is part of the structure of its representative mould.
