ABSTRACT
Of course different readers can construct different readings, but there are ethical reasons for noting that some readings can ignore the material harm caused by “Kidnapped” to which Eurasian voices testify. Bart Moore-Gilbert reads “His Chance in Life” as an attack by Kipling on the views the story seems to espouse, arguing that a reader sees the narrator’s racial slights as inconsistent with its protagonist’s bravery. But as shown in Chapter 2, many Anglo-Indian readers would not have noticed a contradiction, and a Eurasian response in 1887 would have been one of pained disgust. Anglo-Indian readers of “His Chance” like Kay Robinson and Alice Kipling, invited to be awed by Michele’s love for Miss Vezzis, who is “black as a boot and, to our standard of taste, hideously ugly,” would not have been jarred into assuming an unreliable narrator; the “our” included them. Nor would they have seen it as obviously ironic for the story’s narrator to give credit for Michele’s bravery to a drop of white blood. In a world that systematically blocked Eurasian aspirations as those of an inferior race, Kenneth Wallace’s comment in The Eurasian Problem seems restrained. He says that to call Eurasians “‘much maligned’ is only just.… Stocqueler, one time editor of The Englishman, the oldest newspaper in Calcutta, could never say a good word of Eurasians, while Maud Diver, Alice Perrin, Rudyard Kipling and others have been no less unkind” (7-8).
