ABSTRACT
Borders are not merely limits beyond which one cannot explore, imagine, or travel but are also, at the same time, embodiment of intersections, conduits, bridges, and channels. The representation of borders in literary texts is, I argue, an illustration to move beyond the mundane and the conventional modes of thought and expression. This paper investigates the nature of censorship (verbal, visual, and written), as a ‘fabricated border’ in Rudyard Kipling’s Indian short stories published between1888 to 1902. Censorship is primarily a construct which controls what can be said, written, or known within a certain historical period. As a mode of power, censorship limits one’s imagination in order to constitute identity of a nation but it also draws attention to the surmounting of those same limitations. Reading censorship or the surveillance mechanisms so employed by the British Empire as a boundary, I shall examine Kipling’s early writings as preoccupied with limits, peripheries, prohibitions, and restrictions. In trying to circumvent the truths controlled, regulated, and produced within colonial administration, Kipling’s early writings encapsulate the play of words as both embodying and transgressing the surveillance mechanisms of the day. Kipling’s Indian short stories in its fascination with portrayal of diseases, modes of lying, and use of silence signify a pluralistic account of the negotiation and transaction that took place on account of the colonial encounter to recover a world in all its myriad complexity. This paper seeks to embody a nuanced account of the relationship between a torn, troubled body and political responsibility to propose a profoundly complex articulation of a writer’s concern with language and networks of power.
