ABSTRACT
This paper examines Rudyard Kipling’s fictional representations of colonial experiences that are fraught with the problematic of shared cultures and divided politics, in texts that negotiate between the play of the hidden and the seen. Adopting masks, disguises, and poses, his self-divided colonial actors foray beyond the margins into ‘native’ territory and delight in illicit encounters with the anti-self of Empire. Kipling’s early oeuvre compellingly foregrounds its own unconscious ideological fractures and deepest transcultural yearnings.
In a bid to read this cultural mixing through the lens of transgression, my paper re-examines these texts that reveal a desire toward cultural crossover into territory ‘officially’ forbidden to the coloniser. Needless to say, this ‘desire’ is under pressure, hence expressed subliminally since overt conservatism haunts these narratives with the intractability of the native territory and a ‘colonial terror’ of the spectral ‘other’.
My paper argues that this affective urge ruptures the discourse of authority while the texts deploy an ‘alter-native’, pluralistic discourse. The writer sanctions centre-stage presence to the perspective of the colonised entities in several stories like ‘Tods’ Amendment’, ‘Dray Wara Yow Dee’, ‘At Howli Thana’, ‘Gemini’, ‘In Flood Time’, and ‘The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows’. This plural discourse not only incorporates but also embraces and celebrates cultural difference through representations of a shadowy, outlawed world existing on the sub-cultural margins of officially administrable territory, inhabited by morally slippery derelicts, inebriates, and addicts. These multiple subjectivities suggest a desire to abjure cultural limits and dwell in hybrid promiscuity. As postcolonial readers we suspect that Kipling is caught between his affective desire to assert a relationship with those spiritual and physical aspects of India that energise him and the colonised historicity of the same culture that he both condescends to and despises.
