ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the way imperial and wartime politics influenced the shape of literature and its reception via censorship and propaganda; Rudyard Kipling’s epistolary stories, first serialized in newspaper but then collected together as “The Eyes of Asia,” serve as a case study. Written in the voices of Indian soldiers, and based on actual soldiers’ letters that had been censored at the Front and then forwarded to Kipling by the British government, the stories demonstrate the degree to which imperial loyalty—mandated by a colonial law against “disaffection”—increasingly had to be manufactured, and how the uneven application of liberal norms across the empire inevitably compromised press freedoms in the metropole as well.
