ABSTRACT
Members of Rudyard Kipling's nuclear family lived in India for approximately thirty years (roughly 1870–1900), and all four Kiplings (Rudyard, Lockwood Kipling, Alice MacDonald Kipling, and Alice Fleming) published writing based on that experience. As postcolonial readers of Rudyard Kipling’s work in particular have often pointed out, their representation of life in the British Raj was highly ideological and often quite limited. For that reason, my digital thematic collection, "The Kiplings and India: A Collection of Writings from British India," balances the presentation of digital editions of texts by the Kiplings themselves with writing by contemporary Indian reformers and activists like Pandita Ramabai, Rukhmabai, Behramji Malabari, and Dadabhai Naoroji. The project is being built in the Scalar platform, and Scalar's visualization and path frameworks help users learn about a series of thematic debates in British Indian life: the famines, women's rights under civil law (especially marriage law and the rights of widows), and the advent of the Indian nationalist movement. Here I will explore texts focusing on one particular thematic thread, the differential representation of late nineteenth-century Indian famines in writings by the Kiplings as well as Pandita Ramabai, Naoroji, and others.
