ABSTRACT
Rudyard Kipling’s knowingness lies in repeated claims to familiarity with Indian languages and cultures. Kipling himself probably wrote the ‘Hindu proverb’ in its perfect iambic pentameters. Authentic or not, it insists on narratorial knowledge of Indian folk wisdom. ‘The Love Song of Har Dyal’, which brings the lovers together, is supposedly common knowledge in Lahore. No scholar has yet identified its original, which seems, appropriately enough, to be about a doomed inter-ethnic romance between a Muslim ‘Pathan girl’, and the Punjabi Har Dyal, who may be Sikh or Hindu. Kipling wrote about that ‘real Indian life’ in another story ‘On the City Wall’. It thus seems very likely that ‘The Love Song of Har Dyal’ is Kipling’s own composition, based on the Punjabi songs and romances of separated lovers which he had listened to during his nights wandering Lahore and chatting with ‘native friends’.
