ABSTRACT
A good deal of attention has been paid to Kipling’s development of an Anglo-Indian poetic voice and persona, and his capture of an Anglo-Indian audience. One might call this his ‘poetic road taken’, a road which leads eventually to the success of the Barrack-Room Ballads and numerous other verses, still remembered and crammed with frequently quoted lines. The most fascinating of these untaken roads is suggested by ‘The Vision of Hamid Ali’. The poem, in blank verse, was published in the Calcutta Review in October 1885 and has received little critical attention. Four characters – two female ‘courtesans’ and two men – are smoking ganja and talking at midnight in old Lahore near the ‘Mosque of Wuzeer Khan’. The poem therefore contains two visions: the first temporal and political, the second supernatural and apocalyptic. From a biographical point of view, ‘The Vision of Hamid Ali’ seems obviously linked to, in part a product of, Kipling’s night wanderings in old Lahore.
