ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on readings that contest and move beyond unitary modes of thinking. Despite his early years in India, writing presumably for an Anglo-Indian audience, Kipling’s sense of membership within this community is often interrupted by sharp satire against its ‘official sinning’, chronicled in the Shimla ‘Plain’ tales. Ironically, he has contempt even for metropolitan interferences based upon inadequate knowledge of Anglo-India. His critique of both metropolis and periphery seem to position him on a self-constituted critical-liminal space that enables the narratives to become functional in both facilitating and disrupting imperialist ideology. Kipling’s story, ‘Naboth’ read from a monologic perspective is an apparently simple colonial allegory showing the ‘betrayal’ of a charitable Englishman by a poor Indian street-vendor whom the former allows to set up a sweet-shop at the bottom of his garden.
