ABSTRACT
The analysis of Lockwood Kipling’s “A Word on Indian Progress” in the preceding chapter frames in cultural terms the difference between British and Indian and the “degradation” the leader finds represented by much that is Indian. Given its focus on nurture—the effects of uneducated, imprisoned mothers on their children—such a reading seemed fair. However, the scorn in Lockwood’s rhetoric for the naiveté of those who see an end to the need for British rule in India suggests that the word “culture” in its sense of constructed, changeable behaviors may not capture the Kiplings’ concept of what was at stake. That suggestion is confirmed by two of Rudyard’s 1887 Plain Tales that feature Eurasian characters: “Kidnapped” and “His Chance in Life.” These stories make clear that “blood” distinguishes Eurasian people from both white and black, and, in “Kidnapped,” that black blood shows itself in telltale physical characteristics that allow the knowledgeable observer to detect its presence even in an apparently white body. While not all readers have seen the stories in this way, the argument that follows will make a case for taking them as signs of Anglo-Indian sympathy for Eurasians and as signs that race founds the Kiplings’ ideas of difference.
