Harish Trivedi (editor) - Kipling in India, India in Kipling

KIPLING IN INDIA: INDIA IN KIPLING

This book explores and re-evaluates Kiplings connection with India, its people, culture, languages, and locales through his experiences and his writings. Kiplings works attracted interest among a large section of the British public, stimulating curiosity in their far-off Indian Empire, and made many canonise him as an emblem of the Raj.

This volume highlights the astonishing social and thematic range of his Indian writings as represented in The Jungle Books ; Kim ; his early verse; his Simla-based tales of Anglo-Indian intrigues and love affairs; his stories of the common Indian people; and his journalism. It brings together different theoretical and contextual readings of Kipling to examine how his experience of India influenced his creative work and conversely how his imperial loyalties conditioned his creative engagement with India. The 18 chapters here engage with the complexities and contradictions in his writings and analyse the historical and political contexts in which he wrote them, and the contexts in which we read him now.

With well-known contributors from different parts of the worldincluding India, the UK, the USA, Canada, France, Japan, and New Zealandthis book will be of great interest not only to those interested in Kiplings life and works but also to researchers and scholars of nineteenth-century literature, comparative studies, postcolonial and subaltern studies, colonial history, and cultural studies.

Harish Trivedi , former Professor of English at the University of Delhi, was Visiting Professor at the universities of Chicago and London. He is the author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (1993, 1995); has co-edited Literature and Nation: Britain and India 18001990 (2000); and edited Kim (2011).

Janet Montefiore is Professor Emerita of the University of Kent at Canterbury, where she taught English literature, womens studies, and creative writing from 1978 to 2015. Her books include Feminism and Poetry (1987, 1994, 2004), Arguments of Heart and Mind (2002), and Rudyard Kipling (2007). Since 2013, she has edited the quarterly Kipling Journal .

KIPLING IN INDIA: INDIA IN KIPLING

Edited by Harish Trivedi and Janet Montefiore

First published 2021

by Routledge

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2021 selection and editorial matter, Indian Institute of Advanced Study; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of Harish Trivedi and Janet Montefiore to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN: 978-0-367-53046-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-54728-8 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-09032-8 (ebk)

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Contents

Harish Trivedi and Janet Montefiore

I
The Kiplings in India

Barbara Bryant

Harish Trivedi

Jill Didur

Evelyne Hanquart-Turner

Neelum Saran Gour

Angela Eyre

II
Rudyard Kiplings Indian poetry and fiction

Janet Montefiore

Harry Ricketts

Madhu Grover

Usha Mudiganti

Satish C. Aikant

Kaori Nagai

Anindyo Roy

Phillip Mallett

III
The Jungle Books

Amrita Narayanan

Rangana Banerji

Stephen Hancock

Vinita Dhondiyal Bhatnagar

The essays which comprise this book were first presented at a conference held under the same rubric at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla, from 26 to 28 April 2016, with two minor exceptions. Barbara Bryant now contributes a chapter which she had proposed for the conference but could not present and Harish Trivedi has replaced the essay he presented with another one on a subject which serves to fill a gap here.

We are grateful above all to the IIAS for their academic counsel and generous hospitality without which neither the conference nor the book would have been possible. We wish to thank in particular Professor Chetan Singh, former Director of the IIAS, for kindly approving the proposal to hold the conference at the IIAS and for his own active participation in it. We also wish to thank the present Director, Professor Makarand Paranjape, for kindly contributing a Foreword to this volume and for overseeing its publication.

We also thank the Kipling Society (UK) for facilitating the travel to India of four of the overseas participants and on the occasion of the conference making a gift of some forty books by or about Kipling to the IIAS Library; Dr Kaori Nagai for helping with the screening of the large number of abstracts we received for the conference; and to Professor Satish Aikant and Dr Sarvachetan Katoch, both former fellows of the IIAS, for helping with the local arrangements.

Finally, we wish to thank our contributors not only for their valuable submissions but also for their patient and cheerful co-operation through the various stages of putting this volume together.

The Editors

Satish C. Aikant is former Professor and Chair, Department of English H.N.B. Garhwal University and a former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. He has been a Visiting Professor at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is a critic and a translator, and has published on postcolonial literatures, literary theory, and contemporary culture. His publications include Critical Spectrum: Essays on Literary Culture (2004) and Postcolonial Indian Literature: Toward a Critical Framework (2018). He was editor of the journal Summerhill: IIAS Review (200813).

Rangana Banerji is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English, University of Calcutta. She taught at Muralidhar Girls College, Kolkata for several years. Her publications include an article in The Shakespearean International Yearbook, Vol. 12 (2012) and The Origins of English Studies in Bengal (2012). She is interested in nineteenth-century studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and womens writing.

Vinita Dhondiyal Bhatnagar is Professor of Humanities at the University Institute of Technology, Bhopal. She has been Visiting Professor at the Centre for Feminist Research, York University, Toronto. She has authored/co-authored books on women, films, and literature, including Readings in Indian English Literature: Nation, Culture, and Identity ; Art at a time of Terrorism ; Women Empowerment and Mainstream Indian Cinema ; and Women and Power . She has authored two monographs, Hamlet and Miltons Paradise Lost , and several articles on gender issues.