Kipling’s famine‐romance: Masculinity, gender and colonial biopolitics in “William the Conqueror”

Abstract

Our present understanding of colonial masculinity is strongly mediated by Kipling’s fictional representation of late 19th‐century India as a space of male self‐determination and imperial service. This article concentrates on one of Kipling’s short stories, published in American and British women’s magazines and speculates on how a female audience might have caused Kipling to modify his (conventional) depiction of Anglo‐Indian gender relations. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s work and reviewing the history of colonial famine relief, I suggest that the formal conjunction of the romance genre with the unusual setting of a famine‐relief camp is the key to Kipling’s “gender transactions” in this story, and can be read as an indicator of the “biopolitical” logic of the camp as a space of sovereign exception.

Keywords:

• gender
• famine
• exception
• colonialism
• Kipling
• Agamben

Notes

1. Throughout his paper the term “Anglo‐Indian” refers to British nationals living in colonial India.

2. The fact that Kipling was married to Carrie Balestier, an American from Vermont, may have influenced his decision to publish in women’s magazines there, rather than in Britain. Interestingly, one of his closest friends in Allahabad was another American woman, Mrs Edmonia Hill, who was a possible model for the heroine of “William the Conqueror”. Edmonia Hill (known as “Ted”) was the lively unconventional wife of a professor at Muir College; Kipling lodged at their home, Belvedere House, during his time a reporter on the Allahabad Pioneer (see Wilson 117–19).

3. See epigraph quotation.

4. Boxing Day – a day therefore associated with generosity and charitable donation. Kipling’s conclusion gestures towards the story’s December publication.

5. Sublimating any maternal feelings in the management of servants (children were routinely sent home at an early age) the skills expected of Anglo‐Indian women were language acquisition, diplomacy, disciplinary regulation – the skills of imperial administration writ small.

6. See, for instance, Edward Money’s mutiny‐romance The Wife and the Ward (1859), which celebrates the courage of Anglo‐Indian women at the siege of Wheeler’s entrenchment at Cawnpore.

7. William can be read, in some ways, as an “auto‐erotic” surrogate of the younger Kipling – removed professionally from the soldiers, engineers and administrators s/he idealizes, but identifying intimately with them.

8. The idea of a sustaining “domestic sovereignty” was thus built into Victorian public culture: as the contemporary constitutional historian Walter Bagehot stated approvingly, “a family on the throne is an interesting idea [ … ] it brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life” (Bagehot 41).

9. This is a paradoxical conjunction which had horrific consequences in other later British experiments with the concentration camp system during the Boer War.

10. The club‐room scene in Forster’s A Passage to India encodes many of these symbolic tensions. For a more detailed discussion of the cultural dynamics of charivari as a form of colonial exception, see Tickell, Violence and Empire: Terrorism and Insurgency in Indian‐English Fiction 1830–1947.