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In 'The Miracle of Purun Bhagat' , we explore a less well-known Kipling by presenting a short story which offers an alternative perspective on the colonial encounter, where a syncretic approach to Hindu and Christian values suggests that the more popular, jingoistic and massively influential Kipling should not necessarily be considered the only Kipling. Nevertheless, the process of writing necessarily becomes a mirror of the imperialistic process itself and colludes with, rather than uncovers 'empire's lie'.
"There is a conspiracy of silence around the colonial truth whatever that may be.' (Homi Bhabha)
The massive volume and staggering diversity of Kipling's writing, in addition to the fluctuating and contradictory critical responses to it, do not make the critic's initial task easy, but ultimately, and because of this, perhaps no scholar of Anglo-Indian literature can really avoid confronting it at some point and, even from a modest angle, examine Kipling's work and influence. It is important to investigate to what extent the popularly held belief is valid that his writing functioned as jingoistic propaganda to underpin the fabricated ideal of the British Empire in India, promoting the spirit of imperialism, through a romanticization and fictionalization which worked to attract the British to India to assume their 'white man's burden'.
The subject of his influence is a vast one which we cannot, obviously, attempt to address in this short article, but what we will suggest is that his particular 'colonial discourse' functioned like an archetypal hypertext, or in other words, that many writers about India, consciously or subconsciously, were writing either like him or against him. His work (between 1886 and 1937) is situated at a pivotal, end-of-empire site, or at the centre of what we would like to call a palimpsestic, intertextual process since he was influenced in his turn for example, by his own father, John Lockwood Kipling's book Beast and Man in India, by Trevelyan's Competition Wallah and also by the proliferation of more minor Anglo-Indian novelists in the 1870s such as Phil Robinson, Iltudus Prichard, Sir H.S. Cunningham, and Alexander Allardyce. Of the AngloIndian writers who succeeded him - Mrs Maud Diver, Mrs B. M. Croker, Mrs Bell and Mrs Perrin - none captured or retained the popular imagination to the same degree...