Kipling and “The Bridge-builders”

PROF. K. VISWANATHAM

To know how we stand, we have to know how others stand. Compare or perish – is Arnold’s exhortation. To see ourselves as others see us is a healthy corrective to the attitude of I am that, I am the bubble of self-importance has to be pricked. Image of India in Western creative writing is a fascinating topic; it may tickle or tease us; both have educative value leading to a redesigning of our understanding of ourselves or others.

Kipling is a major text for our topic. What does India mean to Kipling? What does Kipling’s India mean to us? Was Kipling a boy who never grew up or one whom nobody read? The 1960s saw the wind of change. If today we question Kipling the artist, we question our own credentials as critics. There is a Kipling boom: J. M. S. Tompkins, J. K. Stanford, J. I. M. Stewart, Andrew Rutherford, C. S. Lewis, T. R. Henn, Allen J. Greenberger, Bonamy Dobree, Louis Cornell, C. A. Bodelsen and others rehabilitate Kipling. E. M. Forster poses the question: Can an immature person (meaning Kipling) be a great writer? and answers Yes. “When he turns from his ‘job’ to his ‘Daemon’ as he calls it, he enters another world at once, the world of inspiration, and he moves with authority there. “Today scholars recognize him as a great artist and a profound thinker. If earlier Herbert Spencer saw in him barbaric sentiments and if Oscar Wilde saw in him a genius who drops his aspirates, Kipling the writer was occulted by Kipling the imperialist. But why should Kipling’s imperial postures blind us to his art? Does Milton’s? To justify the ways of God to man, lessen our admiration for the slow planetary wheelings of his verse? Kipling is an imperialist; Eliot is a royalist in politics. Cicero’s rounded periods are the large utterance of Imperial Rome. Kipling’s imperialism is a politically viable and ethically justifiable stance; it is a metaphor for an existentia1 situation rather than a political creed; it is a paradigm for the structure of his moral universe. Kipling has been, like Actaeon, the father and prey of his own phrases: The White Man’s Burden, the lesser breeds without the law, etc. In a lighter vein the White Man’s Burden, V. S. Pritchett points out,  turns out to be his wife’s adultery. At a serious level it is the idiom of efficient and good government. In Kipling’s day the burden was borne by the white man; it may rest on brown or black or yellow shoulders. The expression is short hand for work. Shakespeare shows in Othello that Iago the white man is black and the black Othello is white. In the words of C. S. Lewis those who admire Kipling defend him tooth and nail and resent unfavorable criticism as if he were a mistress or a country rather than a writer.

India, like the Dark Lady in the plays of Shakespeare, sprawls through all the writings of Kipling except two or three; more importantly is in The Jungle Books, Kim and the stories. The Jungle Book is the heir of Hitopadesa; the Fabulist is at the peak of his powers. Kim is the finest story in English about India and I have dealt in my book. Maugham says regarding Kipling’s stories: “He is our greatest story-writer. I can’t think he will be ever equalled. I am sure he will never be excelled” We get the very feel of India in The Bridge-Builders, “the most consummate evocation of India’s unique identity.” To read Kipling’s Indian writings is to plunge into conflicting emotions, as Benita Parry says: in one story Kipling looks at India through ethnocentric lenses; in another there is rare perceptiveness of the people’s psyche and sensibility (Delusions and Discoveries, p. 208). A bridge is being built across the Ganges; unexpectedly there is a flood; Findlayson and Peroo in trying to save the fleet of stone boats are thrown on an island near a Hindu shrine seven koss downstream both of them have swallowed pellets of opium against fever: they dream of the Punchayet of the gods and listen to a debate about the impact of modern inventions on ancient Faith. The next day Hitchkock and the Rao of Baraon come in a steam launch, rescue Findlayson and Peroo. The bridge is not damaged; the work of opium is over; the Chief Engineer turns to work: the bridge makes or mars his reputation. Findlayson misses the spiritual bus. Or do black men only see gods?

The Bridge-Builders is one of the great allegories about India, an ancient land restructured by modern science and technology. The story spans the whole history of the land from Brahm who dreams to Findlayson who dreams after swallowing a pellet of opium.

It is a Bridge between England and India. East and West. Tradition and Change, Science and Spirit, Past and Present, and Heaven, One and Many, God and Men, Pollution and Conservation, Nature and Technology, Old Gods and New, Here and now and There and Then, Brahman and Maya, man’s Arithmetic and Kismet’s Calculus, Famine and Plenty, Hanuman and the Vision of Mirza, Time and Eternity, Life and Death, Gods and Beasts, Peace and War, personal izzat and higher values, Indian ‘pukka’ and King’s English.

The Canterbury Tales is said to be a concise portrait of the whole nation. The Bridge-Builders is a precise portrait of India of Brahm and of Findlayson. Man’s proud vaunt of harnessing nature is the texture of the story. Indian mythology and religion are dovetailed into it. The modern Bridge-Builders are said to be the descendents of Hanuman; they are, biologically and architecturally. Hanuman was the builder of the bridge to Lanka. In the Punchayet of the Gods, Hanuman and Ganesh are on the side of improvements like fire-carriages which bring a flood of pilgrims to the altars of the Holy Ones who witnessed only a trickle earlier. The others are afraid of neglect. Krishna the god of love and a democrat mediates between the two sections and among the gods squabbling for suzerainty and reconciles them to the changes engineered by the Bridge-Builders. Krishna is the idol of dreaming gopis, the only God who never dies, prince of plackets, king of codpieces, Freud’s sex, fleeting and singing (perhaps fleeting is a mistake for fluting).

Kipling’s deep wisdom lies in the awareness of unalterable permanence that overcomes all changes. Reality is eterne in mutabilitie as Spenser says in the Mutability Cantos. India is Hardy’s Egdon Heath resisting the irrepressible New. The black Buck (Indra) says: “The deep sea was where the Gunga runs but yesterday and tomorrow the sea shall cover her again”. The grey Ape (Hanuman) says: “Each bridge leads surely to US in the end. My worshippers from beyond the Black Water do no more than change the names and that we have seen a thousand times.” Peroo, a Lascar, a Kharva from Bulsar is a completer man spiritually and peripatetically than Finlinson or the Chota sahib as he knows:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Kipling had nothing but contempt for half-baked Indians like the local Maharajah who disown their heritage. Peroo tells the Chief Engineer: “But when Mother Gunga talks I know whose voice will be loudest. What man knew Mother Gunga’s arithmetic? London is London, Sahib. Sydney is Sydney and Port Darwin is Port Darwin. Also Mother Gunga is Mother Gunga and when I come to her banks, I know this and worship.” One is reminded of Eliot’s The Dry Salvages:

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god–sullen, untamed, and Intractable,
... a problem confronting the builder of bridges.

The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten by the dwellers in cities.

These lines neatly sum up the story’s problem. The ancient wisdom of the gods comes through the Bull (Shiv): “Faith follows faith among my people in the schools and I have no anger, for when the words are said and the new talk is ended to Shiv men return at the last. Their gods are born yesterday.” The Elephant (Ganesh) grunts: “Let those whose god is toil control Gunga; let the dirt dig in the dirt if it pleases the dirt.” The Punchayet of the gods is an animal circus, a bestiary consisting of Bull (Shiv), Buck (Indra), Tigress (Kali), Mugger (Gunga), the Ass (Sitala smallpox), Parrot (Karma), a drunken man (Bhairon: it should be Bhairav); Krishna alone is human. Does Kipling suggest that beasts were deified into gods in India? Whatever be their origins they are confident:

We be the Gods of the East
Older than all
Masters of mourning and feat,
How shall we fall? (Naulakha)

Krishna debunks their confidence: “The fire carriages shout the names ofnew gods that are not the older under new names.” Gotterdammerung.

The story refers to beliefs that those who die in Gunga water go to Shiv, that no man dies before his time, that Hinduism is One through Many, that India is plagued by red tape and cholera, drought and riot among twenty warring castes.

But above all Kipling makes you listen to “the dry yawn of water crawling over thirsty sand”, to the burnt and defiled sand whispering and fizzing, to the overhead crane “snorting and ing and grunting as an elephant grunts in the timber yard.” Did any other writer speak of a river lifting herself bodily as a snake does when she drinks in midsummer? One need not mention Kipling’s genius for technical inventories; in a Punchayet of Machines the key address will be Kipling’s. Mahajun, jiboonwalla, lotah, guru, pukka, punchayet, ham dekhta hai, sons of unthinkable begetting–bring whiffs of Indian speech and idiom. A story like The Bridge-Builders is “the fruit not of Kipling the theorist but of an inspired artist who at a deep unconscious level accepted India as his native soil.” Kipling’s Indian writings are, as Benita Parry says, the most vivid fictional transmutation of the sub-continent’s many faces, of its moods and sensibility. The story of the Indian people, a Magna Carta. Vox populi vox Dei. Krishna says: “The matter is with the people. They move.” If Kipling gives Indra the last word, it is difficult to say: “The dreams come and go and the nature of the dream changes but still Brahm dreams and till He wakes, the gods die not ... The gods change–all save One.” Krishna claims that He is that One “walking continually upon the earth so long as a green blade springs here or there are two voices at twilight in the standing crops.” In the lines of Yeats:

Love has pitched his mansion
In the place of excrement;
And nothing is whole or sole
Till it has been rent.

Are we to pity or admire Findlayson emerging from Bottom’s Dream into the prison of Work and Izzat? Kipling does not judge; he is as tolerant as the wise old mother, Mrs Trabert, in Maugham’s The Sacred Flame. It is this suspension of judgment that makes The Bridge-Builders so authentic and irrefutable, a miracle of aesthetic logic, a precis of India:

The One remains, the many change and pass.