Kipling the Plagiarist? The Case of ‘O Baal, Hear Us!’

Abstract

It is known that Kipling admitted plagiarism in the case of The Jungle Book (1894), although the precise sources remain unidentified, but an earlier instance occurs in a poem written seven years earlier, ‘O Baal, Hear Us!’.1 The poem was first published in The Pioneer on 18 July 1888, republished in the Pioneer Mail on 22 July and the Civil and Military Gazette on 23 July. The occasion for the piece is significant, being a debate over the syllabus of education at Indian schools. The poem—or ‘skit’, as Kipling refers to it in a letter to Mrs Hill2—was prefaced with a ‘Resolution of the Indian Government’: ‘An attempt should be made to prepare a moral text-book based upon the fundamental principles of natural religion, such as may be taught in all Government and non-Government colleges.’ Such a Resolution, precipitated by the findings of an Education Commission earlier in the year, had been published in the Gazette of India, 14 July.