Lessons from Kipling and Rao: How to Re‐Appropriate Another Culture

Abstract

This brief study will examine Anglo‐Indian Rudyard Kipling and Indo‐Anglian Raja Rao's, attempts to re‐appropriate a foreign culture in terms of their own wills. The novelist Rao's conviction of India's position as the origin of all Western culture, alongside Kipling's own curious tale of a tribe of distant “Englishmen” rediscovered in Northwest Afghanistan, both offer examples of attempts to re‐describe and ultimately re‐locate radically different cultures within the authors' own more familiar vocabularies. How does this cultural re‐appropriation take place, and what happens to the author's parent culture when something as radically ‘other’ as an Afghan tribe or a medieval French heresy is suddenly and unexpectedly re‐incorporated into the ‘family’? The often unsettling consequences of this operation are considered as they manifest themselves in both texts in similar ways, advancing the possibility that cultural‐appropriation affects the appropriator as much as the appropriated. And so strong is the inclination that is rooted in Mankind to the Love of their Country, that some learned and witty Men … have used great Art and Industry to represent them with such advantage to the World, as though Paradise were but another Name for their native Country. Bishop Stillingfleet1