Abstract
The classics were taught not only in the West but also all over the colonised world –except in India, probably because India was acknowledged to have foundational classics of its own written in a language which was proclaimed by Western scholars to be fully a match of Greek and Latin. However, an earlier connection between Greece and India that began in 326 BCE with the aborted attempt by Alexander the Great to conquer India left enduring cultural traces which have been explored by creative writers and scholars alike. In the hey-day of British rule in India, the British governors and civil servants, who were themselves steeped in classical education, often fashioned themselves on the model of Pax Romana, so that the absence in India of a direct classical education was still not exempt from a pervasive classical penumbra.
Highlights
Introduction andNotes” to Kim by Rudyard Kipling
To be an educated man under a Western flag in any part of the world was to know the classics, and this applied to areas beyond books and learning as well
Forster’s novel A Passage to India (1924), Cyril Fielding, the British character who is most friendly and sympathetic to the Indians and is often regarded as being the mouthpiece for the author’s liberal values, returns to the West after an eventful stint as the principal of a college in India. When he is still some way off from Britain, he begins to feel a strong surge of identification generally with the civilisation he is returning to
Summary
Introduction andNotes” to Kim by Rudyard Kipling. London: Penguin Classics, 2011, xix-xlix and 332-337.
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