THE COLONIAL POSTCARD: THE SPECTRAL/TELEPATHIC MODE IN CONAN DOYLE AND KIPLING

Abstract

Such Enlightenment, the narrator tellsus facetiously, is effected by an elastic religion known as the Simla Creed, alive at the edges of the British Empire where he, an unnamed Englishman, is stationed. An amalgam of occult practices, the creed stretched itself and embraced pieces of everything that the medicine-men of all ages have manufactured (63). So Rudyard Kipling mockingly observes in this satire of British Victorian forays into the marginal sciences of occultism, Spiritualism, and Mesmerism. An early Kipling tale, “The Sending of Dana Da” (1888) is one of Kiplings first engagements with the religions and philosophies of the East; it was published in theCivil and Military Gazette, a provincial newspaper for which Kipling regularly wrote. The infamous Dana Da – whose name, we are told, escapes every ethnological inscription, and who came from nowhere, with nothing in his hands (62) – dispatches a sending on the behalf of (and through) the Englishman. The recipient of this letter, (again) a Lone Sahib, is characteristically armed with scientific naturalism and Christian faith, and therefore refutes the possibilities of ectoplasmic infestation, unseen currents, and the fecund times of reincarnation. Kiplings eloquent exposition on a sending, despite his final rational explanation of this unseemly act, betrays his fascination with such forbidden epistemologies multiplying at the edges of Empire: