5 - Grandpaternalism: Kipling’s Imperial Care Narrative

Summary

“[B]ut who can argue with a grandmother?” quips the exasperated servant to the Widow of Kulu in Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 novel Kim, critiquing the woman’s penchant for charms and pills to cure her grandson’s “most lamentable windy colic” rather than merely cutting back on the boy’s prodigious consumption of unripe mangoes (218, 216). The widow claims confidently that “None but a grandmother should ever oversee a child. Mothers are only fit for bearing” (217). When the lama refers to Kim as a son, the widow responds: “Say grandson, rather. Mothers have not the wisdom of our years. If a child cries they say the heavens are falling. Now a grandmother is far enough separated from the pain of bearing and the pleasure of giving the breast to consider whether a cry is wickedness pure or the wind” (275). For the widow, the relationship between parent and child brings the two positions too close together – the mother’s temporal proximity to the child, her inability to distance herself from the affectively charged events of childbirth and breastfeeding, causes her to overreact. The grandmother, on the other hand, coolly applies the knowledge of her long years to the intractable problems of child rearing, correctly diagnosing the gaseous nature of the boy’s cry. Adopting the widow’s terminology, the lama replies that Kim “is in the spirit my very ‘grandson’ to me” (275). In Kim, it is the temporal distance that intervenes between grandparent and grandchild that serves as a means of mutual understanding between the two positions. Rather than frame empire as the paternalistic relation between father and son, Kipling substitutes the grandparent/grandchild dyad: a structure that makes power appear more rooted in affective bonds than disciplinary ones, a matter of choice rather than coercion. As I will go on to argue, the grandpaternalism of empire that Kipling sketches in Kim serves as an affective manifestation of colonial policy after the Indian Uprising of 1857, using the representation of age to narrativize the successful transition from the liberal project of reform to indirect rule. To do so, Kipling revises the position of the colonized within the imperial imagination: away from an impressionable and unruly child in need of instruction to an already developed and innocuous older person deserving of care.