India as the Uncivilized Other: Reading Kipling’s Letters of Marque

While various critics have explored the mainstream literary works to deconstruct imperialism, the alternative sites such as letters, diaries, and travel writings have not yet been sufficiently investigated. It would be interesting to read and subject some of Rudyard Kipling's other writings which he termed as ‘the bulk of the special correspondence and occasional articles', published between 1887-89, and later compiled in a volume titled, From Sea to Sea, to a fresh and thorough investigation. The paper explores the first part of the volume titled Letters of Marque containing articles that throw open a rich site of a 22-year old Kipling's unsubstantiated value judgments on India. These articles are mostly Kipling's description of life in the semi-Independent States of India but they are interspersed with observations which brand India as the uncivilized other as against the sophistication and profundity of the English. Kipling's Letters of Marque vividly captures the imperial mind in its rare moment of lapse when a young Kipling abandoned political correctness and brazenly depicted India as the uncivilized other whom perhaps only the Empire had the wisdom and wherewithal to civilize, modernize and liberate by colonizing!