11-04-2008, 01:07 PM
<b>Babu English and Rudyard Kipling Insults</b>
Among the ways in which it is common for many of the British in India to humiliate and insult the Indian people, one of the most unwarranted and galling is that of criticizing their use of English language and laughing at their mistakes. "Babu English" is a phrase of ridicule heard wherever Englishmen (not all, but certain large classes) speak of India or Indians. And singularly enough, it is applied oftenest to the Bengalis, who intellectually, and especially in linguistic attainments and ability, are not second to any Indian people, if to any people in the world. "Bengali Babu" is applied as a phrase of peculiar contempt.
The British rulers of the land insist on Indians everywhere addressing them, conversing and doing business with them, in a foreign language ¨C the English. Suppose the tables were turned, and those same rulers were compelled to converse and write and do all their business in Bengali, the Hindustani, the Tamil or some other languages of India. Would they make fewer mistakes? Everybody knows they would make far more and worse.
There are no classes of Indians that the English so much dislike and take so much pains to insult as the educated classes. The uneducated they despise, neglect and treat almost as slaves; but they do not take the studied pains to humiliate and insult them as they do those whom they recognize as their equal in intelligence.
As Sir Henry Cotton says:
¡°The very thought of equality rankles in the Englishmen¡¯s minds; the more intelligent, cultured or intellectual the Indians are the more they are disliked.¡±
We have the following remarkable tribute to these despised and insulted Bengalis from Hon. G. K. Gokhale of the Viceroy¡¯s Council (himself not a Bengali):
"The Bengalis are in many respects a most remarkable people. It is easy to speak of their faults; they lie on the surface. But they have great qualities which are sometimes lost sight of. In almost all walks of life open to Indians, the Bengalis are the most distinguished. Some of the greatest social and religious reformers of recent times, have come from their ranks. Take law, science, literature: where will you find another scientist in all India to place beside Dr. (now Sir) J.C. Bose, or Dr (now Sir) P. C. Ray or a jurist like Dr. Ghose, or a poet like Rabindranath Tagore? These men are not freaks of nature. They are the highest products of which the race is regularly capable."
Such is the race and such are the individual men whom the British take particular pains to ridicule¡ÂThe Englishman has been the worst offenders against the Indian people in the ways mentioned above, or at least the one whose insults have been most galling because his writings have been so widely read, is Rudyard Kipling. The fact that Kipling was born in India and spent his earlier years there, very naturally causes his readers to take for granted that his representations are true. It is as true as a German or Russian writing about England.
Kipling seems to have cared little for the real India, the great India of the past and the present, with its history and its civilization¡Âhe seems to take pleasure in heaping ridicule upon the educated classes and in describing the Indian people generally by the use of such contemptuous expressions as ¡°a lesser breed without the law. And new-caught sullen people half devil and half child.
Such of Kipling's writings as are connected with India have always stung the Indian people to the quick. Their popularity in England and the wide acceptance of their misrepresentations as true, have done more than almost any other cause to exasperate leading Indians¡Â
Professor Gilbert Murray said: ¡°If ever it were my fate to put men in prison for the books they write, I should not like it, but I should know where to begin. I should first of all lock up my old friend, Rudyard Kipling, because in several stories he has used his great powers to stir up in the minds of hundreds of thousands of Englishmen a blind and savage contempt for the Bengali. You cannot cherish a savage contempt for anyone without it being quickly reciprocated¡Â¡±
But Kipling is not the only offender. It is hardly possible to conceive anything more galling to the Indian people than the tone of condescension with which they are nearly everywhere and always spoken of and referred to by the British, in their books, about India¡ÂIt is the same; they the British, are in India because they are superior (of course, they are white). They are there on a high and noble mission ¨C the mission to ¡°bear the white man¡¯s burden.¡± Of course, the fact does not count, that for more than 3,000 years before they, the British, came, India ruled herself wholly and was one of the leading nations of the world.
Says The Democrat of Allahabad (June 5, 1921)
http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/viewthread.ph...able&tid=553936
Among the ways in which it is common for many of the British in India to humiliate and insult the Indian people, one of the most unwarranted and galling is that of criticizing their use of English language and laughing at their mistakes. "Babu English" is a phrase of ridicule heard wherever Englishmen (not all, but certain large classes) speak of India or Indians. And singularly enough, it is applied oftenest to the Bengalis, who intellectually, and especially in linguistic attainments and ability, are not second to any Indian people, if to any people in the world. "Bengali Babu" is applied as a phrase of peculiar contempt.
The British rulers of the land insist on Indians everywhere addressing them, conversing and doing business with them, in a foreign language ¨C the English. Suppose the tables were turned, and those same rulers were compelled to converse and write and do all their business in Bengali, the Hindustani, the Tamil or some other languages of India. Would they make fewer mistakes? Everybody knows they would make far more and worse.
There are no classes of Indians that the English so much dislike and take so much pains to insult as the educated classes. The uneducated they despise, neglect and treat almost as slaves; but they do not take the studied pains to humiliate and insult them as they do those whom they recognize as their equal in intelligence.
As Sir Henry Cotton says:
¡°The very thought of equality rankles in the Englishmen¡¯s minds; the more intelligent, cultured or intellectual the Indians are the more they are disliked.¡±
We have the following remarkable tribute to these despised and insulted Bengalis from Hon. G. K. Gokhale of the Viceroy¡¯s Council (himself not a Bengali):
"The Bengalis are in many respects a most remarkable people. It is easy to speak of their faults; they lie on the surface. But they have great qualities which are sometimes lost sight of. In almost all walks of life open to Indians, the Bengalis are the most distinguished. Some of the greatest social and religious reformers of recent times, have come from their ranks. Take law, science, literature: where will you find another scientist in all India to place beside Dr. (now Sir) J.C. Bose, or Dr (now Sir) P. C. Ray or a jurist like Dr. Ghose, or a poet like Rabindranath Tagore? These men are not freaks of nature. They are the highest products of which the race is regularly capable."
Such is the race and such are the individual men whom the British take particular pains to ridicule¡ÂThe Englishman has been the worst offenders against the Indian people in the ways mentioned above, or at least the one whose insults have been most galling because his writings have been so widely read, is Rudyard Kipling. The fact that Kipling was born in India and spent his earlier years there, very naturally causes his readers to take for granted that his representations are true. It is as true as a German or Russian writing about England.
Kipling seems to have cared little for the real India, the great India of the past and the present, with its history and its civilization¡Âhe seems to take pleasure in heaping ridicule upon the educated classes and in describing the Indian people generally by the use of such contemptuous expressions as ¡°a lesser breed without the law. And new-caught sullen people half devil and half child.
Such of Kipling's writings as are connected with India have always stung the Indian people to the quick. Their popularity in England and the wide acceptance of their misrepresentations as true, have done more than almost any other cause to exasperate leading Indians¡Â
Professor Gilbert Murray said: ¡°If ever it were my fate to put men in prison for the books they write, I should not like it, but I should know where to begin. I should first of all lock up my old friend, Rudyard Kipling, because in several stories he has used his great powers to stir up in the minds of hundreds of thousands of Englishmen a blind and savage contempt for the Bengali. You cannot cherish a savage contempt for anyone without it being quickly reciprocated¡Â¡±
But Kipling is not the only offender. It is hardly possible to conceive anything more galling to the Indian people than the tone of condescension with which they are nearly everywhere and always spoken of and referred to by the British, in their books, about India¡ÂIt is the same; they the British, are in India because they are superior (of course, they are white). They are there on a high and noble mission ¨C the mission to ¡°bear the white man¡¯s burden.¡± Of course, the fact does not count, that for more than 3,000 years before they, the British, came, India ruled herself wholly and was one of the leading nations of the world.
Says The Democrat of Allahabad (June 5, 1921)
http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/viewthread.ph...able&tid=553936