4 - The worst muckers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2009
Summary
“No one can accuse young Cottar of runnin' after women, white or black,” the major replied thoughtfully.
“But, then, that's the kind that generally goes the worst mucker in the end.”
(“The Brushwood Boy,” DW 263)In the Indian stories I mention in this chapter, I want to give a sense of Kipling's worst fear – going “worst mucker” amid the multiple tyrannies and invisible structures of everyday colonial life. Both Victorian and imperial systems of education placed inordinate emphasis on the body as the site to be disciplined by sexual and class power. The colonizer's body is (as Foucault reminds us in another context) also society's body and therefore a political reality that must be schooled into order and harmony. Joseph Bristow, the most recent of critics to draw attention to the education of English schoolboys during the age of empire, reminds us of the conflation of “culture,” games, sports and moral values, and of the assumption that “culture” was a defense against excess, vulgarity and division (1991: 10). The colonizer's body, in particular, is a miniaturized model of the society that needs to be disciplined, tamed and domesticated. So too, the body of the Other. As Susan Stewart eloquently puts it in her discussion of freaks, “The body of the cultural other is … both naturalized and domesticated in a process we might consider to be characteristic of colonization in general. For all colonization involves the taming of the beast by bestial methods and hence both the conversion and projection of the animal and human, difference and identity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Narratives of EmpireThe Fictions of Rudyard Kipling, pp. 78 - 113Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993