Gunga Din

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism and ableism.

“Gunga Din” is a psychological case study of a character in conflict. Rather than pitting his speaker in a traditional conflict—with another character, a friend or a lover perhaps, with their God, or even with themselves—Kipling explores a character in conflict with his country’s grand perception of itself, its ideals, and its cultural mission.

The central drama of the poem isn’t the speaker’s near-death experience but the fact that the speaker is unable to deal with the implications of what he witnesses in India: how to understand the kindness, courage, and compassion of a supposedly “primitive” Indian man the speaker is theoretically supposed to “civilize.” This conflict reflects Kipling’s own nuanced attitude toward South Asia. Born in India and traumatized by his experiences in England as a child, Kipling became a journalist in Lahore, eager to immerse himself in Indian culture and to learn about its diverse peoples.

Kipling’s speaker, however, is a soldier. He is stationed more than 5,000 miles from home, in a hostile and inhospitable environment where daily he risks his life. A proud member of Her Majesty’s occupational army, the speaker opens the poem upholding its mission: the subjugation of the indigenous peoples who need to be rescued from their culture and religions via the oppressive gifts of British colonial government, rapid industrialization, and Christianity.

In the first two stanzas, the speaker shares memories of platoon life in India before he got to know Gunga Din, the company’s Hindu bhisti. The presentation is realistic—Kipling journalistically avoids sentimentalizing war into a glorious adventure. The speaker recalls the oppressive heat, the dirt, the hit-or-miss skirmishes. And through it all he remembers the stoic Din, “the finest man [he] knew” (Line 11). He recounts the regiment’s brutish treatment of the disabled water-bearer, the cruel names they called him, the threats they made to make him move faster to bring them water, even as Din struggled with the unwieldy goatskin mussick. The speaker acknowledges that he used racist, demeaning slurs alongside his buddies.  Worse, the speaker recalls that when Din failed to please all the soldiers all the time—which the speaker now acknowledges was an unreasonable demand—they, including the speaker, would beat him: “[W]e’d wop ‘im cause ‘e couldn’t serve us all” (Line 29).

Individually delivered racism is echoed in the systemic othering of Din formalized by the British army as an institution. The speaker recalls that Din, despite bringing water in the midst of the fighting and being considered a member of the regiment, was never issued a proper uniform. Rather, Din wore a demeaning “piece o’ twisty rag” (Line 21) that purposefully marked him as lesser.

The first hint of the speaker’s life-changing epiphany comes when he says that Din, despite his dark skin, is “clear white, inside” (Line 45)—praise that is fundamentally racist in its associations of dark skin color with moral inferiority. The speaker observes as Din returns from another brutal day tending to British soldiers in the heat and dirt of field combat. Drawing on symbolism that reflects the speaker’s Christianity, he calls Din’s virtuous character “white”—a color symbolizing virtue, hope, and the radiance of God. But this religious valence has at its heart the bigoted idea that the battlefield dirt that covers Din is akin to his natural skin color—both are pollutants. In contrast, his heart is virtuous and clean in a way that mirrors British ideals of racial hierarchy.

In Stanza 4, the speaker recounts his wounding, which triggers his dramatic change of heart. His gut shot is a difficult wound to address under even the best field conditions; here, his pain made him bestial, “chawin’ up the ground” and “kickin’ all around” (Lines 66, 67). He feared he would bleed out long before medics arrived. Prostrate in the tropical sun, burning with thirst, he saw the “good old grinnin’, gruntin’ Gunga Din” (Line 57). The speaker no longer name-calls or demeans Din. The brackish water Din gave him was literally life-giving.

The poem does not end with the wounded speaker accepting water from the bhisti. Instead, Din refuses to let the speaker bleed out. He carries the wounded soldier to the field medics’ stretchers—an action above and beyond any duty that Din as company bhisti would be expected to perform.

This selfless action gets Din killed. Once the speaker is “safe inside” (Line 72), Din is shot and dies almost instantly. That sacrifice compels the speaker’s epiphany. The speaker cannot bring himself to draw the obvious conclusion: The noble heroics of Din highlight the dangerously empty rhetoric of British imperialism and subvert its argument that the colonized peoples need to be saved from themselves. However, the speaker does reveal the unsettling impact of Din’s heroism in his closing observation: Din in heaven will be passing out water to the damned in hell. The clever quip reveals the speaker’s conflicted state. Using as a template the New Testament parable of the beggar Lazarus and the wealthy merchant (Luke 16, 19-31), the speaker forecasts that the Hindu water-bearer will end up in the best afterlife he can imagine—a Christian heaven. The speaker now understands that given how he mistreated Din and how he benefited from Din’s unhesitating compassion, he deserves eternal punishment.