Gunga Din

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

Kipling’s childhood and education reflected his mid-to-late-19th-century historical era, the High Victorian Age, during which the British Empire thrived. Through military operations, missionary work, and imperial investment and development, Britain, by the close of the 19th century, was the dominant global power, establishing colonial governments on four continents. The adage “the sun never sets on the British Empire” was a geographical reality.

What justified this international land grab domestically was the belief that British culture, industrial know-how, governmental organization, and religious tradition would be a gift to places that lived in what Britain’s elite dismissed as primitive, even savage, conditions. The British had little regard for other cultures and the dynamics of the peoples whose countries they colonized.

Because decades after writing the poem, Kipling defended the logic of British imperialism even as the British Empire was in decline, extolling it as a military and economic construct, “Gunga Din” is often read as a defense of British jingoism and xenophobia.

But “Gunga Din” was written by a young Kipling, a British national who had grown up in India, learned much about its cultures, and appreciated its peoples. Raised to accept without question the harmful stereotype of the inferiority of South Asian societies, Kipling was nevertheless also marked by the quiet nobility and compassionate stoicism of the people the British state had oppressed, exploited, and subjugated. This perspective, which in Kipling’s time registered as respect but which would now be seen as paternalistic benign racism, is reflected in the implications of Gunga Din’s heroism: In the end, the speaker discovers a model of behavior outside of British culture.