22 pages • 44-minute read
Gunga Din
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Ballad of East and West” by Rudyard Kipling (1889)
This poem appeared in the same popular 1890 collection. Like “Gunga Din,” this is a ballad—a narrative of an English officer bonding with an Afghan outlaw after seeing the courage and nobility of the rebel fighting the British occupation.
“During Wind and Rain” by Thomas Hardy (1917)
A contemporary of Kipling, Hardy also experimented with reinvigorating the ballad genre’s rhythm and rhyme patterns and the use of the verse/refrain. Hardy’s narratives are bleaker than Kipling’s: This ballad explores the death of Hardy’s young wife, concluding that everyone must die and that time never stops.
“The Hero” by Siegfried Sassoon (1917)
Because Kipling was the most widely read British poet in the years leading up to World War I, British poets of the next generation often acknowledge a debt to Kipling’s themes and prosody. This ballad, in which an Army officer lies to the grieving mother of a dead soldier about his cowardly death under fire, echoes Kipling’s perception that war was brutal and messy and should not be glorified.
Further Literary Resources
“Rudyard Kipling” by T. S. Eliot (1941)
This much-anthologized appreciation of Kipling’s achievement by the foremost poet of the generation after Kipling’s appeared when Eliot’s cohort of younger Modernist poets dismissed Kipling as a second-tier talent. In addition to acknowledging Kipling’s vast readership and influence, Eliot admires Kipling’s use of the ballad form in “Gunga Din,” and Kipling’s ability to write poetry that does not seem to want to be poetry.
“‘Gunga Din’: Using Literature to Understand India’s Colonial Past” by Kathy Sundstedt (2012)
This treatment, begun as a Master’s thesis, shows instructors how to introduce the controversial literature of British imperialism to a contemporary classroom. The guide explores the influence of Kipling’s upbringing in India on his conflicted views of British supremacy.
“‘Gunga Din’ and Other Better Men: The Burden of Imperial Manhood in Kipling’s Verse” by Bradley Deane (2014)
The opening chapter of Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914, uses “Gunga Din” as a model for changing perceptions of masculinity. The chapter explores the difference between the speaker’s rigid understanding of what it means to be a man and how the gentle, compassionate, and quietly noble Din compels him to consider a radical re-vision of what being a man means.
Listen to the Poem
Michael David Farrow reads “Gunga Din” by Rudyard Kipling
Numerous recitations of the poem are available on YouTube. Here, Kipling’s dramatic monologue is performed by veteran British character actor Michael David Farrow. The recitation is staged—the speaker, dressed in period British military uniform, speaks at a campfire to a gathering of friends who stay in the shadows. By avoiding singsong-y delivery, the presentation makes vivid the speaker’s recollection of the death of the Hindu water-bearer who saved his life.
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