22 pages • 44-minute read
Gunga Din
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Themes
The Myth of British Superiority
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism and ableism.
The speaker comes to terms with unsettling insights into the nature of British claims of superiority. This assumption was the premise behind the British Empire; until his encounter with Din, the narrator bought into the idea that the military occupation of South Asia was for the benefit of the indigenous population—that through its military and economic might, the UK could deliver the perfected British way of life to backward peoples.
Britain’s elites couched the mercenary interests from which the British occupation and colonization of India stemmed in the ideals of missionary work: Subjugating the populace would enable inferior cultures to be replaced with the British model. For this propaganda to take root, racist and ethnocentric messaging emphasized that India’s peoples had strange customs, bizarre religions, and indecipherable languages—specific marginalization that would enable soldiers abroad to ignore and dismiss the peoples they encountered rather than trying to understand them. British imperialism was dressed up as benevolent paternalism, with Britain playing the loving father helping wayward countries see the light of civilization.
While the speaker has wholeheartedly internalized British imperialist doctrine, his worldview is shaken when Gunga Din selflessly saves the speaker’s life and then dies in service to the nation that has subjugated his people. The more the speaker talks, the more he convinces himself that it is the British who should learn from the peoples they’ve colonized, whose moral standing and positive qualities echo those held up as British ideals. Acknowledging how despicably he treated Din, the speaker focuses on the man’s heroism and nobility, contrasting him with the selfish cruelty of the British soldiers.
The True Nature of Heroism
The question that haunts the speaker, long after his brush with death, is how a man whom the speaker’s bigotry cast as useful largely as a battlefield convenience manifested self-sacrificing heroics that supersede anything the speaker can imagine himself doing.
Din is demeaned, beaten, and abused by the speaker’s regiment. Carrying a heavy goatskin filled with water on the edge of the battlefront in the tropical heat, struggling to avoid bullets despite his disability, Din is cursed out when he does not bring water quickly enough as “You limpin’ lump o’ brick-dust” (Line 14). The speaker admits that the regiment, himself included, often beat the bhisti: “[W]e wopped ‘im ‘cause ‘e couldn’t serve us all” (Line 29).
Despite such mistreatment, Din seemingly does not hesitate to sacrifice his life to save one of the men who abused him on behalf of a nation that had enslaved and exploited Din’s people. His heroism is reflexive rather than reflective: He does not pause to consider his own survival, and when wounded and dying, Din humbly hopes that the water he provided the speaker helped his injury.
Din’s actions upend the racist assumptions the speaker has long maintained about the nature of heroism—that it is embodied by white men in uniform defending imperialism. In contrast, Din does not consider that the injured speaker is one of his oppressors but protects him as one human being to another, ignoring nationality, race, ideology, and religion. For the speaker, Din’s selflessness expresses humanity’s noblest virtues.
The Brutality of War
More than 20 years before a generation of young British poets would use the vehicle of poetry to expose the brutality of World War I, excoriating the dangerous, empty idea that war is a masculinity-building adventure or a worthwhile crusade, Kipling deflates wartime, portraying it as inhumane and pointless brutality.
The word that Kipling uses to describe war, through a speaker traumatized by his near-death experience, is “slaughter” (Line 4). The speaker never mentions the ideals that the British occupational forces were theoretically defending. He also doesn’t describe battle plans or maneuvers that would frame the fighting as part of a strategic approach to a goal; rather, all of the movements the soldiers perform are similarly pointless and seemingly random: “[W]e charged or broke or cut” (Line 38) without a clear purpose.
For Kipling’s speaker, war is filled with indignities like the desire to “lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got” water (Line 6). The speaker reveals the soul-numbing grind of pointless daily skirmishes, the oppressive conditions of long days fighting in the tropics where the heat is so drying he compares it to a brick kiln: “[O]ur throats were bricky-dry” (Line 28). When the speaker is shot, there is no glory in the moment—he is wounded randomly, even as the British are departing the field, and the shot penetrates his gut rather than a more symbolically rich part of his body.
The deaths the war causes are likewise senseless. The principal casualty in this day’s fighting is the water-bearer, who is not part of the fighting. The stray bullet that “drilled the beggar clean” (Line 71) is lethal and futile, advancing the cause of neither combatant side. Only the speaker’s ruminations can distill some kind of meaning from Din’s death, which is otherwise as pointlessly unremarkable as the rest of the battle.
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