Tag: India

At the End of the Passage by Rudyard Kipling

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I’ve been re-reading some of my favourite Rudyard Kipling stories, as I do from time to time. I consider him one of the best of short story writers, but it has to be said that there are few writers whose best and worst are so far apart. His stories range from the unforgettable to the unreadable. At the End of the Passage is one of the good ones, I think.

Four young colonial administrators in India are in the habit of getting together once a week for a game of whist. They are prepared to travel a considerable distance to do so, because they are the only Europeans for miles around. Over dinner they discuss the difficulties they face and the way life in India is misunderstood back in England. The host, Hummil, is in a thoroughly bad temper and the doctor stays behind to find out what is the matter. It turns out that he has not slept for days and is haunted by nightmare visions. He has even seen his own double sitting at the table.

The doctor gives him medicine to help him sleep and disables his guns, in case Hummil is tempted to shoot himself. He offers to send him off on sick leave, but Hummil refuses because his probable replacement is married and he thinks that neither the man nor his wife are physically robust enough to cope with the environment. I won’t spoil the story for those who have not read it by describing what happens after that.

Part of what makes the story so gripping is the vivid way in which Kipling conveys the harshness of the conditions and the effect that has on those who are not used to them. “There was neither sky, sun, nor horizon – nothing but a brown purple haze of heat.”

These men have a shockingly relaxed attitude to death. If they haven’t heard from someone for a week, they check up on him to make sure he is still alive. Suicides and deaths from cholera are quite common. They are all under thirty, but are described as “lonely folk who understood the dread meaning of loneliness”.

All this takes its psychological toll and here we come to the point. Has Hummil been driven slowly mad by all this, or is there a supernatural explanation for his mental afflictions?  

This 1890 story is presented with gaps in the narrative and ambiguities that anticipate the style of Kipling’s later work where the reader has to work quite hard to understand just what exactly has happened and what it might mean.

On the one hand, Kipling is presenting the lives of administrators in India in a realistic way to a readership that may be unfamiliar with life there. On the other, the story can be read as Kipling’s admission that the imperial enterprise is doomed to fail, because the environment is simply too difficult for those not born to it to thrive in.

That’s the funny thing with Kipling. He’s regarded as the great propagandist for empire, yet a close reading often reveals that he is actually saying something rather different.   

Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden

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Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden was published in 1939 and is an extraordinary novel. It is the story of a group of nuns who travel to the Himalayas to try and establish a convent in an abandoned palace there. Not the most promising material for a compelling story, you might think, and yet it is an intense reading experience quite unlike anything else. It’s tempting to see it as a sort of metaphor for empire, but I think it is above all a psychological novel.    

What makes the novel so powerful is that it seems to exert the same hypnotic, trance-like effect over the reader that the environment does over the nuns. The sense of place is so strong that the reader feels they have been transported to the convent in the mountains, with its bell hanging between two wooden poles at the edge of the precipice. Rumer Godden shares with other British writers who spent their formative years in India, such as Rudyard Kipling and Lawrence Durrell, a particular ability to render light and colour in words.

We are in the far north of India, beyond Darjeeling, an extreme environment in the shadow of Kanchenjunga, so high up that the nuns at first experience altitude sickness. The constant wind and the bright light reflected from the mountain snow seem to cast a spell over them so that their sense of time changes and they find themselves daydreaming. It is difficult to keep their attention on their work or their religious obligations.

Nor do the nuns understand the local people, who are more like Tibetans than Indians. Mr Dean, the local agent of empire, warns them that they must not treat any child in their clinic who is actually ill. The locals are used to children dying, he tells them, but if a child who has been treated dies later on, they will blame the nuns. He thinks the whole enterprise is doomed to fail. “I give you until the rains come”. The nuns find their beliefs and ideas unravelling as the environment overwhelms them. Sister Philippa becomes obsessed with planting flowers rather than vegetables in the garden. Sister Blanche becomes so attached to the children who come to the clinic that she longs for a baby of her own.   

Mr Dean is the only other European in the area. The nuns are dependent on him for help and his masculine presence is a disruption in other ways. They do not consider him to be a good man by their standards. He drinks too much, for one thing. He persuades the convent to take in Kanchi, a local girl who may or may not have been his girlfriend. He has “gone native” but this means that he completely understands the way of life and attitudes of the locals, and their pantheistic religion. He believes any attempt at conversion to Christianity to be  pointless. “They think God lives in the mountain”. This is emphasised by the presence of the holy man who sits motionless under his tree overlooking the convent.

There is a good deal of repressed sexuality beneath the surface here. There is a sort of battle of wills going on between Mr Dean and the Mother Superior, Sister Clodagh, but also a feeling that she is attracted to him. The deeply disturbed Sister Ruth makes no attempt to hide her feelings for Mr Dean. Another disruptive masculine presence is the young prince who comes to the convent to complete his education. He wears brightly coloured clothes and he is fond of the perfume Black Narcissus, leading one of the nuns to make that his nickname.

Sister Clodagh finds herself remembering things she has not thought about for many years. Although he looks nothing like him, the young prince reminds her of the man she thought she was going to marry, back home in Ireland. It was finding out that he intended to go to America without her that led to her decision to join the order. These memories are so strong that she is living half in the present with all its difficulties and responsibilities and half in the past. Much of the novel is seen from her point of view, so we experience her sense of memories swamping the present and this is very skillfully conveyed by Rumer Godden.

In the end, the whole situation is too much for all of them, and the mission fails, as the previous mission run by monks failed earlier. Mr Dean has been proved right. The nuns depart a year after they came, leaving the lonely grave of one of the order, their presence in the mountains destined to become just a distant memory for the locals, who will carry on much as before.