Stories of India

Author: Rudyard KiplingPublisher: PenguinYear: 2003Language: EnglishPages: 304ISBN/UPC (if available): 0143 029371 Description‘No other Western writer has ever known India as Kipling knew it.’—Salman Rushdie, ‘Kipling’, Imaginary Homelands.In these stories, first published over a hundred years ago, Kipling sets the stage for encounters between the East and the West – between India and Anglo-India. These tales are remarkable not just for the range of Indian places and situations they describe or their wealth of historical detail but also for their sensitive and by and large fair representations of both British and Indian characters. Kipling takes on the thorny issues of empire, race, miscegenation and the practice of ‘going native’, and uses them as literary tropes, to examine human culture, religion and society. Whether it is the account of Lispeth who first embraces Christianity at ‘the mature age of five weeks’ and then rejects it and the hypocrisy of missionaries when her heart is b