Rudyard Kipling was considered by his peers to be an excellent satirist. Many minds of his time, including Mark Twain, met him in person and recognized him as one of his peers. One of the things that Kipling subtly criticized through his poetry was the traditional association between upper class and higher learning. This essay will examine Gunga Din, Tommy, and Gentlemen-Rankers to show how Kipling inverts the class hierarchy by presenting a character at or near the bottom of the human social scale as having a higher level of insight, enlightenment, or basic human decency. to those who are conventionally considered to be “above” him. Kipling does not overtly present irony and relies on specific literary techniques to achieve this. This essay will present examples of the techniques Kipling used to establish and then undermine conventional class assumptions. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay In all three poems, Kipling begins by letting his readers know who is speaking. It does this by narrating in the first person singular and changing conventional English spelling to reflect the speaker's accent. This is not a technique unique to Kipling; Dickens also used it in Oliver Twist. When the text is read aloud exactly as it is written, the accent sends a very clear signal to the contemporary reader about the social class and origins of the speaker. The reader therefore fills in some unwritten assumptions about the speaker's education, life experiences, and future prospects. Since Kipling's time, the English language has mutated and entirely new dialects have developed, so distinct from each other as to be mutually unintelligible. It is therefore necessary to interpret Kipling's implied pronunciation and etymology according to the conventions of his time. In Gunga Din and Tommy, Kipling's narrator drops the terminal "f", "g", and "d" as well as many "h" sounds and adjusts the pronunciation of words like "half" and "get". This is consistent with the Cockney English dialect originating in London. Thus, the narrators of Gunga Din and Tommy were not born in India like Kipling himself, nor from Scotland, nor from Ireland, nor from Scotland or Ireland. Furthermore, they lack the cultured speech and grammatical precision of the gentleman narrator of Gentlemen-Rankers, who pronounces each letter. Thus, from the first line of each poem, Kipling establishes the origin and hereditary social status of the speaker. The class signal comes with certain assumptions about the speaker's life experiences and educational level. All three narrators are military personnel, but their locations and perspectives differ significantly. Gunga Din tells the story of a former British soldier's interaction with the bhisti or water carrier of the regiment while serving in India during the time of Queen Victoria. The eponymous water carrier, clad in nothing more than a loincloth and a goatskin water bag, ran back and forth behind the lines to supply water to thirsty British troops. It has been an essential service throughout history, particularly in India, where the heat and humidity can become so oppressive that it forces people to drink more than five liters of water a day , even when they don't make an effort. The Enfield Model 1853 musket rifles used by most British troops by the mid-19th century had been largely abandoned and replaced by breech-loading Snider Enfield rifles from 1866 and riflesMartini-Henry in the mid-1870s. Since Kipling was born in 1865. By the time he was able to observe and understand the things and people around him, soldiers no longer needed to open cartridges powder with their teeth. But the smoke from gunpowder charges was always a very powerful desiccant, so a man who fired his rifle repeatedly would invariably have a dry mouth. A dry mouth is also a physiological response to stress, and because being shot at is stressful, even a soldier who doesn't breathe gunpowder smoke ends up emptying his canteen. He cannot leave his position to fetch more water without giving up a tactical advantage. Hence the need for water replenishment and regimental bhisti. Another Kipling strategy for depicting a character quickly but vividly is to use a key word to quickly establish the location, time, and setting without the need for a lengthy description. The keyword may be an allusion to a specific time or place, or it may have cultural connotations. Gunga Din's speaker uses the word bhisti, meaning "water carrier", but the word has a historical and cultural context. The Bhisti people are an endogamous community in northern India. They speak Urdu, using the Persian-Arabic script, but know the predominant language in the region where they live. Today, they are found in many of India's major cities, practicing various professions and trades. Some still carry water to earn a living. However, in Kipling's time the need for manual water transport was far more urgent and military water carriers traveled wherever the regiment went. Kipling, who was born in India and returned there as an adult, had an intimate and encyclopedic knowledge of India and its people. Living and working as he did in northern India and the territory that eventually became Pakistan, Kipling associated with all manner of people of different castes and classes, particularly through his military acquaintances and connections. Masonic. Kipling's first language was Hindi, which is related to but not identical to Urdu, although he learned English at an early age and wrote primarily in that language. Living as he did in northern India, he could not have avoided coming across at least a few ethnic Bhisti, and he had the language skills to speak with them. According to the history of the Bhisti, the Bhisti were originally the Hindu Rajput warrior caste. Like many groups within a given caste, over generations they developed a professional specialty: bringing water to thirsty soldiers. At one point, the majority of Bhisti accepted Islam, but by then their professional specialty had been elevated to cultural commitment. Many Bhisti chose to serve whatever soldiers they could find, including the French and British European armies fighting for political and economic control of the Indian subcontinent. In Kipling's time, there was an urgent and constant need for water on the front lines, so every regiment needed at least one designated water carrier, and the Bhisti people were so successful in this role that his name, lacking its first capital letter, has become synonymous with the role of water carrier. Hence the “regimental bhisti, Gunga Din”. In one word – just one – Kipling defines Gunga Din as a man who carries water not just as a calling but as a calling. Another technique that Kipling uses throughout his writings is derogatory or derogatory language directed by one person towards another to establishrelationship differences. Status. Yet in Gunga Din, as in much of Kipling's prose, including The Man Who Would Be King, characters who indulge in blatantly racist assumptions about the people around them generally come off as myopic. The narrator of Gunga Din describes the bhisti as "black-faced", dirty and with a "squidgy" nose. Yet when describing how Gunga Din went to tend the wounded under fire, the narrator describes him as being "white" inside. For a racist (which the narrator certainly is), the highest compliment possible is to identify another person as behaving like a person belonging to the racist's ethnic group. But the narrator does not know Gunga Din well. Although Gunga Din speaks clearly and understands enough English to convey an important and timely thought in a grammatically correct sentence, even while dying, the narrator persists in shouting orders at him in broken Anglo-Hindustani. There is no friendship or meaningful social contact between the men, so open conversations about deeper topics such as religious faith or Gunga Din's hometown and native language cannot take place . If Gunga Din is Hindu, which could perhaps be inferred given the loincloth he wore. and the fact that he serves as a bhisti but is not necessarily an ethnic Bhisti – so carrying water to thirsty soldiers is part of his dharma or religious duty. Receiving abuse from the soldiers he helps is simply an inherent aspect of this, and taking the bad with the good hardly bothers him. When he brings water to the British soldiers and is hit by some of them because he is not physically capable of serving them all at once, he does not complain. Why would he do it: he is a man performing a divinely appointed sacrament. Indeed, the Shrimad Bhagavad Gita, chapter 2, verse 47 says: “Your right is only to duty, and not to its fruits. Do not act for the results of your actions. Never get attached to not fulfilling your duty. With Gunga Din's last breath, he doesn't care about anything except whether he has done his duty properly. He has: the drink he gives the narrator, who only survives thanks to Gunga Din's actions, is the drink the narrator describes as the sweetest and best he has ever drunk, despite the poor quality of the drink. 'water. Accordingly, the last place the narrator could see a Hindu Gunga Din would be in the hell he envisions as appropriate for himself: Gunga Din must reincarnate in a role commensurate with the suitability of his service, this which was spectacular. If Gunga Din is not Hindu but Islamic, as most ethnic Bhisti are, then his dress is unusual but his level of language proficiency is not. Din is not only fluent in his native language, he speaks enough English to say something truly meaningful at the end of his life. Because most men raised in the Islamic tradition learn Arabic as well as their own native language, to better understand the teachings of the Quran, if Gunga Din is Islamic, then he most likely speaks not one, not two, but three languages: his own, Arabic, and enough English to understand the narrator and others. This makes him much more educated than the British soldier, who is blissfully unaware of the gap. Illiteracy among the ranks of soldiers was common in Kipling's India, and although sergeants were expected to be able to read and write in English, lower-ranking men did not. As a Sunni Muslim, Gunga Din would be familiar with the principle of submission to the army. will of Allahand to destiny: if Allah had decided that Gunga Din should be born Bhisti, then by working as a water carrier, Gunga Din fulfilled his spiritual destiny and served Allah as well as the British soldiers. His selfless and tireless dedication to his work, the superb manner in which he discharged his duties without complaint and his death in the service of others would therefore certainly have assured him a place in paradise according to the principles of Islam. Indeed, even though Gunga Din did like many natives who served the British and converted to Christianity, he gained salvation either through this or by risking and even sacrificing his own life in order to save the narrator, who is a very noble one, Christ. -as an act. Why, then, would the narrator expect to see Gunga Din in Hell, and still as a servant? This is because Kipling's narrator is supposed to be ignorant. This is part of what creates the pervasive irony. The narrator of Gunga Din betrays his ignorance repeatedly and ironically throughout the poem. Referring to Gunga Din as an "old idol" is offensive both to Hindus, who view idols as physical representations of and connections to their gods, and to Muslims who are prohibited from worshiping idols . He physically and verbally abuses the heroic water carrier who regularly saves wounded soldiers under fire, including the narrator. However, by the end of the poem, it becomes apparent that time has brought the narrator some perspective. He acknowledges that Gunga Din was in fact created by God and also states that the bhisti he so often abused is actually a better man than him. Thus, the man occupying a “higher” social position ultimately arrives at the same conclusion that the reader has already reached: it is the man lower in the social hierarchy who demonstrates a higher level of spirituality, of service, courage, education and service to others. Tommy's narrator is also a British soldier, but instead of reporting abuse like Gunga Din's narrator did, he receives it from British civilians. Kipling establishes the narrator's class and heritage through his speech patterns, which are similar to those of the narrator of Gunga Din but devoid of Indian words and references. Kipling also uses key words to establish the setting or location of the poem (England), the approximate time period, and the narrator's occupation and relationships with local civilians. These are radically different from the keywords used in Gunga Din, but the technique Kipling uses is the same. The first key words that appear in the poem are “pub-house”, “pint” and “beer”. Beer, the quintessential British refreshment, is sold by the pint to the general public. Most establishments specializing in the sale of beer are therefore called "pubs" or "pubs". Many Brits have a favorite pub or "local" where they go to socialize with friends after work. So a pint of beer in a pub is almost stereotypically British. But the narrator cannot buy a libation because the “tax collector,” or owner, refuses to serve the “red coats.” Thus, in two lines, Kipling establishes the location (England), profession and gender of the speaker (a soldier, and by definition a man in Kipling's time). Kipling also shows that the publican, a civilian, has the power to refuse to serve the soldier and that the maids find the whole situation funny. The keyword "red coat" refers to the uniform of a soldier in the British Army. or Marines. The colors were distinct from those of the British Navy, which favored blue and white. In India, during Kipling's time, the armyBritish had abandoned the highly impractical red and white uniforms and issued khaki-colored uniforms to the military beginning in 1948 and increasingly after the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 as an indicator of a major change in British foreign policy. Accordingly, the term "red coat" identifies the narrator as a Navy or Army soldier, but not as someone serving in India. Kipling establishes the period between 1861 and 1901 by referring to his military attire as "the widow's uniform". The word "widow" is capitalized although it is not at the start of a sentence or line, and as the narrator is already established as a British soldier, the only head of state he could have speaking is Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria was not widowed until the death of her first and only husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, in 1861, although she dressed in black for the rest of her life. His predecessor and successor, William IV and Edward VII respectively, were both men. But if Kipling had used the word "Queen" to refer to her, the poem could have been set as early as 1837. Tommy has an unusual naming convention that illustrates how dehumanized the narrator and his fellow soldiers are. The narrator is called "Tommy" or "Atkins", both generic names for a British soldier, but which are probably not the narrator's real name. The people who speak to the narrator are strangers whom he has probably never met. Kipling never uses the soldier's real name or shows the civilians interacting with him as a human being. In this regard, his fellow Englishmen show him even less respect than the narrator of Gunga Din showed the water bearer. "Tommy" and his comrades are either scorned or exalted over the question of whether the nation is at war. Both images are equally unrealistic, especially when even positive public behavior treats soldiers as anonymous, fungible members of a group rather than the individual human beings they actually are. Throughout the poem, Tommy's narrator talks about how he is treated poorly. by English civilians in peacetime: he is refused service in a pub, turned away from a theater (while sober) in favor of a drunken civilian, and generally treated like a criminal. But when “the guns start shooting,” the narrator and his comrades are treated like heroes even though they have personally done nothing heroic. This irony of the situation is so obvious that even Tommy, of low rank and little education, recognizes it and resents him. That "Tommy" is an enlisted soldier as opposed to an officer is quite obvious, although Kipling need not state this openly: the use of the Cockney patois suffices. Officers, in Kipling's time, were almost always literate and educated men from families wealthy enough to pay their commission. The higher an officer's rank, the higher his likely (or assumed) social connections. An officer was considered a gentleman in terms of social conduct, habits, and relationships with his peers, even if he did not descend from a financially independent family. Thus, no publican or theater employee would be inclined to irritate someone by refusing to serve them. In Tommy, as in Gunga Din, Kipling drops a bombshell in the last line of the poem. The narrator, who begins by using the first person singular to describe his personal anecdotal experience, expands in the penultimate stanza to use the first person plural. It is now “us” who are the soldiers who most remarkably resemble the reader. The narrator gathers strength andnow speaks as a representative of a group when he demands that people simply have reasonable expectations of soldiers, and that soldiers be treated "rationally" based on their individual traits and behaviors rather than as the representatives of an amorphous red. coated drop. But in the last line, Kipling suddenly switches to the third person: "And Tommy's no fool, you bet Tommy sees!" He now issues a direct warning to civilians and upper-class people whose insistence on interacting with soldiers in unrealistic and exaggerated ways, both positive and negative. Their stupidity and hypocrisy do not go unnoticed, and in fact, every “Tommy” in a red uniform is well aware of it. Usually, it is the upper classes who scold the lower classes. For an enlisted soldier, treated by many as the lowest of the people, to not only berate but subtly threaten the citizens his army serves constitutes a dramatic class inversion. By identifying himself and all the other soldiers as being fully capable of seeing and recognizing the hypocrisy that everyone else seems to lack, the poorly educated Tommy flips the script intellectually in the same way that Gunga Din did. did morally and spiritually: he proves, through his deduction and analysis, to be more intellectually capable than the people who avoid and criticize him. Gentlemen-Rankers describes another type of class inversion. In this case, the title describes men who willingly moved down in class and placed themselves under the authority of men who, under normal circumstances, would have been considered inferior to them in terms of social status. In Kipling's time, military officers generally came from the upper class and received a special education, both social and academic. A “gentleman,” in the terminology of the time, was a man well-off enough to live off his land and invested property, who did not have to perform manual labor to feed himself or his family. This implied a landed gentry, but after the agricultural depression of the 1870s, the British economy turned away from land as a means of production and towards industry. As a result, merchants, bankers and other business owners became wealthy enough to raise their children and grandchildren in a privileged environment, so that by the third generation their values, behaviors and experiences of lives were virtually indistinguishable from those of the landed gentry, with whom they frequently intermarried. Military service was considered an appropriate activity for a young man, but he usually entered it as an officer by purchasing a commission. The British army of Kipling's era was characterized by a vast social divide between the officer and enlisted classes, but there was also a great deal of mutual respect. Officers respected the skill, tenacity, and raw courage of the men they commanded; working-class enlisted men respected their officers for their education, intelligence, wisdom and kindness. This mutual respect and trust helped build the military discipline that made Britain a dominant colonial power. However, respect was not automatic and it was not conferred on a man simply because of his precise rank. When a man was out of place and significantly different from his peers, despite his skills in other areas, he was often denied the respect of men above, below, and of equal rank. him. Although there weremeans by which an enlisted man could be promoted to lieutenant, it was not a process deemed universally good. The Duke of Wellington and General Redvers Buller, writing almost half a century apart, argued that officers promoted from the enlisted ranks were rarely good or effective, even if the men so promoted had been officers in the past. Enlisted men preferred officers who were gentlemen, believing that they were better educated in military strategy and also less cruel. Gentlemen generally only joined the enlisted ranks if they were somehow disgraced and had to hide abroad, far from creditors, family, or law enforcement. In exchange for the anonymity of the uniform, a man sacrificed his social position not just for a moment, but forever. In Gentlemen-Rankers, Kipling uses specific literary techniques to show the implications of the young man's decision and the feeling of alienation he experiences as a result. As always, Kipling uses a speaking style as evidence of the narrator's class. The gentleman-ranker speaks without dropping letters or using slang. His use of compound sentences and his references to the Bible and Shakespeare's Hamlet make him an educated man. Although he was now a humble soldier, he "led his six horses": that is, he was once rich enough to own half a dozen prize-winning racehorses, and skilled enough to climb himself. The implication is that the narrator has lost all his wealth, perhaps through gambling or some other shameful action, and has therefore enlisted to serve overseas. The fact that his uniform has a spur sewn into his worsted wool jacket, proof of his remarkable riding skills, now embarrasses him. Every time someone calls him "Rider" (usually a title of respect) or sends him on a horseback ride, he is reminded of what he has lost. He therefore feels “marked” by what would be, for most enlisted men, a coveted badge. The Shakespearean reference to "a little more than kinsman and less than kind" is Hamlet's cutting remark about his uncle Claudius, who becomes Hamlet's father-in-law by marrying his son. the wife of the late brother. The world was "more than kind" when the narrator had enough money to please himself and everyone, but now the sergeant is "less than nice" in two ways: he is fundamentally different from the narrator, having been born into a class appropriate to the enlisted ranks, nor does he manage to show the narrator the deference and courtesy he is accustomed to receiving from such men in his former life. working-class men - now make the narrator a target for ridicule. He doesn't have the natural, early training aptitude of his enlisted peers, but he finds himself absorbing some of their values: literally beating someone up for noticing his dancing skills and figuratively drowning himself in beer. Yet the extent to which the soldier now feels trapped by his situation only becomes clear through the use of Kipling's sarcasm. Kipling repeatedly uses the word "sweet" to sarcastically describe things that the young man now feels bitter about: cleaning stalls, emptying kitchen scraps, and socializing with enlisted men and servants. While the men around him accept casual tasks as part of their routine, the narrator has been raised to believe that his work is offensive and shameful. He feels permanently degraded for doing this. This is one of the reasons why he envies the simple man who blackens his boots and sometimes calls him.