A Parable of the Empire: “The Man Who Would Be King”
Asist. Nicoleta MEDREA
Universitatea ,,Petru Maior” Târgu Mureş
The initial mercantile reason of the would-be king parallels the first stage in the history of
the British Empire with its rush after material resources. The power over those “barbarians”
gives us an initial fair king who assumes the civilizing role and reveals both Kipling’s love for and
vision of the Empire: eventually, the king is deprived of his crown and the kingdom fails.
“The Man Who Would Be King” is Kipling’s best known allegory of the Empire where
personal and political desire collide in a daring attempt to transcend the divisions between the
colonizer and the colonized as well as those of a self-divided author.
This is a story of control, desire and subversion, of the world makers and destroyers, of
two daring adventurers who decide that India “isn’t big enough” for them and go to an icy
forbidden Kafiristan to become kings. The population of that remote land stands for the Indians.
These Kafiristans had a utopian faith in the historical figure of Alexander the Great, called by
them Iskander, who had probably crossed their land thousands of years before changing their
history. When faced to the meeting with a possible reality this fantastic/imaginary population
refuses it, killing the new king, even though his only attempt was to help these people evolve.
Kipling shows understanding to this wild India which doesn’t accept the new rulers but he also
acknowledges the civilizing effect of England.
The two protagonists of the story, Dravot and Carnehan, conquer Kafiristan only with
twenty Martini rifles- a sign of the British military drill- providing us with something like a
version of the British Raj. Their downfall gives the story a moral in the form of a “Recessional”
theme, recurrent in Kipling’s writings: England can retain its divinely given right to rule only as
long as it retains its moral superiority, a “humble and contrite heart”. This set of rules is
established from the very beginning in the “contrack” and stipulates: no mixing with the
colonized, Dignity and Discretion that should assert the civilizing role of the colonizers, and
finally, support offered to each other when in trouble, implying the idea of brotherhood but only
within the closed world of the Sahibs.
The development of the story reveals a constant conflict, ambivalence, so typical of
Kipling, between the desire to colonize, connect and possess (country and woman) and the
warning against such desire, between the glorification of the Empire and the debunking of its
origins in greed or childlike games of power.
The conflict is first marked by the title of the story “The Man Who Would Be King”
opposes the human to his politically symbolic function and it gets larger in the story which
unfolds, on the one hand, the world of the narrator- realistic and ironic- and, on the other hand,
that of the two adventurers- romantic and “mad”. Beautifully enveloped in romantic religiosity,
Biblical language and Freemasonic mythology, the story appears to be an anti-colonialist allegory
in which the protagonists are an absurd parody of the British in the third world. However the
imagery and language idealize the imperial mission. The conflict between the realistic frame marked by the presence of the narrator, and the romantic story is generated by the contradictions
of the imperial culture: the myth of imperialism is disrupted by its own principles, by its own
engine- the man who created it is neither a god nor king and the colonized country- Kafiristanalready has its own people, its own gods and superior institutions- a mother lodge- whose world
cannot tolerate the man beneath the myth.
The story’s structure of values is established from the very beginning. The hierarchical
world made up of brothers, princes, beggars and kings seems to be transcended by the epitaph
voicing the Freemason law of equality: “Brother to a prince and fellow to a beggar if he be found
worthy”. However the first paragraph introduces the contradiction between social institutions of
law and life as it is: “the LAW, as quoted, lays down a fair conduct of life and one not easy to
follow”, but the author fails to pursue the effects of this conflict and prefers to soften the skeptical
tone in an elegiac sentence with mythical resonances: “But today, I greatly fear that my king is
dead, and if I want a crown I must go and hunt it for myself”.
Escaping the margins of offices and bureaucracy, transcending the real political and
economic division, the author embarks on a romantic adventure in an attempt to deny the absence
of “brotherhood” between the ruler and the ruled, the rich and the poor. On the other hand the
story betrays a nostalgic attitude towards an empire in crisis which by reconstructing its workings
from the origins hopes to discover the cause of its dreaded future- the fall of the British Raj.
The realistic framing of the story by the presence of the author is marked by four
encounters between him and the “crazy” adventurers. The change in the attitude of the author,
from his initial sense of connection to distrust, doubt and finally reluctant admiration and pity is
similar to the development of the inner story starting with the doubtful stance of Carnehan towards
the grandiose dreams of Dravot. The first meeting is with Carnehan and establishes sufficient
kinship to lead the narrator to agree to pass a message on Dravot at the Marwar station. After all
he is not but “a brother of mine” as Kipling used to call his English peers. Still strange, this “odd
and out of the world happening” is a perfect way to introduce the reader into a world of all sorts of
veiled and mysterious things, a world that both the narrator and the adventurers feel attracted to.
Yet the narrator preserves his objective perspective, he is a correspondent cutting out instances of
the political and social life of the Empire, revealing the indifference of the Metropolis towards its
peripheries, colonies: “The Native States have a wholesome horror of English newspapers which
may throw light on their peculiar methods of government, and do their best to choke
correspondents with champagne, or drive them out of their mind with four-in-hand barouches.
They do not understand that nobody cares a straw for the internal administration of Native States
so long as oppression and crime are kept within decent limits, and the ruler is not drugged, drunk,
or diseased from one end of the year to the other.”
The bonds connecting the narrator as journalist with the adventurers begin with their
mutual attraction to India, to travel and politics. He was a wanderer and a vagabond like myself…
He told tales of things he had seen and done… We talked politics--the politics of Loaferdom, that
see things from the underside where the lath and plaster is not smoothed off”. The
newspaperman’s job takes him to “the dark places of the Earth, full of unimaginable cruelty,
touching the Railway and the Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of Harund-alRashid”. But while the narrator survives to this descendant into the dark, the adventurers will not.
When the two adventurers reappear in the author’s office in that hot and tense night,
clothed all in white, they appear almost as dream figures emerging out of his unconscious. Their
presence is not only too big for India, but also for the office: Dravot’s beard seemed to fill half the
room and Carnehan’s shoulders the other half:” What they share with the narrator is a sense of
defeat by India (“They that governs it won’t let you touch it.”).Following their wish to move to the
center of society from its margins, from being vagabonds to kings, they decide to follow their
megalomaniacal illusion of creating an empire: “We shall be emperors- Emperors of the
Earth!…We shall go to those parts and say to any King we find--"Do you want to vanquish your
foes?" and we will show him how to drill men; for that we know better than anything else. Then
we will subvert that King and seize his Throne and establish a Dy-nasty.” The people they want to
conquer are already split so they are easy to master. They will achieve their goal through
aggression, cunning and conquest. Where is then the civilizing role? Moreover they are ignorant
of these people’s tradition and culture. They are not interested in their identity and their only goal
to master an unknown enemy brings about the tragic failure of their “glorious enterprise”. They
don’t know the power that lies beneath the opposing forces and their principle of divide et impera
collapses within: “it won’t help us to know the names of their tribes. The more tribes the more
they’ll fight, and the better for us….No one knows anything about it (Kafiristan) really. They are a
stinkin’ lot of heathens, but this book here says they think they’re related to us English” This
reiterates the idea of brotherhood which is to be found in the Freemason law of equality and
signals the presence of the narrator who, on his journey along with the two adventurers marks his
presence admitting certain connectors with them, undercutting others, and finally establishes his
authority over theirs by the fact of his sensibility.
The third meeting between the narrator and Dravot and Carnehan occurs at the town square
where the two men, disguised as mad priest and dumb servant, disply their facility at deceiving
native mobs and at concealing the aggression (rifles and ammunition) under the guise of
whirligigs to the Anmir. This image of whirligigs is recurrent and suggests the unconscious
understanding that the Great Game is to evolve from play to massacre. Three years after their last
meeting, the narrator is visited by Carnehan, now a shrunken, ragged shadow who returns after
crucifixion, clutching the decapitated, crowned head of Dravot and survives only long enough to
tell his tale to the narrator.
The movement between Carnehan and Dravot follows the same pattern of opposition
between the narrator and the adventurers. Dravot, the visionary, is to Carnehan the cautious man
and the voice of practicality- what the narrator is to both of them. They don’t take into
consideration the warnings of the narrator, the same way Dravot doesn’t consider those of
Carnehan At first happy to play what appears to be a continuation of their earlier game with
whirligigs and concealed rifles, Carnehan later admits, "I knew he was thinking plans I could not
advise about, and I just waited for orders" .But when Carnehan questions his decisions and his
order to arrange a marriage for him with a native woman, it is too late for Dravot, who has by now
internalized the illusions and the oracular rhetoric of kingship and power: "You are my people,
and by God ... I'll make a damned fine Nation of you, or I'll die in the making... I won't make a
Nation... I'll make an Empire! these men aren't niggers; they're English!" Dravot's desire to marry
is a violation not only of his contract with Carnehan, but of an unspoken code of imperial male
bonding that surpasses the love of woman.
The imperialistic enterprise of Dravot and Carnehan is impregnated with romantic
religiosity and Biblical language. It begins in the language of the Old Testament, with allusions to
creation and harmonizing of the tribes of Israel, and it ends in the language of the New Testament.
Garnehan begins his story by swearing: "It's true ... True as gospel. Kings we were, with crowns
upon our heads - me and Dravot.” During his arbitrations over land wars between villages, Dravot
is peacemaker, judge, destroyer and creator, the first Adam and the second: "And Dravot says,
“Go and dig the land, and be fruitful and multiply, which they did”; 'That's just the beginning,’
says Dravot. 'They think we're Gods... They were a poor lot, and we blooded ‘em with a kid before
letting 5em into the new kingdom”. Eventually, their kingdom will be built upon a rock under
which is concealed the Masonic mark that makes them also into Gods. Their closest and most
loyal friend among the priests and chiefs is Billy Fish; they perceive their people as "The Lost
Tribes, or something like it”; Carnehan uses arguments from the Bible to dissuade Dravot from
taking a native wife: "The Bible says that Kings ain't to waste their strength on women”; and most
lurid of all, Carnehan, marked by stigmata, is punished by crucifixion followed by a resurrection
("it was a miracle that he wasn't dead"), after which he returns to civilization to spread the word
through our narrator.
The author recognizes in England’s attempt to submit India a possible mistake. In its gloryrepresented by Dravot and Carnehan, “gods and sons of Alexander” and on a too high position to
see the details- England cannot do well to someone who doesn’t want this. The new rule asks for
obedience in return of its help. Once started this enterprise has no point of return. The British have
to educate the political class, they have to bring about the Law to those who, they assume, really
“need” it. The crown they get as a prize – “hammered gold it was- five pounds weight, like a hoop
of a barrel”- is not a sign of greed of money, but of glory: “It was too small and too heavy, but I
wore it for its glory”. While “drilling” the natives, the new kings face another problem. The
student has over passed his master. He has learnt almost everything and now he is hunting for his
master’s mistakes, pulling him down of his throne: “one of the old priests was watching us
continuous, and I felt uneasy.” They are not allowed to make mistakes and they feel uneasy
because they don’t know what is to be considered a “mistake” for the natives who have different
values. Apart from the newly gained advantage- freedom given by acquiring knowledge from their
masters, the people from Kafiristan have an inner potential, unknown to the conquerors who have
refused to consider their identity, thus not knowing the potential of those they want to master.
England is an open book to India, but the latter remains closed. It has its own cast system and
England fails when it assumes the civilizing, superior role of intermediary between Gods and
Indians. The British wanted to form a class superior to all casts in India, a thing that is not
accepted: “ The Chiefs and the priests can work a Fellow Craft Lodge in a way that's very like
ours, and they've cut the marks on the rocks, but they don't know the Third Degree, and they've
come to find out. It's Gord's Truth. I've known these long years that the Afghans knew up to the
Fellow Craft Degree, but this is a miracle. A God and a Grand-Master of the Craft am I, and a
Lodge in the Third Degree I will open, and we'll raise the head priests and the Chiefs of the
Village." Here we can find their big mistake. The British assume the role of Gods who are
considered by Indians as intermediary between the sacred and the profane. Kipling recognizes in
this closed system of casts a presumed cause of the downfall of the British Empire in India. Dravot
and Carnehan aren’t the picture of England but of its mistakes. They get trapped in kinship which
separates, isolates and finally demonizes the individual. Dravot cannot be both man and king and
must therefore die. These polarities are as radically incompatible as those oppositions the narrator
seeks to transcend.