Pujit Aggarwal Redivivus - If

 


    This is a somewhat peculiar title for one of the most anthologized poems by the celebrated poet, Rudyard Kipling: ‘If, followed closely by an elongated hyphen or dash. He chose this punctuation to foreshadow several conditional clauses across the four stanzas, which the last line of the poem clinches with the main clause. The concatenation of precepts washes over you like a cascade of crystalline water.
 
    The teacher who introduced the poem to the class for elocution practise was a man with a baritone voice to boot. He took enormous pains to underscore the subtle shades of nuance in the subtext so that we could project them in our performance. When he delivered the finished product, he virtually swayed in a trance.
 
    It was not part of his duty to probe and explore the essence of the poem and what it communicated to the reader by way of its message or lesson. All the same, he would conclude the module with a set of questions that would elicit the purpose of the text.
 
    By revisiting the poem from time to time, I was able to imbibe the import of some of the sterling stiff-upper-lip virtues it so eloquently inculcated. A steady configuration of these qualities would lend a steady solidity to your character. I still have the poem by heart and recite it at the request of a friend or guest to provide entertainment and instruction.
 
    I am loath to confess that the message of the poem has not worn well over the years. Either I have become a little jaded, or my exposure to a widening spectrum of art, craft, and literature has caused Kipling and his oeuvre to pale into obsolescence.
 
    He was a man of contradictions. He had a patronising attitude towards other races. There is a faint reek of misogyny in his novels and short stories. He hated Germans, the Irish, the Boers, liberals, Democrats, women, and educated Indians. His first love, and his only love in his late teens, was Flo Garrard. She never reciprocated his overtures. He continued to labour under the delusion that she, in her heart of hearts, loved him. Eventually, Kipling married Caroline, the sister of his friend, Wolcott Balestier.
 
    Kipling wrestled with tremendous guilt about the death of his only son, John Kipling. He got him enrolled in the army by pulling strings. The boy had been repeatedly rejected for commission on account of his poor eyesight.
 
   John was killed in the battle within a short span of time. His body was never found. The putative dedicatee of IF is supposed to be his own son, John Kipling. The poem has been lauded as ‘a perennial father to fatherless children.’ The irony could not be more agonising.
 
    Kipling outlived the deaths of his two children, Josephine and John. He never mentioned them in his autobiography, which he finished shortly before his death in 1936. Was it guilt, pain, or hardcore stoicism? We will never know. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907—the youngest littérateur to be so honoured. He had declined the award of the Poet Laureateship and knighthood by the British Government more than once. Imperialist that he was, he was born and bred in India but died in London.
 
     The white man’s burden has been taken over by the nonwhite. Rishi Sunak is doing much better than his purist predecessor.


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