KA Bureau
NEW DELHI, April 30: A panel discussion was held on veteran journalist and author Subhash Chopra’s latest book ‘Kipling Sahib – The Raj Patriot’, at the Habitat Centre in New Delhi on Friday.
SubhashChopra is a regular contributor to Kashmir Age.
His latest book is a construct of the famous British author’s unabashed commitment to everything imperial. Itquotes various prose and verse selections of this British author-journalist.
Prof Riyaz Punjabi, former Vice-Chancellor of Kashmir University, one of the speakers at the panel discussion, said Kipling represented the Raj era very passionately. He was a quintessential British spokesman, notwithstanding the fact that he was born in India and loved India. Kipling’s understanding of Indian mythology and culture, including Ramayana and Mahabharata was superficial, he said.
NayanaSagar, film maker and actor, read out passages from the book and asked the author how Rudyard Kipling was at once a supporter of General Dyer’s JallianwalaBaghmassacre and a storyteller par excellence who described Mowgli’s tale so lovingly. To this, Chopra replied that Kipling was a classic case of loving one’s own children but dismissing others cheaply. He wrote Jungle Book for his own kids who were growing up at that time.
Chopra summed up the evening by labeling Kipling as an anti-liberal and a White Mutineer against reforms. He said Kipling’s best novel was ‘KIM’, the story of the Lama and his disciple Kim on the road from Lahoreto Benares. It is another thing that Kipling had no knowledge of India’s Grand Trunk Road’s history and mistakenly thought it was built by the British, he said.
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