'On the strength of a likeness' : Kipling and the analogical connections between India and Ireland

This study firstly focuses on the political implications of Kipling’s representation of the Irish characters in India. Kipling, in the context of the imperial policy of the day, relocates the Irish question onto India. India was one of the few places where the Irish could be represented safely as loyal subjects, without mirroring the fact that many Irish people were forced to emigrate due to England’s ‘misgovernment’ of Ireland. Kipling’s representation of the voice of the Irish soldiers is a powerful counter-representation to the Irish nationalist voices which were raised against the Empire, and Kim is an ideal imperial space where all the different elements of the Empire are seen together and freely traverse without being constricted by the subversive colonial ground.

Secondly, this study explores the analogies and comparisons between India and Ireland frequently made during the nineteenth century. Such analogies were used both by the imperial discourses which constructed the British Empire as a uniform entity and the nationalist discourses which attempted to undermine the unity of the Empire. Applying Roman Jakobson’s distinction between metonymy and metaphor, I characterise the imperialist discourse as ‘metonymic’, and the nationalist one as ‘metaphoric’: the former combines originally different elements into one imperial context according to the spatial or temporal contiguity, while the latter forms the anti-imperial association by identification and substitution based on various degrees of similarity. Kipling’s representation of the Irish in India is shown to be a successful example of the metonymic way of uniting the colonies. Within this framework, I examine the contest between the two types of analogies during the Boer War. Indian nationalist identification with Ireland during the Swadeshi movement is also examined, during which we witness the fall of the imperialist/metonymic analogies.

The last chapter questions the validity of the identification between India and Ireland which tended to be made by nationalists, by contrasting the Irish uncanny with the Indian sublime, both of which were haunted by recurrent famines. Florence Nightingale, as a coloniser, confronted and silenced the former, and reached out for the latter as the stage of her sanitary reform. The Irish voice was regarded as a threat to English supremacy, while the Indian voice was easily dismissed and was seen as needing to be represented.