The Craft: How Freemasons Made The Modern World by John Dickie

Author:John Dickie [Dickie, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2020-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

Outside–‘Sergeant! Sir! Salute! Salaam!’

Inside–‘Brother’, an’ it doesn’t do no ’arm.

Brotherhood between whites and natives was ’armless if, and only if, it remained restricted to the Masonic temple.

The limits of Masonic tolerance in India were a natural fit with Kipling’s own contradictory impulses. His writerly empathy was effortless and all-encompassing; he relished tuning into the profusion of India’s voices. If he had been a mere bigot, he could not have written Kim, his great adventure of Imperial India; it would have been easy for Kipling to avoid joining a mixed Masonic Lodge. But Kipling also hated, in the most un-Masonic way. The list of his hates, which were always trenchantly expressed, grew longer through his life. America: ‘barbarism–barbarism plus telephone, electric light, rail and suffrage’. Germans: ‘the shameless Hun’, ‘who at heart follows the dark Gods of the North with the ferocity and darkness of the were-wolf his ancestor’. The Irish: ‘the Orientals of the West’. Orientals: see previous quote. One of Kipling’s earliest and most long-lasting hatreds, learned in Lahore and particularly in predominantly Hindu Allahabad, was for the babu. On British lips, this was a disparaging term aimed at English-educated, Hindu bureaucrats and lawyers who typically came from Bengal. For Kipling, as for many like him, the babus combined ‘the obstinacy of men’ with the ‘unreasoning petulance of small children, always morbidly afraid that someone is laughing at them’. The babu had polish and came dressed in western clothes. But his very savoir faire made him untrustworthy–as if he were trying to be more British than the British. ‘Babu Chuckerbutty’ was one of the Indian character-types embraced by Masonic tolerance in ‘The Mother Lodge’. Such tolerance might have been permissible in the Lodge, but it ran out very quickly if the babu in question had any pretensions to political authority.

Kipling gave a caustic portrait of an uppity babu in a tale he began to write in Allahabad, ‘The Head of the District’. The story tells of an Indian administrator, the babu in question, who is appointed to govern a frontier province by a well-meaning liberal Viceroy. Bloody chaos ensues. Kipling’s story is a parable about the dangers of Indian self-government. India was so vast and heterogeneous a mix of cultures, the argument went, that only the firm hand of a wise external ruler could hope to hold the country together.

‘The Head of the District’ was occasioned by the arrival in Allahabad of 1,248 delegates, 455 of them lawyers, to the fourth Indian National Congress in December 1888. The Congress had been formed in Bombay three years earlier to demand a greater voice in government for the people of the subcontinent. The British authorities in Allahabad took a dim view, and tried to stop the conference. Only when a nawab who owned an empty property with large grounds in the Civil Lines agreed to its being used for the Congress were the delegates able to come and pitch their tents. To Kipling and most of the rest of the white population, it felt like a babu invasion.

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