Story of the Month

LISPETH
Lispeth. The very title seems to carry a hint of inadequacy. It’s the sound a child or a non-native speaker, someone not able to pronounce the name Elizabeth correctly, might make. And the story opens by instructing the reader in how very far from correct English ways are those of the people this ‘Lispeth’ comes from. It makes a delicious plunge into an exotic world ‘just above the Sutlej Valley on the Kotgarh side’ where a father may be called ‘Sonoo’ and a mother ‘Jadeh’ while their domestic fortunes may involve two bears getting into their ‘only’ opium poppy field. At once, though, a faint clash or challenge is signalled by that note of regret: it prompts the reader to register an unfamiliar, less moralistic way of looking at the production of opium, to understand it as the cash-crop of the poor. ‘So the next season they turned Christian’, it goes on. The tone is matter of fact, though perhaps relying on a tremor of indignation on the part of Kipling’s early readers, maybe of some later ones too. But he is preparing to confront the pious with a tale to embarrass them. First, though, he will have a lot of fun with that gap between cultures that he’d already started playing with. Instead of describing his heroine, Lispeth, in terms of an exotic beauty, and so distancing, even diminishing her, he draws on aesthetics which are purely European. Describing her colour as pale ivory, he aligns her with European works of art: he also gives her a stature that makes her look like a Roman goddess. A different kind of distance, one of respect is being introduced. Alongside this natural wonder Kipling will place the world of European morality and ethics, which is at a loss before her. At first it’s merely amusing that the Chaplain’s wife ‘doesn’t know what to do’ with Lispeth, who came to them as an orphan, once she has grown up. It’s not spelled out but this glorious physical presence presents to the chaplain’s wife a threat. She’d like Lispeth to disappear off to Simla where she can take out all that physicality in working as a nurse. It’s Kipling’s bitter joke when Lispeth does find a man to nurse, a man who calls out her whole-hearted commitment from the moment she finds him unconscious by the wayside. Her integrity is such that she cannot conceive that this man, with the other Europeans, would deliberately deceive her. But we’re not invited to see her as broken: the poem at the head of her story blasts out her fury and contempt for the religion of the Europeans, which she’d absorbed as a child. And if we do glimpse her in old age as ‘a bleared wrinkled creature’, occasionally very drunk, we are given the materials to imagine that she had gone on to live a life more suited to her magnificent physicality: to Lisbeth this episode had been her ‘first’ love-affair. Others, it might suggest, were to follo

LISPETH

Lispeth. The very title seems to carry a hint of inadequacy. It’s the sound a child or a non-native speaker, someone not able to pronounce the name Elizabeth correctly, might make. And the story opens by instructing the reader in how very far from correct English ways are those of the people this ‘Lispeth’ comes from.

It makes a delicious plunge into an exotic world ‘just above the Sutlej Valley on the Kotgarh side’ where a father may be called ‘Sonoo’ and a mother ‘Jadeh’ while their domestic fortunes may involve two bears getting into their ‘only’ opium poppy field. At once, though, a faint clash or challenge is signalled by that note of regret: it prompts the reader to register an unfamiliar, less moralistic way of looking at the production of opium, to understand it as the cash-crop of the poor.

‘So the next season they turned Christian’, it goes on. The tone is matter of fact, though perhaps relying on a tremor of indignation on the part of Kipling’s early readers, maybe of some later ones too. But he is preparing to confront the pious with a tale to embarrass them. First, though, he will have a lot of fun with that gap between cultures that he’d already started playing with. Instead of describing his heroine, Lispeth, in terms of an exotic beauty, and so distancing, even diminishing her, he draws on aesthetics which are purely European. Describing her colour as pale ivory, he aligns her with European works of art: he also gives her a stature that makes her look like a Roman goddess. A different kind of distance, one of respect is being introduced.

Alongside this natural wonder Kipling will place the world of European morality and ethics, which is at a loss before her. At first it’s merely amusing that the Chaplain’s wife ‘doesn’t know what to do’ with Lispeth, who came to them as an orphan, once she has grown up. It’s not spelled out but this glorious physical presence presents to the chaplain’s wife a threat. She’d like Lispeth to disappear off to Simla where she can take out all that physicality in working as a nurse.

It’s Kipling’s bitter joke when Lispeth does find a man to nurse, a man who calls out her whole-hearted commitment from the moment she finds him unconscious by the wayside. Her integrity is such that she cannot conceive that this man, with the other Europeans, would deliberately deceive her. But we’re not invited to see her as broken: the poem at the head of her story blasts out her fury and contempt for the religion of the Europeans, which she’d absorbed as a child.

And if we do glimpse her in old age as ‘a bleared wrinkled creature’, occasionally very drunk, we are given the materials to imagine that she had gone on to live a life more suited to her magnificent physicality: to Lisbeth this episode had been her ‘first’ love-affair. Others, it might suggest, were to follo

“Lispeth”