| The Story of Muhammad Din |
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As a young man, Kipling admitted that the stories he was writing tended to be disturbing, to have an ‘ugsome’ tone, as he put it to his cousin Margaret Burne-Jones. (Yes, the daughter of Edward Burne-Jones the painter: Rudyard was very well-connected through his aunts.) Did you know that Rudyard’s father noted how even as a young man his son was exceptionally fond of babies? Today, wanting to introduce a story with a different tone and to introduce you, as it were, to a different Kipling, I remembered ‘The Story of Muhammad Din’. It’s the most beautiful, delicate rendering of a young child’s behaviour, as observed by an initially indifferent man. That indifference silently gives way, at first in response to the child’s dignity. Every afternoon the man takes care to return the little one’s formal greeting. As time goes on he pays respectful attention to the creativity he sees at play as the child crouches in the dirt. The most tender observation is at work—in both parties. All this in a mere 1,000 words. The love that small Muhammad Din has inspired is spelled out only indirectly and with exquisite reticence in the last ten lines of the story: strikingly, within those lines, the writer also takes a moment to distance himself from the contemptuous indifference to Indian children shown by another Englishman. |
