In Black and White — Reading Notes

The Preface as a Lens

The preface is not merely decorative. It introduces the Chubára as a space where “Mahommedan, Sikh, and Hindu mixed equally,” and where old men find creeds “wonderfully alike and colourless.” This note of syncretism is undercut by the stories themselves, which depict sectarian violence and rigid hierarchies. Gobind, who “fed the fishes with little bread pellets twice a day,” reappears only in the preface, but his detachment—waiting for death “in a sunny corner”—echoes the fatalism of several protagonists. The preface also establishes a pattern of framing: a narrator who collects tales from a holy man, then retires to let the story unfold. This structure recurs in “The Story of Muhammad Din” and “The Sending of Dana Da,” where a British narrator observes but does not intervene.

Violence and Its Aftermath

Several stories hinge on sudden, graphic violence. In the excerpt from “The Taking of Lungtungpen,” a British officer, Tommy Dodd, leads a night charge against a Khusru Kheyl tribe. The aftermath is grim: a Rajpoot trooper notes that a skewbald’s ear was “taken off at the root,” and Tallantire laughs hysterically, his sword “flecked with the blood of the Khusru Kheyl.” Kipling does not moralize; instead, he juxtaposes the brutality with bureaucratic details—blood-money at “thirty-six English pounds per head,” the “wing of the Beshaklis” sent to patrol. The tribal poet Khuruk Shah is said to have sung of the event “in verse that will not die,” but the reader sees only the cold mechanics of reprisal. This tension between epic framing and clinical detail characterizes Kipling’s treatment of frontier warfare.

Voices from the Margins

Kipling frequently gives voice to Indian characters, though always mediated through a British narrator. In “The Story of Muhammad Din,” a young boy’s obsession with a toy is observed by a sahib; in “The Sending of Dana Da,” a native servant manipulates his master’s superstitions. The excerpt from “The Taking of Lungtungpen” includes a speech by Khoda Dad Khan, who justifies killing the Mullah: “I am now Chief of the Khusru Kheyl!” His “charming simplicity” is reported without irony, yet the reader is left to gauge the moral weight. These voices are not allowed to stand alone—they are framed by British commentary—but they offer glimpses of motivations that colonial records would omit. The stories reward attention to who speaks, and how their words are translated or paraphrased.

Recurring Motifs: Guns, Gods, and Ghosts

Across the collection, certain objects and ideas recur. Guns appear as tools of coercion and status: the Khusru Kheyl worry they must “sell our guns” to pay fines. Holy men and shrines are similarly transactional: the tribe proposes to build a dome over the Mullah’s body “of the blue tiles of Mooltan” and burn lamps at his feet. Ghosts and supernatural visitations surface in “The Phantom Rickshaw” and “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes,” but even in the more realistic stories, characters act on omens or curses. The preface’s mention of “swollen corpses” and “pious burning” sets a tone of mortality that pervades the book. Readers may note how Kipling uses these motifs to bind the collection together, even as the settings shift from cantonments to hill tribes to haunted roads.

In Black and White rewards a reading that moves slowly, attending to the gaps between what characters say and what the narrator reports. The stories are not parables with clear morals; they are vignettes of a world where violence is routine, faith is pragmatic, and the British presence is both intrusive and fragile. Kipling’s ear for dialogue and eye for incongruous detail—a peacock feather in a holy man’s hat, a skewbald’s ear on a sword—give these tales a lasting, unsettling vividness.

Reading Kipling’s monastery frame, I remembered sitting on my grandfather’s porch, the heat pressing down like a held breath, and how the old man’s stories of neighboring villages felt just as foreign and close. That same ache of listening across a gap came back with The Fire Within — Reading Companion, where silence between people held more than any spoken word ever did.