The reception was held in Rawalpindi, in a magnificent city of fluttering marquees specially erected for the occasion. In March 1885, Kipling was sent to cover the ceremonial reception of the Amir Abdurrahman, who had consented to pay a state visit to the new Viceroy of India, Lord Dufferin. He returned to India in 1882, and for the next seven years honed his emerging literary talents as a reporter for both the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore, and its parent paper, the Pioneer of Allahabad. Genesis and Reactionīorn in India in 1865, Kipling was sent to England at the age of six, there to undergo eleven years of formal Victorian education. The complexity of the permutations thus produced makes direct comparison of such criticism extremely difficult, and the present study has, of necessity, restricted itself to a brief examination of some of the more interesting facets of the controversy surrounding 'The Ballad of East and West'. Of the former, some deal with the first line in context, most do not. Some of these criticisms are concerned solely with the first line of the poem, others with the ballad as a whole.

The present study of 'The Ballad of East and West', of which poem the above quotation forms the first line, is intended to serve as a brief introduction to the ballad itself, and to some of the criticisms directed against it. Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. Most of the ignorant castigation of Kipling as a racialist in the full aggressive sense comes from a single famous line of verse quoted out of context: Such attacks have focussed mainly on three or four notorious phrases from verses such as 'Recessional' and 'The White Man's Burden' but, to borrow the words of Kingsley Amis: What is different in Kipling's case is the virulence of the personal attacks this misquotation has produced. The phenomenon of literary misquotation is by no means new. Kipling's biographer Charles Carrington wrote that 'no lines of Kipling's have been more freely quoted, and more often misquoted in exactly the opposite sense which Kipling gave them'. Not only is this undoubtedly one of Kipling's most famous and memorable phrases, it is also one of the most misquoted and misunderstood. Of the six examples Orwell gives in support of his assertion, the first is 'East is East, and West is West'. Writing in 1942, George Orwell maintained that 'Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language'. Rudyard Kipling's 'The Ballad of East and West' J.

Kipling ballads