India first impressed itself on my mind when I was a boy perusing a pair of Rudyard Kipling books my father gave me.  A two volume illustrated anthology, the books attracted my attention because of the story, "The Man Who Would Be King."  My parents took me to John Huston's film adaptation of that tale, and I was knocked silly by it.  Starring two of my favorite actors, Michael Caine and Sean Connery, the movie seethed with an adventurous spirit, with mystery of a foreign fictional land somewhat based on Afghanistan, set in the late nineteenth century, but dealing with a culture lost in time.  These two ex-soldiers of the British Empire carve out a kingdom, Connery's character ruling as a god, due to a coincidence when an archer shoots an arrow at him and apparently hits him in the heart.  Not only doesn't Connery's character die, but he doesn't even bleed.  The arrow had penetrated an unseen leather sash beneath his clothing containing pouches of cartridges.  The quick-thinking Caine perceives what this could mean in taking advantage of the natives' awe.  The small mountain kingdom is theirs, for a time.
     When I was eleven years old, encountering this movie and story, I knew nothing of the real histories of that part of the world, of imperial rule and exploitation, of the sense of superiority felt by the British over their subjects, as so brilliantly written about in George Orwell's novel, Burmese Days and in his essay, "Shooting an Elephant."  In that essay, Orwell recounts a difficult day during his civil service in Burma when a bull elephant in rut, on the loose, went rampaging about the town, knocking down walls, messing up the marketplace.  As the prime British authority figure in the immediate area it was his job to take care of the problem.  He took a big gun off the shelf and went to the elephant, followed by most of the townspeople who watched him set up for a shot.  All the while, Orwell didn't want to kill the elephant, but the pressure of all the eyes on his back waiting for him to do it, to uphold his position as Man of the British Empire, made him squeeze the trigger.
     Between Kipling's jolly embrace of British rule of India and other vast lands of the world, and Orwell's jaded vision lies only about thirty to fifty years of a shifting viewpoint influenced, no doubt, by the carnage of the Great War and a growing sense worldwide of the yearning for self-government among those governed by Big Daddy empires.  What Kipling embraced, Orwell rejected.  In Burmese Days he writes a mesmerizing page about the native culture, its habits, its ahistorical way of being: it hasn't changed, essentially, in thousands of years, making absurd the attempt to alter it through some Westernizing effort.  Attempts to change cultures from without are doomed to fail, because the results and consequences of such invasions, peaceful and otherwise, produce the unexpected, peaceful and otherwise.
     "The Man Who Would Be King," a great romantic adventure story about two men with superior technical knowhow taking advantage of modern age people frozen culturally in the ancient world, demonstrates the superior-minded imperial attitude of its author.  Orwell's work shows the reality of that same imperial mindset, decaying like the Burmese jungle's undergrowth.
     My impression of India as a child was just that: an idea bearing no relation to the real place.  It's important to realize there's no getting around the fact of how our illusions can romanticize and even destroy, if we use the power to act that way.

                                                                               Vic Neptune