Plain Tales from the Hills — Key Ideas to Explore

The Narrator's Shifting Gaze

The narrative voice in Plain Tales from the Hills is not a single, stable persona. In 'Lispeth,' the speaker adopts the tone of a colonial chronicler—detached, slightly weary, given to parenthetical asides ('or pahari pronunciation'). Yet within the same paragraph, he will pivot to a simile that feels almost literary: 'you would, meeting her on the hill-side unexpectedly, have thought her the original Diana of the Romans going out to slay.' The effect is disorienting. The reader is never sure whether the narrator is a sympathetic observer or a sardonic ironist. This ambiguity becomes a structural device: the tales often begin in a mode of reportage and end in a mode of moral or emotional deflation. The narrator's gaze is that of a man who knows the colony too well to be shocked by its cruelties, but not so well that he can resist a moment of genuine wonder.

Pace as a Tool of Dismay

Kipling manipulates narrative pace with deliberate unevenness. In 'Lispeth,' the early paragraphs move slowly, accumulating detail about the girl's parentage, the failed maize crop, the bears in the poppy-field. Then, abruptly, the pace accelerates: 'Later, cholera came into the Kotgarth Valley and carried off Sonoo and Jadeh.' The deaths are dispatched in a single clause. This compression is not unique to that story. In 'The Broken-Link Handicap,' the race itself is rendered in a burst of fragmented action—'Red Hat, leading, fell this side, and threw out The Glen, and the ruck came up behind'—while the aftermath is given in a single, flat sentence: 'Four jockeys were taken out dead; three were very badly hurt.' The swiftness of the telling mirrors the swiftness of the violence. Kipling often withholds the emotional weight of an event by refusing to dwell on it, leaving the reader to supply the dismay.

Voice and the Vernacular of Empire

The language of these stories is marked by a deliberate mixing of registers. Kipling uses Anglo-Indian terms—'memsahib,' 'pahari,' 'sais'—without gloss, as if the reader is already inside the colony. He also deploys a kind of barrack-room slang: 'a drifty, glidy stretch,' 'the ruck,' 'a small hell of men and horses.' This vernacular sits uneasily beside more formal constructions, such as the epigraph's 'tangled Trinities.' The effect is to create a voice that is both insider and outsider: the narrator knows the colony's jargon, but he also knows its literary traditions. In 'The Broken-Link Handicap,' the shift from the jockey's uneducated speech ('God ha' mercy, I'm done for!') to the narrator's polished irony ('The plunging in the lotteries was fine') is jarring. That jar is the point. Kipling's India is a place where the sublime and the sordid coexist, and the narrative voice must accommodate both.

These stories reward attention to their seams—the moments when the narrator's tone falters, when the pace suddenly quickens, when a colloquialism intrudes on a formal sentence. Kipling is not a neutral reporter; he is a stylist who uses the plainness of his title as a foil for his own narrative cunning. Read with an ear for those shifts, and the tales reveal their true complexity.

That Kipling collection stayed with me mostly for its quiet cruelty — how a sudden fall can undo everything, like that racehorse’s blood. It made me think of another old book, Life and Death of Mr. Badman — Story, Setting & Ideas, which lingers the same way, watching ruin unfold without flinching. Both leave a strange, heavy stillness behind.