"The Mark of the Beast": Rudyard Kipling's apocalyptic vision of empire

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1996 by Paul Battles

With his hands and knees on the ground and hair loosened, the body is

convulsed, and the head shakes violently, while from the mouth issues a

hissing or gurgling noise. (qtd. in Hastings 488)

If we take the Silver Man to be the temple's punishing deity, light is shed on some puzzling details as well. In the first place, why does the Silver Man endure a whole night of torture, and, just as his torturers seem to have given up, cure Fleete? The narrator doesn't say; if anything, he indicates that the passing of time, not the torture, is responsible for the Silver Man's decision to relent: "The dawn was beginning to break when the leper spoke. His mewings had not been satisfactory up to that point" (230). Then Strickland exclaims that the transformation lasted "exactly four-and-twenty hours!" (230). If the Silver Man were carrying out the predetermined length of punishment of the possessing spirit--24 hours--this detail would make sense. Moreover, the narrator himself states that Fleete had been possessed by a spirit: "We unstrapped the leper and told him to take away the evil spirit" (230). Of course, Strickland and the narrator seem to think that the Silver Man caused the spirit to possess Fleete in the first place. They do not understand the significance of Fleete's behavior in Hanuman's temple, and that is why they cannot wholly unravel the mystery of Fleete's transformation; in fact, Fleete's actions arc those of one already possessed--perhaps that is why the temple priests insist that Fleete did not defile Hanuman's image.

These parallels are surely not coincidental. Hanuman figures in a number of Kipling's tales, and in Beast and Man in India Kipling's father discusses the god as well. We know that Kipling visited Indian temples as a small child, and that he was interested in Indian religions, as evidenced by the Lama in Kim; therefore, he may well have known the Indian traditions concerning Hanuman described above.

Kipling could not have expected his readers to grasp the allusions to Indian religious practices, but the very lack of comprehension is programmatic. It enacts the failure of English and Indian to communicate, discussed in the Preface to Life's Handicap: ". . . the English do not think as natives do . . . native and English stare at each other across great gulfs of miscomprehension." "The Mark of the Beast" dramatizes the impossibility of knowing India. For the colonizers, a lack of knowledge translates directly into a loss of power; despite their apparent mastery of the situation, Strickland and the narrator misunderstand the larger significance of the events that take place, and in the end are overtaken by their own actions. They are brought face-to-face with the Beast, and the Beast lies not within the Other but within themselves. In its denial of Imperial constructions of truth, in its forced and obviously ironic closure, in its insistence on the ignorance and fallibility of the English, "The Mark of the Beast" offers a powerful critique of the project of Empire.