The Man Who Would Be King

The narrator of the story is an Indian journalist in 19th century India—Kipling himself, in all but name. Whilst on a tour of some Indian native states he meets two scruffy adventurers, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan. Softened by their stories, he agrees to help them in a minor errand, but later he regrets this and informs the authorities about them—preventing them from blackmailing a minor rajah. A few months later the pair appear at his newspaper office in Lahore. They tell him of a plan they have hatched. They declare that after years of trying their hands at all manner of things, they have decided that "India is not big enough for them". They plan to go to Kafiristan and set themselves up as kings. Dravot will pass as a native and, armed with twenty Martini-Henry rifles, they plan to find a king or chief to help him defeat enemies. Once that is done, they will take over for themselves. They ask the narrator for the use of books, encyclopedias and maps of the area—as a favour, because they are fellow Freemasons, and because he spoiled their blackmail scheme. They also show him a contract they have drawn up between themselves which swears loyalty between the pair and total abstinence from women and alcohol.

Khyber Pass caravan c. 1880s

Two years later, on a scorching hot summer night, Carnehan creeps into the narrator's office. He is a broken man, a crippled beggar clad in rags and he tells an amazing story. Dravot and Carnehan succeeded in becoming kings: traversing treacherous mountains, finding the Kafirs, mustering an army, taking over villages, and dreaming of building a unified nation and even an empire. The Kafirs (pagans, not Muslims) were impressed by the rifles and Dravot's lack of fear of their idols, and acclaimed him as a god, the reincarnation or descendant of Alexander the Great. They show a whiter complexion than others of the area ("so hairy and white and fair it was just shaking hands with old friends") implying their ancient lineage to Alexander himself. The Kafirs practised a form of Masonic ritual, and Dravot's reputation was further cemented when he showed knowledge of Masonic secrets that only the oldest priest remembered.

A Kalash festival

Their schemes were dashed, however, when Dravot (against the advice of Carnehan) decided to marry a Kafir girl. Kingship going to his head, he decided he needed a Queen and then royal children. Terrified at marrying a god, the girl bit Dravot when he tried to kiss her during the wedding ceremony. Seeing him bleed, the priests cried that he was "Neither God nor Devil but a man!" Most of the Kafirs turned against Dravot and Carnehan. A few of his men remained loyal, but the army defected and the two kings were captured.

Dravot, wearing his crown, stood on a rope bridge over a gorge while the Kafirs cut the ropes, and he fell to his death. Carnehan was crucified between two pine trees. When he survived this torture for a whole day, the Kafirs considered it a miracle and let him go. He begged his way back to India.

As proof of his tale, Carnehan shows the narrator Dravot's head, still wearing the golden crown, which he swears never to sell. Carnehan leaves carrying the head. The next day the narrator sees him crawling along the road in the noon sun, with his hat off and gone mad. The narrator sends him to the local asylum. When he inquires two days later, he learns that Carnehan has died of sunstroke. No belongings were found with him.[2]

Map of Kafiristan 1881

Kafiristan was recognized as a real place by at least one early Kipling scholar, Arley Munson, who in 1915 called it "a small tract of land in the northeastern part of Afghanistan," though she wrongly thought the "only source of information is the account of the Mahomedan traders who have entered the country."[3] By then, Kafiristan had been literally wiped off the map and renamed "Nuristan" in Amir Abdur Rahman Khan's 1895 conquest, and it was soon forgotten by literary critics who, under the sway of the New Criticism, read the story as an allegory of the British Raj. The disappearance of Kafiristan was so complete that a 1995 New York Times article referred to it as "the mythical, remote kingdom at the center of the Kipling story."[4]

As the New Historicism replaced the New Criticism, scholars rediscovered the story's historical Kafiristan, aided by the trail of sources left in it by Kipling himself, in the form of the publications the narrator supplies to Dravot and Carnehan.

• "Volume INF-KAN of the Encyclopædia Britannica," which (in the ninth edition of 1882) contained Sir Henry Yule's long "Kafiristan" entry.[5] Yule's entry described Kafiristan as "land of lofty mountains, dizzy paths, and hair-rope bridges swinging over torrents, of narrow valleys laboriously terraced, but of wine, milk, and honey rather than of agriculture." He includes Bellew's description of a Kafir informant as "hardly to be distinguished from an Englishman" and comments at length on the reputed beauty of Kafir women.
• "Wood on the Sources of the Oxus," namely, A Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Source of the River Oxus by the Route of the Indus, Kabul, and Badakhshan (1841) by Captain John Wood (1811–1871), from which Dravot extracts route information.[6]
• "The file of the United Services' Institute," accompanied by the directive, "read what Bellew says," refers, no doubt, to an 1879 lecture on "Kafristan [sic] and the Kafirs" by Surgeon Major Henry Walter Bellew (1834–1892). This account, like Wood's, was based largely on second-hand native travellers' accounts and "some brief notices of this people and country scattered about in the works of different native historians," for, as he noted, "up to the present time we have no account of this country and its inhabitants by any European traveler who has himself visited them." The 29-page survey of history, manners and customs, was as "sketchy and inaccurate" as the narrator suggests, Bellew acknowledging that "of the religion of the Kafirs we know very little," but noting that "the Kafir women have a world wide reputation of being very beautiful creatures."[7]
• The narrator smokes "while the men poured over Raverty, Wood, the maps, and the Encyclopædia." Henry George Raverty's "Notes on Káfiristan" appeared in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1859, and it is presumably this work, based on Raverty's contact with some Siah-Posh Kafirs region.[8]

In addition to Kipling's acknowledged sources, a number of individuals have been proposed as possible models for the story's main characters.

• 
  Gardner
• 
  Harlan
• 
  Brooke
• 
  Schlagintweit
• 
  McNair

• Alexander Gardner (1785–1877), American adventurer captured in Afghanistan in 1823. Gardner "stated that he visited Kafiristan twice between 1826 and 1828, and his veracity was vouched for by . . . reliable authorities"[9] "Only Gardner provides the three essential ingredients of the Kipling novel," according to John Keay.[10]
• Josiah Harlan (1799–1871), American adventurer enlisted as a surgeon with the British East India Company's army in 1824.[11]
• Frederick "Pahari" Wilson (1817–1883), an English officer who deserted during the First Afghan War and later became "Raja of Harsil."[12]
• James Brooke, an Englishman who in 1841 was made the first White Rajah of Sarawak in Borneo, in gratitude for military assistance to the Sultan of Brunei. Kipling alludes to Brooke in the story by referring to Kafiristan as the "only one place now in the world that two strong men can Sar-a-whack."
• Adolf Schlagintweit (1829–1857) German botanist and explorer of Central Asia. Suspected of being a Chinese spy, he was beheaded in Kashgar by the amir, Wali Khan.
• William Watts McNair (1849–1889), a surveyor in the Indian Survey Department, who in 1883 visited Kafiristan while on furlough disguised as a hakim or native doctor, disregarding Government regulations.[13] His report to the Royal Geographical Society earned him the Murchison Award.[14]

Abdal Kadir, last malik of the Red Kafirs of Kunisht

• As a young man the would-be poet T. S. Eliot, already an ardent admirer of Kipling, wrote a short story called "The Man Who Was King". Published in 1905 in the Smith Academy Record, a school magazine of the school he was attending as a day-boy, the story explicitly shows how the prospective poet was concerned with his own unique version of the "King".[15][16][17]
• J. M. Barrie described the story as "the most audacious thing in fiction".[18]
• Kingsley Amis called the story a "grossly overrated long tale" in which a "silly prank ends in predictable and thoroughly deserved disaster."[19]
• Additional critical responses are collected in Bloom's Rudyard Kipling.[20]

• Kreitzer, Larry J. (January 2002). The Son of God Goes Forth to War: Biblical Imagery in Rudyard Kipling's 'The Man Who Would Be King'. ISBN 9781841271484.

Wikisource has original text related to this article: The Man Who Would Be King

• Full text at Project Gutenberg
• The Man Who Would Be King public domain audiobook at LibriVox