Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, in 1865. By that time the Indian nationalists had been fighting for independence from Britain for eight years. This conflict continued throughout Kipling’s life and for eleven years after his death, for a total of ninety years. In 1947, India’s innate patience and perseverance finally resulted in independence from British rule.
In this brief poem, Kipling appears to be cautioning the colonial powers that they will, in the end, lose. Despite their advantages in technology and armament, a western power cannot defeat the patience of his eastern foe. What Kipling wrote here was prescient indeed. His warning, though, should not be construed to apply to India alone. Its wisdom can also be seen as a warning to France about their determination to hold onto their Indochinese colonies as well as the United States in our efforts to prevent a reunification of Vietnam under communist rule. After all, the people of Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China, which together comprise modern-day Vietnam, spent 1,500 years expelling the Chinese from their lands. Western societies simply do not have the kind of patience required to defeat that kind of determination.
Could we also relate this to Afghanistan?
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