The Overland Mail, Rudyard Kipling

          The depiction of the Indian landscape in Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Overland Mail" gives a clear distinction between natural India and colonizing England by comparing the Indian jungle with the systematic and civilized British mail system. This binary distinction in turn creates a division between the colonized and colonizers. Much in the style of traditional and unchallenged Orientalism, the poem makes its point not by true comparison (as in, a depiction of both English and Indian settlements side by side), but of a one-sided representation of the native land as a means of subtly making a statement about the colonizing empire. For the purpose of disparaging natural India, and providing reason for its colonization, the narrator sets the Indian landscape against the British mail system as an obstacle.  The narrator states "Is the torrent in spate? He must ford it or swim./Has the rain wrecked the road? He must climb by the cliff." and continues with "The service admits not a "but" or an "if" (McLeod, 259).  By allowing the landscape to threaten the British colonial system, the narrator furthers the notion of India as wild, destructive, and savage, and shows England as structured and civilized--in it's uncolonized state it is only represented as a threat to the colonial system. There is no room for allowing the landscape to interfere with the British mail system, however; this suggests that despite difficulties with natural India, England will still overcome these obstacles for their purpose of the colonial Empire. The landscape only becomes less dangerous as the mail is delivered to the British.
           It is also significant to note that as the runner carries the mail, he is climbing in elevation--"up, up through the night goes the Overland Mail" (260). This "ascent" can be interpreted as England sitting (both physically and imperially) higher than the native Indians.  The fact that this poem happens in the course of one night is also of importance. The traversing of the Indian jungle is shrouded not only in physical but metaphorical darkness. The landscape is dangerous and wild, and the darkness seems to suggest a sort of primitive society attached to that landscape--it is empty of other people and remains in the dark until the runner reaches the exiles, and the lack of light suggests formidable and ominous conditions.
          At the same time, the darkness also enshrouds the colonial mail system: not only is the jungle encased in darkness, but a crucial system developed by the colonizers that assists the missions of the colonizers happens in the dark of night.  This suggests not only an obvious distinction between colonized as savage and colonizers as proper, but also that one of the underlying systems of the whole colonial empire comes out of and works in the same darkness that owns the natural landscape.  The landscape of India in Kipling's poem is meant to portray the two supposedly very opposite cultures placed next to one another--wild and dangerous India working for the elevated and structured British Empire--but at the same time it shows a bit of ambivalence in that landscape itself.

Location, in Kipling's poem, is central and of overt importance. The runner moves into the jungle, through darkness and harm's way, and into the sunlight of the day to deliver the mail; on the surface, the differences between the English land and native land could not be clearer.  Digging a little deeper, however, we run into some questions. It is not expressed to the reader, for example, where this runner lives, how he came to work for the mail system, or where the robber comes from and who he is.  We are not shown how this space is divided between the savage and the civilized, only that it is so. For some reference on the landscape that Kipling is describing in his poem, I have included a map (with link to larger image here) that shows the division of land in India by the British as of a certain year.  In an attempt to discover how a settlement like the one Kipling describes might be divided in colonial times, I have also included a map of Calcutta in 1842, found at the American Geographical Society Library's Digital Map Collection.  The mapmakers have included below the map of the city a list of references to public buildings.  Note that the list of buildings does not include any sort of reference to residential areas (inhabited by either the British or the natives), and it does not list any sort of pre-colonial structure as a public building.  The only building that even somewhat makes note of the native population is the listing of the "Native Hospital", but not even servant's barracks are listed. This is presumably because these have been done away with and are no longer in the control of the natives, or if there do remain one or two they are not considered of importance.  In fact, the only hint a user of this map might find of the native people of Indian is in an image set at the bottom right-hand corner of the page.  Here we see Esplanade Row, which in the sketch seems to depict an almost plantation-style farm being worked by the otherwise invisible natives in the foreground of an image of the city.  Still, this image does not show where these natives live in the city, and this lack of information speaks for the colonial attitude towards the natives.