Poetic Prankster: On Rudyard Kipling’s Boundary-Blurring Satire of Bureaucracy

Rudyard Kipling’s Departmental Ditties and Other Verses (1886) was an instant hit. Kipling, just shy of twenty-one, had already spent close to four years in India, writing for The Civil and Military Gazette, a newspaper with offices in Lahore and Shimla, and a forum for some of his first poems and stories.

A slim volume of twenty-six poems, the collection brought together some of Kipling’s earliest observations about the social life of the British in the colonial outposts of South Asia, a subject that he would continue to document and satirize mercilessly throughout his literary career.

The primary target of his acerbic tongue in Departmental Ditties was the institution of the government office—the hub of Britain’s administration abroad—and the civil servants who handled its daily business. The government office was ostensibly crucial to the retention of empire, but Kipling’s series of comical sketches recasts it as a staging ground for scandal, nepotism, and indolence.

Its world is stacked with pompous pretenders with inflated egos, lazy bureaucrats idling away their time with piles of unimportant papers, and unfaithful wives plotting and scheming behind their husbands’ backs.

This portrait of Anglo-Indian life, in short, is characterized less by colonial might than by dissatisfying marriages, dullness of mind, boredom of routine, and the claustrophobic heat of the Indian subcontinent. The collection helped claim a colonial readership, and ultimately a metropolitan one, for the young writer.

It was published in a print run of no more than five hundred copies. Kipling sent out order forms to readers, tracing familiar routes of imperial trade: from Aden to Singapore, from Quetta to Colombo. Within a few weeks, every copy was sold.

In the fall of 2019, I called up a copy from the first run of Departmental Ditties to the reading room of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. I laughed when I saw it, not just because the poems were funny, but because the object in front of me was exactly the kind of joke a book historian would appreciate.

Writing about the production of the book, Kipling chuckled that the narrow quarto volume was meant “to imitate a D[istrict]. O[ffice]. Government envelope,” its light brown wrappers bound together by iconic red tape. A perfect coalescing of form and content, the similarities to an envelope on “official” business continue.

The dedication—”To All the Heads of Depar[tments] and all Anglo-Indians”—declares an addressee (or a reading public). The ornate presentation of the book’s title transforms what would have otherwise been an ordinary envelope into one holding a governmental missive.

Kipling’s name, signifying his authorial claim to the collection, doubles up as a return address, muddying the boundaries between poet and clerk. The mock stamp of The Civil and Military Gazette Press, a nod to the fact that the book was printed in the workshop of his employer, replaces a customary government seal on the flap of the envelope.

As anyone who has worked with bureaucratic archives will spot, the publication date of 1886 merges with the official document number, No. 1, reminding us that this is just the first of many letters that the office will send as the year progresses, just as it is the first of many works to come from Kipling over the course of his career. Opening the envelope reveals a pamphlet with writing printed on only one side of each page, as per official prescription.

We’re invited to read the poems as individual sheaves. Tied together in Kipling’s docket, they make up a bureaucratic collection. Kipling proudly declared that the imitation was so convincing that “among a pile of papers,” it would have “deceived a clerk of twenty years’ service.”

The poems in Departmental Ditties knitted together references to survey maps and charts, official reports and letters, directories, and books of Euclidean geometry. What better to hold a literary rendition of these documents, all part of the professional life of being a servant of empire, than a bureaucratic envelope?

I suggest that Kipling’s Departmental Ditties performs what we might call a material poetics of empire. This is a poetics that not only speaks to the inseparability of the book-as-object and the book-as-text, but also takes seriously the relationship between the literary text and its mundane counterparts, embedding both in colonial networks of production and circulation.

The imperial conditions that made literary production possible—Kipling’s included—were bolstered by a foundation of thick stacks of everyday books and documents: bureaucratic files and forms, statistical accounts, survey reports, ethnographic compendia, military manuals, and almanacs. Such forms of writing served crucial, functional purposes in the daily life of the colonizers and the colonized. They were also ubiquitous, circulating in unprecedented numbers that dwarfed literary print runs.

Kipling’s Departmental Ditties, a literary portrait of empire bound in a bureaucratic spine, is a material acknowledgment of the mundane textual infrastructure of the colonial world. The imbrication of poem and bureaucratic document can be described in bibliographical terms: the faux envelope is the paratext of Departmental Ditties.

Attesting to Kipling’s familiarity with the colonial institution of the office, the cover of the volume sparks a moment of recognition between the author and reader. Without the framing context of the envelope, the poems and their satire on bureaucratic routine fall flat.

The design of Departmental Ditties also tells us something about Kipling’s imagined readers, an anglophone public scattered across Britain’s empire. Kipling knew that nothing quite commanded attention like an envelope bearing government insignia.

Such an envelope inevitably contained something that had to be read: a request, a summons, an official notice. Repositories of actionable information, such envelopes demanded that recipients open them immediately.

Imagine a copy of the book in the hands of a nineteenth-century reader. Our hypothetical reader would have first been worried, then confused, and then amused as the prank was revealed. This progression certainly explains the readers’ complaints that poured in about the difficulties the configuration of the book posed. Reports that the “wire binding cut the pages, and the red tape tore the covers” conjure up an image of a panicked reader hastily tearing open the envelope, only to be relieved to find nothing more than a set of poems.

Departmental Ditties cleverly borrows the urgency of a communication from the government and lends it to a work of literature, intended for leisure and enjoyment. Kipling’s gimmick, in short, framed his debut collection of poetry as required reading.

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Excerpted from Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire by Priyasha Mukhopadhyay. Copyright © 2024 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.