Art and Design Commons^™

Beast And Man In India: Undoing John Lockwood Kipling’S Imperial Citation, Oishani Sengupta

Criticism

This article posits that John Lockwood Kipling’s Beast and Man in India (1891), the illustrated compendium on animals that mixes discussions of colonial cross-species entanglements with personal reflections on transforming local arts and crafts in India in the service of imperial power, is a multiauthored book. Centering the presence of Indian illustrators as central to Beast and Man’s texture, this essay uses the term “imperial citation” to highlight the range of strategies Kipling uses to overtly and covertly appropriate the labor of Indigenous creators within the fabric of this volume. By placing the material text within the context of colonial …