Gunga Din
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Gunga Din (1892) is one of Rudyard Kipling's most famous poems, perhaps best known for its often-quoted last line, "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!" as immortalised in the word of Benjamin King. The poem is a rhyming narrative from the point of view of a British soldier, about a native water-bearer who saves his life. Like several other Kipling poems, it celebrates the virtues of a non-European while portraying a colonial infantryman's view of such people as being of a "lower order". Because of his role as a waterboy in the British Colonial Army, Gunga Din has been likened to Uncle Tom of Harrriet Beacher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. "Gunga Din" has on occasion been used as a ethnic slur in the USA (referring to people of South Asian origin).
[edit] The film
The poem inspired a 1939 swashbuckler film starring Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Joan Fontaine, and Sam Jaffe in the title role.
[edit] Influence
The name 'Gunga Din' is sarcastically used[citation needed] in the musical instrument world; brass instruments, particularly bugles, of low or questionable quality produced in India are often called 'Gunga Din' horns, as well as 'junkers,' or more appropriately, 'wall-hangers.'
'The Ballad of Gunga Din' was recorded by Jim Croce in 1966. The song appears on the albums 'Facets' (1966) and 'The Faces I've Been' (1975).
"Gunga Din" is also the title of an apparently unrelated[citation needed] 1969 song by The Byrds, written by Gene Parsons.
The Gunga Din Highway is also a novel by Frank Chin, the polemical Chinese-American playwright and fiction writer who deals with themes of "authentic" Asian-American identity.
[edit] External links
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