Walls and Sexuality as Trans-cultural Symbols: A Study of Rudyard Kipling’s Short Story ‘On the City Wall’

Abstract

This article aims to discuss Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘On the City Wall’ (1888) from the trans-cultural perspective by analyzing the tropes of wall and sexuality. Kipling’s attachment to Indian culture and love for it is reflected in his fiction when he gives a detailed description of exotic locations and ethnographic peculiarities. The image wall is quite significant to express different expressions as connector, shelter, veil, and boundary while sexuality is mentioned to unite the different mindsets together at one spot. This article, further, traces that by using the tropes of connector, shelter, veil, and boundary, Kipling depicts the inevitability of the confrontation between the colonizer and the colonized and a sense of unity among the natives. The analysis of the discussion results in Kipling’s admission of the failure of racial, cultural, social, and religious hindrance among the different inhabitants of the city-[walled] of an unnamed city [Lahore] before the partition of the subcontinent for being united.