Background
"Tho' I've belted you and flayed you,
By the livin' Gawd that made you,
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!"
The poem is a rhyming narrative from the point of view of a British soldier, about a native water-bearer (a "Bhishti") who saves the soldier's life but is soon shot and killed. In the final three lines, the soldier regrets the abuse he dealt to Din and admits that Din is the better man of the two for sacrificing his own life to save another. The poem was published as one of the set of martial poems called the Barrack-Room Ballads.
In stark contrast to Kipling's later poem "The White Man's Burden," Gunga Din is named after the native, and portrays the native Indian as the hero while the British soldiers are portrayed as callous and shallow, and ultimately inferior to Gunga Din.
"Din" is frequently pronounced to rhyme with "bin", /ˌɡʌŋɡə ˈdɪn/, although the rhymes within the poem (as well as the pronunciation in the 1939 film) make it clear that it should be pronounced to rhyme with "green".
Read more about this topic: Gunga Din
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)