Kipling's famine-romance: Masculinity, gender and colonial biopolitics in "William the Conqueror"

Our present understanding of colonial masculinity is strongly mediated by Kipling's fictional representation of late 19th-century India as a space of male self-determination and imperial service. This article concentrates on one of Kipling's short stories, published in American and British women's magazines and speculates on how a female audience might have caused Kipling to modify his (conventional) depiction of Anglo-Indian gender relations. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's work and reviewing the history of colonial famine relief, I suggest that the formal conjunction of the romance genre with the unusual setting of a famine-relief camp is the key to Kipling's "gender transactions" in this story, and can be read as an indicator of the "biopolitical" logic of the camp as a space of sovereign exception.