Historicizing Difference in The English Patient: Teaching Kip Alongside His Sources

Abstract

Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) ostensibly invites a postcolonial reading when it describes how an English officer nicknames the Sikh sapper Kip after viewing his first bomb disposal report: “the officer had exclaimed, ‘What’s this? Kipper grease?’ and laughter surrounded him. He had no idea what a kipper was, but the young Sikh had thereby translated into a salty English fish. Within a week his real name, Kirpal Singh, had been forgotten.”¹ Kip will only reemerge as Kirpal Singh at the close of the novel,² when he blames England for the American bombing of Japan and decides to return to India and reclaim his identity. Critics have obliged this suggested line of interpretation, sounding the appropriate notes on the subjects of naming and the emergence of the post-colonial identity from the imperial. And yet in the classroom my students and I have found it pertinent to ask: what sources provide Kip with his ‘real’ name and identity? Whose identity and experience does Ondaatje seek to rescue from erasure and forgetfulness? Ondaatje’s own acknowledgments in The English Patient, which credit The Tiger Strikes, The Tiger Kills, A Roll of Honour, and Martial India³ as his sources for Kip,⁴ point to a prior and more determinant act of naming. Martial India singles out the bravery of a Kirpal Singh who was decorated for capturing with a handful of men a large village held in strength by the Germans, prompting author Yeats-Brown to gush, “the cavalry spirit survives, and hearts beat as high as they ever did, amongst these stalwart yeomen.”⁵