With the idea of Orientalism which England used to homogenize "the other" to the East, we can only glean that which is expressed through literature, such as Leonard Woolf's Pearls and Swine, to make sense of what this "other" really entails. Woolf gives us varying perspectives through the characters of the Archdeacon, stock-jobber, and the Commissioner of India. Imperialism is an underlying theme, and by the end of this story all sense of imperialistic pride has somewhat been sucked out.
This video depicts the Great Rebellion of 1857, which is obviously a few years before this short story was written. But it gives a lot of insight as to what direction England was headed with this idea that she was "Top Dog."
Wrote one British officer: "We have power of life and death in our hands, and I assure you we spare not."
"The cruelty of the sea [poise] is only the reflex of England's own conduct in India. The European troops have become fiends."
I would also like to briefly touch on the title of this story. Did anyone else catch the Biblical reference? "Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you" (Matthew 7:6). How can we relate this to the idea of Imperialism, if we can at all?
As the introduction to our reading states, Leonard Woolf wrote this story based on his own experience in Ceylon as an imperial civil servant from 1904-1911, thus making the tension we see from the Great Rebellion of 1857 older but not yet inapplicable. From what you see of the clip from the PBS site relating to "The Story of India," is it a possible assumption that we can see a definite decline in successful British Imperialism from 1857 to when Pearls and Swine take place? Here is one key passage I'd like to point out from the text, located on p. 33:
"'Well, we rule India and the sea, so the sea belongs to us, and the oysters are in the sea and the pearls are in the oysters. Therefore of course the pearls belong to us. But they lie in five fathoms. How to get 'em up, that's the question. You'd think being progressive we'd dredge for them or send down divers in diving dresses. But we don't, not in India. They've been fishing up the oysters and the pearls there ever since the beginning of time, naked brown men diving feet first out of long wooden boats into the blue sea and sweeping the oysters off the bottom of the sea into baskets slung to their sides. They were doing it centuries and centuries before we came, when--as someone said--our ancestors were herding swine on the plains of Norway.'"
