Short Story: The Man Who Would Be King

Overview
Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” is framed as a tale told to a journalist-narrator in colonial India by a ragged survivor of a grand, foolhardy adventure. Two ex-soldiers and wanderers, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, conceive a plan to leave British India and seize a kingdom in the remote mountains of Kafiristan, beyond the Hindu Kush. The story charts their audacity, their improbable rise, and the pride that brings them down, marrying brisk adventure with a stark parable about imperial hubris.

The Pact and the Journey
Dravot and Carnehan first appear as swaggering rogues who blackmail petty rajahs and hustle across the railways. Recognizing in the narrator a fellow Freemason, they enlist him to witness a contract swearing off liquor and women until they have made themselves kings. With a few rifles, animal loads of trade goods, and disguises, they slip north out of India. Months later, after grueling crossings and skirmishes, they reach Kafiristan, a land of warring villages and fierce independence where Alexander’s legend still circulates.

Kingship and Apotheosis
The pair begin as mercenaries, drilling a village’s men and turning matchlock mobs into a disciplined force. Victory breeds victory: they subdue neighboring clans, collect tribute, and amass bags of rubies and other stones. Crucially, Dravot’s Masonic signs and tokens echo arcane symbols still remembered among the Kafirs, whose priests and headmen take him for a divine figure, a successor to “Sikander.” Seizing the moment, Dravot accepts godhood. A coronation follows; Carnehan becomes his chief and “Master of the Skies,” while Dravot reigns as a serene, remote deity-king. They build roads, levy taxes, and draft a rough code, imagining they will bring order where none existed. Dravot’s ambition swells from mere plunder to founding an empire and a dynasty.

Hubris and the Fall
Success curdles when Dravot decides to marry a local woman to beget heirs and yoke bloodlines to his crown. The priests, for whom his divinity has always been political theater, sense an opening. The chosen bride, terrified at the idea of marrying a god, bites Dravot during the ceremony. Blood flows, the mark of mortality. Rumor flashes through the temples and forts: their god is only a man. Uprisings flare. Dravot and Carnehan fight a desperate retreat through mountain gorges, are captured, and dragged before their enemies. They give Dravot one last walk across a rope bridge strung above a chasm. The ropes are cut. He plunges to his death, still crowned. Carnehan is tortured and crucified between two trees, left to die in the cold. He somehow survives and staggers back toward India, stripped of everything but the memory of glory and the relic he carries.

The Return and Aftermath
The frame snaps shut when Carnehan, sun-blasted and half-mad, reappears in the narrator’s office, bearing a bundle. Inside is Dravot’s severed head, crowned with gold and set with gems. Carnehan tells the full tale in a fever of pride and grief, then takes the head away, promising to return. When the narrator seeks him later, he finds Carnehan dying in a poorhouse, raving through snatches of drill and royal proclamations. After his death, his few effects, and any trace of the crown, have vanished into the city’s indifferent machinery.

Themes
Kipling fuses a rattling yarn with a meditation on power, fraternity, and delusion. The contract of abstinence, the Masonic brotherhood, and the easy slide from discipline to megalomania sketch how empire intoxicates men who believe themselves chosen. The Kafirs’ acceptance and sudden revolt show how fragile divinity becomes when bled by a pinprick. The closing image, an office haunted by a jeweled head, a pauper’s cot where a king’s dream dies, leaves the legend glittering and grim, a caution about ambition stepping past its own edge.