Published: Pioneer, 20 October 1888; Pioneer Mail, 24 October 1888.

Atrribution: In Scrapbook 4 (28/4, pp. 87–8).

Text: Pioneer.

Notes: The ‘Interminable Muddle’ is RK's term for the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885. It became one of the chief engines leading the drive for Indian independence. At this stage it was still a new thing and therefore the object of official uncertainty, but RK's treatment of it is uniformly hostile.

Besides the satiric ‘In Wonderland’, RK wrote brief, untitled items about the Indian National Congress in the CMG, 14 and 30 December 1886, and ‘A Study of the Congress’, Pioneer, 1 January 1889.

Reprinted in the Martindell–Ballard pamphlets and in Harbord, iv, 2112–15.

The Interminable Muddle had advanced one step further towards the Embarrassing Jam. Far away in the West. Sir W. W. Hunter spread his wings on the blast and skimmed the new found path of Earnestness which his enemies called his Milky Way. “Treat them, O treat them seriously,” fluted Sir William, and the echo of his cry came back, a hundredfold multiplied, from the ever silent spaces of the East.

“Treat us, O treat us seriously!” clamoured the Proprietors of the Interminable Muddle; “We love you with a love that threatens to destroy our reason, but at the same time we desire nothing more than your complete reorganization, subversion and effacement – always by genteel measures. Just, worthy, sublime, oppressive, brutal, unsympathetic Government of India, extend to us the shadow of your protection while we go about to improve you! O thou, sitting upon the hill-tops adorned with red-tiled roofs, girt as to the loins with a girdle of red-tape and daily drunk upon ink, be kind to us!