Gunga Din

Gunga Din is one of the more famous poems by Rudyard Kipling. Perhaps best known is its often-quoted last line, "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!" The poem is a rhyming narrative from the point of view of a British soldier, about a native water-bearer who saves his life. Like several other Kipling poems, it celebrates the virtues of a non-European while retaining a colonialist view of such people as being of a "lower order".

Read it!

• Gunga Din at Bartleby.com (http://www.bartleby.com/103/48)

---

Gunga Din is a 1939 swashbuckler film about three British soldiers and their native water bearer who fight to survive a Thuggee attack in colonial India. It stars Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks Jr.[?], Sam Jaffe[?] and Joan Fontaine.

The movie was inspired by the Kipling poem, and written by Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Joel Sayre[?], Fred Guiol[?], Lester Cohen[?] (contributing writer) (uncredited), John Colton[?] (contributing writer) (uncredited), William Faulkner (contributing writer) (uncredited), Vincent Lawrence[?] (contributing writer) (uncredited), Dudley Nichols[?] (contributing writer) (uncredited) and Anthony Veiller[?] (contributing writer) (uncredited). It was directed by George Stevens.

It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White. In 1999 the film was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.