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

---

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.