Background
"Tho' I've belted you and flayed you,
By the livin' Gawd that made you,
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 (a "Bhishti") who saves the soldier's life but is soon shot and killed. In the final three lines, the soldier regrets the abuse he dealt to Din and admits that Din is the better man of the two for sacrificing his own life to save another. The poem was published as one of the set of martial poems called the Barrack-Room Ballads.
In stark contrast to Kipling's later poem "The White Man's Burden," Gunga Din is named after the native, and portrays the native Indian as the hero while the British soldiers are portrayed as callous and shallow, and ultimately inferior to Gunga Din.
"Din" is frequently pronounced to rhyme with "bin", /ˌɡʌŋɡə ˈdɪn/, although the rhymes within the poem (as well as the pronunciation in the 1939 film) make it clear that it should be pronounced to rhyme with "green".
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