SOURCE: “On the Threshold of Otherness: British India in ‘El hombre en el umbral,’” in Out of Context: Historical Reference and Representation of Reality in Borges, Duke University Press, 1993, pp. 98–114.

In the following essay, Balderston examines Borges's use of colonial India in his fiction, and his attitude toward colonialism, contrasting Borges's story “The Man on the Threshold” with Rudyard Kipling's “On the City Wall.”

I have never found one among them [the Orientalists] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.¹

—Macaulay, qtd. in Majumdar 10:83

“Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilization?”

“It would be a good idea.”²

“El hombre en el umbral” brings into sharp focus the issues of colonialism and foreign domination that are present in a less obvious way in such other Borges stories as “El jardín de...