June 20, 2004

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat

The literary work of Rudyard Kipling, derided as an imperialist and colonialist for years, is drawing much interest once again, nearly a century after many of his short stories and poems were first penned. Born in Bombay in 1865 when the British Empire was at its zenith, Kipling, a prolific author, was the first Englishman to receive a Nobel prize in literature. Two of his ballads, “East is East” and “The While Man’s Burden”, have become classics. Over the years, a number of books and research articles have critically examined the literature generated by him.

A relatively recent book, Rudyard Kipling, A Life, by Harry Ricketts, narrates his story in some detail, documenting many little known facts. In addition, the Kipling Society, formed in 1927 in England, has remained consistently faithful to promoting and publicizing his poetry and prose, and remains a resource of authoritative information about his work.

Kipling’s current popularity is not confined to literary scholars. It has attracted the attention of some business entrepreneurs as well. At one stage in his career, he lived in the American state of Vermont where he built a house in 1892, naming it Naulakha. The exotic name he gave it was in keeping with his practice of associating many characters in his stories with Indian names.

Kipling and his family lived in Naulakha for four years, when a bitter dispute with his brother-in-law forced him to leave Vermont and relocate to England. The years when Kipling and his family resided in the house were highly productive. He wrote two of his most popular children’s books, The Jungle Book and its sequel, The Second Jungle Book, while living there. Both books have since become timeless masterpieces of children’s literature. The house remained in a state of neglect and disrepair for a period of more than 50 years after the Kiplings departed.

Recently, a charitable organization, with experience in restoring historic houses, has acquired it. They have renovated it, refurbishing many of its original wood furnishings and paneling and have remodeled the study where Kipling once wrote the jungle books. They are now publicizing the history of Naulakha and its association with Rudyard Kipling to attract tourists. It is claimed that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the renowned sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, once stayed there as a house guest.

Kipling had acquired a sentimental bond with India, its culture, traditions and mores, which he could never free himself from. His father, an artist and craftsman by profession, had settled in Bombay in 1865, employed by the School of Art and Industry. The opening of the Suez Canal had greatly accelerated the evolution of the city from a sleepy town to the Gateway of India. Kipling apparently had a happy childhood, spoiled rotten by his Goanese Ayah and a bevy of servants.

Later, he would fondly recall how their melodious songs lulled him to sleep. As a small child, he learnt the local language and spoke to his parents in English “haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in”, he was to recall years later in his autobiography, Something of Myself, published posthumously.

The happy childhood was soon to come to an end. As was the custom among the European residents of India in that era, his parent took him and his sister to live with a family of strangers in England. Kipling was less than six years old and his sister was even younger. Sea travel from India to England was long and arduous and the children did not see their parents for the next five years. Kipling had a very miserable time during his stay with his foster family and later described the house as the “House of Desolation”. His foster mother, a strict Evangelical Christian, expected unreasonably good behavior and enforced rigid discipline, especially on him. The mental and physical abuses suffered at her hands left lasting scars on Kipling’s psyche.

Rudyard Kipling returned to India in 1882 and moved to Lahore where his father was the curator of the City Museum. He was less than 17 years old, and had been out of the country for eleven long years. He was offered a job as a sub-editor with the Civil and Military Gazette, housed in two wooden sheds within the European quarters, by an acquaintance of his father.

His parents occupied a large bungalow on the old Mozang Road; however, the surroundings were so barren that the house was nicknamed, Bikaner House, as it reminded everyone of a desert. As compared to life in England, Kipling lived in luxury in a vast mansion with a large number of servants. These comforts aside, he found life in Lahore lacking in recreational opportunities. Much of the isolation was self-generated. There were only about 70 European families living in the city and their contacts with the local Indian population were virtually nonexistent

Despite his difficult relations with the editor, also an Englishman, Kipling thrived at the daily paper and besides fulfilling his journalistic commitments was able to compose some poetry on the side. Furthermore, in the next few years, he published six volumes of short stories; the most famous of them, Plain Tales from the Hills, were based on his observations of life in India.

Although gaining fame and recognition, Kipling was progressively getting bored with life in Lahore, and had taken to wandering late at nights in quest of some distraction, visiting liquor shops, gambling casinos and opium dens, a fascinating account of which he has provided in his autobiography. He left Lahore to work with the Gazette’s sister newspaper, Pioneer, at Allahabad. Finally in 1889, he left India for good. The years he spent in Lahore and Allahabad led to the creation of the first volume of poetry, Departmental Ditties. Except for a brief visit in 1891 to his parents in Lahore and his Ayah in Bombay, Kipling never returned to India.

By the time he arrived in England, Kipling had already become a famous and well-respected author and poet. His creative talents were still on the rise when he authored perhaps the most popular of his literary products, the children’s stories, Just So Stories, and the spy novel set in India, Kim. In 2001, Kim was judged among the best 100 works of literature of the 20th century. Kipling was offered knighthood by the government as well as the position of poet laureate. He declined both honours. While accolades were accumulating, tragedies were soon to visit Kipling’s life. First, his six-year-old daughter, Josephine, died of illness while the family was on a brief visit to New York. His 18-year-old son, John, was tragically killed in 1915 on the western front during the First World War. Neither his body nor grave has ever been definitively identified.

In the later years of life, Kipling continued to write, travel and also got deeply involved in patriotic causes, raising support and money for the Boer War in South Africa and the First World War. He died in England in January 1936, barely three days ahead of King George V, with whom he had developed a close personal friendship. The London Times Literary Supplement commented in his obituary that “he was a national institution, but no longer a literary one”.

Nearly three-quarters of a century have elapsed since Rudyard Kipling died. His literary legacy and his true place among the literary icons of the past century are currently being debated. In his life-time, he was considered an unabashed imperialist, believing in the moral mission of western Christian nations to civilize the people of Asia and Africa, sentiments so plainly expressed in his famous poem, “The White Man’s Burden” written during the Spanish-American war.

Following the collapse of colonialism in the last century, his views and writings, however, came in for sharp criticism, as they now seemed so much out of tune with contemporary values and enlightened ethos. Today, he is recognized mostly as a superb children’s storyteller, who viewed the world through the prism of his own period, much as most of his countrymen did. The final verdict on Kipling’s true place as a writer and poet is yet to be rendered. Meanwhile, countless generations of children, unconcerned about prevailing political mores, will continue to be enthralled by his Jungle Book and other short stories.

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