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Literary Review
He dreamed in Hindustani
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Kipling never understood the economics driving colonialism. Nostalgia for India and admiration for the colonial administrator dispensing civilisation inspired much of his life and works, says ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA.
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AS a Boy Scout at school in Allahabad, every day I swore allegiance to God, country, and the Wolf Cub Pack. I was proud of being a Scout, proud of their gear: blue scarf, whistle, penknife, compass, tin mug, a length of white cord, used for practising knots. Not quite 10, I fell in love with an Anglo-Indian girl in my class, and by the time I reached my early teens I thought I knew everything there was to know about the opposite sex. "The female of the species is more deadly than the male" was a quote that ran through my head constantly. Mine were one-sided affairs.
I did not then know that the quote was from Kipling, any more than I did that General Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scout Movement, had drawn his inspiration from him. Behind the Wolf Cubs lay the Jungle Books and the imperial work ethic; the non-Scouts in school were the bandar-log. After Shakespeare, Kipling is perhaps the most quoted writer in the English language. "One test of success here is frequent quotation by other papers. And the boy is much quoted", wrote a cautiously proud Lockwood Kipling to Margaret Bourne-Jones of his son's growing fame. And Ruddy, an assistant editor with the Lahore newspaper the Civil and Military Gazette, was only 19 years old.
Christmas 1888 found Rudyard Kipling in Allahabad, a city he detested. Sent there initially to join the Pioneer, the Gazette's more eminent sister paper, he soon was appointed editor of The Week's News, a Pioneer supplement. . He'd been a workaholic since his Lahore days, and continued to be one in his new job as well. Among the dozens of poems and stories he contributed to The Week's News is the harrowing "Baa Baa, Black Sheep".
In Allahabad, Kipling stayed as a paying guest with Professor Alec Hill and his American wife, Edmonia, in a house called the "Belvedere". The setting of "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" is based on the garden surrounding it. The bungalow still stands, opposite the university, and the garden is inhabited by Rikki-Tikki's descendants. On Christmas day 1888, Kipling wrote a poem addressed to the Hills. In it he thanked them for their friendship, for making him "welcome past all worth or right— / An inky gamin doing inky chores / And doing `em at night!" The Hills were planning to travel to the United States in a few weeks time, and Kipling's poem was his farewell to them. In the event, he decided to join them on the trip, which took him more than halfway round the world. Within weeks of arriving in England, in October 1889, Kipling found he was a celebrity. His plain tales, written primarily to entertain "Cynical, seedy and dry" Anglo-Indians, had been published in London to great acclaim, and at least one editor wondered if Kipling might become "greater than Dickens". "Kipling", wrote Henry James, 'strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known." To Lockwood Kipling, the suddenness of his son's climb to literary stardom would have come as no great surprise.
The symbol of imperialism for Kipling, who never understood the economic forces underlying imperial expansion, was the colonial administrator, "the strong man ruling alone", who was out there, in Umballa or Seeonee, not for material gain but to bring civilisation — the railway track, the telegraph line, sanitation — to a dark corner of the world. The graves tell it all, for often the colonial administrator perished in the dark corner he had come to civilise. This is a very different world from the fly-by-wire imperialism on display today, but up to a point only. As David Gilmour writes, Kipling "always admired the manner, the work and the vision of the public servant who believed that imperialism had `all the depth and vision of a religious faith'." Take away the public servant, and the Stars and Stripes begins to look like the flag of another jihad.
Still, Gilmour's even-handed biography, specially its first 100 pages, can fill even those of us who are too young to remember the Empire, who are midnight's children, with something like nostalgia. And nostalgia for India is what drove Kipling to distraction. From Cairo in 1913, the nearest to India he had been since 1889, except for a brief visit in 1891, he wrote to Edmonia Hill: "I felt as though I was moving in a terrible, homesick nightmare and as though at any moment the years would roll away and I should find myself back in India. But it is 25 years and 26 days since I left it." The gamin in Kipling was always struggling to get out of his imperial self; put differently, the gamin was always out, which Kipling kept struggling to put back into the uncorked imperial bottle.
The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, David Gilmour, John Murray, £15.
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