Rudyard Kipling: An author who was inspired by India!

“Jungle Jungle baat chali hai

Pata chala hai…

Jungle Jungle baat chali hai

Pata chala hai…

Arre chaddi pehen ke

Phool khila hai phool khila hai

Arre chaddi pehen ke

Phool khila hai phool khila hai…”

Who doesn’t remember these adorable lyrics by Gulzar for the animated series The Jungle Book. Based on the novel by the same name by Rudyard Kipling it is a favorite of people of all ages.

Believe it or not, Kipling, an English journalist, novelist, poet, and short story writer, was born in British India, which served as a major inspiration for a lot of his writing. On December 30, 1865, he was born in Bombay (now Mumbai).

His body of work

The Jungle Book trilogy (The Jungle Book, 1894; The Second Jungle Book, 1895), Kim (1901), his best-known work, the Just So Stories (1902), and other short stories, such as The Man Who Would Be King (1888), are among Kipling’s works of fiction. Among his poems are Gunga Din (1890), Mandalay (1890), (1890), The Gods of the Copybook Headings (1919), The White Man’s Burden (1899), and If— (1910). He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story.

His family background & childhood

Father John Lockwood and mother Alice courted at Rudyard Lake in Rudyard, Staffordshire, England, in 1863. Following John Lockwood’s acceptance of the post of Professor at the School of Art, they were married and relocated to India in 1865. They called their first kid Joseph Rudyard in honour of the Rudyard Lake region because they were so captivated by its beauty. Alice’s sister Agnes was married to Edward Poynter, and her sister Georgiana was married to painter Edward Burne-Jones. Kipling’s first cousin Stanley Baldwin, who served as the Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times in the 1920s and 1930s, was the son of a third sister named Louisa.

For many years, the dean’s house on the campus of the J. J. School of Art in Bombay, where Kipling was born, served as the residence. Even if a cottage has a plaque identifying it as the place where he was born, it’s possible that the original one was demolished and replaced decades ago. Since the bungalow was constructed in 1882, almost 15 years after Kipling’s birth, some historians and environmentalists believe it denotes a location just near the house where Kipling was born. When Kipling visited J. J. School in the 1930s, he apparently told the dean:

Kipling on Bombay:

“Mother of Cities to me,
For I was born in her gate,
Between the palms and the sea,
Where the world-end steamers wait.”

When Kipling was five years old, his time in Bombay came to an end. He and his three-year-old sister Alice were brought to the United Kingdom, specifically to Southsea, Portsmouth, as was customary in British India, to live with a couple who boarded children of British nationals residing overseas. The children lived with Sarah Holloway and her husband, Captain Pryse Agar Holloway, a former merchant naval officer, at Lorne Lodge, 4 Campbell Road, Southsea, for the following six years (October 1871 to April 1877).
In his autobiography, which was released 65 years later, Kipling described the stay with horror and questioned whether the combination of Mrs. Holloway’s abuse and neglect of him there might not have accelerated the development of his literary life.

After returning from India in the spring of 1877, Alice took the kids out of Lorne Lodge. In the spring of 1877, Alice moved the kids to Goldings Farm at Loughton, where they enjoyed a relaxed summer and autumn, often with Stanley Baldwin, on the farm and the nearby forest. Kipling was accepted into the United Services College in Westward Ho!, Devon, which had just been established to train boys for the army, in January 1878. Although initially difficult, it eventually resulted in strong friendships and served as the backdrop for his boyhood tales, Stalky & Co. (1899). While boarding at Southsea with his sister, Kipling met and fell in love with Florence Garrard. Florence served as Maisie’s model in Kipling’s first novel,The Light That Failed(1891).

His return to India

It was determined at the end of Kipling’s education that he lacked the academic aptitude to be admitted on scholarship to Oxford University. Since his parents couldn’t afford to support him, Kipling’s father found him a job in Lahore, where he was the curator of the Lahore Museum and the principal of the Mayo College of Art. Kipling was appointed assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette, a local newspaper.

On September 20, 1882, he set out for India, and on October 18, he reached Bombay. “So, at sixteen years and nine months, but looking four or five years older, and adorned with real whiskers which the scandalised Mother abolished within an hour of beholding, I found myself in Bombay, where I was born, moving among sights and smells that made me deliver in the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not,” he wrote when looking back on the incident years later. I’ve heard from other boys who were born in India that they experienced the same thing. According to Kipling, this arrival altered him: “There were yet three or four days’ rail to Lahore, where my people lived. After these, my English years fell away, nor ever, I think, came back in full strength.”

From 1883 to 1889, Kipling worked in British India for local newspapers such as theCivil and Military Gazettein Lahore andThe Pioneerin Allahabad.

Kipling travelled to Simla (now Shimla), a popular hill station and British India’s summer capital, in the summer of 1883. By that time, Simla had become a “centre of power as well as pleasure” and it was customary for the government and viceroy of India to spend six months there. Kipling’s family began visiting Simla every year, and Kipling was invited to serve in the local Christ Church. From 1885 until 1888, Rudyard Kipling spent his yearly vacation at Simla, and the town was a major theme in several of his writings for the Gazette.

Kipling kept writing at a breakneck speed. Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie are the six collections of short stories he released in 1888. There are 41 stories in all, some of which are rather lengthy. Furthermore, he produced numerous sketches while serving as The Pioneer’s special correspondent in Rajputana’s western region. These were eventually compiled in Letters of Marque and published in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel.

London calling

Kipling made the decision to use the funds to relocate to London, the British Empire’s literary hub. He departed India on March 9, 1889, first going to San Francisco via Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and Rangoon.

Kipling went to San Francisco for his North American excursions before coming back to London. Magazines in London published a number of Kipling’s stories. For the next two years, he found housing on Villiers Street, close to Charing Cross (in a structure later known as Kipling House). He experienced a nervous breakdown, released a book called The Light That Failed, and met Wolcott Balestier, an American author and publishing agency, with whom he worked on a book called The Naulahka (which he uncharacteristically misspelt).

Kipling wed Caroline Starr Balestier (1862–1939), Wolcott’s sister, whom he had met a year prior and with whom he had reportedly been having sporadic romantic relations.

The idea of The Jungle Book

After deciding on a honeymoon, Kipling and his wife travelled to Japan after first visiting the United States, which included a visit to the Balestier family estate near Brattleboro, Vermont. They learnt that their bank, The New Oriental Banking Corporation, had failed when they got to Yokohama. They rented a modest cottage on a farm close to Brattleboro after returning to the United States, where Carrie was by this point expecting their first child. Additionally, Kipling first became aware of The Jungle Books in this cottage.

“The workroom in the Bliss Cottage was seven feet by eight, and from December to April, the snow lay level with its window-sill. It chanced that I had written a tale about Indian Forestry work which included a boy who had been brought up by wolves. In the stillness, and suspense, of the winter of ’92 some memory of the Masonic Lions of my childhood’s magazine, and a phrase in Haggard’sNada the Lily, combined with the echo of this tale. After blocking out the main idea in my head, the pen took charge, and I watched it begin to write stories about Mowgli and animals, which later grew into the twoJungle Books.”

He wrote a novel called Captains Courageous, a collection of short tales called The Day’s Work, a book of poetry called The Seven Seas, and the Jungle Books in just four years. His poems Mandalay and Gunga Din were included in the March 1892 edition of the Barrack-Room Ballads, which had been largely published separately in 1890. Writing the Jungle Books and communicating with several kids who wrote to him about them were two things he particularly appreciated.

Finally a Nobel Laureate

Charles Oman, a professor at the University of Oxford, nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, and he was granted it. The award stated that it was given “in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterise the creations of this world-famous author.” Carl David Wirsén, the Swedish Academy’s Permanent Secretary, commended Kipling and three centuries of English literature during the award ceremony held in Stockholm on December 10, 1907:

“In giving Rudyard Kipling the Nobel Prize in Literature this year, the Swedish Academy wishes to honour England’s literature, which is full of many splendors, as well as the finest narrative genius that the nation has ever created.”

His passing

Up until the early 1930s, Kipling continued to write, albeit more slowly and with less success than previously. He had a slight intestinal haemorrhage on the evening of January 12, 1936. After undergoing surgery, he passed away at the age of 70 on January 18, 1936, in Middlesex Hospital in London, less than a week later.

Kipling in modern India!

Kipling’s reputation is still contentious in India, where he drew a lot of his inspiration, particularly among contemporary nationalists and certain post-colonial critics. Many modern Indian thinkers, including Ashis Nandy, have a complex perspective on Kipling’s impact. The first prime minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, frequently cited Kipling’s Kim as one of his favourite works.

Kipling was viewed more negatively by Indian fiction writer G. V. Desani. In All About H. Hatterr, he makes references to Kipling he said:

“I happen to pick up R. Kipling’s autobiographicalKim. Therein, this self-appointed whiteman’s burden-bearing sherpa feller’s stated how, in the Orient, blokes hit the road and think nothing of walking a thousand miles in search of something.”

Referring to the ancient Indian text known as the Bhagavad Gita, Indian author Khushwant Singh stated in 2001 that he views Kipling’s If— as “the essence of the message of The Gita in English.” “Kipling, the purportedly knowledgeable author on India, demonstrated a better understanding of the mind of the animals in the jungle than of the men in an Indian home or the marketplace,” according to Indian author R. K. Narayan (1906–2001). “Kipling, that flatulent voice of Victorian imperialism, would wax eloquent on the noble duty to bring law to those without it,” said Indian writer and politician Shashi Tharoor.

In November 2007 it was declared that Kipling’s birthplace on the J. J. School of Art campus in Mumbai would be transformed into a museum celebrating the author and his works.

(The views expressed are the writer’s own)

Smita Singh is a freelance writer who has over 17 years of experience in the field of print media, publishing, and education. Having worked with newspapers like The Times of India (as a freelancer), National Mail, Dainik Bhaskar, and DB Post, she has also worked with Rupa& Co, a book publishing house, and edited over 30 books in all genres.

She has worked with magazines like Discover India and websites called HolidayIQ and Hikezee (now Go Road Trip). She has also written for Swagat (former in-flight magazine of Air India), Gatirang (magazine of Maruti Udyog), India Perspectives (magazine for Ministry of External Affairs), and Haute Wheels (magazine of Honda).

After turning freelance writer she wrote on art and architecture for India Art n Design. She also worked for Princeton Review as a full-time Admissions Editor and then IDP Education Private Limited as an Application Support Consultant. Smita has her own website called bookaholicanonymous.com which supports her love for books and reading!

You can reach her at: [email protected]