A tale of two Kiplings and a hybrid cultural identity

“He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Ghar – the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-breathing dragon’, hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot.”

The opening lines of Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim bring together disparate strands of fact and fiction. The urchins of Lahore roughhouse around the monumental canon installation. Kim is an Irish orphan, so tanned with the Indian sun that people take him to be their own. The ajaib ghar is none other than the Lahore museum of which Rudyard Kipling’s father John Lockwood Kipling was curator. Junior Kipling, therefore, got to spend years of his boyhood in proximity to the precincts he fictionalizes. During his tenure John Lockwood merged the Lahore armoury with the museum collections and personally designed the wooden carriages for the zam-zamah (canon). He appears in a cameo in Kim as the teller of tales, summing up the cardinal influence he cast on his budding writer son. Legend has it that of the two, the senior Kipling is more famous in Lahore even today.

Much before Rudyard Kipling became a famous author, his father John Lockwood Kipling had already spent considerable part of his career in India. An artist and a sculptor, he first moved to India in 1865 as a teacher in JJ School of Arts in Mumbai and then relocated to Lahore as the Principal of the then Mayo School of Industrial Art and subsequently the curator of Lahore Museum. From 1870-72, he was commissioned to document the art and crafts of Punjab, North West and Kashmir. The result was an elaborate collection of realistic drawings depicting craftsmen at their trades. The British were masters of documentation and the rise of encyclopedia as a form of knowledge consolidation went hand in hand with the consolidation of empire. From a rigorous compilation of indigenous flora and fauna to the grammars of various major languages and dialects to tribes, castes and crafts, the British scarce left any field untouched. The maxim knowledge equals power never rang truer. For senior Kipling, however, this fascination with Indian crafts began in his teenage years when he happened to chance upon the Great Exhibition of 1851 held in Crystal Hall. The grand exhibition had captured the European imagination and apart from exhibiting curiosities from the colonies, it sampled the wealth of what was the “New World.”

Last year, March 2017 to be precise, on a visit to Oxford, while rushing to exit the tube station, I thought I crossed a blurry “Punjab” on the sidewalk somewhere. I reckoned I was homesick. But then, on closer scrutiny, it was a hoarding for an ongoing exhibition on John Lockwood Kipling’s connection with Punjab at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Later in the day it came highly recommended by my host and was too tempting to give a miss. V &A was originally known as South Kensington Museum where the senior Kipling had worked before heading out to India. He had designed the sculptures and the friezes and in a gesture of showcasing the obscure legacy of the senior Kipling, the V&A commissioned a major collaborative research project that culminated in an exhibition in 2017. The V&A collections contain, inter alia, John Lockwood Kipling’s personal collection of popular Indian art and the afore mentioned two hundred odd drawings made by him showing dyers, potters, cloth merchants, jewellery makers, wood carvers, toy-makers and metal workers.

He worked towards the retrieval and study of Buddhist sculptures from Gandhara region of Peshawar. Equally fascinating is his work as an ace book illustrator. He famously illustrated his son’s tour de force “Jungle Book” and Anne Flora Steele’s “Folk Tales of Punjab.” One of his famous protégé was Ram Singh who subsequently collaborated with him on important projects. Kipling edited the Journal of Indian Art and Industry which regularly featured sketches made by Mayo College students.

Rudyard Kipling’s oeuvre has a marked stamp of this in-between space: whether through the picaresque Kim, which really is as much a quest for identity as it is an adventure saga, or, for that matter, the good old Mowgli, the Wolf child wherein the clash of man- animal world could very well be an elaborate analogy for clash of two ways of being/ cultures. Despite the larger imperial context (Lockwood designed the imperial assemblage hall where Queen Victoria was crowned Empress of India in 1877), there is an undeniable sympathy in his stance towards Indian crafts and a complex ambiguity in Rudyard Kipling’s oeuvre vis-à-vis hybrid cultural identity that ought not be broad brushed. It is worth a deeper engagement.

Author is a teacher