The art of Kipling

British historian Charles Allen’s new book is a modest apologia on his subject’s behalf, writes Sam Miller

Kipling Sahib: India And The Making Of Rudyard Kipling
Charles Allen
Penguin
448 pages
Rs795

More than 70 years after his death, Rudyard Kipling remains a controversial figure.

Mowgli and his friends are adored by generations of children brought up on the prose and cartoon versions of The Jungle Book. ‘If’, Kipling’s paean to the stiff upper lip, is, if opinion polls are to be believed, Britain’s best-loved poem.

Kipling’s political views, however, draw little support even from those who admire his writings. He is remembered as the man who invented the phrase, ‘the White Man’s Burden’, which became a shorthand excuse for empire, and who spoke of the colonised as “…new-caught, sullen peoples,/ half-devil and half-child”.

Kipling was, in the famous words of that other old India hand, George Orwell, “a gutter patriot”, and a “vulgar flagwaver”.

Kipling, who was born on the penultimate day of 1865 in Mumbai at the
JJ School of Art, where his father worked, would spend less than one-sixth of his life in India. However, it is fair to argue — as Charles Allen does in this intelligent book — that those years were the making of Kipling as a writer.

His best-remembered prose works — Kim, The Jungle Book, Plain Tales From The Hills and The Just So Stories — are all set in India. Apart from a few cliché-ridden later poems and children’s tales, he produced little that has endured in the second half of his life, during which time he did not visit the country of his birth.

Kipling’s relationship with India was complex. He romanticised it as the idyllic land of his early childhood, from which  he was torn away at the age of five — to be sent to school and a hated foster home  in Britain.

He returned at the age of 16 as a journalist living mainly in Lahore, and travelling around many parts of northern India, visiting as many seedy locations as he could find. His dark complexion meant that many British believed him to be ‘eight annas to the rupee’, the contemporary euphemism for mixed race.

His genuine interest in ordinary Indians, and particularly those whom he describes as the nauker-log, sets him apart from almost all of his British contemporaries, giving a democratic undertone to his overpowering rhythms of empire.

He wrote that “I am deeply interested in the queer ways and works of the people of the land. I hunt and rummage among ‘em… I find heat and smells of oils and spices, and puffs of temple incense, and sweat, and darkness, and dirt and lust and cruelty, and, above all, things wonderful and fascinating innumerable.”

But Kipling was also embarrassed by his parents’ low social status, and delighted with the worldwide fame and respect that his success as a writer brought him.

Charles Allen identifies strongly with the man he, slightly embarrassingly, refers to as “Ruddy”. Allen’s great-grandfather was Kipling’s first employer, and Allen himself — who has written many books about the British in India — spent his early years in Bihar and Assam.

His book is a modest apologia on his subject’s behalf, as he seeks to put Kipling’s early views and writings into the context of the late 19th century.

He rightly points out how the poem “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” has been shockingly and almost universally misinterpreted. Jump just one more line and Kipling intones, “But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth/ When two strong men stand face to face/ tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!”

However, Kipling was appalled by the idea of self-rule for India, and was disparaging of those few fellow Brits, like Allan Octavian Hume, who joined the self-rule movement.
Allen admits that Kipling was a contradictory figure, in whom a variety of prejudices were competing with each other.

There comes a time when famous people have been dead long enough for us to aver that they belong to history and not the recent past — and maybe judge them a little differently. Perhaps this should now be the case with Kipling, allowing us to draw a line under the old controversies.

His views on race and empire are clearly outdated and no longer relevant. But what of his art? Orwell had his views on that too, recognising him as undeniably popular but
“aesthetically disgusting”.

He then softens a little, calling him “a good bad poet”. Charles Allen is a little less sneering in his analysis of Kipling’s popularity, referring to his “seemingly unerring instinct for saying, not exactly what the public wanted to hear but what most
needed to be said, and for saying it directly and in a way that was instantly quotable, if not singable.”

Kipling was certainly a great aphorist, a platitudinarian of the highest order, who invented clichés for future generations; he was an innovative short-story writer; he gave us our best literary portrayal of the British in late 19th century India; and
best of all, he was the creator of Kim and of Mowgli, and all their friends and
enemies, in stories of childhood that continue to transcend their time and place of origin.
Sam Miller’s book on Delhi will be  published in India in autumn 2008.