Kipling Sahib
Page 1
Also by Charles Allen
Plain Tales from the Raj
Tales from the Dark Continent
Tales from the South China Seas
Raj Scrapbook
The Savage Wars of Peace
Thunder and Lightning
Lives of the Indian Princes
A Soldier of the Company
A Glimpse of the Burning Plain
Kipling’s Kingdom
A Mountain in Tibet
The Search for Shangri-La
The Buddha and the Sahibs
Soldier Sahibs
Duel in the Snows
God’s Terrorists
Copyright
Published by Abacus
ISBN: 978-0-349-14215-9
Copyright © 2007 Charles Allen
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Maps drawn by John Gilkes.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Abacus
Little, Brown Book Group
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50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
www.littlebrown.co.uk
www.hachette.co.uk
To my children
‘O beloved kids’
Contents
Also by Charles Allen
Copyright
Dedication
Preface: Blowing the Family Trumpet
Maps
Introduction: ‘Seek not to question’
1 ‘Mother of cities’: Bombay and a beginning, 1865–7
2 ‘Youth in the eye of the sun’: Bombay and expulsion from Eden, 1867–71
3 ‘A double death’: Southsea and Lahore, 1871–7
4 ‘One school of many’: United Services College, Westward Ho!, and Bikaner House, Lahore, 1877–82
5 ‘As a prince entering his kingdom’: Lahore and Simla, 1882–3
6 ‘The seething city’: Lahore and the Family Square, 1883–4
7 ‘The Oldest Land’: The Punjab and Simla, 1885
8 ‘In vigil or toil or ease’: The Plains and the Hills, 1886
9 ‘Forty foolish yarns’: From Lahore to Allahabad, 1887–8
10 ‘Who travels the fastest’: Simla, Allahabad and an ending, 1888–9
11 ‘Life and Death … and Love and Fate’: London and fame, 1889–91
12 ‘Try as he will’: Weddings and funerals, Vermont and Sussex, 1892–9
Envoi: ‘In the faith of little children’: Kim and after, 1899–1936
Illustrations
Notes
Glossary
Select bibliography
Index
Preface: Blowing the Family Trumpet
Immodest as it sounds, I was born to write this book. My most formative years were spent in an India not so far removed from Rudyard Kipling’s as the place and time might suggest – Assam and Bihar in the 1940s. The Just So Stories and The Jungle Book were real to me to a degree denied most children: I suffered malaria, dhobi itch and snakes in the bathroom; I rode elephants, played on tiger skins, was spoiled rotten by servants unstinting in their affection, watched my father dispense justice on the verandah, was lulled to sleep under mosquito nets by my ayah to the creak and swish of the punkah and the howling of jackals. Like the boy Ruddy, I became an orphan of the Raj, cast out of Paradise at an early age and seemingly abandoned by my parents in an alien land among unknown people, although in my case they were my paternal grandparents, who themselves had been born in India and had gone through the same cycle – as, indeed, had my parents.
At my grandparents’ home in East Sussex I grew up surrounded by Kiplingiana. Hanging among the watercolours of Simla and the Himalayan foothills in the dining room were two of ten plaster plaques made by John Lockwood Kipling for his son to illustrate the first edition of Kim. One I remember was of the Pathan horse-trader Mahbub Ali who befriends the boy Kim and initiates him into the ‘Great Game’; the other of the old Sikh soldier identified as ‘the Ressaldar’. Just outside the dining room stood a garishly painted chest bearing an inscription which declared it to be the property of J. L. Kipling, made for him by his students at the Mayo School of Art and Industry in Lahore. In my grandfather’s library an entire shelf was packed with Kipling first editions, many carrying inscriptions on the title page with the author’s name crossed out in black ink and signed with the initials ‘R. K.’ – among them a nondescript tome with dull olive-green covers which I’m told is one of half a dozen surviving copies of the first edition of Plain Tales from the Hills.
As I grew older I became more aware of the Kipling connection. Two of the oil paintings in my grandfather’s house were of his father, always spoken of as ‘Sir George’. One was painted in 1851 before his departure for India and showed a dandified twenty-one-year-old at a game of cricket; the other, painted half a century later, was of the same man, returned, now a stern, white-whiskered patriarch. The illegitimate son of an Islington solicitor, George Allen had been packed off to India to seek his fortune, which he achieved twice over, initially as a newspaper magnate and then as an industrialist. In the former capacity he gave journalistic employment first of all to John Lockwood Kipling as a special correspondent of the Pioneer in Bombay and subsequently to his sixteen-year-old son as an assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore.
The fortune made by Sir George in India was subsequently lost in India by his youngest son, my grandfather and namesake Charles Allen. ‘C. T.’, as he was always called, was born of Sir George’s second wife, Maud, the daughter of an Indian Civil Service judge and of a very different social class from that of his first wife, a sixteen-year-old seamstress whom George Allen had met on Delhi Ridge in 1857, when both were in fear for their lives. I remember C. T.’s irritation when Charles Carrington’s Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work was first published in 1955. Carrington’s was the first proper biography of Kipling, but in my grandfather’s view he had been hoodwinked by the playwright Sir Terence Rattigan, who had exaggerated the role played by his barrister grandfather, William Rattigan. Subsequent biographers followed suit, with the result that George Allen was all but written out of the Kipling story. Andrew Lycett’s masterly and monumental life, Rudyard Kipling, published in 1999, restored the balance, placing Allen as primus inter pares in a triumvirate made up of himself, William Rattigan and the Simla banker James Walker, joint owners of the Pioneer and the Civil and Military Gazette.
The George Allen that Rudyard Kipling knew was a somewhat Olympian figure, presiding over an extensive business empire of which his newspaper interests formed only a part, a man with strong political views, used to getting his way and prepared to spend large sums of money to buy the best, whether it was influence, news or journalists. Rudyard Kipling once described Allen as a ‘full mouthed man’, which suggests that he spoke his mind. And although he wrote of loving him and of being willing to do anything for him, yet he lived in awe of him and never felt at ease with him. James Walker, by contrast, was kind-hearted and approachable, as was Mrs Walker, who made something of a pet of the adolescent Kipling whenever he stayed with them in Simla. At that time James Walker was very much the burra sahib in Simla and only slightly less influential than the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief, just as George Allen was the burra sahib of Allahabad, the plains city where Rudyard Kipling was based for the last sixteen months of his six and a half years as a working journalist in India.
My grandfather claimed to have played with Rudyard Kipling in Simla in 1884 when he was f
ive and the latter eighteen. But in truth, his contacts with his father’s famous protégé were few. Their last communication took place in 1936, a matter of months before Kipling’s death, when C. T. appealed to him for financial help to keep his old newspaper, the Civil and Military Gazette, going. Three months later Kipling was dead and the CMG passed into the hands of a group of talukdars in Lucknow who ran it into bankruptcy.
After my grandfather’s death in 1958 the Brighton dealers descended, and much of the family’s Kipling material was dispersed. In the process, some vandal worked his way through the Kipling first editions with a razor blade, slicing out the autographed title pages, which rendered them all but valueless. Most of George Allen’s papers had already been lost, either in a shipwreck in 1887 or in the London Blitz, so that from that point on the Kipling connection was effectively severed.
Then fate intervened. In 1974 the distinguished radio producer Michael Mason asked me to work for him on a new oral-history project for BBC Radio 4. Plain Tales from the Raj was eventually broadcast in eleven episodes, and it made an enormous impact. The book that followed was briefly a best-seller and gave me a start as an oral historian. The magic that illuminated the radio series was Mason’s alone, my role being limited to that of researcher and field-interviewer. But in the process of gathering material I travelled the length and breadth of England listening to elderly men and women who had spent most of their working lives in British India. None had known Rudyard Kipling personally, but in many instances their parents had belonged to the generation of sahibs and memsahibs whose lives Kipling had chronicled in his short stories and satirised in his verses. Indeed, some considered Kipling a cad: a vulgar, socially inferior interloper who had abused the Anglo-Indian community’s hospitality by writing about the seamier side of the British Raj (the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ being used by them to describe the British in India, as it is throughout this book). One of my interviewees even assured me that the reason why Kipling could write so well about the borderline between the British and the Indians was because he was ‘eight annas to the rupee’ – a derogatory term for a person of mixed British and Indian ancestry (‘Eurasians’ as they were called then; confusingly, ‘Anglo-Indians’ as they are now). Despite these lingering prejudices the spirit of Kipling invested the radio series, and the knowledge I gained at the feet of Mason and our ‘survivors’ gave me a new and more sympathetic understanding of the British in India. So began a process of learning about India, past and present, that continues to this day.
In 1987 I was lucky enough to be given my head in assembling an anthology of the best of Kipling’s Indian stories. While researching and writing the accompanying text to Kipling’s Kingdom I made two important discoveries: first, that a large corpus of Kipling’s early writing remained unread and awaiting rediscovery, and, secondly, that he wrote as much about Indian India as British India. The notion of writing a biography of Kipling in India and India in Kipling entered my head, and it has taken the best part of two decades to bring that idea to fruition; that I have finally done so is thanks in large part to the encouragement initially of Tim Whiting at Little, Brown, subsequently of his successor Steve Guise.
During my research a great many authorities on Kipling and his India have given me invaluable assistance, directly and indirectly. Among them two stand head and shoulders above the rest: first, the eminent Professor of English at Pomona College, Claremont, California, Thomas Pinney, who has devoted much of his professional life to tracking down and setting in context the letters of Rudyard Kipling; secondly, Andrew Lycett, author of the definitive biography of Rudyard Kipling, referred to above. Scores of biographies, critical studies and literary deconstructions, ancient and modern, have been consulted, and among these I must highlight four as being particularly valuable in cutting paths through the jungle – or the rukh, to use Kipling’s preferred word: Charles Carrington’s pioneering model of how to assemble a ‘life and work’ (with Lord Birkenhead’s suppressed earlier biography Rudyard Kipling, finally published in 1978, serving as a model of how not to go about it); Louis Cornell’s all too slim Kipling in India, published in 1966, which first demonstrated the diversity of Kipling’s early writing and first set it in context; Andrew Rutherford’s scholarly Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling 1879–1889, published in 1986, which showed that in addition to the collected verse, ballads and poems and the supposedly definitive editions authorised by Kipling in his later years, there was a mass of ‘Unpublished, Uncollected and Rarely Collected Poems’ from Kipling’s Indian years; and, lastly, Judith Flanders’s delightful book about the four Macdonald sisters and their families, A Circle of Sisters, published in 2001, which set Rudyard Kipling’s parents Alice Macdonald and John Lockwood Kipling in their social and artistic contexts.
However, all these biographers would be quick to acknowledge the invaluable assistance to their researches provided by that extraordinary band of devotees who make up the backbone of the Kipling Society, and who since 1927 have worked collectively to publish each quarter, in the pages of the Kipling Journal, the latest research into the life and work of Rudyard Kipling. Each generation of members has provided its leading lights: enthusiastic collectors, dogged compilers, learned scholars and meticulous editors united in their devotion to ‘R. K.’. McMunn, Martindale and Harbord are just three of the many names that come up time and again as one thumbs through past copies of the Kipling Journal, runs one’s hand along the shelves of the Kipling Society Library at the City University or scrolls through the New Readers’ Guide on the Society’s scrupulously maintained website: www.kipling.org.uk. However, the present generation of movers and shakers within the Kipling Society merits equal gratitude from those of us who make use of their industry freely given. My thanks, in particular, to (in strictly alphabetical order): Roger Ayers, Sir John Chapple, Sir George Engle, Norman Entract, Emanul Karim, Jane and Sharad Keskar, Lisa Lewis, John McGivering, David Page, John Radcliffe, John Sherwood, John Slater, Mike Smith, John Walker, George Webb and Alasdair Wilson – and my apologies to anyone inadvertently left out.
Two years after the death in 1976 of Kipling’s last surviving child, Mrs Elsie Bambridge, the papers accumulated by her were passed by the National Trust to the University of Sussex, where they were first collated and catalogued by John Burt. Every Kipling scholar knows what riches are there to be pored over in the Library’s Special Collections and what unstinting help is given by its staff, including Karen Watson, Simon Homes and Adam Harwood, under the direction of Fiona Courage, Special Collections Manager. My thanks to them and to the Director and staff at the absurdly renamed Asia, Pacific and Africa Collection (the India Office Library, as was) at the British Library, and the Senior Librarian and staff at the City University (where the Kipling Society’s Library and Archive is housed). My thanks to the National Trust for permission to quote from and use illustrations from material in its ownership, and to the following institutions for permissions to quote from Kipling letters in their collections: the US Library of Congress, Princeton University, Dalhousie University, the Houghton Collection at Harvard University, the Ray Collection at the Morgan Library, the Huntingdon Library, and the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.
A great many kind persons assisted me with my researches either directly or indirectly as I followed the Kipling trail on a number of journeys through India and Pakistan. My particular thanks to: F. S. Aijazuddin of Lahore, whose scholarly recovery of his city’s past proved invaluable to me; William Dalrymple in Delhi; Professor Srivastava and members of the Department of English at the University of Allahabad; Ram Advani of Advani Books, Lahore; the Indian Army officers and wives who since the 1970s have taken the lead in restoring and maintaining the Gaiety Theatre in Simla as members of the Simla Amateur Dramatic Club (Colonel Ranbir Singh being the Hon. Secretary at the time of my most recent visit); in Bombay, Farooq Issa, and, most especially, my former collaborator and fellow writer Sharada Dwivedi, who dug out of Government of Maharashtra arch
ives a wealth of new information about the Kiplings’ early days in that fair city; in the United States, Ron Rosner and Omar Khan, author of From Kashmir to Kabul; and closer to home, Lindy, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, and Lola Armstrong, Curator of the Dufferin and Ava Archive at Clandeboye, for access to the Dufferin Collection, Sue Farrington and Merilyn Hywel-Jones for their help with maps of old Lahore and Simla, Helen MacDonald for her kindness in lending me a photograph of Trix Kipling, and Lorna Lee, author of Trix: Kipling’s Forgotten Sister, for her guidance. A special thanks also to the Society of Authors for the writing award which gave me a vital breathing space at an early stage of this project, and, closer to home, Vivien Green, staunchest of agents; Liz Robinson, sternest of defenders of literary standards; Charlotte Purton for providing an editorial long-stop; indexer Patricia Hymans; map artist John Gilkes and Linda Silverman and Iain Hunt, tip of the iceberg of the Little, Brown editorial team, whose combined efforts invariably go unnoticed except when things go wrong. Lastly my loving thanks to my first reader, Liz Allen, best friend, life partner and mother of our children.
Since Carrington, scores of Kipling biographies and critical studies have been written, most recently David Gilmour’s The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling (2002), which focused on Kipling as the embodiment of the spirit of the British Empire. So what more is there to say about the man that should be said?
My own view is that one area of his life demands closer scrutiny: the five years of his Bombay childhood, and the six and a half years of his apprenticeship as a journalist in Upper India which Kipling termed his ‘seven years hard’. Even the magnificently comprehensive Andrew Lycett could not afford to devote more than five chapters out of twenty to these twelve crucial Indian years. India was where Rudyard Kipling was happiest, where he learned his craft, where he rediscovered himself through his writing and came of age as a writer. India made him, charged his imagination, and after he left India in March 1889 at the age of twenty-three he was most completely himself as an artist when reinhabiting the two Indian worlds he had left behind. He lived thereafter on borrowed time, a state of higher creativity he was unable to maintain once he had exhausted his Indian memories with the writing of his masterwork Kim. For this man who was never emotionally robust, now locked in an increasingly bleak marriage, the death of his beloved eldest daughter Josephine in 1899 accelerated his withdrawal from human intimacy. He became thereafter increasingly, obsessively private, much preferring in his writing to deal with the workings of machinery rather than with human feelings, his undoubted genius sparking only fitfully but sustained by his mastery of his craft.