Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  During this same period Alice Macdonald’s social horizons widened dramatically when she and her sisters were introduced by their eldest brother, Harry, to his school friends at the King Edward VI Grammar School in Birmingham, among them a close-knit group of aspiring artists and writers which included William Fulford, Cormell Price and Edward ‘Ned’ Jones. When Harry moved on to Oxford his circle of friends widened to include William Morris and other followers of the Pre-Raphaelite movement inspired by Ruskin. Their father’s move to a new parish in London continued the Macdonald sisters’ emancipation, bringing the two eldest, Alice and Georgie, into contact with an ever-widening coterie of young painters and poets based in Bloomsbury and Red Lion Square. Fired by a shared passion for all things ‘holy and beautiful and true’,13 these termed themselves the ‘The Brotherhood’ and besides Ned Jones – now calling himself Burne-Jones – they included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Poynter and, from time to time, their chief mentor, John Ruskin.

  Hard on the heels of Alice and Georgie, and no less eager, came their younger sisters, Agnes and Louie, all four becoming committed Brotherhood groupies. Alice was quick to fall in and out of love. She was twice engaged to the writer William Fulford and once to the Irish poet William Allingham, prompting Edith to declare that she ‘never seemed to go on a visit without becoming engaged to some wild cad of the desert’.14 Georgie was more committed, going one step further than her elder sister by marrying Ned Burne-Jones in 1860 and setting an example that Agnes subsequently followed by marrying Edward Poynter. Alice, however, chose to go her own way – until the increasing ill-health of their father, now based in Wolverhampton, obliged her to abandon London and return to her parents’ side.

  Earlier that year John Lockwood Kipling’s ambitions had also suffered a setback with the sudden death of his father. He too was forced to leave London and go home, to support his mother and four unmarried sisters by working for his former employers in Burslem as a modeller and designer in their pottery. So it came about that Alice Macdonald and John Lockwood Kipling first set eyes on each other just when both had seen their hopes dimmed. In April 1863 Alice went to visit her brother Fred in Burslem, where the latter had recently begun his first ministry after deciding to follow in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps. Soon after her arrival she and Fred joined a picnic party beside the reservoir of Lake Rudyard organised by John Lockwood Kipling’s employer. According to John Lockwood, he looked across the spread and saw ‘a beauteous creature, pensively eating salad’.15 The catalyst that drew them together is said to have been an emaciated grey horse standing in a nearby field: John murmured an apposite line from Browning’s Childe Harold which Alice continued. By midsummer they were engaged. Alice’s only regret, as later given to an old friend, was that ‘I ought to have met John earlier.’16

  Their future happiness now lay in John securing a post with long-term prospects that would remove them from the provincial confines of Yorkshire and the Potteries and ideally provide Alice with the company of kindred spirits such as those she had known in London. By the end of June 1863 John was back in West Kensington assisting the architectural decorator Godfrey Sykes with the modelling of the terracottas at the Museum.17 A frieze of unglazed hard-baked red clay set high on the wall in the courtyard of what is today the Victoria and Albert Museum shows the twenty-seven-year-old John Lockwood Kipling among the designers and craftsmen who had worked on the architectural decorations of the South Kensington Museum: an unmistakable stocky figure with full beard and deep-sunk eyes.

  John continued to work intermittently at the Museum until December 1864. On the third day of that month the Honourable Claude Erskine, a senior judge of the Bombay High Court with a long-standing interest in public education in Bombay and then on leave in England, wrote to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bombay to say he had found just the man to fill the second of three new posts at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art and Industry: ‘As Architectural Sculptor, we have been fortunate in securing the services of Mr J. Lockwood Kipling … For the last four years he has been in the service of the Department of Science and Art at South Kensington, and most of the modelling for the Terra Cotta decorations of the Museum there have been executed by him … He appears to be specially qualified for the duties now allotted to him.’18 Besides setting out the future course of John Lockwood Kipling’s career, this letter also gave notice of its subject’s decision to abandon ‘John’ in favour of his more formal second given name, derived from his mother’s maiden name. At their marriage, in Kensington on 18 March 1865, his wife followed suit in her own fashion, signing herself ‘Alice Macdonald Kipling’.

  It is hard to understand why any young couple without local connections would have wanted to exile themselves in India at this time. British India in the mid-1860s was a far cry from the land of the nabob and the pagoda tree of earlier years. Barely seven years had elapsed since the hideous eruption of violence known as the Sepoy or Indian Mutiny, when British men, women and children in scores of isolated communities scattered across the northern and central Indian plains had been put to the tulwar and bayonet. In the words of the Mutiny’s first historian, the British had experienced ‘the degradation of fearing those we had taught to fear us’.19

  The degradation had been followed by bloody retribution, with the avenging armies of the British often failing to make any distinction between rebels and innocent bystanders. The result was a legacy of bitter distrust and a drawing apart of the two races that was to last for decades. As one of the most widely read Anglo-Indian writers of the time put it, ‘a terrible abyss has opened between the rulers and the ruled; and every huckster, every pettifogger who wears a hat and breeches, looks down upon the noblest of the natives’.20 But it was not only hucksters and pettifoggers who held such prejudices. Writing to a friend at this time, Bombay’s former Governor, Sir Bartle Frere, bewailed the fact that attitudes had changed for the worse. ‘You have no idea how much India has altered. The sympathy which Englishmen felt for the natives has changed to a general feeling of repugnance.’21

  Before 1857 the British in India had habitually referred to themselves as ‘Indians’ and to Indians as ‘Natives’, a word employed without negative connotations. After 1857 it became ‘Anglo-Indians’ and – among a sizeable segment of the British population – ‘Niggers’. Two of the most popular writers of the period were Captain George Atkinson, whose ‘Curry and Rice’ on Forty Plates: or The Ingredients of Social Life at ‘Our Station’ in India was to be found on the bookshelves of every well-established Anglo-Indian household, and Major Walter Yeldham, whose first volume of collected verse, Lays of Ind, was published in 1871 under the pen-name of ‘Aliph Cheem’. Both use the N-word casually and unashamedly. Indeed, one of ‘Aliph Cheem’s’ lays is entitled ‘Those Niggers’ and tells of Colonel Thunder’s distrust of every category of Indian. It begins:

  Old Colonel Thunder used to say,

  And fetch his bearer’s head a whack,

  That if they’d let him have his way,

  He’d murder every mortal black.

  And ends:

  In fact, throughout our whole dominion,

  No honest nigger could be got,

  And never would, in his opinion,

  Until we’d polished off the lot.

  After an initial outpouring of memorials and personal reminiscences the Mutiny of ’57 became a taboo subject among Anglo-Indians, something not to be spoken about but always there at the back of one’s mind, along with the unspoken fear that what had happened once could happen again, and that Indians were to be neither trusted nor respected. These were attitudes that the Kiplings soon came to share.

  Whatever doubts the young couple may have had were evidently outweighed by the prospect of financial independence. To a penurious couple whose fathers had never earned more than £160 in a year, the terms of the Article of Agreement that Lockwood Kipling signed on 14 January 1865 with Judge Erskine must have seeme
d generous: an appointment for three years on a fixed salary of four hundred rupees per mensem, amounting to just over £400 per annum, together with free accommodation, sea passages paid and a further £200 for kitting-out. On the face of it, this would allow Lockwood to remit a small sum home every month and, with careful housekeeping, put something aside for the future.

  But what he may not have grasped, for neither his nor Alice’s families had links with India, was that he would be working for the Government of Bombay’s Department of Public Instruction in the lower of two tiers of government service. The upper level was made up of Civilians, members of the Indian Civil Service who formed the ‘first firing line’ of British India’s civil and political administration, enjoying enhanced status, generous salaries, the prospect of promotion to the highest ranks of government and early retirement on a fat pension. There was a huge distinction, as much in status as in terms and conditions, between the members of this ‘covenanted’ service, and other government employees. A further distinction was that many of the latter were employed by provincial rather than central government services, and the terms they offered were limited and without enhanced salaries or pensions.

  The young man who came out to India to escape British class barriers found himself trapped in a caste system as inflexible as that followed by the Hindus. ‘You must be “in the service” – that is either a Military man or a Civilian – to be thought anything of,’ noted a young British memsahib in a letter to a friend written at this period. ‘If you are an outsider, a railway engineer, or an Indigo Planter or anything else, you are supposed to be not a gentleman, and society makes a dead set against you and excludes you.’22 However witty and amusing his wife might be, a junior officer in Bombay’s Department of Public Instruction was ranked very low in the published Order of Precedence, which laid down the exact standing and salary of every grade in every department of government service.

  It may be that a twinge of desperation had entered the young couple’s minds, as they approached their twenty-eighth birthdays without that financial security deemed a prerequisite for marriage in middle-class society. Or perhaps it was quite simply that Bombay, for all its unknowns and uncertainties, represented a huge gamble. After all, a quite extraordinary metamorphosis was under way there, attracting worldwide attention and drawing adventurers from every corner of the globe. Bombay in the spring of 1865 was widely recognised as a boom town, a trading port which played by its own rules, a beacon of opportunity whereby an independent-minded young couple – British or Indian – might make their own way free of many of the constraints that held them back in their own country.

  Nor would Lockwood and Alice be entirely without friends, for the last of the three teaching posts was filled by one of Lockwood’s fellow artists from the South Kensington Museum, a Welshman named John Griffiths, of the same age as Lockwood Kipling and also an expert in terracotta sculpture, although hired for his drawing and painting skills. Together with an art-metalworker named Higgins, these two were being hired to introduce ‘South Kensington principles’ to India, with the goal of establishing a centre of artistic excellence in Bombay that would bring about a revival of India’s traditional arts and crafts skills, considered by Erskine and other like-minded officials to be in serious decline as a result of an excess of mass-produced imported goods from Europe. Here was a worthy purpose that must have appealed to the evangelical in Lockwood Kipling’s nature. His desire to get young Indian craftsmen and artisans to abandon their slapdash Indian ways and learn to draw, hew, chisel, mould and paint things the way it ought to be done was to become an abiding obsession that stayed with him throughout his years in India.

  Bombay had always been a place of escape and opportunity. Unlike the two other Indian Presidency capitals, Calcutta and Madras, it was an island city, blessed with the finest natural harbour on India’s western seaboard but handicapped by poor communications with the mainland. Its nucleus was Mumbai, the largest of seven islets formerly separated from both the mainland and each other by tidal flats and mangrove swamps but now linked by causeways and bold reclamation schemes into one island some eight miles long and three miles wide, popularly likened to a right hand ‘laid palm upwards, with the fingers stretching southwards into the sea and the thumb representing Malabar Hill, with Back Bay between the thumb and forefinger’.23

  The Portuguese had been the first to recognise Mumbai’s strategic value, establishing a toehold on its southern tip in the form of a fort that commanded the great harbour and renaming it Bom Bahia, the ‘good bay’. Bombay had then fallen into the lap of King Charles the Second as part of his marriage dowry from the sister of the king of Portugal, and he had passed it on to the East India Company for an annual rent of £10. Initially it had proved a disastrous investment, the belligerent Marathas of the Deccan frustrating all attempts by ‘John Company’ to penetrate the Indian interior while at the same time the island’s malarious swamps and foul waters killed off its servants as fast as they could be replaced. However, these setbacks helped to turn Bombay into the most cosmopolitan city in Asia – by forcing its governors to offer inducements to settlers from the mainland, including the right of traders to ‘deal freely and without restraint with whoever they think proper’.24

  Indian merchants found in Bombay a freedom from caste and race prohibitions unthinkable on the mainland, resulting in a mixing of communities that led Lockwood Kipling in later years to describe the city as ‘a very unIndian, cockney sort of place’.25 Combined with an unusual willingness in the authorities to allow Indians to play a part in the running of the municipality, this liberal spirit fostered a sense of common identity and civic pride which stood the city in good stead in the maelstrom of 1857 – although the docility of its citizens may have owed something to the activities of Bombay’s Commissioner of Police, Charles Forjett. Born and bred in India, Forjett was by his own account ‘a master of guise [sic]’ who would mingle with alleged conspirators and encourage them to speak against the Government, before throwing off his disguise and arresting them the moment they did so. His actions spread such terror in the bazaars that no one dared say a seditious word, whether in public or private. Several decades later the Forjett legend became part of the composite of Indian police officers, dead and living, which went to make ‘Strickland’ in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and in half a dozen of his short stories.

  The first to take advantage of the city’s relaxed trading rules were the Parsis, a minority community initially based up the coast in Gujarat. A family of shipwrights, the Wadias, began turning out Bombay-built fighting ships of Malabar teak for the Royal Navy that were easier to handle than British-made men-of-war, lasted twice as long and were cheaper to produce. When Parliament ended the East India Company’s trading monopoly in 1813 the Parsis were ideally placed to compete on equal terms for the hugely profitable China trade, and among them was Rustomjee Jamsetjee Battliwallah, who had migrated to Bombay as a sixteen-year-old orphan to join his uncle in the Native Quarter within the walls of Bombay Fort. Like many Parsis, Jamsetjee initially took a hybrid surname based on his occupation, which in his uncle’s case and at first in his own was selling empty bottles, only reverting to traditional Parsi custom and adding his father’s name of Jeejeebhoy after he had made his fortune. Within a decade Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy had become a rupee multimillionaire, having cornered India’s entire export trade to China, much of it in the form of opium.

  In this same period the long struggle between the Marathas and the East India Company for possession of the Indian interior ended with a series of military victories for the latter, swiftly followed by the building of a highway over the hitherto impenetrable Western Ghat mountain range and a causeway linking the island to the mainland. Bombay at last had unimpeded access to India’s hinterland, and within a decade the city’s population had doubled to over half a million. The long-established and the better-off remained crammed together within the protective walls of Bombay Fort, while the newer economic migrants set
tled in an ever-expanding township known first as Black Town, then as Dungaree,26 and finally as the Native Town, separated from the Fort by the cordon sanitaire of the Esplanade.

  The China trade provided the backbone to Bombay’s economy until the Opium War of 1840. A slump followed, greatly exacerbated by the collapse of the city’s other mainstay, the export of calico and fine cotton muslin piece-goods manufactured on the spinning wheel and hand loom. These swadeshi goods now faced punishing import duties in Britain while at the same time machine-made cotton goods from Lancashire were allowed to flood the Indian market almost free of dues. Even so, immigrants continued to swell Bombay’s population, putting the city’s infrastructure under increasing strain. ‘All round the Island of Bombay was one foul cesspool,’ wrote the city’s first historian, ‘sewers discharging on the sands, rocks only used for the purposes of nature. To ride home to Malabar Hill along the sands of Back Bay was to encounter sights and odours too horrible to describe … To travel by rail from Boree Bunder to Byculla, or to go to Mody Bay, was to see in the foreshore the latrine of the whole population of the Native Town.’27

  What reversed Bombay’s decline was the American Civil War. Deprived of the American South’s raw cotton by the North’s blockade of its ports, the Lancashire mills turned to the cotton fields of Western India. The result was a cotton boom that expanded into a wider commercial boom, greatly helped by the completion of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway’s line over the Bhor Ghat and the opening of the Bombay Baroda and Central India Railway – allowing cotton to be carried direct from the cotton fields up-country to Bombay’s Cotton Green and thence by sea to the outside world. Bombay’s own cotton mills began to flourish, and in four years the cotton trade brought in £80 million sterling to the city. The opium trade also revived, exports to China rising to an average of 37,000 chests per year and adding further to the fortunes of the merchants involved – predominantly Indian rather than British.