Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  Ruddy could not have failed to note the social vulnerability of his two main proprietors and the degree to which it reduced his own horizons. It may explain why the only woman he is known to have set his cap at during his first season in Simla was a Miss O’Meara, the daughter of a dentist, albeit a well-known one who had drawn the teeth of the Amir of Afghanistan.

  Simla Society was no less rigid in the way it shunned those of its own kind who broke the rules, of whom the most notorious at this time was Allan Octavian Hume, late of the Bengal Civil Service, a man ‘of exceptional ability and brain power’ but ‘not free from the eccentricity which sometimes accompanies genius’.43 Hume had considerable private means and owned one of Simla’s oldest properties, Rothney Castle, standing on the lower slopes of Jakko between Snowden and Christ Church, on which he spent huge sums to accommodate a library of ornithological books and a vast collection of stuffed birds, eggs, nests and trophies numbering in excess of 100,000 specimens. He had laboured for eight years as Secretary of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce until his progressive views on land reform and indentured labour proved too much for Lord Lytton, who had him demoted in a manner described by the Pioneer as ‘an act of the grossest jobbery’. Ejected from Simla on Lytton’s orders and directed to take up a minor revenue post in Allahabad, he had there fallen under the spell of Madame Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society and newly arrived from America. Hume and A. P. Sinnett, the Pioneer’s editor, had subsequently become Madame Blavatsky’s most ardent advocates.

  After Lord Lytton’s departure in 1880 Hume had returned to Simla to complete his magnum opus, The Game Birds of India, Burma and Ceylon, only to find that one of his servants had sold the fruit of twenty years’ work in the bazaar for kindling. The disaster led him to redirect his formidable energies towards the building of a charity hospital to serve Simla’s Indian poor – and to the promotion of Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine as conveyed to her by spirit adepts from Inner Tibet known as the Mahatmas. In 1881 Hume invited Madame Blavatsky to stay at Rothney Castle, where she presided over a series of seances and occult manifestations, duly written up by A. P. Sinnett in the Pioneer, which divided Simla into those who fell under her spell and those who saw her as a charlatan. Among the latter was Lockwood Kipling, who after attending one of her seances concluded that she was ‘one of the most interesting and unscrupulous imposters he had ever met’.44 A more outspoken sceptic was the Civilian Sir Edward Buck, who had succeeded Hume as Secretary of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce and was no friend of his. At a dinner party at Rothney Castle he confronted Mrs Blavatsky and exposed her as a fraud, at which point public opinion in Simla turned against her – and against her local champion Allan Octavian Hume.

  According to Rudyard Kipling’s autobiography, the Blavatsky episode ‘devastated the Pioneer’. Sinnett had used the paper to promote Madame Blavatsky with ever-increasing stridency, and had joined forces with Hume to form the Simla Eclectic Society, a liberal body seeking to improve relations between Indians and Englishmen. These actions eventually led George Allen to dismiss him and install a safer pair of hands, in the person of Howard Hensman.45 Hume, however, remained utterly convinced by Madame Blavatsky until the moment early in 1883 when he compared her handwriting with that of the chief Mahatma ‘Koot Hoomi’, whose astral letters fluttered down from the ceiling during seances, and found them to be identical. At this point the scales fell from Hume’s eyes, and he abandoned Theosophy for politics. In March 1883 he published an open letter to the graduates of Calcutta University calling on them to organise and work towards political reform, a rallying cry which led directly to the setting up of the Indian National Congress.

  After the Blavatsky episode Hume and Allen became the bitterest of enemies, Allen using the editorial pages of the Pioneer and the Civil and Military Gazette to undermine Hume and the causes he promoted. ‘I much fear that we shall have The Pioneer against us,’ wrote Hume to Lord Ripon in January 1883. ‘Allen is of the worst type of educated Englishmen, sneering at all things native and natives generally … always guided by the opinions of a clique of civilians who were uncompromising despots, who wanted and want to keep the people for ever in the cradle.’46 Courageous as he was, Hume was also his own worst enemy, losing friends as fast as he made them. ‘Mr Hume,’ observed Sir Edward Buck’s nephew in his classic history, Simla Past and Present, ‘was essentially a man of hobbies, and whatever hobby he took up was ridden well and hard.’

  Three other Simla property owners were to play a significant part in the Kipling story over the next few years. The most distinguished was the Bengal Civil Servant Sir William W. Hunter, owner of Stirling Castle, one of the oldest and best-sited of Simla’s homes, perched on the wooded summit of Elysium Hill. Hunter was a prodigious worker, the author of numerous Government surveys and statistical compendiums but also a historian of note and a minor novelist. Sir Courteney Ilbert had stayed at Elysium Hill as Hunter’s guest in the summer of 1882 while preparing his notorious Bill and was again a guest the following summer when Ruddy first came to Simla – which may help to explain why Hunter subsequently became the butt of a number of Ruddy’s early political squibs.

  The second figure was less respected than feared: Horace Goad, son of one of Simla’s pioneer settlers, whose judicious land purchases in the 1850s and 1860s had made him Simla’s foremost landlord, with thirty-three large properties to his name. A police officer by profession, Goad was spoken of in Ruddy’s day as the cleverest policeman in the North-Western Provinces. According to one of his contemporaries, ‘His extraordinary knowledge of the native language and customs, combined with a genius for disguising himself, rendered him a terror to all evil-doers within his jurisdiction … Even the ayahs regarded him as a man to hold in awe; indeed many of the little ones they tended were quieted by the threat of being handed over to “Goad Sahib” unless they behaved as good children on the Mall.’47 Together with Forjett of Bombay, Goad forms part of the composite policeman Strickland, who is ‘feared and respected by the natives from the Ghor Kathri to the Jamma Masjid; and is supposed to have the gift of invisibility and executive control over many Devils’.48

  The third Simla figure must have excited Ruddy’s interest the moment he first stepped into his jewellery and curio shop on the Mall: A. M. Jacob, a man of mystery in appearance and antecedents. Jacob’s private residence, Belvedere, was sited unfashionably below Lakka Bazaar on the road to Elysium Hill, but it was the scene of many tea and dinner parties, one or more of which Ruddy may well have attended as the Walkers’ guest.

  Very little was known about Mr Jacob’s early life other than that he had arrived in Simla in 1871 with money. He was believed to be an Armenian Jew who had been sold as a child-slave to an Ottoman pasha before securing his freedom to become a clerk at the court of India’s wealthiest prince, the Nizam of Hyderabad. There he had entered into Hyderabad’s jewellery trade, eventually gaining a clientele that included the wealthiest maharajas in India. His learning and his charm, combined with the aura of mystery49 that he seemed always to convey, had enabled him to prosper. He dressed and behaved like an ascetic, yet both his shop and his house were piled with precious objects of every description, all of which made him an obvious subject of speculation – and inspiration.

  In September 1879 a young journalist working on an up-country newspaper entered Mr Jacob’s curio shop in the Simla Mall and found himself transported ‘into the subterranean chambers whither the wicked magician sent Aladdin in quest of the lamp’. The owner of the shop spoke English ‘like a fellow from Balliol’ and had a presence that immediately overwhelmed the journalist, who found himself in thrall to eyes that had ‘a depth of life and vital light in them that told of the pent up force of a hundred generations of Persian magii’. This was not Rudyard Kipling but a young American named Francis Marion Crawford, employed by the Indian Herald of Allahabad. He later went home to America, where he turned his encounter with Mr Jacob into a work of fiction. Mr Isaac
s: A Tale of Modern India was published in Britain in 1883, so it is reasonable to suppose that Simla’s Station Library – hon. sec. Mr James Walker – was in possession of a copy by June of that year.

  The real Alexander Jacob remained a Simla landmark for almost a quarter of a century. But his luck deserted him in 1890 when he purchased on behalf of the Nizam of Hyderabad the largest and most expensive diamond of the age, known then as the Imperial and today as the Jacob Diamond, weighing 184.5 carats. It cost Jacob 4,600,000 rupees, of which the Nizam advanced half before reneging on the deal. Jacob’s increasingly desperate attempts to recover the rest of the money embarrassed the Government of India, and pressure was applied to get him to drop his claim. He refused, and in 1891 what became known as the Imperial Diamond Case was heard in the Calcutta High Court over fifty-seven days. Although Jacob finally won his case against the Nizam, the costs ruined him and in 1892 he was forced to sell his home and his shop in Simla and retire to Bombay, a broken man.

  Besides his starring role in Mr Isaacs, Alexander Jacob appeared as ‘Mr Emanuel’ in Colonel Newnham Davies’s novel Jadoo, published in 1898, and as ‘Mr Lucanster’ in Mrs Flora Annie Steele’s Voices of the Night, published in 1900 – by which time he had secured literary immortality as ‘Lurgan Sahib’ in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.

  In mid-August, after a month of ‘exceeding delight’ and ‘a round of picnics, dances, theatricals and so on’ at which he claimed to have ‘flirted with the bottled up energy of a year on my lips’,50 Ruddy returned to Lahore and his desk in the offices of the CMG. With the Rains in full spate, he wrote a thank-you letter to Mrs Lizzie Walker in Simla in the form of thirteen quatrains, the first of his many ditties from the Hills. It reads in part:

  No longer by the Jhampan’s side

  I frisk along the crowded Mall

  From half past four till even fall,

  Or by Peliti’s take my ride.

  No longer through the stately pines

  The soft Hill breezes come and go,

  No longer in the dusk below

  The merry Rickshaw’s lantern shines.

  For Jakko’s woods are far away

  And, in the place of Combermere,

  Across the muddy chick [slatted screen] I hear

  The rain that ‘raineth every day’.51

  6

  ‘The seething city’

  LAHORE AND THE FAMILY SQUARE, 1883–4

  Unkempt, unclean, athwart the mist

  The seething city looms.

  In place of Putney’s golden gorse

  The sickly babul [thorny mimosa] blooms.

  Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Moon of Other Days’, first published in the Pioneer, 16 December 1884

  When Ruddy returned to Lahore in mid-August 1883 it was to an empty bungalow. Lockwood Kipling had taken his place in Simla and was intending to proceed afterwards to Calcutta to set up the Punjab’s contribution to an international exhibition to be held in December. Alice Kipling was not due back in India with Trix until the end of the year. So for the next four months Ruddy found himself ‘alone, like a hermit crab’1 in Lahore. ‘There are 9 men and 2 ladies in the Station and most of these are going away,’ he wrote to his Aunt Edith, referring to that section of the Anglo-Indian population which constituted Lahore Society. ‘The dullness,’ he added, ‘is something hideous after the bustle of Simla.’ During the day he had plenty of work to keep his mind occupied, but the lack of company in the evenings very soon got to him and he took to dining every night in the Club, returning to Bikaner House only to sleep: ‘At five go to the empty house,’ he wrote of his out-of-office-hours routine, ‘to load cartridges and shoot parrots from my hammock in the garden for an hour, then afternoon tea and a ride to the [Montgomery] hall, where we sit (9 of us) around drinking strange iced drinks and feeling bored. Then home again to change for dinner at the Club, which is a terribly dull ceremony. Then a game of billiards or whist and back to bed.’2

  To fill his leisure hours Ruddy began to study for the Indian Army’s Lower Standard Urdu exam, employing a munshi or Native language teacher to come to his bungalow for an hour before he took his morning ride. He also took up polo, and enlisted as a private soldier in B Company of the 1st Punjab Volunteer Rifle Corps, part of the auxiliary force formed in the wake of the Mutiny to ensure that Europeans in up-country Stations were never again caught unprepared as they had been in ’57. Ruddy’s chief, Stephen Wheeler, went down with another bout of sickness and he was again in sole charge of the paper, during which time he took the opportunity to sit in on an adultery case being heard in camera in the courts, involving a British barrister and the wife of the proprietor of the Lahore Livery Stables. Having sat through every word he then exercised his editorial judgement by refusing to publish the details – ‘to the intense indignation of the two Lahore ladies’.

  He wrote ‘reassuring fibs’ in the wake of the second successive failure of the Rains to save the kharif crops sown in May and June, and grumbled to Crom Price by letter that he found himself ‘hard pressed at times for a really original lie’.3

  In mid-November he sent ‘some specimens of the stuff I write daily’ to Mr Crofts asking him to ‘pass sentence’.4 The cuttings included an account of the Dassera Festival celebrated by Lahore’s Hindu minority in October, on which he had reported in a tone of amused disdain. ‘Sita,’ he had told his readers, ‘uncomfortably astride a broad-backed wicker-work bull, supported by an uneasy Rama, buried in tinsel … was a spectacle more comic than imposing … It may occur to some, that a city, which has had an Oriental College, teaching Oriental poetry, in its midst for many years, might have acquired a taste for more interesting and popular manifestations.’5 His proprietors evidently appreciated his efforts, for at the end of the year Ruddy was appointed a special correspondent and awarded an extra £7 a month.

  As Lahore’s full quota of Europeans returned to their posts Ruddy’s social life picked up. He attended rehearsals for a production by the Lahore Amateurs of Plot and Passion, a melodrama by two well-known Anglo-Indian writers, John Lang and Tom Taylor, and acquitted himself well in the part of Desmarets, head of the secret police in Napoleon’s Paris. The first performance, on 20 December, resulted in a glowing review in the CMG, in which Ruddy described himself as the ‘hero of the evening’. But his acting was also admired by others, one of whom was Berthold Ribbentrop of the Indian Forest Service, who urged him to ‘drop newspapering’ and take to the stage. Some years later Ruddy returned the compliment in casting Ribbentrop in his first Mowgli story, ‘In the Rukh’, as the ‘gigantic German’ Muller, ‘head of the Woods and Forests of all India’ and a man of great perception.6

  A further performance of Plot and Passion took place on Christmas Day and was surely a memorable occasion for Ruddy, since both his parents and his fifteen-year-old sister were present in the audience: Lockwood was back from the Calcutta Exhibition and Alice had just arrived from Bombay with Trix. ‘When my sister came out … our cup was filled to the brim,’ wrote Rudyard Kipling of their reunion. ‘Not only were we happy, but we knew it.’7 And Trix thought likewise: ‘I really believe the happiest time of his life – and mine – was when we lived together after I came out to Lahore.’8

  It was only a year and three months since Ruddy had seen his sister, but in that time she had grown into a young woman, petite and fragile-looking but delightfully pretty. In what is now an incomplete letter to his Aunt Edith, written towards the end of January 1884, Ruddy described how he and his sister felt free ‘to “frivol” like babies and the parents are delighted to think us so’. Their sibling closeness extended to their writing. According to Trix, the two of them always talked over whatever they were working on, to the extent that she could ‘recognise “something of myself” in his writing – in Departmental Ditties especially’, although ‘there was never any Charles-and-Mary-Lamb or Dorothy-and-William-Wordsworth nonsense about us’. In her old age Trix clung to what may well have been no more than a conceit, that much
of her brother’s writing was a ‘family affair’ to which all four members contributed: ‘If we all had our rights the longest and most admired part of “On Greenhow Hill” would be signed J. L. K. and sundry verses A. M. K. In those simple days “Bags I” made a copyright – and the family square “pooled” their work even as No. 5 study in Stalky did their impots [schoolboy slang for imposed punishments].’9 What is rather more credible is Trix’s claim that her mother did her best to steer Ruddy over what he could or should write about their sex: ‘Mother and I used to drop severely on things his women said in Plain Tales. “No, Ruddy, no! Not that.” “But it’s true.” “Never mind; there are lots of things that are true that we never mention.”’10