Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  After being swallowed by mountains and pursued by rivers, the ‘you’ who recounts these hallucinations finds himself on a wayside railway station amid burning sands awaiting the train that will bear him away from his pain:

  At length it comes. Showing first as a tiny speck on the polished burning metals, nearer, nearer, nearer, in a reverberating crescendo, till it halts hotter even than the mid-day sun, a monster of winking brasswork and roaring fires. From the foot-plate, where he has hidden himself until now, leaps off a royal Bengal tiger with yellow eye balls and open jaws, and as he springs at your throat, the masterless train flies away out of your reach, and disappears as rapidly as it came.

  The nightmare ends at dawn with the ‘first deep draught of iced water that Kurim Buksh – taught by experience – brings with chota hazree [‘little breakfast’, usually a cup of tea]’.

  Ruddy’s involuntary drug-taking begun in mid-September brought a new dimension to his thinking. The transformation can be seen in a letter written to his cousin Margaret Burne-Jones, now aged eighteen, who over the course of the next year was to become his closest confidante, one referring to the other as the ‘Wop of Asia’ and the other hitting back with ‘Wop of Albion’. In one paragraph Ruddy sums up for her his received opinion of Indian culture:

  If you knew in what inconceivable filth of mind the people of India were brought up from their cradle; if you realised the views – or one tenth of the views – they hold about women and their absolute incapacity for speaking the truth as we understand it – the immeasurable gulf that lies between the two races in all things[,] you would see how it comes to pass that the Englishman is prone to despise the natives – (I must use that misleading term for brevity’s sake) – and how, except in the matter of trade, to have little or nothing in common with him. Now this is a wholly wrong attitude of mind but it’s one that a Briton who washes, and don’t take bribes, and who thinks of other things besides intrigue and seduction most naturally falls into. When he does – goodbye to his chances of understanding the people of the land.

  But Ruddy had also recognised that as long as he continued to think like that and hide behind the purdah of the Civil Station and its moral values he could never cross the racial divide: ‘Underneath our excellent administrative system; under the piles of reports and statistics; the thousands of troops; the doctors; and the civilians [ICS] runs wholly untouched and unaffected the life of the people of the land – a life as full of impossibilities and wonders as the Arabian nights … immediately outside of our own English life, is the dark and crooked and fantastic, and wicked, and awe inspiring life of the “native”.’

  To understand this ‘dark’ India and conquer one’s fear of it meant putting one’s prejudices to one side and reaching out. In Ruddy’s own words, he had to ‘penetrate into it’ – and by the end of the year he could report to the ‘Wop of Albion’ that he was putting what he had learned from this penetration into the pages of a novel, to be entitled Mother Maturin: ‘Heaven send that she may grow into a full blown novel before I die – My experiences of course are only a queer jumble of opium dens, night houses, night strolls with natives; evenings spent in their company in their own homes (in the men’s quarter of course) and the long yarns that my native friends spin me, and one or two queer things I’ve come across in my own office’s experience. The result of it all has been to interest me immensely and keenly in the people.’49

  This growing interest in Indian India was further whetted by Ruddy’s reading of a new novel, Lalun the Beragun, or The Battle of Panipat: A Legend of Hindoostan, published in Bombay earlier in 1884 by one Mirza Moorad Alee Beg ‘Gaekwaree’, a Native of Bhavanagar princely state. It was thought to be the first-ever novel written in English by a Muslim, and gave its readers a far more convincing glimpse into the lives of Indian Muslims than that conjured up by the author of Lalla Rookh and other British writers; for Ruddy it provided an invaluable source of information. Quite soon – and how soon has still to be determined – it became known that Mirza Moorad Alee Beg was a fraud: no Indian but an English clergyman’s son who had converted to Islam while working for the Maharaja of Bhavnagar, only to then become a Theosophist after meeting Madame Blavatsky in Bombay. Following Madame Blavatsky’s public exposure in 1882–3 the unfortunate Moorad Alee Beg had suffered a mental breakdown, conceiving a hatred of her so violent that he had to be confined, and eventually dying insane.

  Exactly when Ruddy first heard of Moorad Alee Beg’s true antecedents is uncertain, but he had only to read the book’s introduction to learn that its author had suffered a series of misfortunes in life which had taken him to the very edge of despair. That reading appears to have preceded the episode of the night cramps and the opium-and-chlorodyne binge on the night of 16 September.

  Ten days later, on 26 September, a short story entitled ‘The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows’ appeared in the CMG, under the byline of ‘The Janitor’, who opens the tale by declaring that ‘This is no work of mine. My friend, Gabral Misquitta, the half-caste, spoke it all, between moonset and morning, six weeks before he died; and I took it down from his mouth as he answered my questions.’ A rambling monologue follows, as Misquitta describes his life as an opium addict, centred on the opium den of the title, sited ‘between the Coppersmith’s Gully and the pipe-stem seller’s quarter, within a hundred yards, too, as the crow flies, of the Mosque of Wazir Khan’. As Misquitta describes the regulars who gather to smoke the ‘Black Smoke’ he explains how he became an addict, how it destroys all who partake of it and how he awaits his own end with an addict’s fatalism. Misquitta’s underworld is filled with grotesques, yet entirely believable. So completely has Kipling entered his poppy-fuddled head that the distinguished English literary critic Andrew Lang was led to declare that as an expression of drug-induced writing the tale ‘defeats de Quincey on his own ground’.50

  Mid to late September 1884 marked Ruddy’s literary coming of age. The publication of ‘The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows’ in the CMG on 26 September was sandwiched between his cutting verses on the departing Viceroy, ‘Lord Ripon’s Reverie’, published on 15 September, and ‘The Story of Tommy’ on 29 September. They constitute a turning point in Rudyard Kipling’s creative life: the moment when the young writer throws off the protective carapace grown during his English exile and with it his dependency on English literary models – including his need for the security of the Family Square, which for all its Pre-Raphaelite modishness was deeply conventional.

  T. S. Eliot once wrote that ‘some forms of illness are extremely favourable, not only to religious illumination, but to artistic and literary composition’, and he could well have cited Rudyard Kipling as a classic case. A combination of circumstances – overwork, a lonely bungalow and the night terrors, an involuntary drug-taking, a horror of rampant disease and, at the back of it all, a lurking fear that he might be going mad – had combined within the cauldron of a hot September night to break down the inhibitions of an eighteen-year-old, freeing him to speak more directly from within himself. It did not mean that he abandoned his former self, far from it. Rather it gave voice to another aspect of his personality, long suppressed: that of his Bombay childhood, when he had moved freely between worlds as a child of many parts.

  With that rediscovery his imagination sloughed off the inhibitions holding it in check, leaving him free to write with a facility and a versatility that at times became positively Mozartian in its brio and industry. ‘I chuckle a good deal over the week’s work,’ was how Ruddy concluded his letter to his Aunt Edith on 17 September, ‘and am meditating a whole series of fresh assaults … But Lord! Lord! What vanity is this. Here am I, just helped by my servant out of something exceedingly unpleasant to say no more, and with my head still ringing like a bell from the fumes of that infernal opium, plotting and planning and crowing on my own dunghill as though I were one of the immortals.’51

  7

  ‘The Oldest Land’

  THE PUNJAB AND SIMLA, 1885r />
  A stone’s throw out on either hand

  From that well ordered road we tread,

  And all the world is wild and strange:

  Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite

  Shall bear us company tonight,

  For we have reached the Oldest Land

  Wherein the Powers of Darkness range.

  Verse heading to ‘In the House of Suddhoo’, first published in the Civil and Military Gazette, 30 April 1886

  In December 1884 Lord Ripon left India a disappointed man, acclaimed by crowds of Bengalis in Calcutta but reviled by the bulk of the Anglo-Indian community. His successor was the fiftyeight-year-old Anglo-Irish aristocrat Frederick Blackwood, 3rd Earl of Dufferin and Clandeboye, ex-Eton and Christ Church, witty, urbane to the point of caricature and a man of letters, as befitting a descendant of Sheridan on his mother’s side. ‘Charming in manner,’ was how one of his senior political staff later described him, ‘no shyness or awkwardness, a touch of blarney, a quick temper, a slight or more than slight lisp, and a very decided will.’1 Besides terms as Governor-General of Canada and Ambassador in Turkey, Lord Dufferin had served under Palmerston as Under-Secretary for India, so that he came to India well-versed and not altogether surprised to find the country ‘divided into two camps with Natives and Anglo-Indians yelping at each other across a ditch’.2 Yet he was well received by the British community. ‘If Lord Dufferin had not come,’ wrote Lockwood Kipling to Edith Plowden, ‘I think poor Anglo-India would have gone crazy with vexation and apprehension but we have no end of confidence in the new man.’3

  The commencement of the Dufferin viceroyalty marked an upturn in the fortunes of the Kiplings. During his visit to Calcutta the year before Lockwood Kipling had been taken up by the Duke of Connaught, the third son of Queen Victoria and newly appointed to the post of Divisional Commander at Meerut. Lockwood gave the Duchess of Connaught advice on collecting Indian brassware, and his enthusiastic advocacy of traditional Indian craftsmanship led the Connaughts to become patrons of his work. In December 1884 the Connaughts visited Lahore, where, after touring the workshops of the Mayo School of Industrial Art they placed an order for the decoration of a billiard room and a smoking room in their home at Bagshot Park in Surrey, both rooms to be panelled throughout in wood carved in traditional eighteenth-century Punjabi style. This was a most prestigious contract and a formidable one, requiring more than five hundred panels, mouldings and other fixtures that would take four years to complete. Combined with the Government of the Punjab’s decision to entrust him with the design for a new building to house the Punjab Museum, it confirmed Lockwood Kipling as the leading British authority on Indian arts and crafts. The Duchess of Connaught also put him in touch with the administrator-poet Sir Alfred Lyall, now Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces, and together they founded a new magazine, the Journal of Indian Art, with Lockwood as its editor.

  Things were also beginning to go well for the younger Kipling. In November 1884 Ruddy had submitted two poems to the Pioneer: ‘The Moon of Other Days’ and ‘To the Unknown Goddess’. Both were published pseudonymously, and to his great joy he received in payment one gold mohur, a Mughal coin then worth about sixteen rupees, and a note from George Allen offering to publish in the Pioneer ‘anything I might choose to send’.4 He responded with ‘In the Spring Time’, a bitter-sweet poem written as an Indian homage to Robert Browning’s famous lamentation of the Englishman in exile, ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’:

  My garden blazes brightly with the rose-bush and the peach,

  And the köil sings among them in the siris by the well,

  From the creeper-covered trellis comes the squirrel’s clattering speech,

  And the blue jay screams and flutters where the cheery Satbhai dwell.

  But the rose has lost its fragrance and the köil’s note is strange, –

  I am sick of all this splendour, sick of blossom-burdened bough –

  Give me back the leafless woodlands where the winds of spring-time range,

  Give me back one day in England, for it’s Spring in England now!

  In the pines the winds are waking; o’er the brown fields blowing chill;

  From the furrow of the ploughshare comes the scent of fresh-turned loam;

  And the hawk nests in the cliffside, and the jackdaw in the hill,

  And my heart is back in England mid the sights and sounds of home.

  But the ‘garland of the sacrifice’ this wealth of rose and peach is;

  Ah! köil, little köil, singing on the siris bough,

  In my eyes the knell of exile your ceaseless bell-like speech is –

  Can you tell me aught of England, or of Spring in England now?5

  Lyrical and confident in metre, ‘In the Spring Time’ was arguably the best thing he had written since ‘Ave Imperatrix’.

  Ruddy had now entered his nineteenth year, and since his discovery of Lahore’s dark side he had begun to follow a more independent way of life. By happy chance, a diary left behind in the CMG’s offices when he moved on to Allahabad was later found and preserved,6 allowing a rare glimpse into the private life that Kipling afterwards worked so hard to erase from the record. It runs from mid-December 1884 through to early October 1885 and was intended to be a working diary, most of the entries being limited to details of work in progress and remarks of the sort expected of a hard-working journalist trying to fit in his own creative writing. The very first entry, dated 8 December 1884, begins: ‘Mem. to finish handsomely the ‘Village of the dead’ which was taken in hand three days ago.’ Over the next weeks the progress of this work is noted and charted:

  Saturday 10 January: Wrote three scraps … and did seriously take in hand – having a spare hour at three, my City of the Dead – wh. may be some use eventually.

  Thursday 15 January: A bad day and a worse headache … so fell back on the Village of the Dead and Among the Houhnyms and did something to each.

  Saturday 17 January: Wrote scrap on attempted assassination of Munquldass Nathoobhoy … Also my Village of the Dead.

  By 23 January 1885 ‘Village of the Dead’ had become ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie etc.’, clarified a day later with the entry: ‘Did a lot to Morrowbie Jukes who is beginning to look well.’ So the story continued to take shape, each entry showing that ‘Morrowbie Jukes’ was written in snatched breaks between official duties at the office.

  What the diary entries make clear is that much of Ruddy’s creative writing was now taking place away from the eyes of his family – and that his taste for night explorations whetted the previous summer had further developed, with the city of Lahore providing rich material for copy. ‘Dug up a couple of opium dens in the city,’ runs one telling diary entry. ‘Queer night altogether. Suddhu is his name.’ Suddhu duly became ‘Suddhoo’, the tale of a white-haired old man who owns a two-storey house near the Taksali Gate and rents out rooms to two Kashmiri courtesans, Azizun and Janoo. All three are characters in a tale of grand guignol in which they and the English sahib who narrates it witness a terrifying act of magic in a darkened room.7 Written at this same period was a poem submitted to the Calcutta Review – the first to be printed in India giving his full name as author. Written in blank verse, ‘The Vision of Hamid Ali’8 has obvious links with ‘The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows’ in that it has a narrator and involves drug-taking, although now the narrator is a Muslim cleric, a moulvie, and the drug ganja, Indian hemp dried for smoking. Three habitual hashish smokers are gathered late at night in the company of Azizun, Pearl of Courtesans, dreaming of the future glories of Islam when one of them, Hamid Ali, breaks out of his stupor to tell the narrator to set down his vision, in which he foresees the destruction of Islam and all the world’s great religions. It is just one of a score of verses written in 1885–6 afterwards repudiated by their author.

  On Saturday 7 March Ruddy noted in his diary: ‘The idea of “Mother Maturin” dawned on me today.’ He would write a great Indian novel – but
about an India unknown to his peers. It would ‘deal with the unutterable horrors of lower-class Eurasian and native life as they exist outside the reports’, it would be ‘not one bit nice or proper’9 and it would be set in Lahore: ‘The yard-wide gullies into which the moonlight cannot struggle are full of mystery, stories of life and death and intrigue of which we, the Mall abiding, open-windowed, purdah-less English know nothing and believe less.’ In the hands of the right man, ‘our City, from the Taksali to the Delhi Gate, and from the wrestling-ground to the Badami Bagh, would yield a store of novels’.10 By the spring of 1885 Ruddy had no doubts as to who that man would be.

  But before Ruddy could make any real headway on Mother Maturin he was called to take on his most important assignment to date. The Amir of Afghanistan was to meet the Viceroy at Rawalpindi in the northern Punjab. It would be a grand state occasion, which Ruddy was to attend and report on. Over the previous months the CMG had carried a series of lively on-the-scene reports written by its assistant editor which had left the paper’s proprietors in no doubt that the boy had a talent for vivid reporting that could be used to greater advantage. Accordingly, on Monday 9 March Ruddy received his orders: to proceed with all speed to the Afghan frontier at Peshawar to await the coming of the Amir.

  The Rawalpindi Durbar was the most significant political gathering to be held in India since Lord Lytton’s Imperial Assembly of 1877, and no effort was to be spared to ensure that Amir Abdur Rahman was left in no doubt as to his importance to Britain as an ally against Russia – and of the military might of the British Raj. A tented town was laid down outside Rawalpindi on the lines of the earlier Delhi model: Viceroy’s Camp at the centre, lesser camps for the visiting Amir, the Commander-in-Chief, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, various local princes and other dignitaries. But what the organisers could not plan for was the spectacularly foul weather, with days of heavy rain which turned the camp into a quagmire and made a nonsense of the carefully drawn up programme of events. It meant that after a long, bumpy ride in an open tikka gharri Ruddy arrived at Peshawar soaked, battered and bruised, his hat cut to bits by hailstones.