Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  At the start of the Hot Weather of ’87 Alice Lockwood and Trix went up to Simla ahead of their menfolk as usual. It was now widely known that the Kiplings were on intimate terms with the Dufferins, and one consequence was that Trix was besieged with suitors, again headed by Archie, Lord Clandeboye, whose regiment had now returned to England but who had remained behind as an additional ADC to his father. Clandeboye now proposed for a second time, and was again turned down. ‘He suggested that though I didn’t think him up to much it might amuse me to be a countess,’ wrote Trix witheringly of her suitor. ‘“Too expensive,” I said and he explained at length in his stodgy schoolboy way that though of course I should have to be “presented [at Court] at my marriage”, my wedding dress with a train of family lace would be A.1. and a small tiara that belonged to his beautiful Granny would suit me far more than the “fender full of shamrocks Mother sports” [Lady Dufferin’s tiara].’ Lord Clandeboye’s first proposal had remained a secret between the two of them but this second rejection was evidently too much for him and he complained to his parents. One reacted with approval, the other with indignation: ‘Though Lord D. loved me for my good sense,’ commented Trix, ‘Lady D. never forgave me, and she had always been so nice to me before. Of course a penniless daughter-in-law was the last thing she wished for, but she said openly that she had always thought me a really sweet and charming girl – but – if her “splendid Arch” was not good enough for me – she gave me up.’4

  Simla Society being what it was, it soon became known that Lord Dufferin had personally approached Alice Kipling and asked her to remove her daughter from Simla, whereupon Alice had replied indignantly that it was his son who should go – which he did. Small wonder that when Lady Dufferin’s journals were published after her return to Ireland in 1889 her account of the first half of the Simla Season from late April to the end of July was limited to eleven entries and just one reference to her eldest son: ‘Archie played polo before breakfast.’ The affair led to a froideur between the Dufferins and the Kiplings, which Ruddy’s subsequent public poems attacking various policies of Lord Dufferin’s government can have done little to ease.

  But there was one aspect of the Dufferin Viceroyalty of which Ruddy heartily approved: Lady Dufferin’s decision to make a cause of the low status of women in Indian society and the lack of medical facilities for them. In June 1885 she had announced the formation of the Countess of Dufferin’s Fund for Supplying Medical Aid to the Women of India and then set about securing contributions. Hariot Lady Dufferin had, according to Ruddy, a ‘most baleful and malevolent glare due to short sight’ and this, combined with a forceful character and the exploitation to the hilt of her privileged position, produced results. Indian maharajas and other wealthy notables vied with one another to demonstrate their loyalty, and the happy outcome was the provision of Lady Dufferin hospitals, dispensaries and medical training schools for women up and down the land. Ruddy lent his support, for nothing engaged his ire more than what he saw as the hypocrisy of the Indian intelligentsia in demanding political rights for themsleves while refusing to grant human rights to their womenfolk. ‘We might wait till Doomsday till the Bengalis educated their native women,’ he wrote in one of his letters to the Wop of Albion:

  Meanwhile they are rotting in the zenanas, for sheer want of medical attendance; English docs you know aren’t allowed to see a zenana woman in her last agonies … Same with ‘widow remarriage’. Thank Goodness you haven’t any notion of the horrors of enforced widowhood out here. The agitation is as old as the hills but our progressive Aryan brother, the Oxford BA who’ll eat with you, ride with you and talk to your wife won’t dare to fly in the face of his ‘custom’.

  Ruddy saw it as his duty to fight this humbug, and developed two potent weapons for doing so, in his on-the-spot reporting and his public verse: ‘People won’t stir quickly for abstracts of reports. Go down and look at the place yourself and write all you know on the running pen. Serve hot and something is sure to come of it … If prose doesn’t go home hack out some verses with a lilting refrain that will take and catch the public ear and you have helped scotch a snake.’5 Here was a stratagem of which Ruddy the polemicist became the supreme proponent, first tested in India and subsequently applied to great effect in London in the 1890s.

  One example of snake-scotching verses hacked out with a lilting refrain was published in the CMG in mid-February 1887 to mark the laying of the foundation stone of the Lady Aitchison Hospital for Women in Lahore, paid for through the Lady Dufferin Fund. The verses called for continuing support for Lady Dufferin’s Fund but also demanded that Indian menfolk play their part:

  The Wisdom of the West is theirs – our schools are free to all.

  The strength of all the West is theirs, to prop them lest they fall;

  And men may say what things they please, and none dare stay their tongue.

  But who has spoken out for these – the women and the young?6

  Such public verses now became an established feature in both the CMG in Lahore and the Pioneer in Allahabad, and it comes as a surprise to find how many of these were attacks on the Government of India for its failure to fulfil its duty as protector of the Indian poor. One of the most remarkable was written in response to the numerous public celebrations and events staged to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Published in the CMG in May 1887 and given a metre which matches the plod of the ox at the plough or the wheel over the well, ‘What the People Said’ suggests that the Queen-Empress and her Empire mean nothing to the vast bulk of the Indian populace:

  By the well, where the bullocks go

  Silent and blind and slow –

  By the field, where the young corn dies

  In the face of the sultry skies,

  They have heard, as the dull earth hears

  The voice of the wind of the hour,

  The sound of the Great Queen’s voice:

  ‘My God hath given me years,

  ‘Hath granted dominion and power:

  ‘And I bid you, O Land, rejoice.’

  But India’s peasants are concerned only with their crops and the harvest. The poem closes:

  And the Ploughman settled the share

  More deep in the sun-dried clod:

  ‘Mogul, Mahratta, and Mlech [foreign barbarian] from the North,

  ‘And White Queen over the Seas –

  ‘God raiseth them up and driveth them forth

  ‘As the dust of the ploughshare flies in the breeze;

  ‘But the wheat and the cattle are all in my care,

  ‘And the rest is the will of God.’7

  J. L. Kipling’s drawing inspired by his son’s verses (National Trust)

  These verses anticipate and rehearse Kipling’s more famous meditation on Empire set down in ‘Recessional’ a decade later, marking the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee of 1897.

  Ruddy joined his family in Simla in mid-August to find a theatrical revival under way. On 30 May the Gaiety Theatre in the new Town Hall had opened with a play performed by the Simla Amateur Dramatic Club, the A. D. C., whose membership was largely military staff officers and their wives, led by the ubiquitous Lord William Beresford. Three months later a rival theatre opened in the Commander-in-Chief’s refurbished ballroom at Snowden, with a gala performance in aid of Lady Roberts’s own charity, ‘Homes in the Hills’, set up to improve the nursing facilities in British military sanatoriums. The evening consisted of a burlesque of Lucia di Lammermoor in which the Kiplings were very much to the fore, Ruddy providing a verse prologue and Trix delivering it dressed fetchingly in a nurse’s uniform. Some weeks later the Kiplings and the Burtons were involved in a production of Sardou’s popular French farce A Scrap of Paper at the Gaiety, with Major Burton playing the leading role of Count Prosper Couramont, Isabella Burton Susanne de Ruseville and Ruddy her lover Brisemouche. The Dufferins put in an appearance, the Viceroy afterwards writing to his eldest daughter Lady Helen that he had found Ruddy’s performance ‘too horrid
and vulgar’ and Lady Dufferin making it clear in her journal entry that they had ‘felt obliged just to look in’ only because a Member of Council was in the cast.

  On 11 June Trix turned nineteen. Her enhanced status and what Kay Robinson called her ‘statuesque beauty’ now ensured that she had more admirers than she could ever have wished for. By one account,8 she rejected no fewer than four proposals of marriage, and by late summer was sufficiently worn down by the persistence of a fifth suitor to accept him. The successful beau was twentynine-year-old Captain Jack Fleming of the Survey of India, a dull and gloomy Scot whose charms were not readily apparent to the rest of Trix’s family, and particularly not to Ruddy, who called him an ‘objectionable cuss’. Trix herself seemed to be unconvinced and after less than three months broke off the engagement ‘on the grounds of incompatibility of temper’, only to relent to the extent of giving Fleming permission to write to her. To Ruddy this was a case of misplaced pity and he returned to Lahore at the end of his month’s leave filled with foreboding: ‘In respect to Jack Fleming I do not care one straw … but … my faith in my sister’s excellent judgement … is a little shaken. There was no compulsion, and there was ample time to choose … For my little maiden I have nothing but sympathy because she is very sorry and upset in her poor little mind.’9

  Ruddy returned to Lahore knowing also that his days there were numbered, for it had been decided that his talents could be put to better use in Allahabad. Wheeler had now gone, judged by Allen and his co-proprietors on the CMG to be incapable of maintaining the ‘sparkle’ that Kay Robinson had brought to the paper. His editorial chair was now taken by Robinson, and a new man had been hired to work as his assistant.

  So it came about that in mid-November 1887 Ruddy packed his bags and papers, and said goodbye to family and friends – and to the now familiar mosque, minaret and tomb-strewn landscape of the Punjab that he had come to know and love. From the Land of the Five Rivers he and his bearer Kadir Baksh journeyed six hundred miles by train to the Doab, the Land of the Two Rivers, and to Allahabad, capital of the North-Western Provinces and Oude.

  Two years earlier Lady Dufferin had noted in her journal that ‘Allahabad is very uninteresting; there is nothing at all to see’. She was right as far as the Civil Station went, but wrong in thinking that Indian Allahabad had nothing to offer.

  Despite its Muslim name, Allahabad was very much a Hindu city, revered for centuries as Prayag, the confluence of three sacred rivers, of which only two, the Ganges and the Jumna, were visible to the naked eye. Consequently it was one of four holy places which every Hindu was expected to visit in his lifetime, ideally at the height of the spring festival of Magh Mela, when many thousands of devotees assembled to bathe from the sand spit where the two rivers converged. Like Lahore, its most dominant feature was the Fort, built by the Great Mughal Akbar to command the two rivers. But despite its strategic importance Allahabad had never achieved the greatness of Lahore. After being ceded to the East India Company in 1801 it had served as a staging post on the Grand Trunk Road linking Delhi to Bengal, but had never been thought important enough to merit a garrison of British troops. Consequently there was no British corps present when in June 1857 the sepoys of the 6th Bengal Native Infantry mutinied and killed their officers before torching the bungalows of the Civil Station.

  Ten days later Colonel Neill retook the town with the European Madras Fusiliers and set about exacting revenge, setting fire to the Native bazaar and suburbs and shooting down all who tried to escape the flames. Four tribunals had then sat in summary judgement, executing at least as many innocent persons as guilty, so that when General Havelock brought the rest of the army into Allahabad some days later he saw corpses hanging from every tree as the ‘fresh fruits of rebellion’. According to the British historian Sir John Kaye, ‘six thousand beings had been thus summarily disposed of and launched into eternity’.10 Allahabad’s Muslim community bore the brunt of this punishment, and from that time onward the Native population was ninety per cent Hindu. In November 1858 British Crown rule was proclaimed in Allahabad and the town became the capital of the North-Western Provinces and Oude, usually known as the NWP.

  The rebuilt town that Ruddy saw when he climbed down from his train carriage had been shaped around these tragic events, with the new Civil Lines being laid over the ruins of the Native Town. The new railway line, built parallel to the Grand Trunk Road, effectively divided Allahabad into two: the Station on the north side, the bazaars and Native Town on the south. ‘To the immediate front of the railway lies the Civil Station,’ explained G. H. Keene in his Handbook for Visitors, written in 1875. ‘It contains a number of wide streets … laid out in building sites, now mostly occupied with houses, and crossing each other at right angles like those of a modern city in the United States. These roads are all well planted with teak and other timber trees, and each bears the name of some person of local or imperial celebrity. Thus, parallel with the City Road runs the Queen’s Road and Albert Road, while transversely run Canning and Elgin Roads.’

  At the heart of the Station was the maidan, which became Alfred Park after the visit of a lesser heir to the British throne, and at its northern end a district known officially as Colonelganj, and unofficially as Lalkurtiganj or ‘Redjacket town’– not on account of the barracks which had formerly stood there but because of its military brothels, where the women wore red blouses as the mark of their calling. Here, wrote Keene, ‘a large and handsome pile of adapted Saracenic architecture is being raised for the use of the new Central College, to be known by the name of an ex-Lieutenant-Governor Sir William Muir. Still further on is the Government House.’11 Two months before Ruddy’s arrival in Allahabad Lord Dufferin’s Council had passed an act incorporating Muir College as Allahabad University, with the power to confer degrees in the Faculties of Arts and Law.

  Keene’s Handbook makes no reference to the district abutting Colonelganj to the north and east and just over the road from the University. By 1887 this had become known as Allenganj, or ‘Allen Town’, dominated by the offices and printing works of George Allen’s Pioneer Press, the biggest private employer in Allahabad, with a workforce of six hundred. After the 1857 Mutiny a political decision had been made to move the capital of the NWP from Agra to Allahabad and to keep the latter free of modern industrial development – not for environmental reasons but in order to ensure that ‘the turbulent natives’ of Cawnpore, 110 miles upriver and the scene of the appalling massacres of 1857, were ‘absorbed in industrial concerns and … tamed to such an extent as to help us to consolidate our Empire in India’. One of the principal beneficiaries of this ‘politico-industrial experiment’12 had been George Allen, who had set up a leather works and tannery in Cawnpore which he enlarged in 1884 with the help of an enormous loan authorised by Sir Auckland Colvin, then the Financial Secretary. A month after Ruddy’s move to Allahabad Allen’s close ties with central Government were further strengthened when Colvin became Lieutenant-Governor of the NWP and moved into Government House, right across the road from the Pioneer Press, which was itself little more than a stone’s throw from No. 1 Bund Road, where George and Maud Allen lived in a palatial bungalow overlooking the sand flats of the River Ganges.

  No. 1 Bund Road was where Ruddy was put up for his first weeks in Allahabad, and where he found himself ‘like a rabbit in a strange warren’13 as Allen pondered on how best to employ his protégé’s talents. The Pi already had two assistant editors in post so Allen decided to make Ruddy a special correspondent, but with the additional responsibility of editing a new weekly. Some years earlier he had founded Allen’s Weekly Mail, printed in London and containing all the latest news from India. This was now to be revived in Allahabad as the Week’s News, made up of ‘a re-hash of news and views’ taken from the main newspaper together with an extra page devoted to fiction. However, the Week’s News was not to commence publication until the start of the New Year, and in the meantime Ruddy was sent off to gather new material in the
field.

  ‘Since November last I have been a vagabond on the face of the earth,’ Ruddy wrote to the Wop of Albion in late January 1888. ‘Did I tell you how the Pioneer took me over and bade me go out for a month into Rajputana – the home of a hundred thousand legends?’ Rajputana stood at the very heart of India, a region made up of a score of Native states ruled by maharajas and rajas, great and small, permitted to govern or misgovern according to their own traditions provided they did not step too far out of line. Ruddy had been anxious to explore the territory ever since Wheeler had forbidden him to accompany the Walkers on their tour the year before. Beginning at the old Mughal capital of Agra, he journeyed by train to Jaipur, then by tonga to Udaipur and on to the ancient Rajput citadel of Chittor, before doubling back by train to visit the desert principalities of Jodhpur and Bikaner. As he criss-crossed Rajputana he mailed a series of dispatches to Allahabad that appeared in the Pioneer under the title of ‘Letters of Marque’. Reading these neglected dispatches today, one is reminded that the fresh perspective Kipling brought to his fiction served him equally well as a travel writer.

  Apart from the brief foray up to Peshawar and the Khyber made when he was a callow youth of nineteen this was Ruddy’s first opportunity to fend for himself in unknown country and he returned thoroughly pleased with himself. ‘Was there anything like that dissolute tramp through some of the loveliest and oldest places upon the face of the earth?’ he asked his favourite cousin:

  I railed and rode and drove and tramped and slept in King’s palaces or under the stars themselves and saw panthers killed and heard tigers roar in the hills, and for six days had no white face with me, and explored dead cities desolate these three hundred years, and came to stately Residencies [where British Political Agents attached to the local rulers were quartered] where I feasted in fine linen and came to desolate wayside stations where I slept with natives upon the cotton bales and clean forgot that there was a newspapery telegraphic world without. Oh it was a good and clean life and I saw and heard all sorts and conditions of men and they told me the stories of their lives, black and white and brown alike, and I filled three notebooks and walked ‘with death and morning on the silver horns’ [Tennyson, The Princess].14