Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  9 ATF in a letter to the editor, KJ, October 1942.

  10 ATF, ‘My Brother Rudyard Kipling’, BBC 17 April 1943, subsequently published in KJ, December 1947.

  11 RK to Edith Macdonald, Lahore 16–28 January 1884, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  12 RK’s political polemic ‘A New Departure’ was first published in the Englishman before being reprinted in the CMG, 29 March 1883.

  13 Col. H. R. Goulding, Old Lahore.

  14 RK, ‘The Story of Tommy’, in CMG, 29 September 1884, signed ‘E. M.’, Scrapbook 1, RK Papers, Sussex, collected in Rutherford, Early Verse.

  15 Gen. Sir Thomas Edward Gordon gives an account of the killing at Ranikhet in A Varied Life.

  16 From a MS in Royal Leicester Regiment Museum, reprinted in The Green Tiger, August 1952, and afterwards in ‘Concerning “Danny Deever” and a murder at Ranikhet, India, in 1886’, KJ, July 1954.

  17 RK, ‘Danny Deever’, first published in Britain in the Scots Observer (afterwards the National Observer), 22 February 1890, and in India in the Week’s News, 23 March 1890.

  18 The link with the folk ballad was identified by Lord Baldwin in The Macdonald Sisters.

  19 T. S. Eliot, A Choice of Kipling’s Verse.

  20 RK, ‘Anglo-Indian Society’, CMG, 29 January 1887, collected in Pinney, Kipling’s India.

  21 RK, SM.

  22 RK, ‘On Fort Duty’, February 1884, Notebook 1, RK Papers, Sussex, collected in Rutherford, Early Verse.

  23 RK to Edith Macdonald, Lahore 4 February 1884, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  24 RK to Edith Macdonald, Lahore 4 April 1884, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I. A rather different version of this episode is given in SM, where the bribe is remembered as ‘a five hundred rupee note and a Cashmere shawl’ and is returned ‘at the hands of the camp-sweeper’. This has the ring of authenticity, for the young Kipling enjoyed taking and giving offence.

  25 RK to Edith Macdonald, Lahore 4 April 1884, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  26 Rudyard Kipling and Wolcott Balestier, The Naulahka, 1892.

  27 Kay Robinson, ‘Rudyard Kipling in India’, in Pearson’s Magazine, June 1896. The poem in question, ‘Ichabod’, was published in the CMG on 9 November 1887 under the signature of ‘Kingcraft’ and achieved considerable notoriety. Collected in Rutherford, Early Verse.

  28 RK, ‘Mister Anthony Dawking’, one of eight contributions signed ‘The Traveller’ published in the CMG in 1888 but not collected by RK in his scrapbooks. Reproduced in Charles Allen, Kipling’s Kingdom.

  29 RK to Edith Macdonald, Lahore 28 April 1884, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  30 E. Kay Robinson, ‘Rudyard Kipling in India’, Pearson’s Magazine, June 1896.

  31 Noel F. Cooke, ‘The “Pioneer” of Kipling’s Day’, KJ, March 1964.

  32 CMG, 20 March 1886.

  33 RK to Edith Macdonald, Lahore 4 June 1884, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  34 One of the guests at Ruddy’s picnic in the Shalimar Gardens may have been eighteen-year-old Adela Cory, one of three daughters of Col. Thomas Cory, the CMG’s one-time editor and part-proprietor. Adela was in Lahore in 1884 and, given her father’s links with the newspaper and the fact that he and Alice Kipling acted together in at least one amateur production, we can take it that the Cory girls rubbed shoulders with the Kiplings. Even if the high-caste Miss Adela Cory was off-limits to Ruddy, their mutual love of poetry ought to have drawn them together. Unfortunately, there is not a jot of evidence to show that either party sought or received the attentions of the other. Adela moved with her father to Sind in 1886 and there met and married Col. Malcolm Nicholson. A decade later the Nicholsons retired to England, where Adela published The Garden of Karma under the pen-name of ‘Laurence Hope’. It included ‘Four Indian Love Lyrics’, considered at the time to be wildly sensual, including the well-known verses which begin ‘Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, / Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell?’ See also Jennifer M. T. Carter, ‘A Tale of Two Poets’, KJ, June 2000.

  35 RK, ‘False Dawn’, PTH, January 1888.

  36 RK to Edith Macdonald, Lahore 11–14 June 1884, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  37 RK, SM

  38 RK to Edith Macdonald, Dalhousie 14 August 1884, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  39 Just to confuse the issue this copy begins with the inscription ‘The Mater / From Ruddy. / August 22nd 1884’. Rudyard Kipling Collection, George Arents Research Library, Syracuse University, collected in Rutherford, Early Verse.

  40 RK, ‘The Tragedy of Crusoe, C. S.’, CMG, 13 September 1884, collected in Pinney, Kipling’s India.

  41 RK, SM.

  42 RK to Edith Macdonald, Lahore 4 June 1884, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  43 Sir William Moore, A Manual of Family Medicine.

  44 RK, ‘The Moon of Other Days’, Pioneer, 25 December 1884.

  45 RK, ‘The City of the Heart’, Echoes, 1884.

  46 RK to Edith Macdonald, Lahore 17 September 1884, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  47 A close parallel can be found in Coleridge’s drug-taking and writing. On a manuscript copy of his poem ‘Kubla Khan’ Coleridge wrote that it was conceived ‘in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium, taken to check a dysentery’.

  48 As, for example, RK to Edith Macdonald, 4-5 December 1886: ‘I broke down with insomnia again and after a merry course of leeches and morphia injections went to Simla’, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  49 RK to Margaret Burne-Jones, Lahore late November and early December 1885, RK Papers, Sussex, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  50 Andrew Lang, Essays in Little.

  51 RK to Edith Macdonald, Lahore 17 September 1884, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  7: ‘The Oldest Land’: The Punjab and Simla, 1885

  1 Sir Mortimer Durand, head of the Foreign and Political Department under Lord Dufferin, quoted in P. Sykes, Sir Mortimer Durand.

  2 Lord Dufferin to Sir James Stephen, Simla 28 July 1885, Stephen Papers, Cambridge University Library.

  3 JLK to Edith Plowden, Lahore 16 March 1885, JLK Papers, Sussex.

  4 RK to Edith Macdonald, Simla 30 July 1885, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I. The invitation was probably contained in the note from George Allen mentioned in the 5 February entry of RK’s 1884–5 Diary.

  5 RK, ‘In the Spring Time’, Pioneer, 20 March 1885, under the byline ‘R.’ The siris or Indian acacia flowers in early spring to produce scented white flowers; the köil is a bird of the cuckoo family whose distinctive two-note mating call ‘ko-el’, repeated several times over with increasing volume and higher pitch, is first heard in March; the sat-bhai or ‘seven brothers’ are jungle babblers which move about in small, chattering flocks, found throughout the plains.

  6 RK, Diary 1884–5, Houghton Library, University of Harvard, reproduced in Pinney, ‘Something of Myself’.

  7 RK, Diary 1884–5, Thursday 1 October 1885, Houghton Library, University of Harvard, reproduced in Pinney, ‘Something of Myself’. Suddhu made his first public appearance in the short story ‘Section 420, I. P. C.’, CMG 30 April 1886, republished as ‘The House of Suddhoo’ in PTH.

  8 ‘The Vision of Hamid Ali’ was published in the Calcutta Review in October 1885 but RK refers to its acceptance in a letter to Edith Macdonald dated 30 July 1885.

  9 RK to Edith Macdonald, Simla 30 July 1885, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  10 RK, ‘The City of Two Creeds’, CMG, 1 October 1887, collected in Pinney, Kipling’s India.

  11 RK, ‘The City of Evil Countenances,’ CMG, 1 April 1895, collected in Pinney, Kipling’s India.


  12 RK to Mrs Isabella Burton, 7 November 1887, private collection, quoted in Lycett, RK.

  13 RK to Lionel Dunsterville, Lahore 30 January 1886, RK Papers, Sussex, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  14 RK, ‘To Meet the Amir’, tenth article in the series, CMG, 6 April 1885, collected in Pinney, Kipling’s India.

  15 RK, ‘Boots’, The Five Nations, 1903.

  16 Hariot, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, Our Viceregal Life in India.

  17 Ibid.

  18 Sir Walter Lawrence, The India We Served.

  19 JLK to Edith Plowden, Lahore 16 March 1885, JLK Papers, Sussex.

  20 RK, ‘Lispeth’, CMG 29 November 1886, collected in PTH.

  21 Lieut.-Gen. Sir G. F. MacMunn tells the full story in ‘Kipling’s India as I saw it in ’33’, in KJ, December 1933.

  22 RK, ‘Simla Notes’, CMG 16 June, collected in Scrapbook 1, RK Papers, Sussex.

  23 RK, ‘Collar-Wallah and the Poison Stick’, St Nicholas Magazine, February 1893.

  24 JLK to Edith Plowden, Lahore 16 March 1885, JLK Papers, Sussex.

  25 ATF to Stanley Baldwin, Edinburgh 27 March 1945, RK Papers, Sussex.

  26 This and the earlier remark about ‘heart-burning’ were recollected by Sir George Birdwood of the Indian Medical Service, a great promoter of the arts in Bombay, quoted in a note in KJ, Dec 1941.

  27 Maj.-Gen. J. C. Rimington, ‘Westward Ho! Reminiscences’, in KJ, October 1941.

  28 JLK to Edith Plowden, Lahore 16 March 1885, JLK Papers, Sussex.

  29 JLK to Margaret Burne-Jones; this section of his letter was dated Simla 10 October 1885 but not completed and posted until 31 January 1886, JLK Papers, Sussex.

  30 RK to Edith Macdonald, Simla 30 July 1885, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  31 RK, ‘Simla Notes’, CMG, 29 July 1885.

  32 RK, Diary 1884–5, 2 August 1885, Houghton Library, University of Harvard, reproduced in Pinney, ‘Something of Myself’.

  33 RK to Edith Macdonald, Simla 1 August 1885, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  34 RK, Diary 1884–5, August 1885, Houghton Library, University of Harvard, reproduced in Pinney, ‘Something of Myself’.

  35 RK, Diary 1884–5, August 1885, Houghton Library, University of Harvard, reproduced in Pinney, ‘Something of Myself’.

  36 In these speculations I have followed the detective work of Pinney, ‘Something of Myself’.

  37 From Lord Birkenhead’s notes, first noted by and quoted in Lycett, RK.

  38 RK to Kay Robinson, Lahore 30 April 1886, RK Papers, Sussex, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  39 RK to W. C. Crofts, Lahore 18-27 February 1886, Dalhousie University, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  40 RK to Margaret Burne-Jones, Lahore 26 September 1885, RK Papers, Sussex, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  41 JLK to Margaret Burne-Jones, begun Simla 10 October 1885 but not completed and posted until 31 January 1886, JLK Papers, Sussex.

  42 RK to Margaret Burne-Jones, Lahore, begun 28 November 1885, the last-quoted completed 18 December 1885, RK Papers, Sussex, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  8: ‘In vigil or toil or ease’: The Plains and the Hills, 1886

  1 RK to Lionel Dunsterville, in a letter now lost but quoted in Carrington, RK.

  2 RK, ‘The Rupaiyat of Omar Kal’vin’, CMG, 30 January 1886.

  3 JLK to Margaret Burne-Jones, begun Simla 10 October 1885 and completed Lahore 31 January 1886, JLK Papers, Sussex, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  4 RK to W. C. Crofts, Lahore 18–27 February 1886, Dalhousie University, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  5 JLK to Margaret Burne-Jones, Lahore 31 January, 1886, JLK Papers, Sussex, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  6 RK to Kay Robinson, Lahore 30 April 1886, RK Papers, Sussex, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  7 RK to Kay Robinson, Lahore 30 April 1886, RK Papers, Sussex, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  8 RK to Andrew Macdonald, Lahore, undated but February 1886, Ray Collection, Morgan Library, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  9 Kay Robinson, ‘Rudyard Kipling in India’, Pearson’s Magazine, June 1896.

  10 Kay Robinson, ‘Kipling in India’, McClure’s Magazine, July 1896.

  11 RK to Kay Robinson, Lahore 30 April 1886, RK Papers, Sussex, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  12 RK, ‘East and West’, CMG, 14 November 1885.

  13 RK, ‘The Ballad of East and West’, Macmillan’s Magazine, November 1889.

  14 ‘Sabretache’, Tatler, 21 February 1954, referred to in KJ, July 1954.

  15 RK, ‘A Week in Lahore’, CMG, 19 January 1886, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  16 Kay Robinson, ‘Rudyard Kipling in India’, in Pearson’s Magazine, June 1896.

  17 RK, ‘A Popular Picnic’, CMG, 30 March 1886, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  18 RK, ‘From the Masjid-Al-Aqsa of Sayyid Ahmed (Wahabi)’, introductory verses to ‘The Captive’, Limits and Discoveries, 1904. The verses have no relation to the story and must have been written many years earlier. Sayyid Ahmed was the charismatic leader who introduced Arabic Wahhabism to India in 1826 and then set out to make jihad against the Sikhs and the British. In Kipling’s time in India Wahhabis were involved in the Black Mountains uprising of June 1888, leading to a military campaign in the autumn. Lockwood Kipling made drawings of some Black Mountain Sayyids, most likely prisoners in Lahore Jail.

  19 RK, ‘A Week in Lahore’, CMG, 11 January 1886. The possible link with ‘The Story of Muhammad Din’ is speculated upon in Pinney, Kipling’s India.

  20 RK, ‘The Story of Muhammad Din’, CMG, 8 September 1886, collected in PTH, 1888.

  21 His letter is quoted in Emanul Karim, ‘Rudyard Kipling and Lodge Hope and Perseverance’, KJ, March 1974.

  22 The statement is made in Laski, From Palm to Pine, but no source is cited.

  23 RK, ‘The Mother Lodge’, BRB, 1895.

  24 Col. H. R. Goulding, Old Lahore: Reminiscences of a Resident, 1924.

  25 RK to Margaret Burne-Jones, Lahore 24 June 1886, RK Papers, Sussex, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  26 ATF, ‘My Brother Rudyard Kipling’, BBC Radio, 19 August 1947, subsequently published in KJ, April 1948.

  27 RK declares in one letter (27 February) that he and Robinson had ‘a lively four days together’, in another (24 June) that her unnamed suitor had written to him ‘some weeks ago’, and had ‘only seen Trix for four days’. Both RK and Trix gave the suitor’s age as twenty-eight, when Robinson was thirty-one, but would RK have called him ‘a nice youth and a merry’ if he had known he was that old?

  28 ‘The Grave of the Hundred Dead’ was evidently revised and published in the Week’s News on 7 January 1888.

  29 RK, ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’, DD, 1886.

  30 RK to W. C. Crofts, Lahore 14 September 1886, Cornell University, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  31 Given in George MacMunn, ‘The Original Gunga Deen’, KJ, July 1943.

  32 RK, ‘Only a Subaltern’, Week’s News, 25 August 1888, collected in Under the Deodars, subsequently in Wee Willie Winkie and Other Stories, 1890.

  33 RK, ‘It’s Oh to meet an Army man’, ‘De Partibus’, CMG, 27 December 1889, collected in Abaft the Funnel, 1906.

  34 RK, SM.

  35 G. C. Beresford, School-Days with Kipling.

  36 John Fraser in an interview, Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, 1978.

  37 RK, ‘Snarleyow’, National Observer, 29 November 1890, afterwards collected in BRB, 1892.

  38 RK, ‘A Levéety in the Plains’, CMG, 26 May 1886.

  39 RK, Preface to PTH, 1888.

  40 RK, ‘Love-o’-Women’, collected in Many Inventions, 1893.

  41 JLK to Margaret Burne-Jones, Simla 27 July 1886, JLK Papers, Sussex, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  42 Rudyard Kipling, ‘My First Book�
��, reprinted in KJ, March 1960.

  43 George Younghusband, Forty Years a Soldier.

  44 Sir Ian Hamilton, Listening for the Drums.

  45 RK, ‘The Mark of the Beast’, Pioneer, 12 and 14 July 1890, and New York Journal in that same month, collected in Life’s Handicap, 1891.

  46 Quoted by C. E. Buckland, Dictionary of Indian Biography.

  47 RK, ‘Our Gentleman Riders’, CMG, 20 August 1888.

  48 RK, ‘An Old Song’, CMG, 15 August 1887.

  49 George Younghusband, Forty Years a Soldier.

  50 RK, ‘Three and – an Extra’, CMG, 17 November 1886, collected in PTH, 1888.

  51 Mrs Hauksbee makes her first appearance in ‘Three and – an Extra’ and her last in ‘Mrs Hauksbee Sits It Out’, Illustrated London News, Christmas 1890, collected in John Whitehead, Mrs Hauksbee & Co.

  52 John Whitehead, ‘Mrs Hauksbee Rides Again’, KJ, September 1998 and December 1998.

  53 RK, ‘The Education of Otis Yeare’, Week’s News, 10 March 1888, collected in Under the Deodars, 1889.

  54 RK, ‘Anglo-Indian Society’, CMG, 29 January 1887, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  55 RK to Edith Macdonald, Lahore 4–5 December 1886, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  56 RK, ‘Christmas in India’, Pioneer, 24 December 1886.

  57 RK to Edith Macdonald, Lahore 4–5 December 1886, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  9: ‘Forty foolish yarns’: From Lahore to Allahabad, 1887–8

  1 RK to Thacker, Spink and Co., Lahore 3 February 1887, Yale University Library, uncollected, referred to in Lycett, RK, 1999.

  2 RK to Mrs Maunsell, Lahore 10 June 1887, Library of Congress, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  3 RK to Mrs Isabella Burton, Lahore 26 October 1887, private collection, composite published in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I. Further details of this and succeeding letters to Mrs Burton are found in Lycett, RK.

  4 Sir Ian Hamilton, Listening for the Drums.

  5 RK to Margaret Burne-Jones, Lahore 27 September 1885, RK Papers, Sussex, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.

  6 RK, ‘For the Women’, CMG, 18 February 1887, collected in Rutherford, Early Verse.

  7 RK, ‘What the People Said’, CMG, 4 May 1887, reprinted in the third edition of Departmental Ditties, 1889.