312. Rudyard Kipling: Son of Empire (Part 1)

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0:28the influence of India on Kipling resulted in what has always struck me as a personality in conflict with itself part bazaar boy part sab Kipling is a writer with a storm inside him and he creates a mirror storm of contradictory responses in the reader I have never been able to read Kipling calmly. Anger and delight are incompatible emotions, yet the stories do indeed have the power, simultaneously, to infuriate and to entrance. Well, that was Salman Rushdie writing as a young critic around the time he wrote Midnight's Children about Rudyard Kipling, the subject of not just this week's pod, but an entire mini-series that we've been saving up as the climax of our Writers in Empire series.

1:19And sadly, it's just me this week because poor Anita has a bad back and is in A and E, so please say a prayer for her. And I'm going to particularly miss her this week because this subject is one that we talked about doing right from the first inception or conception of this pod. And it was always something that we disagreed on. Anita and I agree on most things. And Kipling is something we disagreed on. I'm rather a convert to Kipling. And in middle age, I've rather judged him anew as someone I'm very interested in. Juanita just hates him and thinks he's an old bigot. Before I introduce our superstar guest, who is waiting to say hello to you all, I should just lay out my cards about why we're doing Kipling, because like Rushdie, Kipling is a writer who fills me with contradictory emotions.

2:05The first thing to be said is that Roger Kipling is part of the furniture in England in an odd sort of way. He's one of the writers sitting in Westminster Abbey. He's there along with Tennyson and Hardy and T.S. Eliot as, you know, one of the great writers who lived in Britain. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yet today, I don't know whether he is so much read. And in India, where I'm speaking from, I actually had to ring round about four bookshops in order to get a copy of his short stories, which definitely would not have been the case 20 years ago when I first started reading him, or 40 years ago, maybe, when I first started reading him.

2:40He's a writer that today probably is better known secondhand through the Disney version of The Jungle Book, maybe, or through the terms that he coined, which are now in everyday speech. East is east and west is west. The white man's burden. He who travels the fastest is he who travels alone. Most ancient profession in the world. The female of the species is deadlier than the male. And so on. Going finally to obviously his poem, which is frequently voted still Britain's favourite poem, If You Can Keep Your Head When All About You Are Losing Theirs and Blaming It On You. Because despite all that, I think Kipling is a writer that people love to hate, and in many ways with good reason.

3:18In all sorts of ways today, politically, Kipling's views seem absurd, xenophobic and ultra-racist. Not many people today hate the idea of Mahatma Gandhi, and Kipling did. He also donated money for General Dyer after he committed the Jolly and Wallabag massacre. Kipling adored Rhodes, who has been an entire movement in Oxford to remove his statue. He unequivocally approved of wars of expansion, and he urged everyone to pick up the white man's burden. Why then should anyone bother reading him today? And I would argue that Kipling should be read because he was a writer of genius. And he has an odd and surprisingly wide-based fan club, not just the kind of usual suspects that would enjoy a sort bit of ultra-racist Victorian prose.

4:06People like Edmund Said, the post-colonial critic, he wrote, Kipling would no more have questioned the right of white Europeans to rule than he would have argued with the Himalayas. Yet he was still, as Said wrote, a major artist. And his masterpiece came a remarkable, complex novel belonging to the world's very greatest literature. The postmodernist poet Craig Rains calls Kipling our very greatest short story writer. So when we read Kipling, we have to hold these two things together in our head. Even by the standards of his own time, he was ultra reactionary. He believed, as the white man's burden says, the subject peoples of the empire were half devil and half child.

4:44Yet he's also, and simultaneously, one of the greatest British writers and one who, in the words of Saeed, brought to a basically insular and provincial British audience the colour, glamour and romance of the British overseas experience. So to conclude our writers and empire, we're going to do this most contradictory and difficult of imperial writers. The man who, for better or worse, was regarded in his own lifetime as the laureate of empire. And in this first episode today, we're going to deal with the Indian phase of his life. And in order to guide us through this very difficult writer, difficult in terms of how to stomach him and read him today, not that his work is particularly difficult, but it's trying to understand, in a sense, how to translate this very Victorian mindset to our own time.

5:30And to help us with this, we have his most talented of his many biographers, one of the writers I most admire. Hello, I'm Andrew Lysett, yes. Andrew Lysett, you're very, very welcome. Andrew has written many great biographies. I've strong-armed him to come in today because his work on Kipling, I think, has stood the test of time. And maybe we could start, Andrew, by just telling us why he's someone that you thought you'd be willing to devote five years of your life, presumably, to reading every word that he'd written and analysing him. Why Kipling? Yes, indeed. There was both the literary side and the political side and the journalistic side.

6:10Somehow the mix seemed to be just ripe for a new approach. And we're now talking about 20 odd years ago. But whenever I come back to him, it's always with great enthusiasm. Let's dive into his life. Before we do that, we should say that if you want to hear the whole of our Kipling three-part series in one big binge, then you can sign up to the Empire Club for early access. Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up or click the hyperlink in the episode description. Anyway, let's now dive in. Andrew, do you want to talk about where he was born and when? Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, as it was then called, Mumbai now.

6:48It was end of 1865. His father was an architectural sculptor who'd had quite a distinguished career in England, studied in Staffordshire, Burslem, where he'd met his wife, Alice, the daughter of the local Methodist minister. and okay this is perhaps a bit of a diversion but um rudyard kipling's father lockwood had um wooed his mother alice at lake rudyard in in staffordshire near burzland hence the name and hence the name of course yeah lake rudyard lockwood kipling could have carried on in england but somehow he was attracted to a post at the sir jamstitchi gg boy school of art in bombay kipling is born there very close today to the gateway of india the taj hotel anyone that knows Bombay, the VT Terminus, absolute heart of Bombay.

7:38So Alice, who described as the daughter of a Methodist minister, was also the sister of Berne-Jones's wife. I mean, they're kind of well-connected, arty world. And Stanley Baldwin is the first cousin. So not only do we have Berne-Jones on one side, but three times prime minister. They were a very formidable family, which actually helped propel Kipling through his latter part of his life. This is although very distant from Kipling's childhood, which was entirely in Bombay, separated from all these people for his first years. And we have his own accounts of the kind of sensory impressions that Bombay and India left for him, impressions of daybreak, light, colour, golden and purple fruits.

8:19And he was spending time with his ayah, his nursemaid, speaking Hindustani as a first language. And we know from one account that she had to remind him to speak even in English, that Hindustani was his natural way of expressing himself as a baby. I mean, he used to love going out with his ayah and taking walks along the esplanade. He took in the sights and the sounds, as you've said. The light was very important in his early childhood. And then it was all taken away from him. In this dramatic way, which some biographers have seen as, you know, a psychological explanation of the kind of violence and nastiness and harshness of many of his stories.

9:01Tell us about the House of Desolation. Tell us about him moving to England and the trauma of this experience. At the age of six, he was taken by his parents to England when Lockwood went on leave. To my mind, one of the kind of weirdest parts of the story. The family went on a sort of mini holiday to Littlehampton. And then suddenly, Kipling found that he was taken away from Littlehampton, taken just down the coast there to Portsmouth and left with his sister at not very opulent house in Portsmouth's suburb of South Sea. It was called Lawn Lodge. South Sea was a strange kind of magnet for people who'd served in colonial places.

9:43Kipling was taken with his sister and they were more or less unceremoniously dumped with this family called the Holloways in South Sea. And this gradually became what Kipling later called the House of Desolation. It became the focus of a very unhappy period of his childhood. I mean, it was brutal. The woman into whose hands he was committed punished him. These were his sort of foster parents. They were called the Holloways. And there was quite an amiable old chap called Captain Pryser Agar Holloway. Kipling got on quite well with him and they used to take walks and they used to go down to the dockyards in Portsmouth and Holloway would show him ships and such, you know, interest Kipling in naval life.

10:23But Holloway's wife, she was a very prissy evangelical character and she took against Rudyard Kipling. She had a son called Harry between the two, between... This was turned into one of his most famous short stories, wasn't it? Barbar Blacksheep. Indeed. I've got it open in front of me. I'll just do a very quick little extract to show how miserable the fictional version of Kipling is. You're a liar, a young liar, said Harry with great enthusiasm, and you're having tea down here because you're not fit to speak to us, and you're not fit to speak to your sister again either, till mother gives you leave.

10:57You'll corrupt her. We're only fit to associate with the servant. Mother says so. Untrustworthy in one thing, untrustworthy in all, said Aunty Rosa, and Harry felt that black sheep was delivered into his hands. He would wake him up in the night to ask him why he was such a liar. I don't know, Punch would reply. Then you ought to get up and pray to God for a new heart. And so on, it goes on. It's one of those terrible Victorian tales of sort of the torture of children, rather like something from Dickens. That was a psychological torture, but also he was beaten. Kipling liked to retreat into reading.

11:31He did quite a lot of his early reading while he was there at the House of Desolation in South Sea. And he's eventually saved Andrew, from this by Aunty Georgie Byrne-Jones, who pulls the alarm cord after a year or two. That is correct, yes. His mother's sister, Georgina, kept a bit of an eye on him there, and he used to go to the Byrne-Jones house in Fulham, and that was a bit of a respite for him. Georgie sends a sort of alarm call, doesn't she, to India, and his mother, who's more or less abandoned him, hasn't particularly asked his sister to keep an eye on him. Potentially, other families with family in England would have put the child in with a sister rather than with complete strangers.

12:07Yeah, that's right. But the warning signs had gone out and Kipling's mother, Alice, comes back to sort of see what's going on. She goes to him. He was lying in bed when she arrived. He sort of puts his arm up to fend something off. He thought he was going to get beaten again by his mother. But she was able to extricate Kipling from there. It became a kind of great symbol of the hardship that Kipling endured, physical and psychological hardship that had scarred Kipling's early life. But his sister, Trix, stayed there after he'd gone. And I always find that a bit odd. If one child's being tortured, exactly.

12:42So after the horrors of the House of Desolation, things are now looking up as Kipling's mother rescues him and plans are made for his future.

12:59Welcome back. Before we go back to Kipling's life, let me tell you quickly about our future live show on saturday the 5th of september 2026 we will be at the south back center in london as part of a goal hanger takeover weekend from the 4th to the 6th of september 2026 and our lovely empire club members will be emailed a pre-sale link on the 4th of december at 10 a.m that's this week and if you want to join the club it's empirepoduk.com if you haven't already that's right if you want early access for tickets see us live at the inaugural rest is fest it's empirepoduk.com if you aren't already a member that's empirepoduk.com anyway back to Kipling.

13:45Following the trauma of the house of desolation Alice Kipling's mother took the children to stay on a farm in Essex near Epping Forest and Rudyard ran around with his first times British Prime Minister. And then at the age of 12, he starts off at the United Services College at Westwood Ho in Devon. Was it an improvement on the House of Desolation? Couldn't have been worse. This was a sort of step down from the main stepping stones to careers in the military, which was Sandhurst and Woolwich. Which was Halebury. No, it was actually linked to Halebury, but it wasn't Sandhurst. It was sort of reflected something that was happening in British society, which was that commissions into the army couldn't actually be bought any longer.

14:34So there's much more competition and competition was the name of the game. The United Service College at Westwood Hope, the headmaster was Crumb Price, who was a friend of Alice Kipling in particular. He was the sort of coterie of artists who surrounded Alice and her sisters, who sort of introduced them to the pre-Raphalites. He was a sort of very humane man. It was kind of odd that he became headmaster of this military college, basically, because he nurtured Kipling. He encouraged him to read. He gave him the run of his own library. He introduced him to journalism. Got him to edit the school magazine.

15:12Exactly. Kipling got to edit the school magazine, which is quite fun, I guess. And he got to know about printing, etc, etc. It was a formative period. And Kipling was already showing signs by the time he was sort of 16 of being a subprogedy. He was writing extraordinary essays and his parents were quietly publishing, without his permission, his poems that he was producing. I mean, definitely he was beginning to show the signs of that great talent. Well, he was obviously very talented from the start, but also he became part of a little group of three of them. He called them later the Dusky Crew.

15:50He and a couple of his friends, Lionel Dunsterville and George Beresford. And they became a kind of little clique. And he later wrote about them. They became the basis of a series of stories that he wrote about school children and the kind of awfulness they could manifest. And this was his stalky stories. But he was a happier time. I mean, he's had this miserable and traumatic time at the House of Desolation. He's been punished. He's almost gone blind. and at school he discovers himself he discovers he's got talent crumb takes an interest in him but there's no money to send him to college he was the top of the class but while his friends were thinking of possibly going to university for kipling it was straight back to endure age 16 there was no question of there was no finance was there um there's no money to send him to university there was a a curious time which is sometimes forgotten that kipling was actually going to studied to be a doctor.

16:46And I think he did a little bit of training as a doctor, but very, very short time. But his father had moved to Lahore. He'd taken control of the museum there. That's Lockwood Kipling, who was curator of the Lahore Museum. Tell us about what it's like for Kipling to return to India, because this is a place he'd be very happy as a child. He has all these memories of the light and the colour and the warmth and his relationship with his ire and so on. He arrives back in Bombay, he gets on the frontier He starts to recognize Hindustani phrases that he's forgotten. He even can speak some Hindustani without remembering what it actually means.

17:20Correct. Yeah. He was actually very excited by it all. You know, he sort of took to being a journalist in Lahore. It was an enterprise that didn't have much manpower to it. So he was plunged in. He was 50 % of the staff. That's right. It was only him and one other. That's exactly right. Yeah. So, you know, he found himself sort of going out into the countryside, going out to the Amritsa Fair. He wrote an article about that. Now, Andrew, he's living at home. He's with Trix and his parents. He's going out, covering these stories, sometimes dining in the club. He regarded as a bit bratty. Occasionally, people regard him as sort of slightly jumped up above himself.

18:00But his first fiction comes from the hill station of Simla, doesn't it? Yes. There was columns to fill on the Civil and Military Gazette, and he used to go up with his parents. Initially, I think he went to Missouri, but then he went to Simla. This is a class difference. Missouri is the kind of second division hill. Time when everything in British India is very ordered by your rank and where you are in the social hierarchy. And Kipling and his wife initially are not very high in the hierarchy. So they go to Missouri. But similar is where the viceroy and the commander in chief and the fancy ADCs and all the glamour goes to.

18:39It's like a sort of can or in Russian terms, Yalta, maybe the Crimea. This is sort of like Chekhov writing about ladies with lapdogs walking along the beaches in Crimea. Kipling, at the same time, is describing a similar sort of colonial world in the hill stations of the Himalayas. That's right. Kipling was actually appointed the correspondent of the Civil and Military Gazette in Simla. And he used to go out there and, you know, that had become, as you say, the sort of centre of government. Everything moved from Calcutta to Simla. It's kind of bonkers to us that you have the whole of British India, this sort of vast administration moving from Calcutta halfway across India to a ledge in the Himalayas connected by a goat path.

19:25It's almost as if they're sort of inviting insurrection. Well, it was something to do with the heat of Calcutta. And, you know, they had to get out. They wanted to recreate or they wanted to experience something a bit more like home. And this was, you know, the milder climate of the hill station. And they do recreate home, don't they? They create these little bungalows with names like sort of Balmoral or Edgerton. That's right. They have all these sort of very English names with English blooms in the garden. But what Kipling uniquely tells us, which we don't get in the other sources, is that this is a place of enormous sort of flirtation.

20:04All the wives are up there. There's only the glamorous top rank of the men are there. And all these affairs are taking place. Kipling says, Jack's own Jill goes up the hill to Murray or Chakrata. Jack remains and dies in the plains and Jill remarries soon after. That's the sort of verse he's writing. That's right. Kipling immediately became very interested in the life up there in the hills and sort of incorporated with his knowledge of what was going on down in the plains. And there was that sort of dichotomy between the two kind of existences. But he made his name, really, I suppose it's true to say, but writing about the intrigues of life up in the hills.

20:45He started writing these stories for his paper about the marital discords that emerged and the ambitions that people had. The world that Kipling reveals that we don't really get in any other sources because it's the sort of tittle-tattle, which obviously is not recorded in state papers and so on, is this world that Kipling presents of these, what he calls the grass widows, Mrs. Hawksby or Mrs. Reaver, one of the town's carnivorous memsabs. He rode with her and walked with her and picnicked with her and tiffened at Politties with her till people put up their eyebrows and said, shocking. Yes, indeed.

21:21I mean, these were all printed in his newspaper. And pretty soon he developed them into what became one of his first books, Plain Tales from the Hills, which collected these stories about life in the hill station with the coming together of government affairs, marital affairs, marital affairs going wrong, all that in the context of the development of life in India, because underneath it, there was understanding and an attempt to portray what was going on in the bazaar, because that's part of the plain terms of the hills as well. We have to end it there, but in the next episode, we are going to see Kipling's literary career suddenly explode.

22:04This young journalist writing short story turns into the chronicler of the British Raj, both within India and then to produce great books like The Jungle Book and Kim when he moves to Vermont and from the United States continues to write about India. If you can't wait to hear that, then sign up to The Empire Club to binge the next episode right now at empirepoduk.com. Anita will be back soon. But for now, it's goodbye from me, William Drimple, and the wonderful Andrew Leissett. See you soon. you