313. Rudyard Kipling: Escaping India & Writing The Jungle Book (Part 2)

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0:29Hello and welcome. There is no Anita, I'm afraid, in this episode as she is still in A &E. So all your prayers. Her back is giving her terrible pain. But with me is my great friend Andrew Lysett, the brilliant biographer of Rudyard Kipling, who took us in the last episode so brilliantly through Kipling's childhood and his early writings. Now, in this episode, we are going to follow Rudyard Kipling through his brilliant Indian short stories, including classics such as The Man Who Would Be King that became that famous movie with Michael Caine and Sean Connery. And then his move to America, where improbably in Vermont, he wrote The Jungle Book and Kim, two of the greatest volumes of British fiction about India.

1:17We last saw Kipling with Mrs. Hawksby and Mrs. Reaver Andrew up in similar dining in Polities and involved in Himalayan flirtations. By the end of the summer, he's back on the planes and he's beginning to publish short stories in the Christmas annual of the Civil and Military Gazette. Now, one of the first stories he writes, extraordinary tale called The Strange Ride of Moruby Dukes. And this tells the tale of an unimaginative engineer, a typical servant of empire, who is going out for an evening ride. He's got a slight fever, so he's trying to ride it off and wake himself up. and the horse careers off and he ends up falling into a pit where, says Kipling in this work of fiction, the undead of India, those who recover on funeral paths, people who are suffering from cholera but who suddenly get better on their way to the cremation gaps, they're not allowed back into society, according to Kipling, and they are put in this pit where they are living off crows and living this half-life, this life of almost like sort of the undead.

2:28And it's a strange and weird tale that reminded me some of the early H.G. Wells science fiction. It's not quite of this world. Andrew, what do you make of this story? I agree with you. It is a very weird story. And it shows Kipling's sense of alienation from the society that he finds himself in. I mean, both the immediate society of Anglo-Indians, but also the wider India. He is finally helped out by, I think it's his bearer. Who puts a rope down and hauls him out. Yes, who sort of faithfully has followed him and discovered what has happened to him and puts a rope down, as you say, and pulls him out from this nightmare.

3:14It shows the sense that Kipling is beginning to develop and which actually lies at the bottom of his stories, that India is a fascinating place, but it's also a harrowing place, and it's full of pitfalls. His literature is really about how he, as a sort of Brit in India, negotiates these things. And partly, obviously, one way that he negotiates is it goes up to similar, where Little Britain is recreated. Now, after this, he produces his first proper a book in 1886 called Departmental Ditties. Not a title, perhaps, that would sell today, but it actually is a huge hit, isn't it? 500 copies are printed at the Gazette, and it sells out immediately.

3:57It's then republished by the pioneer and then by Thacker Spink and Co. And he becomes sort of standard railway reading for the Anglo-Indian community. He's their own sort of Chekhov or their Tolstoy recording their lives. And his work is terrifically popular. I mean, the age of only, what is he now, 18? Still a teenager. So this is the point at which he writes The Man Who Would Be King. This is more famous, I think, now as a movie with Sean Connery than it is as a short story. But it works very well. I just reread it this week and it stands up fantastically well. He's sitting in his newspaper in the fictional story when this man turns up with this tale.

4:36It's a sort of adventure story, really, and that's why it sort of translates very well into the cinema. It's about these two ne 'er-do-wells. At least one of them has a military background. They sort of go out into French-er land, if you like. It's in kind of Afghanistan, I think. It's Pichy Dravo and Carnahan are the two protagonists, who, again, are kind of early versions of what will be very common in Kipling, which is this sort of, you know, the Irish common soldier who he makes a point of sketching and bringing to life. And basically, these British stroke Irish people try and make themselves the kings of this wayward people on the northwest frontier.

5:18They adopt the sort of mythology of kingship. Which is related to Freemason. It's got a whole Freemason thread running through it, isn't it? Funny enough, that is perhaps one of the underestimated aspects of Kipling, that there is a sort of Masonic theme running through him because he became a member of the Masonic Lodge in Lahore, which he liked to present as a kind of multicultural environment. I think it was one of the very few places in the Raj that Indians and Brit could meet on the same social level. It really did have a levelling effect. Now, the man who would be king has a very gruesome ending.

5:55I'll just read a little fragment from it. Do you know what they did to peachy between the two pine trees they crucified him sir as peachy's hands will show they used wooden pegs for his hands and his feet and he didn't die he hung there and screamed and they took him down the next day and said it was a miracle that he wasn't dead they took him down poor old peachy that hadn't done any harm that hadn't any done to them he rocked to and fro and wept bitterly wiping his eyes with the back of his scarred hands and moaning like a child that That story seems to pick up on two real stories. There's one of an American who set up a kingdom in Gur in Afghanistan and another figure called Bihari Wilson who set up a sort of kingdom in the Punjab hills very briefly.

6:41But other of Kipling's stories mirrored more closely his own life. And I'm very intrigued by On the City Wall, Andrew, which is a story which sort of implies that Kipling's going out at night, wandering through Lahore and visiting the red light district because he seems to have very intimate knowledge of the Kutis, as they're called, the Tawafs or the courtesans. Tell us about On the City Wall, 1889. Well, yes, Kipling found sleeping difficult. And when this became oppressive, he used to get up at night and he used to go and wander into the city and find what I guess was open at the time, which was opium shops and places like that.

7:20And he went into them and he wrote about them. And one of the things that he wrote about was the world of the prostitutes who inhabited the darkness of Lahore. But he wrote very sympathetically about them. And one of the memorable things about on the city wall is his portrayal of this bejeweled, very gracious, very educated prostitute called Laloon. This is very much a British understanding of the Tawafs who are not prostitutes, they're such more courtesans, I think you'd call them probably. I think you're right, yeah, I think that's absolutely true. While there is definitely sex available, these places are hubs of gossip, places where young men get sent to learn manners and learn the way of the world.

7:59It's much more a salon than simply a place that people go for sex. As well as focusing on the demimonde and the world which most Brits would not have seen, this world of courtesans and opium dens and so on, he's also going into the barracks and recording the speech patterns and the ways of the simple squaddies, the Irish and the British recruits, who often get left out of the official records, but who were the backbone of the British Army. He liked to go to Myanmar, which was the barracks just outside the city. He got to know the squaddies. He wrote very sympathetically about them in stories like Soldiers 3.

8:41He liked to have his groups of soldiers. So he had three soldiers, an Irishman, a Yorkshireman and a Cockney. So that was very important in his world picture because he was beginning to develop this sense of how the Raj operated. And this was also reflected in his stories because there were often appreciations, if you want to use that word, of the administrators. And this became, again, a sort of plank in his understanding of India. But within about two or three years, he becomes notably reactionary. He absorbed the world of the club. He was a member of the Lahore club and he used to go in there.

9:20They were incredibly reactionary. But on the other hand, he liked what they brought to India. He thought that they brought Orday. They were the people who made sure that the railways ran, that law was administered. And he admires these people. There's no sense of speaking from De 'o Amba, is there? He's not talking down to them. He admires the Irish squaddies. He admires the engineers building the bridges, the guys in the public Works Department, keeping the sewers clean. These are people that were very low on the Raj hierarchy, but he sort of turns them into heroes in his stories. Yes, indeed.

9:55And this, of course, contributed to the popularity of his stories because there was a wider constituency because these were people who appreciated that. But yeah, it was a conservative view of the Raj that he was in favor of the administration as it was. He was against any kind of fiddling with it. Now, in 1887, he's already at the age of 22, the best-selling author in India. His stories are on sale on railways. He's read in the newspapers. And he's moved from being this sort of brattish 16-year-old fresh from school to this highly respected figure, age 22, who's become a local celebrity. He moves from Lahore to Illehabad in central India, and this is the setting for his last years in India, to the pioneer.

10:45Indeed. His boss, chief of the Civil and Military Gazette, has fingers in lots of pies, and one was a rather more popular paper, which was The Pioneer in Illehabad. He was also given a bit more license to sort of go and travel and such. It leads to some, what you might call, travel writing about Rajasthan. Rajasthan. This is the princely states, which are half outside of British control. They administer their own courts. There's a resident, but otherwise it's not British territory. So he writes interesting travel writing about the princely states, but he'd also upset some people, doesn't he? There's one character called Hersey who tries to horsewhip him.

11:20What's that story, Andrew? That's to do with Kipling's sort of burgeoning antipathy to the forerunner of the Indian National Congress, which was having a gathering, a meeting, one of the annual meetings in El Abad. Kipling wrote about this, and he wrote pejoratively about Captain Hersey, who was of mixed race origin. It's a distinguished Anglo-Indian family. The Herseys were like the skinners. They were one of the sort of grandees of the Anglo-Indian community. Kipling wrote disparagingly and rudely about his dark skin. And Hersey came to the pioneer office. With his horse whip. Indeed, he was going to beat the living daylights out of Kipling.

11:59I don't think he did, actually. Kipling, I think, was luckily out when he had turned up, when he would have been his just desserts. Yes, right. It's interesting that this is indicative of Kipling's growing demonstrative conservatism. He developed this idea that any kind of Indian self-expression in politics was going to be dangerous for the Raj. Yes, I mean, even by the standards of the time, people occasionally defend Kipling, say that by the standards of the time, he wasn't reactionary. But he actually was, wasn't he? I mean, there was many liberals in India that were trying to widen Indian self-rule.

12:32The Indian National Congress had been founded by an Englishman, Alan Octavian Hume. And Kipling thought this was anathema to him. This was not what should be happening at all. So he was, even by the standards of the Raj, increasingly a reactionary. Absolutely right. So by the stage, Kipling is now ready to spread his wings. He's a celebrity in India, but he's not widely known outside. So in 1889, with Hersey and his horsewhip not far behind him, he's packing up his things and moving to London. But he decides to do so rather than the normal route of heading westwards by the Suez Canal back to Europe.

13:12He decides to take a long sea voyage by the Pacific and via America. More on this after the break. Hello, I'm Professor Hannah Fry. And I'm Michael Stevens. Together we host The Rest is Science, a brand new show from Goalhanger. Every week we take a fresh look at the familiar. We're going to be exploring the forces, the theories, and the phenomena that shape how we live in, think about, and see the world. We're going to pull apart what we take for granted to reveal the unexpected patterns and hidden logic just beneath the surface. Because that's what moves science forward. Not the polishing of answers, but the sharpening of questions.

13:53It's curiosity that sparks those, hey, wait, how does that actually work, kind of a moment that changes the way we see the world. Yeah, I mean, science isn't a subject. It's a way of seeing it. It's a way of noticing all of the extraordinary things that are hiding in plain sight, and realizing that the familiar was never ordinary at all. Stick around until the end of this episode for a first listen. And if curiosity gets the better of you, join us every Tuesday and Thursday for new episodes of The Rest is Science.

14:30Welcome back. So it's 1889 and the 23-year-old Rudyard Kipling is leaving India. He pays one last visit to India after this, but basically this is the end of his Indian phase of his life. And yet it's something he continues to write about for the rest of his life, but it's no longer a place that he will be based. And this is the moment, age 23, that he discovers his love of travel, particularly of the high seas. Tell us about his journey away from India. Kipling decides that he's going to travel back to England. He's been sort of seduced by the possibility of greater audiences for his increasingly popular stories and poems.

15:08He should go for the big market in Britain. Does he have any audience at all in Britain at this point, Andrew, or is he just read in India? Very small. You know, he's been just being picked up by one or two sort of critics in England. It's not an audience at all. So he wants to sort of crack that new market. He's decided that he's not going to go back to England via the sort of traditional route via Suez. Hong Kong he goes to and is rather impressed by. Hong Kong famously goes to Burma and enthuses about the pagoda at Mandalay and the women. And that's the basis of one of his most famous poems.

15:43As quoted rather embarrassingly by Boris Johnson on a diplomatic visit to Myanmar. That is correct. Yes, I'd forgotten that. Anyway, he sort of makes his way round. In Singapore, he sees for the first time Chinese people. And this impression is sort of continued when he makes his way up Hong Kong and goes to Japan. He idolizes, not quite the right word. Yes, he realizes he's onto something completely different in Japan, that this is an Asia that he doesn't recognize. And he then heads to San Francisco, where rather unflatteringly for America, as he heads through the Golden Gate and sees a blockhouse, He remarks, it could easily be silenced by two gunboats from Hong Kong.

16:25So he's going there very much with the eyes of a British imperialist, even when he's in San Francisco. This was at a time just after the Civil War when relations between Britain and America was a bit icy. He makes his progress through the United States. He goes to Chicago and is appalled by the meat markets there. He goes to meet Mark Twain in upstate New York. Who he admires. He's a big fan of Mark Twain, isn't he? He greatly admires. And then comes back to England. Kipling in 1889 is back in London. And he is appalled by the place. This is the place that was going to be his making. What doesn't he like about London?

17:04It's too dirty, too crowded. What's wrong with it? The weather. Yeah, sure, you could say that. Can't argue with that. There's something else about the cultural ambiance of the place that he doesn't like. He'd been thinking of going to visit every theatre in London while he's in India. but when he arrives, it isn't at all what he imagines him. No, right. He doesn't like, you know, the sort of emerging world of Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde would not be to Kipling's taste at all. He doesn't like the artistic world that he discovers in England. He begins to yearn for Indian certainties, the sort of the order of Indian society.

17:40Now, Andrew, he doesn't much take to literary London, but he does make friends with a man called Wolcott Ballestier. Tell us about him. Wilkert Molestia was an American publisher, basically, or agent. He was over here touting for English talent for American publishers and American magazines. Kipling befriends him. They become quite close. Kipling is going through a bit of a crisis. He really doesn't like it in London. Might almost be called a nervous breakdown. So the certainties of Britain imagined from India are one thing, but the reality of Victorian London is another thing altogether. Yeah.

18:20Kipling is disappointed by London. He likes the musicals. He enjoys the uproarious atmosphere behind Charing Cross, gets these songs into his work. But he's still looking back to India, isn't he? He's writing about Indian barracks, about where ballads are written at this point. He's uneasy in London. There's no doubt about that. And he meets this American publisher, stroke agent, Walcott Ballestia. They actually write a novel together. Not one of his better works. No, no, it's definitely not. The Now Lacker, a story of East and West. At one stage, Kipling sort of tries to escape London. He goes on a great voyage, goes down to Australia.

18:56And he's actually quite popular there in Australia already. But he wants to meet one of his great heroes, Robert Louis Stevenson, who is not available. So he comes back and he comes back via Nahor. He makes that return visit to India for the last time that he goes to India. Which is the last time he'll see it. He continued writing about it the rest of his life, but it's the last time, age 25? 18, 91. Yeah, that's right. He goes to Lahore. There's a wonderful description of his journey from Ceylon, Sri Lanka to Lahore. While he's in Lahore, he has this telegram from Walcott Ballester's sister, Caroline, who Kipling has got to know.

19:29Carrie. Carrie, yeah. And Carrie says, come back. Walcott is dead. and this is a great shock to Kipling because Wolcott is a sort of bosom buddy of his. He rushes back from Lahore to London. I'm not even sure if he actually makes it for the funeral. I don't think he does but the kind of shared experience of the mourning for Wolcott. This charismatic figure throws him together with Carrie. Absolutely. Brings him together with Wolcott's sister and within a very short time they are married. People such as Henry James who's a mutual friend kind of looks slightly askance on this union. Henry James makes a speech at the wedding, which doesn't sound like one of the, it sounds like the kind of the best man's speech from hell.

20:10He says, it's a union of which I don't forecast the future. That's not what you want to hear on your wedding day. I'm afraid that is true. This is something to do with a slight prejudice that there was within Kipling's family against him marrying an American woman. The fact is that she's a very powerful woman and becomes his mainstay throughout the rest of his life. What sort of marriage is it, Andrew? I mean, is Henry James' right to be skeptical, or is she actually a rock that he relies on? Of course she's a rock. She sort of runs his household and allows him to get on with writing, like most writers.

20:44They've got to have somebody a bit like that in their lives. He describes her in his autobiography as the committee of ways and means. And she is powerful enough to sort of entice him to go with her back to her home in America, to Vermont. Do they have means? Are they a richer family than the Kiplings? I think they are, yeah. They've got links to old families in the United States, in Chicago, and a statesman in Washington. But she is, I guess, adamant that they will live in Vermont. And he builds a house there. One of his biographers says it's the only ugly house in Vermont. It's an acquired taste, let's put it that way.

21:23Because his later English house, Bateman's, is absolutely charming. But I've seen pictures of Naulaka and it's horror. The Naulaka, as it's called in memory of India and of Wolcott. His joint novel, yeah. He begins to understand America, which is a kind of another awakening for him because he finds that it's not all happy in America, that Americans are a bit too democratic for him. It doesn't have the autocratic government that he admires in India. Yeah, right, exactly. But they have a daughter, don't they? 1892, Josephine is born, and it's a place where he manages to get a lot of work done. He's living in the countryside.

22:02He's healthy and energetic and productive. And bizarrely, it's in America that he writes his two greatest Indian books, or certainly the two books for which he's most famous. And in 1893, the year after Josephine is born and dedicated to her, he writes The Jungle Book, a story of Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves. Is this at the time as big a success? I mean, today it's probably the single most famous book he wrote, thanks to Disney. At the time, is it a big success? I don't think it is the amazing success that it has continued to be, but it is indicative of Kipling going through a period of incorporating his Indian experience.

22:45So those memories of India. After The Jungle Book comes Kim, which many people regard as his masterpiece. He doesn't finish it in America, but he does begin it. And I think it's probably my favorite Kipling book. It's a book which I enjoyed much more on a second reading later in life than I first did when I came across it at school. it's the story of kimball o 'hara the son of an irish color sergeant and you infer a eurasian nursemaid he follows a tibetan lama on religious pilgrimage to benares the lama is trying to find the river that will wash away his sins but within the pages of kim are some of the best description most evocative description of india that we get in any british writing on india also some of the most sympathetic writing on India.

23:32It's almost as if, despite his reactionary political views, his innate love of the colour of India, which he grew up with, is expressed in this extraordinary masterpiece. Tell us about the writing of Kim. I know it doesn't compete in America, but let's talk about it now, Andrew. It is Kipling's masterpiece, enduring masterpiece of literature. It's not a story, it's his attempt at a full-scale novel. He hadn't had great success up to that stage in writing a novel, he tried to incorporate his love of India in all its facets. And it starts with an amazing evocative picture of Lahore. I'll read it.

24:11I have it in front of me, this wonderful opening passage. He sat in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zamzama on her brick platform, opposite the old Ajaybgar, the wonder house, as the natives call the Lahore Museum, who holds the Zamzama, the far-breathing dragon holds the Punjab, for the great green bronze piece is always the first of the conqueror's loot. The Wonder House in the background there is the museum where his father was the curator. And there are sort of all sorts of fascinating sort of allusions to the artifacts that Lockwood Kipling has accumulated there, the sort of Buddhist.

24:49Gandharan sculpture, exactly. It is the colors, the lights, the smells that come alive, isn't it, it's this wonderful portrait. That's right. So the story gets tied up with the great game, doesn't it, Andrew, that amid this sea of people with Kim and the llama wandering around, Kim gets taken up by Colonel Creighton, who's the head of the, I suppose, the Secret Service. Is that right? That's right. And, you know, this is one of the great stories about the great game, the battle between Britain and Russia for control over the sort of wider Indosphere. Crichton sort of ensures that Kim is educated in the colonial ways.

25:26And Kim, who had been this sort of street boy, becomes part of the establishment. He wants to be still free. Meanwhile, there's a sort of the lama following his path. Looking for the river that will give him eternal life and cleanse his sins. So it's a story of two paths to understanding and living in one's environment. You have the Sahib's way that Kim inculcated into it, Lat Matinir. And then you've got the Lama, who Kim goes a long way with on the Tibetan Buddhist path, but eventually is pulled towards the colonial world. And there's echoes of the previous book, the Jungle Book here. Maugli, too, is living away from the Brits, but is pulled into that world.

26:11He, again, is at the end of the Jungle Book, he goes back to, quote, civilization. The two books have parallels, don't they? Well put. They're very interesting. Yes, yeah, you're absolutely right. I should read a little bit, Andrew, a small snippet here. This broad, smiling river of life, he considered, was a vast improvement on the cramped and crowded Lahore streets. There were new people and new sights at every stride. Casts he knew and cast were altogether out of his experience. They met a troop of long-haired, strong-scented Sansis, with baskets of lizard and other unclean food on their backs, their lean dogs sniffing at their heels.