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Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936): Author Profile

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Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a prolific writer and journalist who wrote extensively about India. He was born in Bombay in 1865, and sent to England to study at age five, away from his parents. He returned to India in 1882, and lived with his family at Lahore for several years. There he began working as a reporter for the Lahore-based newspaper, the Civil & Military Gazette. He also began writing and publishing poems and stories, at first collaboratively with other family members (especially his sister, Alice), and then eventually under his own independent signature. Between 1886 and 1888, Rudyard Kipling published a large number of short stories and poems related to Anglo-Indian life, many of them in collections like Plain Tales from the Hills and Soldiers Three; quite a number of these were also published in stand-alone form in Indian newspapers. Kipling left India in 1889, but continued to write about India while living first in the United States and then in England. Several books published over the course of the next decade, including The Jungle Book and Kim, would become extremely influential depictions of everyday life in India during the British Raj.

Early publications: Rudyard Kipling gained experience as a writer working for the Civil & Military Gazette, a local English-language newspaper based in Lahore, which was oriented to the local Anglo-Indian community there. His experiences there, and later with an Allahabad newspaper, also gave him opportunities to travel around India and learn about its different regions and cultures.It also gave him venues where he could publish his early poems and short stories, whether in individual form or in early editions that were actually printed on the printing press at the newspaper. (Rudyard and his sister co-wrote Echoes, which was printed this way. The first edition of Departmental Ditties was also printed on the C&MG printing press.)

Rudyard Kipling's early output consisted of a number of poems describing and documenting Anglo-Indian life (Departmental Ditties, 1886) and soon after, short stories that aimed to do something similar. These stories and poems often used or invoked Hindustani words and place-names ("Shall I meet you next season at Simla, oh sweetest and best of your kind?"), though they rarely engaged with the actual voices of Indian people.

Rudyard Kipling's first collection of short stories is Plain Tales from the Hills. Today, Plain Tales from the Hills is best known as a collection of stories by Rudyard Kipling, published in 1888. However, before Rudyard published forty stories as Plain Tales From the Hills under his own signature, he and Alice Kipling published the stories without signature in the Civil & Military Gazette in the fall of 1886 and throughout 1887. The collaboration followed a series of successful collaborations between brother and sister, on Echoes (1884) and Quartette (1885).

Formative experiences: Considering the impact of his Anglo-Indian writings, it is worth noting that Rudyard Kipling did not live in India for very long as an adult -- really just about seven years (1882-1889). In terms of knowledge of the country and its cultures, he did benefit considerably from the longer experience of his father, John Lockwood Kipling, who had lived in India for more than twenty years. One formative experience for Rudyard Kipling might be the February 1883 Ilbert Bill, introduced by liberal reforming Viceroy Lord Ripon. The Ilbert Bill would have given Indian judges the right to pass judgment over white Englishmen. However, the Anglo-Indian community was outraged at this modest reform to empower highly qualified Indians in the judicial system, and the Bill would subsequently be withdrawn. While his editor at the Civil and Military Gazette, Stephen Wheeler, initially wrote an editorial praising the reforms, biographer Charles Allen indicates that Rudyard Kipling saw the intense racial feeling among the broader Anglo-Indian community. Subsequently he would also be a "Tory" with respect to Empire -- an advocate for a strict racial hierarchy within the colonial system. Rudyard Kipling's first published poem, "A New Departure," published in the Civil and Military Gazette on March 29, 1883, was a response to the Ilbert Bill.

Themes to look for:

Opium dens and the underside of Lahore: "The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows" (CMG, September 26, 1884; also published in Plain Tales from the Hills).
Stories with actual Indian characters: A good example might be "In the House of Suddhoo" (CMG, April 30, 1886), which deals with an elderly Englishman who rents out rooms in his house to Indians. The core of the story involves an Indian magician who tricks a poor Indian woman, who may also be a prostitute.
Interracial romance. This is actually quite rare in Kipling's works. One story that does address it might be "Lispeth" (first published in CMG in November 1886), which involves an Indian woman in a remote hill station, who falls in love with an Englishman. Another example is "Without Benefit of Clergy."
Disease epidemics and cholera. This is a common theme in early Kipling short stories. An example might be "The City of Dreadful Night" (CMG, September 10, 1885), where the narrator visits the city of Lahore at night, and observes piles of corpses, and observe thousands of people sleeping on rooftops in the city (a common practice in hot summer months). As he returns home at dawn, he notes a woman's corpse being taken to the ghats for cremation. Also, a short story from Plain Tales From the Hills that deals with cholera might be "Thrown Away"; there a young Englishman in a remote station in colonial India dies by suicide, but the death is ascribed to cholera to protect his reputation.

Writings by Rudyard Kipling:

Echoes (1884; collaborative volume with 32 poems by Rudyard Kipling)
Quartette (1885; collaborative volume with numerous contributions from Rudyard Kipling)
Departmental Ditties (1886; poetry)
Plain Tales from the Hills (1887; collaborative volume with short stories by Rudyard Kipling and Alice Kipling)
Soldiers Three (1888; A.J. Wheeler's Railway Series)
In Black and White (1888; A.J. Wheeler's Railway Series)
Naulahka, A Story of East and West (1892; co-written with Wolcott Balestier)
The Jungle Book (1894)
Kim (1901)