13 - Reading Kipling in India

Summary

Reading Kipling in India may seem as natural an activity as reading Kipling in England, or perhaps only a little less so, for he was an English writer with a crucial Indian dimension. Born in Bombay, he grew up speaking an Indian language, Hindustani, more fluently than he did English and was mollycoddled and indulged by a small army of Indian servants that included a dear ayah and a bearer. Kipling was sent (back?) to England at the age of six, as nearly all children of the Raj were, to prevent them from being contaminated in their formative years. He then spent the next six years of his life in the boarding-house in Southsea that he later described as the 'House of Desolation' where he had been introduced to 'Hell ... in all its terrors'.

In contrast, Kipling’s initial years in India came to be seen by him as a lost paradise, which he later revisited in fantasy and by proxy through the child-hero of his greatest work, Kim (1901). Thirteen when the novel begins and seventeen when it ends, Kim leads a carefree, footloose, hybridised and adventurous life, which takes him over vast tracts of India in the company of a richly varied array of surrogate father figures and avuncular well-wishers, including the Lama, Mahbub Ali and, to a lesser extent, Colonel Creighton and Hurree Babu.