Economic migrants flocked to the island by land and sea, eager for a slice of the city’s good fortune, trebling the population within less than a decade to more than 800,000. Such was the pressure on housing that by 1864 two-storey Native dwellings were occupied by an average of six families, or sixty-one persons.28 For much of the year the greater part of Bombay’s citizenry slept on rooftops or on the streets, the better-off on charpoys or bedsteads, the rest on the ground, but all wrapped head to foot in white sheets to keep off mosquitoes, so that at night much of the city resembled a morgue.
Presiding over this massive accumulation of both wealth and numbers as Governor of Bombay was the far-sighted Sir Henry Bartle Frere, ambitious to turn the island into the first city of Asia. In a remarkable gesture of confidence, Frere ordered the ramparts and ditches of the Fort to be levelled. The new land was then sold by auction and the money put towards the construction of a number of grandiose public buildings worthy of Bombay’s new position as the ‘Manchester of the East’. They were to be designed by the best English architects according to the latest style and laid out in extended line to look out across the sweep of Back Bay, like a chain of Gothic cathedrals. A modern business district was also planned, with broad avenues that broke up the Esplanade into four greens, to be serviced by two new railway termini that would allow the BB&CI and the GIP railways to deliver passengers and goods almost to the water’s edge – where new docks would be built on reclaimed land.
With a little arm-twisting from Frere, the city’s leading financiers and industrialists now embarked on a quite extraordinary round of public benefaction. Wealthy traders like Premchand Roychand (‘the uncrowned king of Bombay’), Sir Cowasji Jehangir Readymoney (‘the Peabody of the East’), Sir David Sassoon (a Sephardi Jew from Baghdad with a classic rags-to-riches story) and Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy vied with one another to fund new bridges, embankments and water tanks, and to set up and endow public institutions. Roychand paid for the construction of Bombay University’s library and attached bell-tower, Jehangir set up forty drinking fountains at various points in the city, Sassoon funded schools and hospitals and Jeejeebhoy established – among much else – a School of Art and Industry that came to be known, for simplicity’s sake, as the ‘Sir J. J. School of Art’.
Hitherto the scarcity of land had limited the city’s growth, but now the combination of excess wealth and a determined municipal government eager to support private ventures led to the setting up of scores of wildly ambitious schemes – which very quickly degenerated into a mania for speculation. James Maclean, owner and editor of the English-language Bombay Gazette, was one of many citizens caught up in the events that followed. ‘The value of land had been trebled and quadrupled,’ he later wrote. ‘The population was every day increasing in numbers, and, as the available space within the island was very small, every additional foot tacked on seemed likely to be worth its weight in gold.’29
By the start of 1864, the year before the Kiplings’ arrival in Bombay, every company in the city, as well as any individual who could rub a few silver rupees together, was deeply involved, investing in such ventures as the huge Back Bay Reclamation Scheme, set up to extend the city’s western seafront deeper into the great curve of sea and sand that was one of the island’s most attractive features. At first speculation was confined to ventures in cotton and land but, as the profits grew and the options diminished, all sorts of ingenious financial associations were formed, with investors clamouring to buy shares. ‘The passion for speculation’, wrote Maclean, ‘is a contagious disease, and spreads like wildfire as soon as a few brilliant examples are on record to show with what ease fortunes may be won.’ The prospect of 600 per cent returns ‘sent the city quite mad … The Government of Bombay, not thinking what fortunes it wrecked and what lives it made miserable, and only eager to get money for the prosecution of its own public works, added fuel to the fire by inciting projections of new schemes.’
Many Britons in India found this state of affairs in Bombay extremely unsettling, not least because of the growing wealth of the Parsi community. ‘Government is being jostled out of Bombay,’ declared the editor of the country’s newest English-language daily, the Pioneer of Allahabad:
The Parsees, by their enormous profits, are making everyone discontented with Government pay, some men have degraded themselves by taking bribes in the shape of shares – others more honourable are leaving Government service to make their fortunes in commerce. Parsees splash the mud up against you as you walk; Parsees puff their smoke into your wife’s face as they pass; purse-proud Parsees are admitted into English society, and delight to think that the wealth which introduced them there is the only test of power … If they would only keep themselves aloof from us in their social relations, as other Natives do, these annoyances would be less intimately felt.30
On 9 April 1865, the day before the Kiplings set sail for India, a ‘horrid telegraph’ announcing the surrender of General Lee’s army at Appomattox brought Bombay’s share-buying mania to an abrupt halt. Even before the news of the final surrender of the Confederate Army had reached Bombay the price of cotton had halved. By the time the Kiplings set foot on the Apollo Bunder three weeks later Bombay’s stock market was in free fall. As Maclean saw it, ‘When the crash came there was nothing but paper to meet it, and the whole elaborate edifice of speculation toppled down like a house of cards … Men who had been trading or speculating beyond their means found themselves unable to meet their engagement; a leading firm of Parsee merchants set the example of failing for three millions; and a panic ensued which baffles descriptions.’ A brief rally towards the end of 1865 was followed by a second collapse and ‘the panic at Bombay set in with renewed intensity’. By the end of 1866 virtually every bank and land company in the city had failed, leading to the collapse of scores of leading firms and leaving many individuals bankrupt. Yet the boom-funded investment that had gone into land reclamation and building over the previous five years had given the city a modern infrastructure that was of enormous advantage in years to come. As Maclean was afterwards to remind his readers, ‘the splendour of the public buildings and useful and benevolent institutions of new Bombay is due to the munificence of the speculators of 1864–5’.
This was the extraordinary scene that met the Kiplings on arrival: an island in the throes of transformation, the walls of a score of public buildings half-built on every side, along with new avenues and railway lines, and acres of land freshly reclaimed or in the process of rising from the sea – while at the same time the community teetered on the brink of ruin: prices rocketing as inflation took hold, affordable housing impossible to come by, thousands thrown out of work and many households facing destitution. The crisis was encapsulated in verses that went the rounds at this time, part of which went:
Three Wallahs [persons] came sailing out to the East,
Out to the East as far as Bombay.
Each thought to go home with a fortune at least,
And live like a swell meanwhile on his pay.
But Wallahs must work, and Wallahs must swear:
For there’s nothing to earn, and things are so dear
That Sir Bartle Frere is starving.31
One of the casualties of the 1865 crash was the building programme for the School of Arts. For the purpose a generous parcel of land had been made over to Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy at the eastern end of the Esplanade beside the Mody Bay reclamations, where a hundred acres of the foreshore was in the process of being filled with earth and rubble for the foundations of the GIP Railway’s Victoria Terminus. Plans for a magnificent school of art modelled on South Kensington were being drawn up but in the meantime what were known as pendals – described in official reports as ‘a set of sheds’ – would have to serve as accommodation for staff and students, and even these were going to take some weeks to put up. So, instead of moving into the roomy bungalow they had expected to occupy, the Kiplings spent their first months in India housed like refugees, joining
a crowd of Europeans encamped on the Esplanade in what one observer described as ‘wigwams’,32 most probably canvas tents strengthened with walls of bamboo and cane. To make matters worse, their luggage, sent out on the longer sea route via the Cape, failed to arrive, forcing Lockwood Kipling to spend his first week’s wages on a dinner service and other household necessities.
Lockwood was later to call Bombay ‘a blazing beauty of a place’ and ‘the finest city in the world so far as beauty is concerned’,33 but their first months must have been trying in the extreme. Alice Kipling was six weeks pregnant when she arrived and within days was enduring her first Indian Hot Weather – made only a little easier by the sea breezes that blew across Back Bay. Shortly before the start of the Rains in July the teaching staff and students of the Sir J. J. School of Art moved into their sheds in the School’s new grounds beside Esplanade Road, an area afterwards remembered as ‘thick with tropical palms and flowering trees … converted in May and June by the Gold Mohur into a flamboyant jungle’34 but which Alice Kipling viewed at the time as an unhealthy swamp. When it rained the pendals were scarcely fit to live in, their mud floors ‘saturated with wet’,35 yet the Kiplings had no option but to make the best of it. ‘It’s no use grumbling,’ declared Alice in a letter to a Bombay friend, ‘I daresay the new building will begin when we are all killed by living in the old cheap [?].’36 Once the Rains began in earnest their conditions grew even more intolerable. ‘No one,’ wrote Lockwood, ‘pretends to hide the fact that he is the moistest and most miserable of mortals.’37 As for Alice, after finding toadstools growing in her bonnet and cockroaches nesting in her newest hat, she was moved to set her feelings down in verse:
Dull in the morning, duller still at noon,
Dullest of all as dreary night draws round,
I go from mildewed couch to mouldy bed
And in the morning shall not feel surprise
If from the reeking pillow, neath my head,
I find a crop of mushrooms when I rise.38
In the only complete letter to survive from their early years in India, addressed to his sister-in-law Edith Macdonald and dated 12 December 1866, Lockwood Kipling described the site of their home in some detail: ‘We have as you know open sea on one side of the narrow neck of land on which we live and the ship-crowded harbour on the other – neither side further than from your house to the Market Place.’39 And here Rudyard Kipling was born: ‘between the palms and the sea’,40 as he later put it, but not in the building that today sports the plaque and bust. When asked in 1930 by the then head of the Sir J. J. School of Art if the present bungalow was the house in which he had been born, Kipling replied that the original building had stood ‘on a slightly different spot some yards away’.41 He was unwilling to add more, probably because he had no wish to draw attention to his father’s lowly status at that time or to the humble conditions in which they had lived. In his unfinished autobiography, written in his seventieth year, Rudyard Kipling chose to describe his father as ‘Superintendent’ of the Sir J. J. School of Art and a ‘Terry Sahib’ as his assistant. In reality it was the other way round: Wilkins Terry, a draughtsman and wood-engraver by trade, was the School’s Superintendent and Lockwood Kipling one of his three British members of staff.
Expected on Christmas Day 1865, the boy was finally delivered two hours short of midnight on 30 December – after five days of painful labour which were said to have been brought to an end by the household servants’ sacrifice of a goat at one of the many shrines to the Hindu deity Shiva at the nearby temple complex of Bhuleshwar. A notice was duly placed in the Times of India: ‘Kipling, December 30th, 1865 at Bombay, Mrs J. Lockwood Kipling, of a son.’
The boy was named Joseph, because it was the tradition in his father’s family to call the eldest sons John and Joseph by turns, and Rudyard, at the insistence of one of his mother’s sisters, after the reservoir where his parents had met. Rudyard very quickly became ‘Ruddy’ to his parents and remained so for the rest of their lives. On 22 January 1866 the boy was christened in St Thomas’s Cathedral, the oldest Protestant church in Bombay and at that time the shabbiest, having been caught up in the great crash at the start of a rebuilding programme that was to take another forty years to complete. A smudgy photograph was sent home to Alice’s parents showing the baby cradled in the arms of an Indian ayah or lady’s maid, apparently causing his uncle Fred Macdonald to exclaim in dismay, ‘Dear me, how dark Alice has become!’42 From her garments and appearance this first ayah was a Madrassi, considered by many Anglo-Indian parents to make the most reliable nurses because they were said to be less indulgent. It is most likely that she also served as a dhai or wet nurse.
When it came to child-rearing British women in India were rarely able to draw upon the motherly advice their sisters back in England took for granted. They had little option but to follow Anglo-Indian convention, which dictated that even nursing mothers should concentrate on their own adult preoccupations and leave it to the servants to keep their offspring fed, washed, dressed and entertained for the greater part of their waking hours. In the 1860s this often meant employing Native dhais to suckle European babies, as it was thought that the milk of a healthy Indian woman was superior to that of a white woman unadapted to the Indian climate and would give the baby a better chance of surviving India’s many diseases.
According to Bombay’s most eminent physician, Dr William Moore, author of Health in the Tropics; or Sanitary Art as Applied to Europeans in India and A Manual of Family Medicine and Hygiene for India, such a wet-nurse should be between twenty and thirty years of age, of temperate habits and ‘not addicted to over-eating or to drink, or to smoking opium or Indian hemp’. The dhai was to be carefully examined before selection to ensure that she was free from piles, an enlarged spleen or skin disease. If she was found to suffer from a sore throat she was to be rejected, on the grounds that she was probably venereal. The condition of her own child had also to be examined ‘and the mother of a weak, puny, badly nourished infant should be rejected; especially if there are any sores about the buttocks, privates, or corners of the mouth, which are also probably venereal’.
Mother and child, J. L. Kipling (National Trust)
Whether or not the infant Ruddy benefited from such a wet-nurse, the adult Rudyard Kipling certainly looked upon them with approval. In the last of his several ‘Strickland’ short stories the headstrong child ‘Adam’ is suckled by the wife of one of his father’s policemen, one of whom comments: ‘Those who drink our blood become our own blood.’43 Paradoxically, it was the fear of being tainted by Indian blood that eventually led increased numbers of Anglo-Indian parents in the post-Mutiny years to abandon the habit. The Civilian Alfred Lyall, widely regarded as British India’s finest poet before Rudyard Kipling’s appearance on the scene, had a son born a year after Ruddy and wrote to tell his sister that he and his wife had dispensed with the services of a local wet-nurse: ‘We are determined to eschew black foster mothers, and our triumph over other households who maintain negresses is great and deserved.’44
In a sentence taken from a letter now lost Alice Kipling provides the briefest of glimpses of Ruddy the babe in arms: ‘He notices everything he sees, and when he is not sitting up in his ayah’s arms he turns round to follow things with his eyes most comically.’45 From the solitary surviving letter spoken of earlier we have his father’s portrait of Ruddy the eleven-month-old toddler:
Ruddy is a great lark but he won’t be a baby much longer; he gets into imminent peril with chairs and things daily. It’s the quaintest thing in life to see him eating his supper, intently watched by the three dogs to which he administers occasional blundering blows with a little whip & much shouting. His best playfellow is one ‘Chang’ a small Chinese pup … He is a beautiful tawny colour with a black nose and tongue. His hair is exactly like a thick & fine sable muff, and Ruddy buries his fat fists in it and pulls him up by the tail as a handle … We want to have baby photographed with him but woe’s me t
he baby won’t be long a baby & Chang will change into a big dog before we know where we are.46
The infant grew into a plump, bumptious child: a ‘sturdy little boy’, according to the sister who joined him when he was two and a half years old, ‘with long straight fair hair – yes, flaxen hair – eyes like dark violets and a particularly beautiful mouth. He was thoroughly happy and genial – indeed rather too noisy and spoilt. Mother used to say that, like Kim, he was “little friend of all the world” and that’s what the Indian servants in Bombay called him.’47 This icon of the young Ruddy as ‘little friend of all the world’ is perfectly preserved in a story related by Alice Kipling to her son’s first biographer, of the four-year-old walking hand in hand with a Maratha ryot or peasant cultivator over a ploughed field and calling back to his parents in the vernacular, ‘Goodbye, this is my brother.’48
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‘Youth in the eye of the sun’
Kipling Sahib Page 5