Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  Tods thinks and speaks Urdu, but has also mastered ‘many side-speeches like the queer chotee-bolee [small talk] of the women, and held grave converse with shop keepers and Hill-coolies alike. He was precocious for his age, and his mixing with natives had taught him some of the more bitter truths of life … He used, over his bread and milk, to deliver solemn and serious aphorisms, translated from the vernacular into the English, that made his Mamma jump and vow that Tods must go Home next hot weather.’23

  Trix’s accounts of their shared childhood suggest that she had the same gift for languages – in fact, could swear in the vernacular with even greater fluency than her brother – and that both enjoyed the power this gave them over their mother, who remained unaware of their words’ true meaning.

  It comes as no surprise to find that the heroes of Kim and The Jungle Book tales are little boys abandoned by their birth parents – and that the most caring parents in Kipling’s fiction are foster parents: in The Jungle Book the wolves who succour baby Mowgli, supported by the bear Baloo and the panther Bagheera; in Kim the widowed Sahiba who looks after Kim when he has a breakdown. In Rudyard Kipling’s slight story ‘The Potted Princes’, which appeared in the American monthly the St Nicholas Magazine in 1892 but was afterwards suppressed by him, the two children, Punch and Judy, are playing on the verandah of their Bombay home when a large pink crane in the garden clatters his bill and frightens Judy. Ayah comforts her by singing a song, but then Punch gets pricked by the spikes of an aloe hedge as he chases the crane, and he too is comforted by Ayah, who tells him a story which begins, as in all the best children’s tales in India, ‘Once upon a time there was a Rajah’. When the story has been told the children rush to tell their mother, who has been out for her evening constitutional in her broom-gharry or open carriage. But Mama fails to understand the story and becomes confused and, in attempting to explain it to her, Punch reaches out for the bottle of eau-de-cologne on her dressing table ‘that he was strictly forbidden to touch’ and spills its contents down the front of his shirt, upsetting Mama.

  Punch and Judy reappear in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ and in his sister’s long-overlooked version of the same events, ‘Through Judy’s Eyes’, written after her brother’s death.24 Both tell the same story: of an Anglo-Indian brother and sister from Bombay abandoned by their parents among strangers in an English boarding house. In Trix’s version her alter ego Judy can recall every detail of the servants left behind in India but finds that she has scarcely any memory of her mother. In their exile it is not her parents whom she misses most of all but the servants: ‘Dear ayah who was never cross; clever Meeta, our bearer, who made toys out of oranges and nuts; Dunnoo who took charge of the fat white pony which Punch would call Dapple Gray; and Chokra [boy], the boy who called the other servants and only grinned and didn’t mind when I pelted him with bricks.’25

  These and other stories show two small children learning to move effortlessly between two worlds: one formal and exclusive, the other informal and all-embracing and, moreover, one in which they exercised a remarkable degree of authority, despite their ages. In their Indian world, as Trix put it, she and her brother were ‘king and queen in their own country – none daring to make them afraid’,26 an analogy extended by Rudyard in his short story ‘His Majesty the King’, which tells of his alter ego Punch growing up in India as ruler of the nursery, spoiled by the servants but always wishing that his distant parents – ‘two very terrible people who had no time to waste upon His Majesty the King’27 – would show him more affection.

  One can read too much into a work of fiction, but the signalling of parental neglect by both siblings is too marked for it to have been entirely the product of Rudyard Kipling’s imagination. How else can one explain why, in an era when the three Rs were part and parcel of the nursery furniture, no effort was made to teach this highly intelligent child to read and write? ‘Six and a half years old and he had never been taught to read!’ wrote the long-widowed Trix in a revealing letter to her cousin, the former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. ‘I don’t know what the parents were thinking of … but he hadn’t been taught! Mother had a very strong will but there were streaks of sand in her marble.’28

  A recurrent theme in Anglo-Indian literature of this period is the degree to which British children were left in the care of the servants – and the dangers this represented in the misshaping of their characters. ‘In the reeking atmosphere of the servants’ huts,’ wrote the unnamed author of an article in the Pioneer newspaper on the European child in India, ‘he soaks in Asiatic vices and meanness through every pore of his little white skin’.29 It was accepted as inescapable fact that European children in India must first be spoiled by servants – and then sent Home to England in order to counteract this damage. In this respect Alice and Lockwood Kipling appear to have been content to follow custom. ‘We are,’ wrote Lockwood, ‘willing slaves to our small emperors, feeling that the best we can give them is but poor compensation for the loss of their birthright of British air’.30 Yet there is nothing from either Rudyard’s or Trix’s pen to suggest that their parents actively gave of their best – rather the contrary. ‘They said in nearly every letter that they loved their little boy and girl and missed them very much,’ grumbles Judy in Trix’s story. ‘But Punch could have learnt to read every bit as well in India, if only Mamma had taught him, and Ayah could have shown Judy how to be “a utiful [dutiful] girl”, if Mamma had really wanted her to brush her own hair, or even wipe the cups after breakfast.’

  The spoilt prince in his kingdom, J. L. Kipling (National Trust)

  At the start of 1868 Lockwood Kipling signed a new contract to continue his teaching for another three years – but on less advantageous terms, since he was now forbidden to give private tuition. With his salary barely covering his domestic costs Lockwood sought to supplement his income by submitting designs for building decorations to the Public Works Department – only to find them rejected and then copied without his approval. To make matters worse, the dynamic Sir Bartle Frere had been succeeded as Governor of Bombay by a British Government placeman whose prime concern was to put the city’s finances to rights and who had no intention of wasting money on art schools. The reluctance of Government to sanction the funds required for the new school buildings and staff quarters meant that the Kiplings’ living conditions failed to improve. Frustrated at every turn, Lockwood began to look outside his craft for ways of supplementing his income.

  In the artistic circles in which they had moved in England both Lockwood and Alice Kipling had found opportunities to indulge in what a friend termed their ‘thirst for scribbling’,31 mostly in the form of verse. In Bombay both appear to have harboured hopes of putting their scribbling to better use, perhaps in journalism, initially without success. However, in the spring of 1870 Lockwood secured a commission from the Government of India to tour the North-Western Provinces to make sketches of Indian craftsmen at work. This was thanks to the good offices of the Kiplings’ Civilian friend Henry Rivett-Carnac, who had recently moved from Bombay up to Allahabad, capital of the North-Western Provinces, to take up the post of Commissioner for Cotton and Commerce. His tour took Lockwood to Allahabad and to the offices of the Pioneer, which, under the combined leadership of its founding proprietor, George Allen, and its editor, the Reverend Julian Robinson, was fast gaining a reputation as the most influential upcountry newspaper in India. The patronage of these two men was to be decisive in shaping the futures of both father and son.

  Allen and Robinson were what were known in Anglo-Indian parlance as ‘old koi-hais’: experienced India hands who knew the ropes and held deeply conservative, not to say reactionary, views on all matters pertaining to British rule in India. Allen had begun his Indian career as the partner of a trader in pills and patent medicines, which made him a boxwallah, the derogatory term for those engaged in trade. In May 1857 he had been among the survivors who had gathered on Delhi Ridge and, although a non-combatant, had
made himself useful by setting up the British camp’s one and only shop, supplying at great profit to himself ‘“tar bund” beer, Exshaw’s brandy and Harvey’s sauce, and many varieties of tinned provisions, besides Holloway’s pills and ointment, and such like nostrums’.32 The family story is that he also got hold of an abandoned printing press and began to produce a daily broadsheet, after which he and his partner set up a dak or postal service, employing loyal Indians to run messages through rebel-held territory. Once peace had been restored Allen returned to his former business, building up a chain of up-country stores in Allahabad, Lucknow, Simla, Umballa and Lahore that sold imported goods to a largely British clientele. But the bug of journalism had bitten and in 1865 Allen co-founded from his base in Allahabad what became upcountry India’s first professionally produced newspaper, modelled in format, layout and type on The Times.

  Allen’s junior partner in this enterprise and the newspaper’s first editor was the Reverend Julian Robinson, an independent-minded clergyman whose political views accorded with Allen’s. In the pages of the Pioneer they gave voice to both their own prejudices and those of the majority of their readers in northern India: planters, boxwallahs, businessmen, engineers, Europeans in the provincial services and junior officers in the ranks of the Indian Army. They not only provided the Indian and European news that their readers wanted but went to great lengths to be first with it, employing the best news services available. They also introduced a higher standard of journalism, including in every issue several leaders in which they expiated at length on every conceivable topic, from Native juries and civil service leave rules to joint stock companies and European vagrancy. In one of the earliest of these editorials the Pioneer’s chief proprietor set out his own position on British India:

  Asiatics are, and always have been, the least democratic of men; they care nothing for self-government: they infinitely prefer being ruled by others; they must have some to look up to as rulers and guides. We can but partially occupy the place, separated as we are from them by race, religion and social customs, and it is important we should recognise the fact. The great mass of the population is now exactly what it was three hundred years ago, neither richer nor poorer, neither wiser nor more foolish, while their leaders, their federal lords, the magnates of the land, would not be men if they did not cordially hate us – so completely have their importance and power been crushed down.33

  Within a decade Allen and Robinson had established the Pioneer as northern India’s premier daily, with a reputation for always being ‘first with the news’. By offering generous ‘fees’ to highly placed officials Allen was able to give his paper a lead over its rivals by gaining advance notice of Government moves as well as providing the greatest insight into what Government was thinking. This made the ‘Pi’ indispensable reading among the senior ranks of the civil services and the military. The Pi also reflected the literary tastes of its owners, and once established began to include every form of literary expression in its pages, from essays and reviews to poetry and fiction.

  The modern popular image of British India as a cultural desert and Anglo-Indian society as unremittingly philistine owes a great deal to that pair of misfits E. M. Forster and George Orwell and their monocular visions of the British Raj. But it is true to say that the British in India in the late nineteenth century were isolated from their cultural roots. ‘No situation more unfavourable to the development of imaginative literature could be found,’ wrote the poet and Civilian Sir Alfred Lyall in one of his many essays, ‘than that of a few thousand Europeans isolated, far from home, among millions of Asiatics entirely different from them in race, manners, and language.’34

  But if their numbers were small – in Kipling’s day probably no more than fifty to sixty thousand in total – and their lives too unsettled for them to be able to carry much cultural baggage, many Britons came out to India well educated and determined to continue their intellectual pursuits. From the time of Warren Hastings onwards intellectual and scientific enquiry went hand in hand with literary endeavour, with outlets such as the Calcutta Review and a dozen or so presses such as that of the Pioneer. ‘Considering how short a time it is since the British began to occupy the country,’ wrote a reviewer in the Pioneer in 1882, ‘and the small number of those who are here at any given time, it is truly marvellous how many thinkers and writers of the very highest class have distinguished themselves in Anglo-Indian literature.’ The same reviewer goes on to suggest that instead of reading established English literature, Indian university students would do better to read the novels of Philip Meadows Taylor and other more recent Anglo-Indian novelists: ‘We should like to see the names of Keene, Chesney, Cunningham, Talboys Wheeler, and Hunter; instead of Goldsmith, Thompson and Dickens.’35 All the above-named authors were members of either the Indian Civil Service or the Indian Army and they represented only the tip of British India’s literary iceberg.

  No one understood better than Rudyard Kipling that he was part of a well-established literary tradition. ‘There is always an undercurrent of song, bitter for the most part, running through the Indian papers,’ he declared of the quantities of verse that appeared in English-language periodicals and newspapers in his own time and before:

  The bulk of it is much better than mine, being more graceful, and is done by those less than Sir Alfred Lyall – to whom I would apologise for mentioning his name in this gallery – ‘Pekin’, ‘Latakia’, ‘Cigarette’, ‘O’, ‘T. W.’, ‘Foresight’, and others … Sometimes a man in Bangalore would be moved to song, and a man on the Bombay side would answer him, and a man in Bengal would echo back, till at last we would all be crowing together, like cocks before daybreak … The newspaper files showed that, forty years ago, the men sang of just the same subjects as we did – of heat, loneliness, love, lack of promotion, poverty, sport, and war.36

  What Rudyard Kipling had to say about poetry in British India applied equally to prose writing, where the fiercely competitive editors of the English-language papers went out of their way to encourage Civilians and army officers to express their views in print as anonymous special correspondents. Among their number were the three sons of the Reverend Julian Robinson. The middle son, Kay, born in 1855, was to play a decisive role in encouraging and guiding the young apprentice Rudyard Kipling. However, it was the eldest brother whose influence was first felt by the Kiplings.

  Born in India in 1849, Phil Robinson was appointed Professor of Logic at the newly established Allahabad University in the early 1880s, but was happier as a writer and naturalist. He briefly succeeded his father as editor of the Pi before going his own way as a freelance journalist, making his name as an observer of animal and human behaviour, which he chronicled in a series of books beginning with Nugae Indica: On Leave in my Compound, published by the Pioneer Press in Allahabad in 1871. Purporting to be notes from the field book of a visiting naturalist, it is made up of a series of sketches of Indian birds, people and scenes, each subject carefully observed and portrayed with light humour.

  What became popularly known as Robinson’s Indian Garden Series – In My Indian Garden, Under the Punkah, Chasing a Fortune and Tigers at Large – established a genre that became hugely popular in Anglo-Indian society and was widely imitated, most successfully by a near contemporary, Edward Aitken, born and raised in Bombay and educated at Bombay University. Under the initials ‘E. H. A.’ Aitken further extended the genre, writing columns for the Pioneer’s main rival in Bombay, The Times of India, and publishing such widely read books as Tribes on my Frontier, Behind the Bungalow and Naturalist on the Prowl.

  Aitken and Robinson were unusual in that they were professional writers at a time when the Anglo-Indian literary scene was almost entirely made up of gentlemen riders, amateurs who wrote for mainly pleasure and as a distraction from the cares of office. In the spring of 1870 Lockwood Kipling joined the fold to become the Pioneer’s special correspondent in Bombay.37 His first report appeared unsigned in April and was followed at
fortnightly intervals by further articles, mostly accounts of social events in European Bombay such as the Byculla Club’s summer ball, the Bombay Yacht Club’s regattas, the Bombay races, and concerts and musical soirées at the Grant Theatre – which Lockwood likened to ‘a detestable dog-house’.

  The writing was unremarkable, but leavened by Lockwood’s sense of humour. In noting the absence of mosquitoes at the Byculla Ball, where they usually gathered in clouds about the bare shoulders of the ladies, he added that had he been a mosquito he would have made the most of the succulent opportunities presented. In commenting on the Bombay Philharmonic Society’s musical evenings he bewailed the shortage of talent, for amateur singers in Bombay were like ‘sands in the desert, ever changing … The doctor orders your best tenor to England on pain of his becoming a croaker if he remains; your bass mournfully leaves you to wake the echoes of a remote jungle solitude: your lovely soprano has to lead her infant chorus back to school via the P. and O.’38 No opportunity for reporting on social scandal was missed. ‘In view of the difficulty of loving one’s neighbour as oneself,’ Lockwood notes in November 1870, ‘some of us sought to compensate by loving our neighbour’s wife better than our own!’ The unhappy consequence of a Mrs Lennon’s conversion to Islam was gleefully reported: ‘Her paramour, who is said to be a fine-looking Pathan, was yesterday sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for adultery. The punishment seems heavy for the offence.’39