The Kiplings’ initials are not found again among the latter surviving issues of The Chameleon. Many contributors identified themselves by initials or pen-names most of which remain unidentified, but two of their number were writers of quality whose work became a major influence though the 1870s and into the 1880s. One was Major Walter Yeldham, writing as ‘Aliph Cheem’, whose verses ‘Those Niggers’ have already been quoted in an earlier chapter. In his Lays of Ind one can hear that same disconcerting change of tone which so startled readers when Rudyard Kipling’s Departmental Ditties was first published more than a decade later, as for example in the last verse of ‘Twaddle’:
You say we hold the land in trust,
And for a little span, sir,
The truth is, that we’ll hold it just
As long as ere we can, sir!19
The other writer of consequence was ‘Political Orphan’, the pen-name of George Aberigh-Mackay, a member of the Education Department of the North-Western Provinces, recruited by George Allen in 1871 to be one of the Pioneer’s special correspondents. He afterwards went on to write for the Bombay Gazette, in which he published the satirical essays which made him Anglo-India’s leading political and social satirist, later issued in one volume as Twenty-one Days in India: Or the Tour of Sir Ali Baba KCB. An enthusiastic sportsman, naturalist and historian, Aberigh-Mackay was said to have only one failing as a writer: his cynicism, which he used to advantage in his portraits of Anglo-Indian ‘types’. His ‘grass widow’ who spends her summers flirting in Simla while her husband labours on in the heat of the plains predates Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Mrs Hauksbee’ and his other Simla femmes fatales by more than a decade, and is no less memorable. ‘Yes, she is a source of disappointment to them,’ the author declares of his grass widow and her jealous rivals:
They have watched her for three seasons going lightly and merrily through all the gaieties of Cloudland [Simla]; they have listened to the scandal of the cuckoos among the pine-trees and rhododendrons, but they have not caught her tripping … Her beauty has burned itself into their jealousy; her merry laughter has fanned their scorn; her bountiful presence is an affront to them, as is her ripe and lissom figure. They pronounce her morally unsound; they say her nature has a taint; they chill her popularity with silent smiles of slow disparagement. But they have no particulars.20
George Aberigh-Mackay was set for a distinguished literary career when in January 1881 a chill caught after a game of lawn tennis ended his life at the age of thirty-two. Had he lived on, Rudyard Kipling’s impact on Anglo-Indian literature would have been far less dramatic.
No issues of The Chameleon survive after its sixth. It may well have folded, perhaps undermined by the success of a more downmarket rival, the Indian Charivari, modelled on Punch but more down-to-earth and accurately reflecting the prejudices of its readership. A constant theme of the latter magazine’s cartoons is the foolishness of Indian servants, with the verbal exchanges between them usually given in Urdu, the assumption being that its readership spoke it well enough to get the joke. Equally popular are ballads about conniving Hindu babus – the English-educated Indians chiefly of Bengali extraction who served as office clerks and junior functionaries in Government departments – who invariably receive their comeuppance after giving themselves too many airs. According to Harry Rivett-Carnac, Mr Terry, Lockwood Kipling’s superior at the Sir J. J. School of Art, was editor of the Indian Charivari for a time, and he and his friends all contributed to the periodical. This would suggest that the Kiplings were involved, but since few issues survive and contributions were unsigned, it is impossible to determine if this was the case.
In March 1875 Lockwood Kipling completed his third contracted term of service at the Sir J. J. School of Art. He was thirty-seven years old, his career was stagnating and his employers had demonstrated their lack of sympathy with the school’s aims by dropping ‘Industry’ from its title and removing the artisan element from its teaching curriculum. Again, it was Lockwood’s well-connected friend Harry Rivett-Carnac who came to the rescue – by supporting his application for the post of Principal of the newly established Mayo School of Industrial Art in Lahore.
After Lord Mayo’s assassination in 1872 the Government of the Punjab had decided that funds raised by public subscription to honour his memory should be used to erect two new public buildings in Lahore: a hospital and a school of art. What made the principalship of the latter particularly appealing to Lockwood Kipling was that it was combined with a second responsibility: curatorship of the Lahore Museum. He applied and secured the double post, and in April 1875 proceeded to Lahore alone, leaving Alice behind to pack up in Bombay.
The land in which Lockwood Kipling now found himself was very different from that which he had known for the last decade. The Punjab was open plains country segmented by five great rivers, its capital one over which fifty-eight kings and 173 of their satraps had ruled: a walled city whose fame in the days of the great Mughals had been acknowledged by Milton and Dryden but which had now fallen on hard times. Before the rise of the Sikh sirdars under Ranjit Singh, Lahore had been the home of generations of Mughal rulers and noblemen whose garden-enclosed tombs were scattered across the countryside outside the city walls. This ancient heritage was tangible to an almost intolerable degree:
The dead at all times were around us – in the vast forgotten Muslim cemeteries round the Station, where one’s horse’s hoof of a morning might break through to the corpse below; skulls and bones tumbled out of our mud garden walls, and were turned up among the flowers by the Rains; and at every point were the tombs of the dead. Our chief picnic rendezvous and some of our public offices had been memorials to desired dead women, and Fort Lahore, where Runjit Singh’s wives lay, was a mausoleum of ghosts.21
From the British perspective the Punjab constituted frontier territory, only recently won, and when Lockwood arrived in Lahore the Union flag had been flying over the rampart of Fort Lahore for barely a quarter of century. But from the moment when Governor-General Dalhousie had proclaimed British rule over the Punjab, he and his successors had set about making their mark. Lahore became the seat of a succession of Lieutenant-Governors of the Punjab Province whose names were attached to various public buildings and streets, most prominently Sir John Lawrence and his successor Sir Robert Montgomery, whose memories were preserved in the ‘frigidly classical’ Lawrence Hall, built as a venue for meetings and theatrical performances, and even grander Montgomery Hall, intended to provide a platform for public occasions.
Lawrence Hall (left) and Montgomery Hall (Illustrated London News)
However, the first public building to impress itself on Lockwood Kipling could only have been Lahore railway station. Completed in 1864, it had been designed both to withstand a siege and to serve as the main depot of the Punjab railway network. Behind a brick façade bristling with battlements, turrets and keeps was a complex of railway workshops and sidings extending over a hundred acres. From the railway station entrance a semicircle of roads radiated outwards like the spokes in a cartwheel, among them Railway Road, which served as a divide between old and new Lahore. West of Railway Road rose the walls of the medieval city, within which were crammed most of Lahore’s 100,000 inhabitants, and above which rose the bastions of Fort Lahore and the minarets of the city’s greatest mosque, Emperor Aurangzeb’s Badshahi or ‘royal’ mosque – said to be second in beauty only to the Taj Mahal. Access to the city was provided by twelve arched gateways, of which the first to meet Lockwood Kipling’s gaze would have been the Delhi Gate, newly and clumsily restored by the British administration in ‘a quasi-classical and incongruous style’. The Delhi Gate gave directly on to the enamelled façade of Wazir Khan’s Masjid, Lahore’s most ornate and, from the European point of view, most accessible mosque. From here the city’s main thoroughfare ran on to the Moti and Kashmiri bazaars and then on again to the Kashmir Gate and the caravanserais of the Afghan horse-traders and the camel kafilas from the north.
Even in the Kiplings’ day the city was a place to be entered with trepidation, and with lit cigarettes to mask the stench, and for as long as they remained in Lahore both father and son combined their fascination with the place with an almost obsessive interest in its drains and their dangers. Yet Lahore was a city as beautiful without as it was ugly within, inspiring the visiting Vicereine Lady Dufferin to remark that ‘there is a garden five miles long surrounding the walls of the city so that whenever a Lahore cockney chooses to step out from his close dwelling and narrow street, he finds himself among plantains, and roses, and palms, and mangoes, and peepul-trees, and lovely flowering pomegranates’.22 It was this verdant Lahore, its garden suburb lying entirely without the city walls, that the British colonised.
Like the Sikh rulers who had preceded them, the British kept clear of the city and settled initially in the tomb-strewn fields south of its walls, which came to be known as the suburb of Anarkali, after a dancing girl whose dalliance with the son of her owner, the Mughal Emperor Akbar, had caused the latter to have her killed. The son became the Emperor Jehangir and erected a fine octagonal tomb over her grave, which the Sikhs converted into a residence and the British into their first administrative headquarters. A number of other Muslim tombs dotted about were put to similarly practical use and Anarkali very quickly became Lahore’s Civil Station, the area within which the local British administration based itself. From the Bhatti Gate, on the south-west corner of the city, a road led due south to Anarkali’s Tomb – a main artery which the British, in accordance with Anglo-Indian custom, named the Mall. From another of the city’s southern entrances, the Lohari Gate, a second road also ran south, parallel to the Mall, and this became Court Road.
The rectangle of land between these two roads very soon became crowded with new government buildings, private residences, barracks, bazaars, and a Company Bagh or public garden. More space was needed and, with that confidence so characteristic of the British in India, engineers began to lay out a greatly enlarged Civil Station extending eastwards from Anarkali across the fields and tombs. Five miles away, in a marshy waste named Mian Mir after the tomb of a local Muslim saint, they plotted out a military cantonment and a raised roadway connecting it to Anarkali. This became the Upper Mall, a broad avenue planted with tamarisk shade trees, off which ran more than a dozen raised side roads, so creating a series of sunken square plots. In one of these plots, on the north side of the Upper Mall about two miles down the road from Anarkali’s Tomb, stood the tomb and surrounding garden of a cousin of Emperor Akbar. This provided the nucleus for Government House, seat of the Lieutenant-Governors of the Punjab, allowing the vacated Anarkali’s Tomb to be converted into Lahore’s first Christian church. At this same time the first steps were initiated to preserve Lahore’s heritage. The Badshahi Mosque was cleared of its Sikh occupiers and restored to its original religious function – and funds allocated for a museum.
Initially the museum’s first curator had to make do with Wazir Khan’s baradari, a handsome cuboid building with a cupola at each corner located at the south-eastern corner of the Anarkali rectangle. Then in 1864 the Punjab Exhibition of Arts and Industry was staged in Lahore to promote the Province’s arts and crafts, and a temporary structure was erected by the Public Works Department for the purpose in the gardens beside Wazir Khan’s baradari. Once the exhibition had closed, this new building, consisting of a long, narrow hall with a series of arches on either side opening out into closed verandahs, was converted into the Punjab Museum, with the exhibits left over from the Punjab Exhibition providing the bulk of its collection. The vacated baradari subsequently became Lahore Public Library.
The Punjab Exhibition Building, later the Museum (Illustrated London News)
In 1867 the museum’s part-time curator, Thomas Thornton, used his authority as Secretary to the Punjab Government to issue an instruction to every official in the Punjab to send in ‘any object of interest or curiosity in the way of agricultural produce, manufacture or antiquity’. As a result the museum gained a wonderfully eclectic range of exhibits, most notably an array of Graeco-Buddhist Gandharan statues, bas-reliefs and artefacts excavated from various sites in and around Peshawar. A further addition was Lahore’s famous antique cannon, known as Zam-zamah or the ‘Hummer’. Cast in Lahore in 1762 to the orders of the Afghan invader Ahmad Shah Durrani, this awesome fourteen-foot weapon was at one time the largest artillery piece in India, and had come to be regarded as a talisman of victory. But after being damaged at the siege of Multan in 1818 it had been dragged to Lahore, to stand sentinel outside the Delhi Gate until 1870, when it was moved to a raised brick platform outside the museum – which was where Lockwood Kipling first set eyes on it. According to Lahore as it was and is, an early guidebook written largely by Thomas Thornton with a contributing chapter from Lockwood Kipling, the museum had by then become known to Lahore’s Native inhabitants as the Ajaib-ghar or ‘Wonder House’.23
Until he could find suitable accommodation to rent Lockwood took a room at the Punjab Club – not the present Punjab Gymkhana Club building with its imposing Palladian façade but its predecessor: a ‘hideous barrack-like structure, with its racket court at the back’, standing in its own plot of land beside the Upper Mall just west of Government House. Just across the road was the Civil Station’s main recreation area, consisting of Lawrence and Montgomery Halls, Lawrence Gardens and the racecourse. From here it was a five-minute ride by pony cart to the museum – and the building immediately behind it which provided temporary accommodation for Lockwood Kipling’s chief responsibility, the fledgling Mayo School of Industrial Art: a ‘dilapidated building of stucco … painted a dull yellow … in a large empty compound without a tree or shrub near it’.24
As Rudyard Kipling was to grumble seven years later, the Punjab Club was materially no more than a place ‘where bachelors, for the most part, gathered to eat meals of no merit among men whose merits they knew well’, sitting down together at one table in a ‘long, shabby dining-room’. Its significance lay in the fact that it was the hub around which Anglo-Indian Society in Lahore revolved, for it was an exclusive institution, open to ‘none except picked men at their definite work – Civilians, Army, Education, Canals, Forestry, Engineering, Irrigation, Railways, Doctors, and Lawyers – samples of each branch and each talking their own shop’.25 According to the 1875 census, there were 1723 Europeans in Lahore at this time, many of them members of the railway community who lived, quite literally, on the wrong side of the tracks – in a suburb known as Naulakha beside the railway workshops. They included a large number of Eurasians of mixed race and neither they nor anyone who engaged in business or trade was eligible for the Punjab Club, so that its actual membership was less than a hundred, all white men. Had Lockwood remained a member of the provincial service, as in Bombay, it is unlikely that he would have been eligible for membership. In Lahore he was neither flesh nor fowl, since his appointment was, in the words of a friend, ‘permanent but he had no official rank’.26 But he had the support of Civilian friends and he was self-evidently a gentleman and this was enough to ensure that he was at once put up for temporary membership of the Punjab Club and subsequently voted a full member.
By the time Alice joined him in Lahore in May, Lockwood had found a bungalow to rent, although not the house that became their permanent home. The Punjab Hot Weather was now fully upon them and was like nothing the Kiplings had previously experienced. Lockwood compared it to ‘a red thread’ encompassing all with ‘garments of fire’, and ever afterwards he and other members of the family dreaded Punjab’s summers. On one of the hottest nights of the year the Kiplings were invited to dine with the Deputy Commissioner of Lahore and there met an eighteen-year-old girl, Edith Plowden, who afterwards became their closest friend in India, to the extent that Alice regarded her as her ‘sixth sister’ and Ruddy viewed her as ‘the “missing link” between Lahore and London’.
Both Miss Plowden’s parents were dead and she had come out to
India to live with and housekeep for her elder brother and guardian, Walter Plowden, a senior Government barrister in Lahore. Also living in Lahore at this time was a second brother, Chichele Plowden, newly enrolled in the Indian Police, and a cousin, Henry Plowden, another barrister. All were members of the closest thing that Anglo-India had to an aristocracy, based partly on class but principally on Indian service. Every Plowden in India was a descendant of Richard Plowden, who had joined the East India Company as a ‘writer’ or junior merchant in the 1770s and whose five sons had all become Bengal Civilians. Of their offspring five had followed their fathers as Civilians and another four had entered either the Indian Army or the Indian Police, so that by the 1870s male Plowdens were to be found comfortably placed in every Province in northern India – to say nothing of female members of the family such as Edith Plowden’s aunt Katherine, whose husband Sir John Strachey was at this time Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces.
Miss Edith Plowden was shy, prudish and insecure. Her elder brother’s legal work took up most of his time and, despite her connections, she found herself friendless in Lahore – until the Kiplings took her under their wing. Fortunately for the biographer, Edith Plowden kept a number of the many letters they exchanged over the years, as well as writing an unvarnished account of their friendship which survives as an unpublished manuscript. At the dinner where they first met Edith barely noted Alice Kipling, beyond observing that she was the last to be escorted in to dinner because of her husband’s lowly status and that her arms were ‘bare of ornament’. But Lockwood Kipling was placed next to her and took pains to keep her amused throughout the meal. Despite his restricted stature, Edith Plowden found him ‘impossible to overlook … with his fine head, beneficent [sic] expression and grey beard. I called him Socrates from his resemblance to a cast of the philosopher.’ After dinner the guests moved out on to the lawn, where – since snakes liked to lie out on the warm ground after sunset – a carpet had been laid. Here Edith had her first opportunity to talk to Alice Kipling and to exchange confidences: ‘No one could persuade me to enjoy a life in the Punjaub; drifting from one ugly station to another; changing communities breaking up friendships; or a broken up life in some hill station … Alice’s cheerful philosophy rising above depressing conditions, her interest in all around her, as it seemed to me, was a rebuke to me … My life took a new direction that evening.’27
Kipling Sahib Page 10