Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  Lord Ripon was never forgiven for his unwitting part in Ruddy’s discomfiture. He came to represent all the follies of Gladstonian liberalism, and when he prepared to make a premature departure from India at the end of 1884 Ruddy mocked him in the pages of the CMG in another of his unsigned political squibs. In ‘Lord Ripon’s Reverie’ he imagines Ripon brooding on his failures:

  Of the millions that I govern who will wish me back? Not one.

  Curse the land and all within it. As of old, the papers scoff –

  Dreary columns of invective, read by stealth at Peterhof.

  Peterhof, that through the pine-trees overlooks the Simla hills,

  And the City of Calcutta where they rave against my Bills.

  There I sketched my swart Utopia, nourishing the Babu’s pride

  On the fairy-tales of Justice – with a leaning to his side.27

  In May 1883 the Punjab Hot Weather set in with a vengeance. Between sunrise and sunset every door and window was shuttered to keep out the heat, and no foray into direct sunlight was made without the protection of dark glasses and the mushroom-shaped sola topee de rigueur at that time. Wheeler went down with a bout of fever and proceeded to Simla to recover, leaving Ruddy once more in charge of the paper. A month later he dashed off a long letter in rhyming couplets to his Aunt Edith on how well he was coping with this first baptism of heat:

  For the heavens are red hot iron and the earth is burning brass,

  And the river glares in the sun like a torrent of molten glass,

  And the quivering heat haze rises, the pitiless sunlight glows

  Till my cart reins blister my fingers as my spectacles blister my nose.

  Heat, like a baker’s oven that sweats one down to the bone[,]

  Never such heat, and such health, has your parboiled nephew known.

  The letter-in-verse ended on a note of doubtful nostalgia:

  Oh what is ‘two hundred a month,’ and half year ‘rises’ to come,

  To a fellow with hairs in his pen, and lizard-tails in his gum;

  His ink putrescent and loathsome, a paste of corrupting flies,

  His spectacles dimmed and steamy, and goggles over his eyes.

  ‘Oh give me a London trottoir, some bywalk damp and muddy,

  In place of this wholesome heat’ is the cry of your washed out

  Ruddy.28

  The Hot Weather imagery first deployed in this poem was to be recycled time and again in the many short stories, such as ‘At the End of the Passage’, which are set in oven-like rooms where a tattered whitewashed punkah can do no more than puddle the hot air as the occupants’ lives fall apart.

  The stunt-sahib’s reward for deputising for his chief was a summons from the banker James Walker, co-proprietor of the CMG, to take a month off on full pay and join him as his guest in his summer residence in Simla. In that same month Alice Kipling left for England in order to be with Trix from the start of the summer holidays, while Lockwood stayed on alone in Lahore. It meant that for the first time since his arrival in Lahore nine months earlier Ruddy was off the parental leash – and on his way to Simla, summer capital of British India and already saddled with a reputation for ‘frivolity, jealousy and intrigue’29 for which he himself was afterwards held largely responsible.

  Besides serving as the summer capital of both the Government of India and the Government of the Punjab, Simla was also the summer headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief and the various military departments under his authority, as well as other services such as the Police and the Public Works Department. These senior civil and military officers and their wives made up the inner core of Simla’s Anglo-Indian population in its summer season and they represented Simla Society, which was as close as British India ever came to having an upper crust. Their presence ought to have made Simla more hidebound than any other any Station in India. But Simla’s summer population was further swelled by the presence of large numbers of British wives and their offspring dispatched to the hills to escape the heat of the plains, including a generous sprinkling of unmarried daughters fresh from school in England, the much-maligned ‘fishing fleet’ come in search of husbands. What this meant was that at the height of summer the British womenfolk in Simla, almost uniquely in India, outnumbered the menfolk several times over – a situation that would have been intolerable but for the presence of significant numbers of male birds of passage influential enough to wangle a fortnight’s local leave. These were the ‘poodle-fakers’, ‘danglers’ and ‘mashers’, mostly young and unattached, eager to ‘spoon’ with a ‘grass widow’30 rooming in one of Simla’s many hotels and guest houses. It was this undercurrent of the illicit that gave Simla its peculiar frisson.

  Simla was also exclusive, because it was hard to reach and almost prohibitively expensive to live in. Perched on one of the lower ranges of the Western Himalayas 170 miles due north of Delhi, it was badly placed for most Anglo-Indians, although conveniently close to Lahore. Even so, Ruddy had first to transport his pony Joe by train to the railhead to Umballa and then transfer to a two-horse tonga to Kalka before he could even begin the first stage of the long climb through the Himalayan foothills, with Joe following on behind with his syce. It was a journey of delight Ruddy was to make many times, afterwards recalled in almost the last of his many Indian tales, ‘Garm – a Hostage’ in which Ruddy and his bearer, Kadir Baksh, flee the Hot Weather in the company of his own fox-terrier, Vixen, and a bull-terrier named Garm:

  A cool breath from the snow met us about fives miles out of Kalka, and she [Vixen] whined for her coat … ‘Hi-yi-yi-hi!’ sang Vixen as we shot round the curves; ‘Toot-toot-toot!’ went the driver’s bugle at the dangerous places, and ‘Yow! Yow!’ bayed Garm. Kadir Baksh sat on the front seat and smiled. Even he was glad to get away from the heat of the Plains that stewed in the haze behind us. Now and then we would meet a man we knew going down to his work again, and he would say: ‘What’s it like below?’ and I would shout: ‘Hotter than cinders. What’s it like up above?’ and he would shout back: ‘Just perfect!’ and away we would go.31

  Like every European new arrival to Simla, Ruddy spent his first mornings ‘calling’ – visiting every house where he had hopes of being received to leave his card in a tin receptacle beside the front door. Invitations to call duly followed, which meant that he spent much of his leave on horseback negotiating Simla’s precipitous mountainside on roads that were just ledges. At first they turned my head a good deal but – in a little I was enabled to canter any how and any where.’32

  Much of Simla’s effervescence was due to the fact that it stood at an elevation of 7000 feet, extending westwards for about a mile and a half along a steep-sided ridge from the deodar-covered mountain peak of Jakko to Prospect Hill, with two knolls in between. On either side of the ridge the ground falls away to create two deep bowls, so that most dwellings have views looking either northwards towards the Himalayan ranges or south towards the Punjab plains. The main thoroughfare was – and still is – the Mall, which runs the length of the ridge and at the Jakko end curls round its southern flank as the Mall Extension. In Kipling’s day this was closed to all carriages except that of the Viceroy and Vicereine.

  Only at one point does the Mall broaden out to create a patch of open ground, known as the Ridge, scarcely the length and breadth of a football pitch, extending from Christ Church at the foot of Jakko Hill to Scandal Point, where three roads converge. This was the site of Simla’s first bazaar, which had sprung up to house the camp-followers accompanying Lord Amherst, the Governor-General, when he made the Simla ridge the site of his summer camp in 1827. There was a single cottage standing before he arrived and half a dozen by the time he left, all simply built in rustic style using local timber, with steep gables and chimneys. It was then decided that Simla ridge should serve as a sanatorium for invalids, land was bought from the local rajas and within a decade more than a hundred summer houses had been constructed along the ridge.

  Consciously or not
, the English owners of these houses strived to replicate the world they had left behind in a way impossible in the plains – the one concession being the use of corrugated tin for roofing, easy to transport but hard on the ears when it rained. They planted gardens with roses and other conspicuously English flowering shrubs and creepers, and gave their homes and surrounds English names. ‘Most of the houses have their peculiar names,’ noted the author of Journal of a Tour of Upper Hindustan after his visit to Simla in 1839. ‘Bearing the most fanciful names are Stirling Castle, Wharncliffe, Annandale Lodge, Oakfield, Eagle Mount, Longwood, Allan Bank, Union Cottage, Primrose Hill, Annandale View, Prospect House, The Crags, Bellevue, Rookwood, Swiss Cottage, Fountain Hall, Daisy Bank, The Hermitage, Blessings, The Briars, Victoria Lodge, Edward’s Cot, Morna’s Grove, Richmond Villa, Woodbine Cottage, Kenilworth, Abbeyville, Sunnybank, Holly Bank etc.’33 Most of these cottages were rented out by the season, the rates depending on size and location. Within a quarter of a century the numbers of cottages and guest houses had quadrupled and quadrupled again, following Lord Lawrence’s decision to make Simla the summer seat of Government, regardless of the expense involved in moving the entire central administration over 1000 miles twice a year.

  Little thought was given to planning until Lord Lytton’s first appearance in the summer of 1876. The ever-fastidious Lytton was dismayed to find himself housed in a rented house, Peterhof, which he likened to ‘a sort of pigsty’.34 He immediately called for plans to make Simla fit for an imperial capital, which would mean building a proper Viceregal Lodge and removing the Native bazaars which had grown up on the Ridge at the Mall’s eastern end. The opportunity to clear the Mall came when fire swept through Simla’s Upper Bazaar, with cholera to follow. ‘This fearful visitation,’ noted Martin Towelle, the Civil and Military Gazette’s local manager and author of Towelle’s Hand Book and Guide to Simla, ‘roused the Municipal Commissioners and the Authorities of Simla to more energetic exertions in endeavouring to cleanse the place of its many impurities.’ The eastern end of the Mall was cleared to become the focal point of the Station, forcing ‘those who minister to the wants of the glad city – jhampanis who pull the pretty rickshaws by night and gamble till the dawn, grocers, oil-sellers, curio-venders, firewood dealers, priests, pickpockets, and native employees of the Government’35 – to resettle tier upon tier along a series of lower terraces cut into the ridge’s steep southern slopes. These became Simla’s Middle and Lower Bazaars: ‘the crowded rabbit-warren that climbs from the valley to the Town Hall at an angle of forty-five’ where Kim’s mentor, the Afghan horse-trader Mahbub Ali, rented a room in the house of a cattle-dealer, knowing he could sink out of sight.

  When Rudyard Kipling first came to Simla, Lord Lytton’s schemes for the town’s modernisation had still to be realised. A site had been acquired on the summit of Observatory Hill for the new Viceregal Lodge and the foundations had been laid for a magnificent town hall to rise from the ashes of the Upper Bazaar, incorporating a small theatre, library, Masonic hall, public hall, ballroom, police station and an armoury for Simla’s volunteer Rifle Corps, only for the work to be put on ice on Lord Ripon’s orders. This meant that the Ridge resembled a building site, so that the promenade known as the hawa khana or the ‘eating of the air’ held every afternoon between half-past four and seven now took place at the top end of the Mall Extension, running south along Jakko Hill’s western flank from the Church to Chota Simla or Little Simla. For two and a half hours every day this one-mile stretch of road was thronged with promenaders, gentlemen on horseback and ladies in their jampans, clumsy-looking sedan chairs on wheels which required the services of four jampanis, and were about to be superseded by the very latest importation from Japan, ginrickshas, swiftly Anglo-Indianised into ‘rickshaws’. It was here that Ruddy was first introduced to Simla society, although in his case society with a small ‘s’.

  Simla Society with a capital ‘s’ revolved around three lat sahibs: the Viceroy, otherwise known as the Mulki Lat Sahib or Lord of All the Land; the Commander-in-Chief – the Jungi Lat Sahib or Lord Of War; and the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab – the Punjab Lat Sahib. Of the three, only the last had an official residence worthy of his position: Barnes Court, a sprawling mock-Tudor building set in forty-six acres of land in Chota Simla. The other two had to make do with temporary accommodation, and in the summer of ’83 the C-in-C found himself in the humiliating position of having to vacate Woodville, located above Barnes Court on the sunny side of Jakko, and move to the less attractive property Snowden, also on Jakko Hill but on its northern flank. The reason for this enforced move was that Woodville was one of a number of Simla properties recently acquired by James Walker and his Alliance Bank of Simla.

  The head office of the Alliance Bank of Simla was at Kelvin Grove, which also doubled as James Walker’s private residence, and it was here that Ruddy spent his first summer leave. Sited on the upper side of the Mall Extension just south of Combermere Bridge, Kelvin Grove was ideally placed to put Ruddy at the centre of Simla’s main amusements. Of these, by far and away the most important in Ruddy’s eyes was Benmore, a property owned by a German musician, Herr Felix von Goldstein, who had been imported to Simla by Lord Lytton as his bandmaster and had stayed put. After securing Benmore for himself von Goldstein had converted it into an entertainment centre, advertised in 1877 as ‘“Benmore” with its new and handsome Concert Room, and Stage, available for Theatrical Performances, Balls, Parties, Musical and other Entertainments’. The concert room and stage could be hired for private functions for fifty rupees, with an additional twenty-five rupees for the adjoining drawing room and hall, and a further thirty-two rupees for the supper room. When ‘rinking’ became fashionable in the late 1870s a roller-skating rink was added, which makes Rudyard Kipling’s homage to Benmore in ‘The Lovers’ Litany’ more understandable, if rather less romantic:36

  Eyes of blue – the Simla Hills

  Silvered with the moonlight hoar;

  Pleading of the waltz that thrills,

  Dies and echoes round Benmore.

  ‘Mabel’, ‘Officers’, ‘Goodbye’,

  Glamour, wine, and witchery –

  On my soul’s sincerity,

  ‘Love like ours can never die!’37

  During that first summer the short ride between Kelvin Grove and Benmore and back again was one that Ruddy made many times over. Returning from late-night revelries at Benmore he had always to pass Simla’s earliest cemetery, the Old Burial Ground, which lay just out of sight below a bend in the road. This became the subject of two early meditations in prose and verse, written within days of each other. The first drew the attention of Ruddy’s Simla readership to the fact that close by a favourite trysting place for lovers was this forgotten cemetery – ‘a short tumble backwards, in fact, from the white railings – you come suddenly upon a relic of old Simla neglected and forgotten, as are most old things in India’.38 The idea of Simla’s forgotten dead was then used to chilling effect in the poem ‘Possibilities’:

  Ay, lay him ’neath the Simla pine –

  A fortnight fully to be missed:

  Behold, we lose our fourth at whist

  A chair is vacant where we dine.39

  The poet imagines the unlamented dead listening to the sounds of music wafting across from Benmore and mocking the living they have left behind.

  A better-known landmark on the Mall Extension was the bandstand, heralding the beginning of Simla’s shops and hotels, beginning with the Rockcliffe and Lowrie’s Hotel, where bachelors and other hopefuls stayed during their brief visits. Then came Combermere Bridge and the beginnings of Upper Bazaar, fronted by a row of two-storey buildings that included Combermere House, containing Meakins & Co., purveyors of ‘celebrated beers and porters’, and Moore’s the milliners, offering ‘the latest Parisian trimmed millinery, the newest styles in Untrimmed Felt and Straw Hats, French Flowers and Feathers in great variety, Bonnet silks etc., its dress department being under the e
ntire management of Mrs Craymer’. Next door to Combermere House was Regent House, ‘where are located the establishments of Messrs Richards and Co., Thacker, Spink and Co., and the renowned restaurant of Peliti’. The last-named was Signor F. Peliti, Calcutta’s favourite confectioner and ice-cream maker, first brought to Simla by Lord Lytton along with the French chef Monsieur Bansard. Both men had subsequently gone into business in Simla as restaurateurs and hoteliers, and Peliti’s had become the fashionable place of rendezvous, where ladies gathered on the restaurant terrace to exchange gossip and pleasantries with their cakes and ices.

  Immediately below Peliti’s were the Assembly Hall and the Billiard Room, as well as the Station Press building – the last of particular interest to Ruddy because it housed the local offices of his newspaper. Here Ruddy must have called on his arrival to pay his respects to George Allen’s right-hand man in Simla, Howard Hensman. As much a diplomat as a journalist, Hensman was the Pioneer’s officiating editor in Allahabad and its special correspondent in Simla. He had made his name as a correspondent in the recent Afghan War and, by learning to play his cards in both the figurative and the metaphorical sense, had become the confidant and sometime mouthpiece of anyone who mattered, including the outgoing Viceroy, Lord Ripon, and the present Commander-in-Chief, Major-General Sir Donald Stewart. According to Kipling, Hensman was a ‘power in the land’ who played whist with ‘Great Ones, who gave him special news’.40

  What must also have impressed Ruddy on his arrival in Simla was that Kelvin Grove stood at the very gates of the United Services Club, exclusive to members of the ‘Civil and Military’. Despite its shabby buildings, the Club could claim to be the most important meeting place in India, for, as one of its members explained, it was where he ‘met every day the great men of India … I would hear what the Viceroy thought or what he had said, would be told who were the coming men, and sometimes would listen to opinions on the Ilbert Bill and on Lord Ripon’s scheme for Local Self-Government.’41 However, the Club was open only to the ruling caste. Ruddy’s host James Walker was Simla’s leading banker, co-proprietor of the two most successful newspapers in the country, a generous benefactor to the town and first Chairman of Simla’s newly formed Municipal Committee. Like his business partner George Allen, Walker had many friends in the ICS and Army. Yet both men were inadmissible for membership of the United Services Club, and so excluded from Simla’s inner circle. Allen, it was reported, gave ‘le beau monde in Simla picnics, presents, balls and fetes’ and ‘panted for social and political advancement’, yet was snubbed at every turn: ‘Indian [Anglo-Indian] Society, though quite ready to eat his excellent dinners, drink his expensive wines, and accept his costly presents, would not fraternise with anyone who had been in trade. In this respect it is far more “select” than royalty.’42