Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  The Afghan caravansarai, Lahore, J. L. Kipling (Beast and Man)

  It should be noted that Robinson’s description of Mahbab Ali appeared in print long before Kim was published – a reminder that the Afghan horse-trader ‘Mahbub Ali’, the most rounded and sympathetic character in the novel after ‘Kim’ himself and his Tibetan lama, was drawn from life – as indeed was the courtesan Ruddy named ‘Lalun, the Pearl’, the delightful, devious courtesan in ‘On the City Wall’, who plies her trade from a little house on Lahore’s city wall which looks out across the sandbanks of the Ravi River and the walls of Lahore’s Fort. Ruddy took her name from Mirza Moorad Alee Beg’s novel Lalun the Beragun, but he clearly based her on a city prostitute known to him, and when he returned briefly to Lahore some five years later he made a point of looking out the house where she had lived. References to women prostitutes in two letters written at this time (quoted in the previous chapter) show that Ruddy was now on intimate terms with the city’s street women. This intimacy led to a surprising outcome: in February 1886 Ruddy wrote a leader in the paper ‘on infant marriage and enforced marriage’, and from this time onward the injustices inflicted on Native women by their menfolk became a pet hobby-horse that he rode with ever-increasing vigour.

  This growing intimacy with Lahore and its denizens extended to the city’s dominant religion: Islam. When Ruddy heard that one of the office chaprassis or messengers was planning to attend the city’s annual Chiragan Fair, a ‘festival of lamps’ held in the Shalimar Gardens to honour a local Muslim saint, he asked him to be his guide. ‘Nearly every body’s khitmatgar [butler] and bearer was there,’ Ruddy afterwards observed, and it seemed to be rubbed into you that the people who make up our nauker-log [servant-people] have the manners and instincts of gentlemen away from their service and on their own ground. Humiliating thing to confess of course; but I fancy it’s true. My friend the chaprassi will be ‘O-chaprassi-idher ao’ [Chaprassi, come here] in another twelve hours and my bondslave for six rupees per mensem as is right and proper and just. But I saw another side of his character on the day he piloted me through the packed tumult of the Chiragan fair of 1886.17

  Muslims at prayer, J. L. Kipling (National Trust)

  From then on Ruddy showed himself to be favourably disposed towards Muslims and Islam in India, even to the extent of writing admiringly of a Wahhabi prisoner in a chain gang, most probably encountered at Lahore railway station while he was being transferred to the Punjab Central Jail behind Lawrence Gardens and the racecourse. The Wahhabis had a long history of anti-British violence and the fomenting of tribal jihads on the North-West Frontier, and were viewed by the authorities as dangerous fanatics. But if Ruddy’s verses entitled ‘From the Masjid-Al-Aqsa of Sayyid Ahmed (Wahabi)’ are to be taken at face value, he had questioned the prisoner at length, and came away greatly moved by the Wahhabi’s devotion:

  So I submitted myself to the limits of rapture –

  Bound by this man we had bound, amid captives his capture –

  Till he returned me to earth and the visions departed;

  But on him be the Peace and the Blessing; for he was greathearted.18

  Nothing better illustrates Ruddy’s changed attitude than the ‘scrap’ he slipped into the CMG in early September that same year. In January he had puzzled in the paper over a household servant sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for stealing a cricket ball, wondering ‘what in the name of everything incongruous can a bearer want with a cricket-ball?’19 He supplied an answer of sorts in ‘The Story of Muhammad Din’, which begins with the narrator’s khitmatgar asking if he has any use for the chipped polo ball on his mantelpiece, which his little son wants to play with. The next day the narrator comes back from the office earlier than usual and surprises the little boy in his room. The boy, Muhammad Din, is given permission to play in his garden and thereafter the two exchange grave salaams whenever they meet. This goes on for some months, until one day there is no Muhammad Din to greet the narrator on his return home. He makes enquiries and learns that the boy has fever. A doctor is summoned but departs with the comment that ‘They have no stamina, these brats,’ and the boy dies. Kipling closes his story with a series of terse, simple sentences, devoid of emotion, making the ending all the more powerful.

  ‘The Story of Muhammad Din’20 was the third written of the stories that later went into Plain Tales from the Hills, ‘The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows’ and ‘In the House of Suddhoo’ being the first and second.

  On 5 April 1886 Ruddy was initiated as a Freemason in the Lodge Hope and Perseverance, No. 782, at Lahore. What attracted him was Freemasonry’s emphasis on universal brotherhood: in a country riven by caste and race, Lodge Hope and Perseverance was neutral territory, where Indians and English met as equals. ‘I was entered by a member of the Bramo Samaj [a reformist Hindu movement], passed by a Mohammaden and raised by an Englishman,’ he wrote in a letter to The Times. ‘Our Tyler was an Indian Jew. We met, of course, on the level, and the only difference anyone would notice was that at our banquets some of the Brethren, who were debarred by caste rules from eating food not ceremonially prepared, sat by empty plates.’21

  In contrast to his dismal record of attendance as a Punjab Volunteer, Ruddy was a regular attender at every monthly meeting and acted conscientiously as the Lodge’s secretary for a year. He also researched the subject of Freemasonry well enough to be able to present papers to his brother Masons on the ‘Origins of the Craft’ and ‘Some Remarks on Popular Views of Freemasonry’, and he took the opportunity to attend meetings at the Military Lodge at Mian Mir, from whose rolls he purloined the names of two fellow Masons: Surgeon-Captain Terence Mulvaney and Lieutenant Learoyd of the Royal Artillery. The older Kipling is said to have declared that Freemasonry was the closest thing to a religion that he knew.22 Raised as a non-believer, Ruddy nevertheless had a strong religious impulse which Freemasonry satisfied by providing a spiritual centre ground, a sanctuary from which he could emerge as he pleased to explore the plethora of creeds about him. His ballad ‘The Mother Lodge’ is a tribute to the fellowship he found in Lahore’s Lodge Hope and Perseverance and the lodge he joined subsequently when he moved to Allahabad. In the opening verse all the local European trades are listed, in the next all the Lodge’s Indian Brothers. ‘There ain’t such things as infidels,’ asserts the poem’s soldier narrator, going on to describe how at their monthly meetings the Brothers often end up discussing their respective religions late into the night:

  So man on man got talkin’,

  An’ not a Brother stirred

  Till mornin’ waked the parrots

  An’ that dam’ brain-fever-bird;

  We’d say ’twas ’ighly curious,

  An’ we’d all ride ’ome to bed

  With Mohammed, God, an’ Shiva

  Changin’ pickets in our ’ead.23

  Freemasonry looms large in some of the best of Kipling’s fiction. That stirring tale of trickery and derring-do in the mountain fastnesses beyond Afghanistan, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, is stuffed with Brother Masons, Masonic talk and Masonic imagery, as is Kim to a less obvious degree. In both these major works the ‘Craft’ is represented by men who can hardly be regarded as shining examples of Freemasonry: the two loafers ‘Dravot’ and ‘Peachey’ in ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, and in Kim ex-colour sergeant ‘Kimball O’Hara’ of the Mavericks, deceased, who leaves his son little else besides a Masonic certificate, a birth certificate and his own name.

  That little boy, of course, is Kim, who may have had his origins in a white adolescent boy who for a period in the late 1870s and early 1880s was a familiar figure in the Anarkali bazaar area, where the Mayo School of Industrial Art and the Lahore Museum were located. He was the son of a clerk for the Punjab Government Secretariat, identified only by the first letter of his surname, B——, a retired British soldier who had married a local Indian woman and died after having had several children by her. According to Colonel Goulding, the man wh
o commanded the company of Punjab Volunteers of which Ruddy was briefly a member, the widow and her children ‘lived in the bazaar near Kapurthala House where young B—— reigned supreme … He was to be seen driving a tikka gharri owned by an Indian who had married one of his sisters … Hatless and barefooted, with the cunning of a street Arab, this boy roamed about at will, and anything he did not know about bazaar and serai life was not worth knowing … The market crossing, where the Zamzammah then stood, was one of his favourite haunts.’24 At the risk of spoiling a good story, it should be added that a more literary source for Kim is the Meerut lawyer John Lang’s novel Who Was the Child?, published in 1859, the child in question being the orphaned son of a sergeant of the 13th Regiment of Foot, raised by Indians and restored to European society after being identified by his signet ring.

  At the start of May 1886 Alice and Trix Kipling departed for Simla, as usual, Lockwood following on a month later, so that once more Ruddy was alone to enjoy what he described as the ‘desolate freedom of the wild ass’ until his own leave began in July. Again the Hot Weather did its worst and by mid-June he was complaining to Margaret Burne-Jones of being ‘nearly crazy’ for lack of sleep, and of having to be ‘hypodermically syringed’ with morphine by the doctor. He had been suffering nightmares ever since reporting on a fatality at the Lahore High School, where the roof had collapsed killing three boys as they slept. Since visiting the scene of the tragedy he had been haunted by what he had seen and heard and smelt: ‘A view … of the three swathed figures in the cots, the sound of the midwives who had laid them out, whispering together, and the smell – the death smell of carbolic acid … If I’d been a convicted murderer I couldn’t have been more persistently followed by those things on the beds.’ The ‘washers of the dead’ afterwards reappeared in ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’ and the awful sounds of their ministrations in ‘At the End of the Passage’, in which the narrator has to stand by as a dead man is prepared for burial.

  What saved Ruddy from ‘the horror of a great darkness’ was a book: Walter Besant’s All in a Garden Fair. Biographers have puzzled over why a reading and rereading of this mediocre novel should have been regarded by Kipling as an act of ‘salvation’ that kept him sane. The answer can only be that Ruddy identified with its hero, a young man trying to make his way as a writer in London. The book gave him hope by allowing him to believe that through his own efforts he could make a career for himself outside India and that what Kay Robinson had said to him only months earlier was indeed possible: his future lay not in India among his own people, but in London.

  Just as Ruddy was reading his way out of his Hot Weather crisis he received a letter from a friend whom he identified to Margaret Burne-Jones as ‘only eight and twenty, a brother journalist from the Northwest’, telling him of his feelings for Trix and asking if he thought his case was hopeless. Ruddy had always been fiercely protective of his sister and ever since her arrival in India had fretted about the prospect of her being removed from his care. ‘You being a mere woman,’ he had written earlier to Margaret, ‘can’t understand my intense anxiety about the maiden and my jealous care lest she should show signs of being “touched in the heart”.’ Now he was outraged: ‘Personally I liked the man – would have even gone so far as to back his bill for him [–] but that didn’t prevent me from sitting down and sending him a brief and courteous epistle of an exceedingly unpleasant nature. Unofficially of course I was sorry for him because I knew how he’d feel but, officially and as a Brother, I was at some pains to thoroughly sit upon and end him.’ He went on to ask the Wop of Albion not to let on to Trix or his parents what he had done, revealing that he had acted as much for his own sake as for his sister’s: ‘You can’t realise how savage one feels at a thing of this kind – an attempt to smash the Family Square and the child barely eighteen too! If after my lucid reasoning he chooses to write to the Parents and get their verdict he has only himself to thank for what follows. I shall declare war against him to the knife.’25

  A rather different view of this episode was provided by Trix herself a decade after her brother’s death: ‘There was a man who wanted to marry me – a lifelong friend of Ruddy’s – and he kept on writing me letters. I took one of them to Ruddy one day and said, “Here’s Herbert again; what am I to do?” Ruddy shifted his pipe to the other side of his mouth and said, “Shoot the brute!” That was all the help I got from him.’26 Trix might have chosen to identify her suitor as ‘Herbert’, but there is little doubt that he was none other than Ruddy’s best friend in India and his most supportive admirer, Kay Robinson.27

  The pacification of Upper Burma, so successfully occupied the previous November, was now failing to proceed according to plan. Resistance took the form of ambush and sniping, with officers as prime targets. In early June the CMG ran a report that a Lieutenant J. E. O. Armstrong of the Hampshire Regiment and another officer had been shot by unseen snipers as they took an evening stroll outside Mandalay’s Fort Sagaing. Ruddy’s first response was ‘The Grave of the Hundred Dead’, which begins:

  A Snider squibbed in the jungle,

  Somebody laughed and fled,

  And the men of the First Shikaris

  Picked up their Subaltern dead,

  With a big blue mark in his forehead

  And the back blown out of his head.28

  Further reflection led Ruddy back to his first reaction to the news of Dury’s death seven months earlier and his remark about ‘£1,800 worth of education gone to smash’, which he expanded into the six acerbic verses of ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’. Three decades before Wilfred Owen, Kipling turns on their head his beloved Horace’s lines about how sweet and proper it is to die for one’s country. ‘A great and glorious thing it is,’ his poem opens, ‘To learn, for seven years or so, / The Lord knows what of that and this, / Ere reckoned fit to face the Foe.’ The scene shifts to India’s North-West Frontier, where the crude jezail flintlock and the curved tulwar are the weapons of choice, and the verses go on to expound on the awful ease with which the product of an expensive education can be blown away by a few grains of crude saltpetre:

  A scrimmage in a Border Station –

  A canter down some dark defile –

  Two thousand pounds of education

  Drops to a ten-rupee jezail –

  The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,

  Shot like a rabbit in a ride!29

  Despite having been the odd man out at United Services College, Ruddy had always felt a close affinity with his former schoolmates. In India he was almost pathetically keen to keep in touch with those who had gone into the British or Indian Armies. During the Rawalpindi Durbar he had met and dined with seventeen USC old boys, and had afterwards maintained a close watch on their movements, detailed in every letter sent to ‘Uncle Crom’ or to other teachers at USC. ‘Maxwell goes to Burmah with his regiment,’ runs part of one such list from 1886. ‘Molesworth has died of typhoid fever at Cherat near Peshawur … Ranken has been ordered off to Burmah to join the transport there. “Toby” Fitzgerald and “Nelly” Gordon are at Umballa with the Queen’s Bays. Dunsterville in the Murree Hills with the 107th is reported to be spending his time “gardening”.’30

  Having been schooled among their kind Ruddy identified with the junior officers in the Indian Army and the British Army in India. He derived a great deal of pleasure from dining in their company in the regimental messes at Mian Mir and delighted in joining in the after-dinner ragging, rowdy games, sing-songs and other arcane rituals that were part of mess life. The jolly marching song ‘Bang upon the Bass Drum’, celebrating the Army’s achievements in the late Afghan War, became a lifelong favourite of his – as did a popular mess song which told the tale of a young officer who, when ‘he first came to land / On this hot and burning strand / As a valet he engaged a mild Hindoo’.31 This ‘dusky son of sin’ is named ‘Gunga Deen’ and he cheats his master at every opportunity. Yet for all his shortcomings ‘Gunga Deen’ earns his master�
��s respect and affection – as, indeed, he does in Rudyard Kipling’s rewrite, ‘Gunga Din’, which retains the original metre but transforms the servant into a bheesti or water-carrier who dies heroically on the battlefield after bringing succour to a wounded Tommy, thus earning his unqualified admiration as ‘a better man than I am’. Popular as ‘Gunga Din’ subsequently became as a Barrack-Room Ballad, it is a rare instance of Kipling failing to do his source justice, for the real-life water-carrier on whom his verses are based was an Indian officer of the Corps of Guides named Jumma who in the mid-1850s was cashiered for having lied to shield a superior officer. Unable to continue as a soldier in the regiment that was his life, Jumma re-enlisted as a bheesti and in that humble capacity served with the Guides throughout the famous siege of Delhi in 1857, carrying his leather water sack under fire to wherever it was most needed. For its gallantry the corps was collectively awarded the Order of Merit, but the men conferred and voted that the medal should go to Jumma alone, since he had shown more courage than any soldier.

  Given Kipling’s subsequent reputation as a vivisectionist of his own kind, it is curious to find that, when it came to writing about the British officer caste in India, his supposed detachment all too often dissolved into sentimentality. Whether from a sense of his own physical inadequacy or a desire to belong, in India Ruddy displayed an admiration for the subaltern type bordering on hero-worship, exemplified by his portrait of the young Bobby Wicks in the short story ‘Only a Subaltern’. When his regiment is stricken by cholera, Bobby does all he can to keep up the spirits of his men, nursing the sick and the dying until he too catches the disease and dies, greatly mourned by his men as a ‘bloomin’ hangel’.32 Bobby Wicks is simply too good to be true. An Army officer, Ruddy wanted to believe, was ‘set up, and trimmed and taut’, and he walked ‘as though he owned himself’. He did not ‘spout hashed libraries’ – as Ruddy himself did – ‘or think the next man’s thought’.33