Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  However, the most direct means of their transmission to both Lockwood and Rudyard Kipling was the formidable educationist and women’s emancipator Mrs Flora Annie Steel. Ruddy had first come to know Mrs Steel in Lahore when she was in her mid-thirties, the wife of a Punjab Civilian but better known throughout Upper India as an amateur actress, the ‘Infant Phenomenon’. In February 1884 she had come to Lahore to act in a performance of Winning a Husband, which Ruddy reviewed for the CMG. In that same year Mrs Steel published Wide-awake Stories for Children, based on Punjabi folk tales which were themselves largely derived from the Jatakas. Her work as inspector of schools for the Punjab Government brought her into contact with the Kiplings, and it is impossible to believe that her forthright views on the status of Indian women and on corruption in high places did not impress themselves on the younger Kipling. Mrs Steel then made the mistake of taking on the Government of the Punjab, claiming that official posts were being bought and sold, and she was punished by having her husband posted to the other end of the Punjab. She herself refused to budge from Lahore and eventually a High Court judge had to be brought in to resolve the dispute, which he did, but at the cost of her husband’s career. So in 1888 the Steels retired to England, where Mrs Steel began to write more seriously, first The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, dedicated to ‘The English Girls to whom fate may assign the task of being House-Mothers in Our Eastern Empire’, and then a series of novels set in the Punjab: From the Five Rivers, Miss Stuart’s Legacy and The Potter’s Thumb, all published in 1893–4.

  Flora Annie Steel’s work was accomplished enough for Ruddy to declare her to be ‘a beautiful writer and she knows’,9 and she was close enough to his father to ask him to collaborate with her on a reissue of her Wide-awake Stories under the new title of Tales of the Punjab. Lavishly illustrated by Lockwood Kipling throughout with delightful engravings and pen-and-ink sketches of birds, beasts and enchanted humans, the book was published by Macmillan in 1894. However, long before Tales of the Punjab appeared in print both text and drawings had exercised a profound influence on Ruddy’s writing.

  A further inspiration at this same time came from Rider Haggard’s Nada the Lily, published in serialised form in the summer of 1892, which drew on a Zulu story of a wild boy who ran with a pack of wild dogs. It led directly to Ruddy’s writing ‘In the Rukh’, which he described as ‘a tale about Indian Forestry work which included a boy who had been brought up by wolves’. The rukh is the Indian forest interior, where Gisborne of the Woods and Forests and his chief, Muller, encounter a mysterious jungle-dweller ‘naked except for the loin-cloth, but crowned with a wreath of the tasselled blossoms of the white convolvulus creeper … his brown skin glistening in the sunlight’. He gives his name as ‘Mowgli’, describes himself as without parents, home or caste, and proceeds to demonstrate to the two Europeans his complete mastery over the jungle. Then it emerges that Mowgli has been suckled by a she-wolf and raised as a wolf cub, and still lives among a pack of wolves that are ‘my playmates and my brothers, children of the mother that gave me suck … Children of the father that lay between me and the cold at the mouth of the cave when I was a little naked child.’10

  This first rather clumsy-footed foray into the Indian jungle opened up all sorts of possibilities. By Thanksgiving 1892 Ruddy was writing enthusiastically to Mrs Dodge to tell her that an elephant tale was complete, a tiger story was in the process of being written and a wolf tale would follow on. The first was ‘Toomai of the Elephants’,11 the second ‘Tiger-Tiger’12 – ‘a tale of the man eater who was ignominiously squelched in his lair by the charge of the village buffaloes under the command of the little boy herd’ – and the third was to be a companion-piece to the tale about the jungle-dweller Mowgli already told in ‘In the Rukh’ and would be entitled ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’: ‘He was a wolf boy (we have them in India) but being caught early was civilised. His brothers the wolves followed his career respectfully and afar … from village to village till at last Mowgli’s too faithful retainers became a nuisance and … the upshot was that he went out into the moonlight and explained things to these four grey wolves of Oude and they saw the justice of his demands and left him in peace.’13

  Fortunately for children’s literature, Ruddy’s initial outlines for ‘Tiger-Tiger’ and ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’ were abandoned as he delved deeper into the matter of Mowgli’s imagined beginnings. Ruddy had always delighted in the company of small children but the birth of his ‘first beloved’ Josephine had lifted him to a condition of happiness such as he had never experienced, and in this state of euphoria he was able to loosen the restraints of adulthood and slip back into the shape-shifting innocence of his childhood days, imagining himself into an Eden-like nursery populated by fearsome beasts into which a naked, helpless man-child is abandoned. And what greatly facilitated this return to childlike ways was the arrival in Brattleboro in June 1893 of Lockwood Kipling, bringing with him what must have been a very large portmanteau stuffed with his Indian drawings and a small library of Indian books that included Flora Annie Steel’s Wide-awake Stories.

  Thanks to the efforts of friends in high places such as Walter Lawrence, now Private Secretary to Lord Dufferin’s successor, Lord Lansdowne, Lockwood Kipling had been permitted to retire early on a full pension in recognition of his public services. For reasons that can only be guessed at but which may have had their roots in a mother’s extended sulk over a son’s unsuitable match, Lockwood came on to America alone, leaving Alice in England to look for an affordable retirement home – eventually secured as a modest ‘snail-shell of a house’ in Tisbury, near the Wiltshire cathedral city of Salisbury. There is a hint in Edith Plowden’s unfinished MS ‘Fond Memory’ that Alice Kipling’s mercurial nature did not serve her well in India once the Dufferins’ golden age had ended and her children had gone – and that she never recovered her sparkle. The shadows of depression were closing in on her, just as they were on her daughter Trix.

  In Brattleboro father and son worked together in the closest harmony. Indian service tended to harden the views of most koi hais but Lockwood Kipling seems to have been an exception, in that he retired with his even temper further mellowed. Almost eighteen years of close proximity with men like the master craftsman Bhai Ram Singh, who accompanied him to England on his royal contracts, had taught Lockwood to look more kindly on India’s pre-Islamic Buddhist and Hindu cultures. His later Indian drawings are suffused with humanity and ‘a wisdom beyond earthly wisdom’ born of ‘experience and adversity’. Something of this greater understanding seems to have been imparted to his son as the two sat smoking their pipes and plotting out fresh stories together, initially in Ruddy’s new house Naulakha and then, a year later, in Tisbury.

  Hindu couple with sick child, J. L. Kipling (National Trust)

  The frontispiece to Flora Annie Steel’s Tales of the Punjab is a full-page pen-and-ink drawing by Lockwood Kipling showing a little Indian boy in turban and loincloth playing a flute. He squats under a tree filled with birds and monkeys, surrounded on every side by ‘the beasts of the forest, and the birds of the air, and the fishes of the pond’ drawn by his music. In the story it illustrates, ‘Little Anklebone’, the little boy is a shepherd eaten by wolves and reduced to an ankle bone, but Lockwood has chosen to illustrate him whole. Here is the archetype of both Mowgli the man-cub and Kim, ‘little friend of all the world’.

  Father and son are known to have mulled over Kim together in Vermont, but he failed to grow and so was put to one side in favour of Mowgli, the infant who is found by Father Wolf and saved from the jaws of the ravening tiger Shere Khan, most feared of all jungle creatures.14 Suckled by Mother Wolf, accepted as a brother by her own cubs, Mowgli is brought before the Wolf Pack, led by Akela the great grey Lone Wolf, where Bagheera the Black Panther and Baloo, ‘the sleepy brown bear who teaches the wolf cubs the Law of the Jungle’, speak up for him. Despite being an alien presence in the jungle, Mowgli is permitted to enter the Wolf Pack. Akela
foresees a ‘time of need’ when the man-cub may be of help, so she orders Baloo and Bagheera to take Mowgli away and train him in the Laws of the Jungle. So begins ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’, finished in December 1893, which became the first of the three Mowgli tales in The Jungle Book, afterwards followed by another five collected in The Second Jungle Book.

  According to Carrie’s diary, Ruddy now confided to her that he had experienced the ‘return of a feeling of great strength, such as he had when he first came to London’. Kipling himself put it rather differently when he came to look back on this most fruitful period. Again his Daemon took charge, in the form of a Zen-like directness that allowed him to set his innermost thoughts on to the page without intervention from his outer consciousness: ‘The pen took charge, and I watched it begin to write stories about Mowgli and animals, which later grew into the Jungle Books. Once launched there seemed no particular reason to stop, but I had learned to distinguish between the peremptory motions of my Daemon, and the “carry-over” or induced electricity, which comes of what you might call mere “frictional” writing. Two tales, I remember, I threw away.’15 It was that Daemon, surely, that guided Ruddy’s pen when he wrote in ‘The King’s Ankus’ of the growing Mowgli wrestling with Kaa, the big Rock Python, before they took their evening swim:

  Sometimes Mowgli would stand lapped almost to his throat in Kaa’s shifting coils, striving to get one arm free and catch him by the throat. Then Kaa would give way limply, and Mowgli, with both quick-moving feet, would try to cramp the purchase of that huge tail as it flung backward feeling for a rock or stump. They would rock to and fro, head to head, each waiting for his chance, till the beautiful statue-like group melted into a whirl of black-and-yellow coils and struggling legs and arms, to rise up again and again … ‘Good hunting!’ Kaa grunted at last; and Mowgli, as usual, was shot away half a dozen yards, grasping and laughing. He rose with his fingers full of grass, and followed Kaa to the wise snake’s pet bathing place – a deep, pitchy-black pool surrounded with rocks, and made interesting by sunken tree stumps. The boy slipped in, Jungle-fashion, and dived across; rose, too, without a sound, and turned on his back, his arms behind his head, watching the moon rise above the rocks, and breaking up her reflection in the water with his toes. Kaa’s diamond-shaped head cut the pool like a razor, and came to rest on Mowgli’s shoulder. They lay still, soaking luxuriously in the cool water.

  As we read them today the Mowgli stories in the two Jungle Books are interspersed with other tales, of which two are worthy but unconvincing stories set in the Canadian Arctic Circle and another five are set in India. Of the latter, four are pukka animal tales, including two masterpieces of storytelling: the grim fight to the death waged in a bungalow compound between cobras and mongoose in ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’, and the even grimmer ‘Undertakers’, in which three scavengers – an adjutant crane, jackal and crocodile – reflect on the follies of men as they guard a river-crossing on the Ganges. They look back nostalgically to the summer of ‘thirty seasons ago’ when all the river predators feasted on the bodies of the English dead as they floated downriver, and lament the fact that an iron railway bridge under construction will deprive them of food in the future. The dating of the Mutiny year of 1857 to thirty years earlier shows that the first draft of this story was written not in Vermont but in Allahabad in 1887.

  Equally out of place in this collection is ‘The Miracle of Purun Bhagat’, which tells of a Bombay University-educated Brahmin, Purun Dass, who rises through the ranks to become prime minister of an Indian state and to be fêted by London society as a Westernised, progressive Indian – only to turn his back on the world to become a wandering sanyassi or Hindu holy man. He settles into a Himalayan mountain shrine and communes with the birds and beasts in the manner of St Francis. The benign Kipling who wrote this is very far removed from the hardliner who had railed so loudly against Hindu philosophy and Hindu intellectuals in his Allahabad days. It could be that fatherhood had mellowed him, or that his father’s influence had taught him tolerance. But there is a sting at the end of the tale, for one night Purun Bhagat is roused by a langur and realises that a landslide is about to crash down upon the sleeping village below. Seizing a firebrand he scrambles down the hillside to rouse the villagers and save their lives. Kipling seems to be saying that the Hindu creed of passivity and acceptance of fate, worthy as it is, is not enough; that in a crisis it is the Western notion of action and intervention that saves the day.

  Arresting as they are, ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’, ‘The Undertakers’, ‘The Miracle of Purun Bhagat’ and the other non-Mowgli tales are trespassers in the Jungle Books. By being interleaved between the Mowgli stories they cloak Kipling’s achievement, which is that the eight Mowgli tales and associated verses together form a cohesive eight-chapter novel with its own unifying philosophy. The Free People in Mowgli’s jungle are not the Bandar-Log, the anarchic ‘monkey-people’ who think of themselves as free but who squabble and fight among themselves, but those creatures who voluntarily submit themselves to the discipline of the Law of the Jungle. Without that Law, as followed by the members of the Wolf Pack, and as taught to Mowgli by Baloo and Bagheera, there can be no order. It requires little stretching of the imagination to read into this a metaphor for British rule in India, with the British as the members of the Wolf Pack and the Indians in the role of the Bandar-Log. This philosophy seems to have had its roots in Ruddy’s mixed feelings about both American society and British India, and his belief that what kept these fractured societies from falling apart was the rule of law firmly applied, as exemplified by the British in India and as summarised – perhaps rather too summarily – in his poem ‘The Law of the Jungle’, which makes its point in the opening quatrain:

  Now this is the Law of the Jungle – as old and as true as the sky;

  And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it may die.

  As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back –

  For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

  The Law of the Jungle demands absolute loyalty to the Pack and to its leader, and while parts of it, in Kipling’s telling, are specifically vulpine, its conclusion was intended to have universal application:

  Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and mighty are they;

  But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch and the hump is – Obey!

  The paradox, which Rudyard Kipling never fully addresses or resolves, is that while he recognised the necessity of the Law and made much of it, he himself wanted no part of it, but demanded for himself the licence to stand outside the Law, even to mock it and challenge it.

  A further product of this happy period in Lockwood Kipling’s company was ‘The Bridge-Builders’,16 a deeper exploration of the tensions between Western rationalism and Eastern mysticism touched on in ‘The Miracle of Purun Bhagat’. Back in 1887 Ruddy had reported for the CMG on the completion of a new bridge over the Ganges at Benares, the ceremonial opening of which by Lord Dufferin had had to be postponed due to a severe flood. This provided the basis for another of the unfinished tales Ruddy took with him when he finally left Allahabad in 1889, to be brought out three years later and given depths which the younger Ruddy could never have conceived. ‘The Bridge-Builders’ tells the story of Findlayson of the Public Works Department, who with the assistance of his Native gangmaster Peroo has been constructing the ‘great Kashi Bridge over the Ganges’, soon to be declared open by the Viceroy. Findlayson is a practical man, his beliefs rooted in modern science. His bridge is ‘raw and ugly as original sin, but pukka – permanent’, like British India itself, and he is immensely proud of his achievement: ‘He looked back on the humming village of five thousand workmen; upstream and down, along the vista of spurs and sand; across the river to the far piers, lessening in the haze; overhead to the guard-towers – and only he knew how strong those were – and with a sigh of contentment saw th
at his work was good.’ By contrast, Peroo the Hindu knows the power of Mother Ganga at flood time and fears that the building of the bridge has angered the goddess.

  The floodwaters duly rise: ‘The river lifted herself bodily, as a snake when she drinks in midsummer, plucking and fingering along the revetments, and banking up behind the piers till even Findlayson began to recalculate the strength of his work.’ When the moment of crisis arrives Peroo offers Findlayson some pellets of opium, which he swallows unthinkingly. Under its influence he acts without thought to his safety and he and Peroo are washed downriver and on to a sandbank. They shelter beside an abandoned Hindu shrine, where they are joined by a number of wild animals, each an avatar of a Hindu god, who dispute among themselves over the effect the bridge will have on them and whether it should be allowed to stand. When woken from his stupor by the chill of dawn, Findlayson claims to have suffered a fever: ‘It seemed that the island was full of beasts and men talking, but I do not remember.’ Peroo, however, remembers everything and is able to conclude, ‘Now I am wise.’ They are rescued and find the bridge intact, but it is Peroo who gains from the experience and Findlayson who is humbled, even if his engineering has triumphed over the river.

  ‘The Bridge-Builders’ can be read as a struggle between the natural and supernatural, of East confronting West, and of new India challenging the old – but also as a fusion of opposites, a merging of the real and the fabulous. It can equally be interpreted as an endorsement for the power of drugs to lift the mind on to a higher plane of consciousness. A psychiatrist might also make something of the fact that two of Rudyard Kipling’s most powerful Indian stories (‘The Bridge-Builders’ and ‘In Flood-Time’) involve death-dealing and life-altering river floods, and three (‘The Bridge-Builders’, ‘The Undertakers’ and ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’) involve netherworlds set on shifting sands or sandbanks where the Law does not apply.