India, Kipling’s calling card

When the arch-satirist Nancy Mitford wanted to establish the ridiculousness of Lady Montdore, her megalomaniac character in “Love in a Cold Climate” who had recently returned from India with her husband the viceroy, Mitford had her declaim that they had put India on the map, no one really having heard of it before! Well, Rudyard Kipling might indeed have put the subcontinent into the literary consciousness of the world, so powerful was the impact of his indelible tales of the Indian Raj and its diverse people and cultures.

As Charles Allen puts it at the beginning of his brilliantly insightful biographical study, “Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1900,” which focuses on the first half of the writer’s life, from his birth in Bombay to his unhappy childhood in England to his much more joyous young adulthood back in Bombay, India made Kipling the great artist he was, just as his works created an India, in all its peoples and cultures (colonial and indigenous), that for so many millions of readers was their introduction to its many splendors.

“India was where Rudyard Kipling was happiest, where he learned his craft, where he rediscovered himself through writing and came of age as a writer. India made him, charged his imagination, and after he left India in March 1889 at the age of twenty-three he was most completely himself as an artist when reinhabiting the two Indian worlds he had left behind. He lived thereafter on borrowed time, a state of higher creativity he was unable to maintain once he had exhausted his Indian memories with the writing of his masterwork ‘Kim.’ ” A century after Kipling received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907, the first English-language writer and at 42 still the youngest ever to win it (the Swedish academy paying “tribute of homage to the literature of England, so rich in manifold glories, and to the greatest genius in the realm of narrative that that country has produced in our times”), his fame has receded somewhat. At the time, he was not just one of the world’s bestselling authors but also one of the most critically esteemed.

As Allen notes, “It is hard to grasp the extent to which Rudyard Kipling dominated the popular imagination of the English-speaking world just over a century ago.” And although Kipling’s robust imperialism has typed him as a right-wing apostle of the reactionary, his influence was by no means limited to conservatives. Allen quotes the hero of a novel by Kipling’s contemporary, the progressive, anti-establishment, iconoclastic H.G. Wells averring that the “prevailing force of my undergraduate days was not Socialism but Kiplingism . . . he coloured the very idiom of our conversation. . . . He helped broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he provided phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion and organised effort the Socialism of our times failed to express.”

Of course, like most great writers, Kipling is protean and complex. This arch-imperialist published a celebrated poem, “Recessional,” on the very day of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the apogee of the British Empire, warning of the transience and fragility of all empires in history. (It would still be just as appropriate as a warning to 21st century America.)

Although generally conservative and supportive of established institutions and order, Kipling declined all titles, including a knighthood and the position of poet laureate of England. In “Kim,” he chronicled the poorest of Irish orphans fostered by a variety of Indians and, in the book’s end, forced to choose between playing the “Great Game” involving the contending imperial powers Britain and Russia and the teachings of a Buddhist lama -- as fine a portrait of ethnic and religious crosscurrents and multiculturalism as there is.

And in an Indian Raj where a particular variety of snobbery limited the British elite to those in government service whether civil or military, Kipling, as an outsider, was keenly aware of the ludicrous and impoverishing rigidity of such categorization. So when he pens a line like “the colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are all the same under the skin,” is he giving vent to his egalitarianism or to the misogyny for which he was famous, as exemplified in the verse “the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail / For the female of the species is more deadly than the male”?

In his terrifying tale “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” (who has ever written more powerfully or more anthropomorphically about animals than Kipling in “The Jungle Book”?), the eponymous mongoose has to confront and vanquish a terrifying cobra, Nag, and his deadlier -- yes, you guessed it -- female partner, Nagaina. Allen is very interesting in his acute and perceptive analysis of Kipling’s intense relationships with the women in his life, including his mother, sister, wife and the older married woman he was attached to as a young man, both of the latter American.

Allen makes a convincing case for the crucial role India played in Kipling’s life and art. As he says, he “was born to write this book,” having spent his formative years there and being part of a distinguished British family with deep roots in the subcontinent and professional connections to Kipling and his father. He has also written -- and clearly thought -- a great deal about the Raj. But he is equally sound on all important aspects of Kipling, including his mother’s family connection to the Pre-Raphaelite artist society (his favorite aunt was married to Edward Burne-Jones; another was married to Edward Poynter) and to his first cousin British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, whose government began the process of self-government for India.

The Raj came to an end little more than a decade after Kipling’s death at 70 in 1936, but for millions of readers past, present and future, the sun will never set on an India that Kipling so splendidly and vividly evoked.