Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), English writer and Nobel laureate, who wrote novels, poems, and short stories, most of them set in India and Myanmar (Burma) during the time of British rule.

Kipling was born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, where his father was principal of a new art school. He was named “Rudyard” after the reservoir at Stoke-on-Trent in England, where his parents had become engaged. At the age of six he was sent to be educated in England. He spent five miserable years at a foster home in Southsea where he was beaten and humiliated, years that he described in his story “Baa Baa, Black Sheep”. In 1878, he was sent to Westward Ho!, a United Services College in Devon, which was later to appear in his novel Stalky and Co.(1899), which questioned the public school ethic. In 1881, Schoolboy Lyrics was published privately. Kipling returned to India in 1882 and from then until 1889 he edited and wrote stories for the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore, India, experimenting, as he put it, with “the weight, colour, perfume, and attributes of words in relation to other words”. Some of these stories and poems appeared in collections: Departmental Ditties (1886), a volume of satirical verse dealing with civil and military barracks life in British colonial India, and Plain Tales from the Hills (1888).

Kipling’s literary reputation was established with six stories of English life in India, published in India between 1888 and 1889. They were “Soldiers Three”, “The Story of the Gadsbys”, “In Black and White”, “Under the Deodars”, “The Phantom Rickshaw”, and a story for children, “Wee Willie Winkie”. In 1889, Kipling returned to England and continued to write. In 1891 he published The Light that Failed, a long narrative about a blind war artist and an experiment in the fin de siècle decadent style. Barrack-Room Ballads, which contains the popular poems “Danny Deever”, “Mandalay”, and “Gunga Din”, was published in 1892, the year that Kipling married Caroline Balestier, an American. The couple travelled extensively in Asia and the United States, then lived briefly in Vermont where Kipling continued to write prolifically. It was during this period that much of his most popular work was written. Short fictional works dating to this time include Many Inventions (1893) and The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895), two collections of animal stories, which many consider his finest writing and that were immediately very successful.

Kipling, however, did not get on well with the American way of life, and the growing Kipling family returned to England in 1896. Captains Courageous, a story of the sea and Kipling’s most American book, followed in 1897, and Stalky and Co. in 1899. It was in 1899, too, that the Kiplings’ eldest child, Josephine, died, an event from which neither parent ever fully recovered. Kim, a picaresque tale of Indian life that is generally regarded as his masterpiece, was published in 1901. The family finally settled at “Batemans” in Sussex in 1902 and Just So Stories for Little Children was published—the book that Kipling had planned to write for his daughter. A collection of verse, The Five Nations (1903) contains the well-known poem “Recessional” written for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897. Puck of Pook’s Hill, another children’s book, was published in 1906. In 1895, Kipling refused to accept the role of Poet Laureate, but in 1907 he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, thus becoming the first English author to be so honoured. Another book for children, Rewards and Fairies, came out in 1910.

Kipling wrote in a very accessible style and appealed to many readers beyond the literary world: he was, indeed, an enormously popular writer. As a poet he is remarkable for rhymed verse written in the slang used by the ordinary British soldier. His verse and his fiction revealed values that were intensely patriotic, paternalistic, and imperialist. By 1910, however, Kipling’s popularity had already passed its zenith. The mismanagement of the Boer War (South African War) at the turn of the century had presaged what was to become a growing reaction against high Victorian imperialism. The catastrophe of World War I shocked and altered the national consciousness in a way to which Kipling never seemed to adapt. His only son, John, died in action in 1915 and after the war Kipling became very active on the War Graves Commission. By his perpetual endowment, the Last Post is sounded every evening at the Menin Gate in memory of all the war dead.

The later work of Kipling is rarely read, although some of his best writing dates from this time: A Diversity of Creatures (1917), his two-volume history of his son’s regiment; The Irish Guards in the Great War (1923); Debits and Credits (1926); and Limits and Renewals (1932). After the war he became an increasingly isolated and politically unattractive figure; he was angrily anti-democratic, energetically opposing women’s suffrage, for example. He was described by one newspaper as a “vindictive maniac”. For some years Kipling’s work was deeply unfashionable, but in recent years his reputation has been somewhat revived, partly through a new interest in schools and universities in the literature of the empire.

Kim tells the story of Kimball O’Hara, a young Irish boy in India (“[t]hough he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference”), who has a double identity, being both a sahib, or Englishman, and a native boy and chela, or follower, of the Tibetan lama he meets in Lahore. The lama is afforded great respect in the text, and Kim is an obedient follower: the lama himself says, in a moving scene, “Child, I have lived on thy strength as an old tree lives on the lime of a new wall”. Yet Kim is simultaneously involved in the “Great Game”—the British Secret Service—which recruits him because of his knowledge of indigenous culture. Thus, Kim combines his pilgrimage with the lama with his mission for the British government. Despite the fact that by 1901, when the book was published, Indian nationalism was a growing and significant phenomenon, no conflict between the Indian and the English sides of Kim develops in Kipling’s novel. As Edward Said has remarked, Kim constitutes a “major contribution” to what Francis Hutchins calls “the India of the imagination...which contained no elements of either social change or political menace”. Although Kipling idealizes British rule in India, this does not detract from the power of his writing in Kim. The description of the long journey that structures the novel includes many vivid vignettes of Indian life; for instance, this description of Kim and the lama walking down the Grand Trunk road:

Kipling died on January 18, 1936, in London and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Something of Myself, published posthumously (1937), is an unfinished account of his unhappy childhood. Perhaps this account by George Orwell of the experience of reading Kipling is not atypical: “I worshipped Kipling at thirteen, loathed him at seventeen, enjoyed him at twenty, despised him at twenty-five, and now again rather admire him. The one thing that was never possible, if one had read him at all, was to forget him”.