Rudyard Kipling
Innovator of the short story
by Bipul K Debnath
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English author, journalist and poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is also regarded as a major innovator of the short story; his childrens books are classics of juvenile literature, and critics have described his works as exhibiting a versatile and luminous narrative gift.
Kipling was born on December 30, 1865 in Bombay (now Mumbai) in British India. At the time of his birth, his parents, John and Alice, were recent arrivals in India. They had come, like so many of their compatriots, with plans to start a new life and help the British colonial government run the subcontinent. The family lived well, and Kipling was especially close to his mother. His father, an artist, was the head of the Department of Architectural Sculpture at the Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay.
According to Kipling, India was a wondrous place where he reveled in exploring, with his nanny, the local markets of the bustling city of Anglos, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews. He learned the local language and fell in love with the country and its culture. He was particularly interested in Buddhism.
Kipling referred to conflicts over identity as: In the afternoon heat, before we took our sleep, she (the Portuguese ayah, or nanny) or Meeta (the Hindu bearer, or male attendant) would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution Speak English now to Papa and Mamma. So, one spoke English, haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in.
Kipling was sent to school in Britain at age five and returned to India in 1882. His father was then the principal of Mayo College of Art in Lahore and Kipling got a job there in a small local newspaper, the Civil Military Gazette. In 1887, he joined The Pioneer as an assistant editor in Allahabad, where he worked till 1889.
Kipling had published some 39 stories in the Gazette from 1886-87, and most of those were included in his first prose collection, Plain Tales from the Hills, published in Calcutta in 1888.
During the summer of 1883, Kipling visited Simla, a popular hill station and the summer capital of British India. By then it was established practice for the Viceroy of India and the government to move to Simla for six months, and the town became a centre of power as well as pleasure. He describes this time as: My months leave at Simla, or whatever hill station my people went to, was pure joyevery golden hour counted. For over four centuries, the Grand Trunk Road has remained, in the words of Kipling: Such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world. The Grand Trunk Road is one of Asias oldest and longest roads, it runs from Chittagong in Bangladesh to Howrah in West Bengal, India.
Kipling was to write of Bombay:
Mother of Cities to me,
For I was born in her gate,
Between the palms and the sea,
Where the world-end steamers wait.
In 1892, Kipling married Caroline Carrie Balestier, the sister of an American writer friend, Wolcott Balestier, and settled in Brattleboro, Vermont, USA. The Kiplings first child, Josephine, died of pneumonia at the age of 6 in 1899. In the wake of her death, Kipling concentrated on collecting material for what would become Just So Stories for Little Children. That work was published in 1902, the year after Kim was first issued. His childrens stories remain popular today, and his famous fiction The Jungle Book (1894) has been made into several movies and cartoon serials.
Kiplings works of fiction include many short stories, such as The Man Who Would Be King (1888). His poems include Mandalay, Gunga Din, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, The White Mans Burden, and If.
In 1907, Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the award. He was also recommended for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions, for a knighthood, both of which he declined.
Various writers, such as Edmund Candler, were strongly influenced by Kiplings writings. The poet TS Eliot edited A Choice of Kiplings Verse (1941) with an introductory essay where he writes: I cannot find any justification for the charge that he held a doctrine of race superiority. In response to Eliot, George Orwell wrote a long consideration of Kiplings work for Horizon in 1942.
Over his last few years, Kipling suffered from a painful ulcer that eventually killed him on January 18, 1936. Kiplings ashes were buried at Westminster Abbey in London in the Poets Corner, next to the graves of Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens.
In modern-day India, whence he drew much of his material, Kiplings reputation remains controversial, especially amongst modern nationalists and some post-colonial critics. Other contemporary Indian intellectuals, such as Ashis Nandy have taken a more nuanced view of his work. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, always described Kiplings novel Kim as his favourite book. Indian historian and writer Khushwant Singh wrote in 2001 that he considers Kiplings If the essence of the message of The Gita in English, referring to the Bhagavad Gita. Indian writer RK Narayan said, Kipling, the supposed expert writer on India, showed a better understanding of the mind of the animals in the jungle than of the men in an Indian home or the marketplace.
In November 2007, it was announced that Kiplings birth home on the campus of the JJ School of Art in Bombay would be turned into a museum celebrating the author and his works.
