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Rudyard Kipling: Biography And Visits

Rudyard Kipling is the writer most closely associated with the period of the British Empire. Certain elements of his writing strangely reflect the nature of a world wide empire centred on a small set of islands. For example a recurring theme in Kipling's work is the transformation of a small space into the whole world. Similarly Kipling writes about identity, always a vital consideration for any imperial power, when the struggle between an empire and its colonies is essentially a battle of identities. In his most accomplished novel Kim, Kipling wrote about a young orphan who leaves a life on the streets of Lahore to become a British secret agent. Kim is a master of disguise and is given to musing on the nature of his identity: "He looked at his boots, ruefully. 'No, I am Kim. This is a great world, and I am only Kim. Who is Kim?' He considered his own identity, a thing he had never done before, till his head swam." (P158 - 159)

Rudyard Kipling was born on the 30th of December 1865 in Bombay. The house in which he was born still survives on the campus of the J.J. Institute of Applied Art. Rudyard had idyllic memories of his early life, but this happiness ended abruptly when he and his sister Trix were left with paid guardians in Southsea. This was fairly typical practice at the time, and was a means of ensuring a British education. Nevertheless the household selected wasn't a good one. The guardians were unknown to the Kiplings, and had been found through a newspaper advert. In 1871 the Kiplings left their children in Southsea without explaining their departure. Rudyard and Trix found themselves in the care of Harry and Rosa Holloway. Harry was a pleasant man, who stood up for the young, headstrong Rudyard against the bullying of his wife and son. But when he died in 1874 Rudyard was left unprotected. Occasionally Rudyard and Trix would visit their uncle and aunt, Edward and Georgie Burne-Jones in London. Their house in London was a haven of happiness, and the knocker on the door of their house eventually made its way to the front door of Bateman's, the house in Sussex where Rudyard lived from 1902.

Meanwhile back in India Rudyard's parents, Lockwood and Alice, had been getting on. Lockwood was a craftsman, who had worked in some capacity on the Museum of Art at South Kensington, now called the Victoria and Albert Museum. In the stratified society of Victorian England it was difficult to move up, and perhaps a move to the empire's frontiers made this process easier. By 1875 Lockwood had become principal of the Mayo School of Industrial Art in Lahore. Soon after this Edward Burne-Jones alerted the Kiplings to their children's unhappiness in Southsea, and Alice returned to Britain to take them away from the Holloways. Rudyard was then sent to the United Services College, a boarding school designed to create future army officers. Here Rudyard had a happy time, engaging in various minor rebellions against the benign authority of the school, and decorating his room with china and fans. This period inspired his novel Stalky and Co.

In 1882 Rudyard left school and sailed for India to take up a job with The Gazette in Lahore. In 1889 he returned to England, and never went back to India, except for a brief visit to his parents in 1891. But these seven years in India had a great impact on Kipling. His experiences in Lahore, in the British mountain top retreat of Simla, and in Allahabad, fed into his fiction, inspiring the writing of Kim.

In England Rudyard was busy writing, and was at least partially accepted by the literary establishment. He lived in rooms in Villiers Street, Charing Cross. Kipling married an American woman, Caroline Balestier, and moved with her to the United States for four years. He built a house called Naulakha high in the Vermont Hills, Naulakha being an Indian colloquial term for a fortune. The house can still be found on Kipling Road. Kipling wrote The Jungle Book during his time here. The family returned to England in 1895 following a quarrel with Caroline's brother.

The family then lived at Rottingdean, though there was much travelling, particularly to Africa, which provided material for the Just So stories. On a trip to America in 1899 both Rudyard and his daughter Josephine developed pneumonia, Josephine eventually dying from the infection.

In 1902, the inconvenience of tourists seeking out a view of the famous author brought about a move to Bateman's in Sussex. During this latter phase of his life Kipling became closely involved with the navy. He wrote, played with his children, and went motoring, which he loved. And yet even in happier periods the insecure Kipling was worrying about what the future might hold for Britain and the world. He had hated the jubilee celebrating Queen Victoria's sixty years on the throne. To Kipling all of Britain's self congratulation seemed to ignore the fact that all hopes and securities rest on thin ice. From these feelings about the jubilee came the poem Recessional, which contains the famous lines: "Lord God of Hosts be with us yet, lest we forget, lest we forget."

Sadly Kipling's fears were not unfounded. The world was soon to be convulsed by World War One. His son John was killed in 1915 at the Battle of Loos. Rudyard felt the deepest of pain and remorse at his death, particularly as he had pulled strings to get his son into the Irish Guards after initial rejection because of poor eyesight. After the war Kipling did much work with the War Graves Commission which is responsible for the British war graves which can still be seen today along what was once the Western Front.

In the post war years Kipling wrote less, found his reputation falling, and suffered increasing stomach pain. He died in Nice in 1936.

The Pond At Bateman's

By 1936 the time of Empire was coming to an end. Britain had to find a new identity, to replace whatever vague identity it had during its time presiding over such a varied Empire. Kipling being identified with the old period became deeply unfashionable. This brings us back to Kipling's own deeply ambivalent attitudes towards identity. As a writer he had spent his life looking at his experiences, creating poems, short stories and novels out of them; and yet he had a real fear of knowing himself, opposing, for example, any attempt to study his genealogy. Perhaps Kipling instinctively knew that all identity rests on illusions, and disappears if investigated too closely. Kipling's character Kim doesn't know who he is, and thinking about his identity makes his head spin. Kim looks after a Lama, a Tibetan holy man who is somehow wise in his naivety and downright silliness. The Lama is on a mission to find the holy stream which will free him from the wheel of life, checking each stream he passes in case it is the special one. The search spans the whole of India but the holy river seems to be no specific river which can be identified. The Lama ignores the sellers of Ganges water who hawk their wares on trains. In the end it seems that the holy river cannot be found in one place, only because it is found everywhere. The holy water seems to spring out of the ground at the feet of the person seeking it. The Lama comes to this insight at the end of the book after a nasty bang on the head, and you wonder if the poor old man isn't simply seeing things after the knock. And yet there is wisdom in his words, wisdom found in the ramblings of an old man with a head injury, just like a holy river somehow bursting out in the last place you'd expect, out of the ground at the seeker's feet. The Lama has a shifting identity, as wise or deluded; the river he looks for has a shifting identity. While Kipling did not like such uncertainty, in Kim his best work, he seems to come to terms with it. If the holy river has no definite identity then its qualities need not be limited to one place: they are instead vague enough to spread over the world and be found anywhere. "This is a great world, and I am only Kim" says the young boy, but somehow in not being able to decide who he is, Kim has the chance to transcend his individuality, just as his priest tells him he must seek to do. In remaining only Kim he can be part of the great world. Rudyard Kipling was a man of his time, and some aspects of his life and work may grate today, but in Kim he left behind the failings and limitations that in one way or another blight us all and offers a kind of transcendence.