Kim and Kipling

Allen8217;s task as a biographer was difficult. Kipling, as the years passed, became more and more obsessive about covering his tracks. He pleaded with his family and friends not to speak about him. As he sister Trix would say, his was an 8220;almost morbid desire to throw veils over his perfectly respectable past8221;. After his parents died, he burned their papers. He became obsessive about acquiring his correspondence with all and sundry in order to destroy it. His wife Carrie ordered in her will that 45 volumes of her diaries written during their married life be destroyed.

Therefore, Allen recreates Kipling8217;s India years by going to other sources about life in north India in the second half of the nineteenth century. The British in India were then hectic chroniclers of the minutiae of their lived lives, and it helps the biographer8217;s task that Rudyard8217;s father, John Lockwood Kipling, was such a well-known figure. Attached first to the JJ School of Art in Bombay, JL was instrumental in the setting up and growth of Lahore8217;s Mayo School of Instrumental Art and the city8217;s museum locally called, even now, Ajaib Ghar, the spot from where the action of Kim begins, as the British boy, 8220;little friend of all the world8221;, meets Buddhist lamas, Pathan traders and Bengali babus to be drawn into the imperial Great Game. And, of course, the first drafts of so much of Kipling8217;s fiction came from reports filed for the Civil and Military Gazette.

In the writing of Kim, Kipling spoke of 8220;two separate sides of my head8221; 8212; which Allen, like so many others, sees as the practical side of Kipling which rationalised the imperial mission and the intuitive side given to great affection to India and its people. It is routine to argue which side wins in Kim 8212; for Allen, however, the victory of the intuitive, 8220;better side8221; is evident.

The development of the two sides is wonderfully depicted. Through, for instance, the power games in Shimla, the summer capital of the Raj, that Kipling sees and reports on. And through his midnight strolls in Lahore8217;s old, crowded streets. Both scenes come through so graphically in the book, and the contradictions that will later propel the action in Kim seem almost inevitable. The Kipling of the imperial court and the Kipling of the bazaar both seem so organic that the duality creates a dramatic tension that cannot be sustained. And it wasn8217;t: the first triumphed in real life, with Kipling carrying on with his patriotic verses, but the second did triumph in the novel.

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