Tags:
Journalism of Courage
That news of an inscribed first edition of The Jungle Book has created so much buzz is a reminder of the enduring thrill of rediscovering Rudyard Kipling and his work. The copy recently discovered by librarians in Cambridgeshire bears the inscription: This book belongs to Josephine Kipling for whom it was written by her father,May 1894. Josephine died five years later at the age of six,and for Kiplings readers the inscription deepens an understanding of the deep family attachments that informed his work. His father,John Lockwood Kipling,participated in early editions of The Jungle Book and of Kim as an illustrator.
The biographical sketches are in fact not mere asides in reading Kipling. Even in his lifetime (he was born in 1865 and died in 1936,neatly overlapping with the dominant phase of the British Empire) and especially after Indias Independence he was at the heart of a bitterly polarised post-colonial culture war. For his enthralled readers,however,it was by tracing his fidelity to experience and history that a more complicated and enormously inclusive middle ground was found. Kiplings may have been a remembered India but his reporters discipline and personal experience informed these two books to a degree that continues to amaze.
In fact,biographical and literary investigation by Kipling scholars has invested the books with an openness that accommodates parallel readings. As Peter Hopkirk found when he set off on the Kim trail for his travelogue Quest for Kim: in Search of Kiplings Great Game,even a casual tour of Saharanpur could give the informed visitor a clue or two about which house exactly may have hosted a key development in the book. This is perhaps why every so often theres a clamour for publication of Kiplings books with the original illustrations.
