The Unsentimental

Education of
Rudyard Kipling
BY MUKUND BELLIAPPA

F or two weeks in the spring of 1885, from the British cantonment

in Rawalpindi, Rudyard Kiplingnot yet twenty, he was the Special
Correspondent for the Lahore-based Civil and Military Gazettere-
ported on the spectacular durbar conducted by the British Sirkar (un-
der Viceroy Dufferin) to awe Abdur Rahman, the Amir of Kabul who
was also the de facto ruler of Afghanistan. Anglo-Afghan relations
were a pivotal chord in the gamut of geopolitical machinations known
as the GreatGame: the struggle for influence in Central Asia between
czarist Russia and imperial Britain. While the durbar was a rare, felici-
tous milestone in the already half-century-old, mostly blood-soaked
struggle of the British empire to dominate Afghanistanthe biggest
prize of the GreatGame as far as the Empire was concernedthe ex-
perience of covering the event served as a crucial chapter in the edu-
cation of the future author of Kim: the GreatGame novel which is
considered the Nobel laureates most successful.
Experiences like covering the durbar stabilized the platformthe
ideological, cultural, and literary terrafirma, so to speak, on which
the authenticity of good fiction is soreliantupon which Kipling be-
gan to erect his influential stories. There were numerous other such
events, which could be linked in a biographical chain going all the
way back to his itinerant childhood, which honed his perceptions and
shaped his rhetoric en route to Kim. Kim appeared sixteen years after
the durbar experiencemore than ten years after Kipling had left In-
dia. And Kim was packed with elements from the diffuse repertoire of
210 The Antioch Review

themes, locales, and characters that Kipling began to explore in sto-

ries starting months after the durbar. On the eve of Rudyard Kiplings
hundred-and-fiftieth birth anniversary, drawing from over a century
of Kipling scholarship and critique, we trace, and reassess, these key
biographical fragments that shaped his often Manichean view of the
GreatGame, and of Afghanistan.

Rudyard was the first child of Alice and John Lockwood Kipling
recently married twenty-seven year-olds who had arrived in Bombay
months before their first-born was expected. Both parents were artistic
and would prove to be powerful influences on their son. John Lock-
woodwhose appointment as a lecturer of architectural sculpture
and design at the J. J. School of Arts had brought them to Indiawas
a journalist, artist, and illustrator whose insatiable curiosity about In-
dian society would find abundant purpose in his sons later efforts. The
fathers fingerprints have been noticed on many of the sons works; by
most accounts, the Paters contributions to Kim were closer to that
of a collaborator. Before her marriage, Alice Kipling had been a cen-
tral figure in a clique of pre-Raphaelite artists in London that included
Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Socially astute, she would guide the family through the intricacies of
class-conscious Anglo-Indian society.
Kiplings five-year-long childhood in Bombay is considered by
his admirers to have deeply influenced his later artistry. The typical
colonial-era, Anglo-Indian Babaespecially a pre-school toddler
was likely to develop a social and linguistic intimacy with servant-
class Indians, which was denied to most white adults by the rigid stric-
tures of Victorian Raj society. Kipling admirers are likely to credit the
mystique of Kiplings allusive and scintillating prose to a vernacu-
lar translation device (to borrow the description of the GreatGame
historian PeterHopkirk), which developed from the tots interactions
with, mainly, Portuguese-Goan maids. On the other hand, dissenters
like Salman Rushdieare likely to discount these first five years by
pointing out how narrowly pragmatic, even prosaic, Kiplings use of
Indian words was: lots of jaldis, salaams, mallums, and bahut achas,
but little else.
Members of Post-Sepoy-Mutiny, Anglo-Indian society like the
Kiplings tended to regard themselves as missionaries of progress and
secular modernity. The renowned jurist James Fitzjames Stephen
 The Unsentimental Education of Rudyard Kipling 211

an architect of this ethos, he was on the council of the Viceroy Lord

Mayo during these yearslikened British power in India to a vast
bridge over which an enormous multitude of human beings were pass-
ing from a dreary land of cruel wars, ghastly superstitions, wasting
plague and famine on their way to a country orderly, peaceful and in-
dustrious. The Mutiny had been one unequivocal repudiation of this
conveniently blinkered point of view. But Anglo-Indian societyand
those sections of upper-class Indian society that had begun the trudge
across Stephens bridgehad rejected the Mutiny as little more than
the final fatalistic gasp of medieval and regressive forces. It is no sur-
prise, then, to discover the event that left the strongest impression on
Baba Kipling from his childhood years in Bombay.

On 8 February 1872, the Viceroy of India, Lord Mayo, was assassi-

nated while on an official tour of the British penal colony in the Anda-
man Islands. The Andamans was the repository of the Indian prisoners
sentenced by the Anglo-Indian courts to transport. In the 1860s and
70s these included thousands sentenced to transportation for life for
their roles in the Sepoy Mutiny. The presence of these dangerous pris-
oners explained why the security detail assigned to Mayo was larger
and more vigilant than usual. But, late in the eveningat the end of a
day when the viceroys launch had sped him around the islands from
one inspection to the nextseizing the one moment when the vice-
roys guards were not closely guarding him, the assassin struck. The
viceroys private secretary reported that the assassin fastened on his
victims back like a tiger. Mayo was stabbed twice with such force that
the post-mortem report said that either stab was sufficient to cause
death; he died in minutes. The killer was a native of Kabul. Before
he had ended up in the Andamans (convicted for a revenge killing in
Peshawar) he had been the orderly of the commissioner of Peshawar, a
job that must have given him insights into the routine and protocol of
such visits by high-ranking officials. Captured on the spot, he showed
no sign of fear or remorse. During interrogation, he often broke into
a harsh, triumphant laugh. A lengthy investigationone seeking a
larger conspiracyrevealed almost nothing new. The assassin had
acted alone. A little more than a month later, he was hanged.
The Mayo assassination was even more explosive because, just
three months earlier, the chief justice of the Bengal High CourtJus-
tice Normanhad been attacked on the steps of city hall in Calcutta by
212 The Antioch Review

an incensed Afghan. The attacker had been as fanatically ferocious as

Mayos assassin. Undeterred by his victims flight up the steps of the
imposing building, and by the large number of people milling around,
he managed to stab the chief justice several times. Norman died. There
was no conspiracy here either: the killer was found to be a gloomy
bigot, strict [in the practice of Islam], living a life of asceticism in one
of the musjids of the city and taking no man into his friendship. Many
police officers and magistrates judged him to be insane. He was put
through trial and hanged anyway.
The assassination of Lord Mayo was the only empire-rattling In-
dian event that Rudyard Kipling recalled in the meager, posthumously
published autobiography that he penned in the last year of his life
and which he defensively titled Something of Myself for my Friends
Known and Unknown (1937). Clearly the assassination had left a deep
and indelible impression on him: he was recalling an event that was
almost seventy years old in a country to which he had not returned in
forty-five. But even more curious is that the recollection itselfof
his six-year-old self in Bombay being told about the murder of the
big Lord Sahib by parents returned from a dinner engagement that
had been cut short upon arrival at Bombay Fort of the news about
Mayowas patently incorrect. In April of the previous year, the Kip-
lings had left Bombay for England to place Rudyard and his sister in
schools in Englandthe ritual of Anglo-Indian society which dreaded
its offspring growing up with what was called a chi-chi accent (the
outcome, it was believed, of learning English in the presence of con-
taminating Indian languages). The detailed recollectionthe next
day, he recalled, the maid servant informed him about how Mayo had
diedsuggests that this was no ordinary blooper but a delusion so
long-lived and so frequently replayed that it had permanently replaced
reality.
Mayos stab wounds were wounds to the Empire. They were
alsoinsomuch as the Empire was a living, thriving, conniving, self-
preserving organismbody blows to the Empires ego. Any inquiry
into the manner of Kiplings absorption of the news about the assas-
sination of the viceroy of India, and of its appropriation into his own
experiences, is, then, derivative of a more general investigation on the
development of Kiplings identity (or ego) as both a citizen of the Brit-
ish empire and a member of the race that dominated its top echelon. In
any such inquiry, one convolution immediately takes center stage: this
was no ordinary time in Kiplings life.
 The Unsentimental Education of Rudyard Kipling 213

The months around the date of the Mayo assassination were eas-
ily the most traumatic of Kiplings youth. During these months the
six-year-old was being wrenchingly adjusted from his pampered Baba
life in Bombay (that Hindi-warbling center of attention, and worry,
for a small crew of doting Indian servants) to life under the excori-
ating and bleak regime of an English boarding facility called Lorne
Lodge in Southsea (near Portsmouth.) Around Kiplings five South-
sea yearsaround the life in a house smelling of aridity and emp-
tiness; under the evangelical tyranny of the soon-to-be-widowed
Mrs.Holloway, who took in the school-aged children of Anglo-Indian
parents; in a milieu where the six-year-olds adorable Baba vivacity
was viewed as a trait to be flayed offKipling scholars have erected
an often trite Dickensian mythology. Some criticsmost compel-
lingly Elliot L.Gilbert and EdmundWilsonhave made this period
crucial to understanding Kiplings oeuvre. Going by the (clearly au-
tobiographical, but as clearly nonjudgmental) novella Baa Baa Black
Sheep, Kipling endured beatings, mental torture, food deprivations,
and enforced memorizations of passages from the Bible. But no con-
clusive estimate of the impact of these years on his work, or on his
world view, is possible.
One reason for this obscurity is that all members of the incredibly
tight Kipling clan, at different times, have been prodigious destroyers
of family correspondence. Some biographers have mentioned bonfires
of personal papers. Very little survives from these years. Compound
this family-wide obsession with privacy with Kiplings unfathomable
and lifelong prickliness, and, over that, compute the incalculable ef-
fect of a slowly but steadily deteriorating eyesight, which would re-
main undetected and uncorrected for more than a year, and even the
most keen-eyed biographer is likely to feel like hes groping around
in pitch darkness. In all this uncertainty, however, if theres a central
logic that can be applied to the widespread agreement of the impor-
tance of this harrowing period toward Kiplings artistic development
it is (to quote Erik Erikson) that it is human to have a long childhood;
it is civilized to have an even longer childhood. That is to say that
some aspects of Kiplings childhood ended at Southsea; some aspects
of civilization were never given a chance to take root. It explains at
least partly the brutish worldview projected by so many of the stories
of this otherwise gentle, even shy, soul.
A closer inspection of the timeline shows how powerfully the
Mayo assassination may have dominated all family exchanges during
214 The Antioch Review

these busy and unsettling months. It occurred within weeks of John

Lockwood and Alice Kiplings return to Bombaythe very same
weeks when, in all likelihood, the youngster, while chaffing under the
new, baba-erasing regime, waited to hear from them. The specter of
murderous Afghans, and the reminder of their most prominent vic-
tim, was kept alive during the next couple of years when John Lock-
wood accepted the position of the first principal of the Mayo Industrial
School of Art at Lahore. Any anxieties felt by either parent on their
move to the Punjabviewed from distant Southsea, a step away from
the Afghan borderand conveyed either in their own words through
letters, or planted by another adult, would have created an irrational
fear in a boy of the age at whichwe know well from Freudhis
identification with the superego of the parents is especially strong.

If Rudyard Kiplings education on Afghanistan began with the Mayo

assassination, then a far more rigorous education began when Rud-
yard, just shy of his seventeenth birthday, arrived at Lahore (in the
fall of 1882) to begin his career as an assistant editor for the Civil and
Military Gazette.
Kipling arrived at Lahore fresh from five years at the United Ser-
vices College in Devon, a school that guided the children of Anglo-In-
dians toward careers in India. To the milieu at the USCnurturing, lit-
erary, intellectualhe owed much of his budding writerly confidence.
Kiplings experiences there, especially the influence of teachers like
the principal, CormellPrice, (Dear Uncle Crom was also a family
friend who restarted the school paper for his protege) had worked like
an antidote on the boy who had shut down after the Southsea years.
But, surely, dampening any exuberance leftover from the USC was
the sobering reality that the Lahore job was mainly a result of the Kip-
lings not being able to afford a university education for their son. Also,
his terrible eyesight and sickly and feeble constitution (he weighed
a mere 117pounds and his straight-talking mother thought him too
feminine and kept him from playing polo) had precluded many other
career options. In a year or two his USC comrades would be trickling
into India to sinecures as engineers, railway officials, planters, civil
servants, or as glitzy army and police officersthe kinds of real ca-
reers that he would always admire. The precocious teenager was all
too aware of his plight: letters back to Uncle Crom and others were rife
with inflations of his responsibilities at the Gazette. Rudyard would
 The Unsentimental Education of Rudyard Kipling 215

have to shape his own destiny and do it with the inklings of the dis-
heartening reality that any fool . . . could write. The first two years
passed grappling with the tedium of being an employee of a privately
owned newspaper that was little noticed outside the Punjab while not
altogether giving up original writingsomething that at this point
he could more easily name than identify.
The Civil and Military Gazette, true to its name, existed to give
official news to a readership of officials. This it did primarily by
overusing the common system of scrapsa reflection as much of
its editor Stephen Wheelers imagination as of the expectations of
its readership. The contents of the newspaper were mainly produced
by applying a thoughtful scissorone was never far from Rudyards
elbowto news reports telegraphed in from major European news-
papers and from the newspapers of the three Indian presidency capi-
tals. No matter how much enthusiasm Kipling injected into descrip-
tions of his duties, it was abjectly provincial labor that, on account of
Wheelers frequent illnesses and accidents, often fell exclusively to
Rudyards lot.
The responsibilities of his job left Kipling little time to write
originally, and, perhaps, even to think and act originally. The great
comfort of being able to live in his fathers large bungalow came with
restrictions. Most of the bawdy after-hours club life, the weekend
hunting trips, polo tournaments, and (that charming Victorian chap-
eroned occasion for romance) picnicsall de rigueur for the young
male colonialwere vetoed either by mollycoddling Alice or by John
Lockwood (an animal lover). On many an evening shooting pestilen-
tial parrots in the garden while lying supine on a hammock had to pass
for entertainment. Lahores Anglo-Indian society was centered around
the cantonment at Mian Mir, a few miles away. Dinners theresit-
down affairs, large gatherings, with families, where everyone from the
top military brass down to lowly civilians confirmed their positions in
Anglo-Indian society and their distinction from Indian societywere
clearly cherished. But the teenage journalists demeanor in that set-
tingin the presence of older, more experienced, and, physically, far
more imposing, subalternsnever seemed to graduate past one of
awed silence. It was probably here, mingling with officers and men
who were circulated in and out of the many military camps between
Lahore and the Afghan borderthe big stations like Rawalpindi and
Peshawar and the smaller far-flung ones like DeraIsmailKhan and
Abbottabadthat Kipling first learned about the real state of the
216 The Antioch Review

British Empires relationship with its recalcitrant neighbor.

As a consequence of the successes of the Second Afghan war
(187880), the Empire had installed Abdur Rahman as Amir of Kabul,
obliging him to cede control of his foreign policy to India. A friendly
government at Kabul, however, had changed little about the dynam-
ics of the GreatGame. Elastically interpreting its treaties with the Af-
ghans and the British, now proclaiming the need for an intermediary
zone in Central Asia, now denouncing the growing Islamism of
the Central Asian Khanates, Russian forces, or Russian-backed mili-
tias, had control of most of Uzbekistan and were contesting control of
the cities of Turkmenistan. Neither had a handpicked ruler at Kabul
been much help in restoring any semblance of order to the Empires
troubled northwest frontier.
Over the thirty years since the British had inherited the Afghan
border provinces from the Sikh dynasty of Ranjit Singh (which had
devolved into chaos in the decade after his death in 1839), these im-
penetrable tribal lands had become the Empires most painful extrem-
ity: a region where, periodically, casualties could be expected and, as
often, egregious atrocities would be perpetrated. If it wasnt bloody
raids conducted by needy tribals who had grown dependent on loot-
ing, then it was jihadistsvestiges of a two-generation-old movement
sparked by fiery Indian clerics during Ranjit Singhs brutal oppression
of his Muslim subjects. In retribution, the cross-border incursions of
British army columns into the border regions of Hajaristan and Swat
valley were harshburning villages, executing summarily, letting se-
poys loose on women. Neither was the British side of the border easy to
manage. Dozens of British officials and other minor functionaries had
shared Mayos fate. A Frontier Outrages Act gave local law enforce-
ment special powers when it came to handling Ghazis (the term used
rather indiscriminately by the authorities on any attacker who invoked
Allah). These suicidal attackersusually solitary and rustic and, in-
variably, psychotic after capturewere usually tried and hanged by
the end of the day. Additionally, at the gallows, a pig-skin was draped
over the condemned mana guarantee that he would be denied entry
to any empyrean paradise that he might have been promised.
For his first eighteen months working at the Gazette, even as
Kipling learned about the Afghan border problems, there was no sign
that it had piqued any writerly curiosity or empathy. Its possible that
the intense experience of the Mayo assassination made none of it
seem especially new. Everything changed in April of Kiplings third year
 The Unsentimental Education of Rudyard Kipling 217

in Lahore, when the Afghan Boundary Commission was activated.

Empowered by the new Indian control over Afghan foreign policy,

the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, dispatched a Commission to demarcate
Afghanistans northern borders. The Commissionthirty Raj offi-
cials, loaded with gifts, escorted by some five hundred troopstrav-
eled into Afghanistan in considerable style, hoping to negotiate locally
with Russian commanders who threatened Afghan borders from the
north and the west. It was partly a fact-finding trip, partly an ami-
able gesture, partly a way to send the message that India was serious
about protecting Afghanistans integrity, and partlythat peculiarly
colonial-era enterprisean ethnological survey of regions north of
Afghanistan about which the British knew little.
The proprietors of the Gazette now delivered to Kiplings desk-
bound lap the first opportunity to cut his teeth with some original
reporting. They hired two members of the Commission as correspon-
dents, with instructions to send back unclassified reports of their ex-
otic travels. The reports by themselveschock full of curiosities on
tribal customs, costumes, carpets, and jewelry, and accompanied by
samples of the samemight not have had this effect on Kipling (pe-
rennially didactic, John Lockwood used some of them to publish pa-
pers in Indian art journals) but for the assistant editors one quixotic
qualification.
In emulation of Cormell Pricewho had spent some years as a
tutor in RussiaKipling had learned the rudiments of Russian at the
USC. He was also fluent in French. Ever since his arrival, amongst
the mound of other newspapers that periodically settled on his desk
(he claimed disemboweling some thirty papers daily) were No-
voye Vremya and the JournaldeSt.Petersburg, both published from
St.Petersburg, and the Gazette de Moscow. The last two were semi-
official newspapers in French. He was the only person in the Gazette
qualified to use, if needed, scraps from these. With the reports of the
commissioner-correspondents streaming in on one side, and the Rus-
sian newspapers stacked on the other, with eager anticipation about
the Russian response to the Boundary Commission building all around
India, Kipling was uniquely positioned to expertly and originally
report on the GreatGame. The opportunity was not lost on him.
While the voluminous writing of these months was the start of the
journey that would culminate sixteen years later with Kim, they were
218 The Antioch Review

hardly edifying. They ranged from the banalWe may safely assume
that Russia will annex, more or less formally and completely, every
inch of ground in Central Asia, [which is] not defended and safeguard-
ed by Englandto the vague and unsubstantiatedwe seem even
now, from time to time, to come across the [tracks of] . . . paid agents
of Russia [who] would seek . . . to establish intimate relations with . . .
those [Indians who are] dissatisfied with our rule, to the meticulously
researched but sensationalist, as when, on rumors that the Russians
intended to lay siege to Herat (the gateway to Afghanistan from the
west), after a compilation from all available publications on Russian
shipping in the Caspian sea, Kipling computed the size of an army that
the Russians could deliver for such a siege and, based on this inflated
estimate, concluded that within the next few weeks . . . the Indian
government may be compelled to occupy Kandahar, if not march on
Herat. It was all very amateurish. But he was only nineteen.
The Afghan Boundary Commission lost relevance as the weeks
slipped by. The Empire was vast; its troubles were many. In the same
weeks, other calamitiesIrish bombs in London, a disastrous defeat
in Khartoumsnatched the headlines. Then, because London re-
vealed the separate, and high-level, diplomatic line it was running to
St.Petersburg, the Commissions activities became a sideshow. It vir-
tually vanished from the newspapers at the announcement of another
far more promising development.
Viceroy Dufferin had orchestrated what promised to be a clinch-
ing move in this chapter of the GreatGame: AmirAbdurRahman had
accepted an invitation to a grand durbar at Rawalpindi. Based on the
sheer volume of reporting the assistant editor had done on the subject
over the past six months (the Gazette had also published a biography
of Abdur Rahman which was at least partly authored by Kipling) the
proprietors thought him fit to cover the event as a Special Correspon-
dent. The Amir was supposed to enter India through Peshawar, just
miles from the Afghan border. Kipling, like all the journalists covering
the event, was expected to trail the Amir and his entourage from Pe-
shawar to Rawalpindi and then to report on the durbar. He was going
to get his first, and only, glimpse of Afghanistan.

Theres no sign that Kipling was given a choice when it came to cover-
ing the Dufferin-Abdur Rahman durbar. It was obviously a rare oppor-
tunityin an entirely different class from that of editing the reports
 The Unsentimental Education of Rudyard Kipling 219

of the Boundary Commissioners. Entirely missingin everything that

survives of the Kipling correspondence and diaries from and around
the two weeks of coverage of the durbarhowever, is enthusiasm.
It was an assignment that sparked complicatedly mixed emotions.
There were, as always, health worries. During the past month there
had been the usual fevers and headaches, even a minor emergency
from an insect bite on the eye. There were also signs of a decline of
interest in journalism. This discontent ran parallel to the unreliable but
definite progress toward original writing. A steady stream of poems
had been published in the Gazette and, the previous September, he
had overcome Stephen Wheelers resistance and published his first
short story. There was also, surely, the worry about having to spend so
long at the dangerous border. The family noticed his anxiety and put it
down to nervousness about his first big thing.
In Peshawarawaiting the unscheduled entry of Abdur Rahman
into British territorywhatever those combinations of emotions were,
they did not abate. The days were long, cold, and wet and the streets
of Peshawar were a quagmire from being churned up by thousands
upon thousands of horse and camel hoofs: Afghan tribals, by the thou-
sands, were pouring into the city to participate in the durbar. In the
thick crowds the air was redolent, one stench competing with another.
The lamplit evening street scenes were worthy of the Inferno. On
the streets was a vast human menagerie . . . twenty thousand wild
beasts held back from murder and violence, and chafing against the
restraint, with the faces of dogs, swine, weazels and goats, spitting
malevolently on the ground whenever an Englishman passed, held in
check, like wild beasts by their keepers, only by the ubiquitous
policemen. Peshawarwhere, Kipling must have heard often in La-
hore, attacks on Europeans were commonwas everywhere repul-
sive to every sense.
The dak bungalow where Kipling spent his nights was packed
with journalists. Stephen Wheeler alone had sent two others to cover
this latest set piece of Anglo-Afghan drama. Theres no sign that the
special correspondent mixed with the vulgar herd that wrote for
papers. Even the dak bungaloweverywhere in India for the Brit-
ish visitor an oasis of familiar comforts and soothing English ritu-
alsprovided little relief. The books thereincluding a mutilated
copy of the New Testament and a copy of the Calcutta Review miss-
ing every other pageonly reinforced the feeling of having landed
at the lawless edge of the world. Kipling interviewed two minor
220 The Antioch Review

chieftains (part of an advance party) or had listened in while they had

been interviewed by other journalists. When was the Amir coming?
He would come in whenever he liked, the chieftains said. The lon-
ger the Amir delayed, the longer he made his hosts wait, the greater his
stature grew in the eyes of the Afghans collecting from all around. The
special correspondent was now having difficulty sleeping. With each
passing day, his emotions grew more intense. His observations, his
writinghe was now writing on the spotdeveloped a keen edge.
On the day, finally, when all of Peshawar turned toward Jamrudthe
Indian gateway to the Khyber Pass, which was two or three miles from
Jamrudto witness the arrival of Abdur Rahman, Kiplings prose was
as sharp as a chisel.
Kiplings first vantage point was excellentastride the bastions
of Jamrud fort. A fine freezing rain that penetrated to ones marrow
blanketed the landscape. Far below, the road out of the Khyber Pass
was teeming with what looked like lines of black ants on a foraging
missionthe Amirs camp followers, interminable lines of camels,
yahoos, donkeys, and coolies streamed toward Peshawar under the
watchful eyes of hundreds of Bengal cavalry and the Royal Horse
Artillery. Then, for an instant, a gruelly streak of sunshine broke
through the clouds, checkering the hills with light and shadow, expos-
ing gorge and cavern in what had been overcast uniformity. British
cavalry pranced out of the courtyard of the fort, one by one, to assem-
ble on the maidan in three squadrons of one hundred eachbay, gray,
and chestnut. They were followed by the heavy salute guns which
took up their position on the road from the Khyber. A full hour later
a solid column of men appeared at the mouth of the pass. The road to
Jamrud was by now clear of all other traffic. Abdur Rahman, ruler of
Afghanistan and its dependencies, arrived on British soil to a twenty-
one-gun salute.
If in Peshawar the young journalist had terrifyingly experienced
the British sirkars grasp at its weakest, then, just a hundred miles
away, Rawalpindis cantonment, with the imperial war machine hum-
ming in top gear for Dufferins durbar, showcased the awe-inspiring
achievements of the British empire. Eighty thousand troopsa veri-
table harvest of dragons teeth, recruited from Dublin and the Dec-
can, Paisley and Punjab, Nepal and Lancashire . . . a solid bar of hu-
manity, one mile . . . of man, horse and gun in battle arrayhad been
assembled to impress the Amir. Dufferin had also summoned many
bejeweled Indian rulers. The sprawling assembly, with its exotically
 The Unsentimental Education of Rudyard Kipling 221

clad squadrons of personal bodyguards, had the deceptive aura of a

summit of diverse and independent nations. The special correspondent
drank it all in. The reports from Rawalpindi, after the first full nights
sleep in a week, were gushy. No contrast could have been more re-
velatory, if not epiphany-provoking, than that between the wild and
threatening streets of Peshawar and fearfully and wonderfully martial
Rawalpindi.
Kipling sent back some thirty thousand words during this trip.
Much of it was mediocre. There are spots where he falls to the obliga-
tory Victorian club yarnreporting the kind of encounter that every
Englishman who had served on the frontier was obligated to keep at
the ready. Have you ever done anything with it? a teenage Afridi boy
at Jamrud was asked about his oiled and clean Colt revolver. The boy,
all swagger and filthy clothes, replied with a cherubic smile, Not yet
sahib, but please God, I shall some day. In another instance Kipling
reports that the ominous heaps of stones that dotted here and there
the landscape around Jamrud, each marked a spot where a man had
been done to death. It was the kind of thing a Baba might have been
told, and believed. But, some of these paragraphsin their intensity
of observationcould pass for the finest of our own time. The experi-
ence of the durbar coverage had clearly played the role of an initiation.
It marks the start of Kiplings first powerfully creative phase.

The experiences at Peshawar and Jamrud festered in Kiplings imagi-

nation through the rest of the year. But Afghan issues would have to
wait. Not only had his muse been awakened, but he was making a
name for himself and acting on the first stirrings of literary ambition.
The Gazette was now being constantly extended and reshaped to ac-
commodate his eclectic writings. He had begun submitting his stories
widely, focusing on the Calcutta publications. They dont pay much
on that estimable old ragbag, he wrote to Uncle Crom about the Cal-
cutta Review, but a certain amount of dignity is supposed to attach to
writing for it and I am sadly deficient in dignity. By dignity he meant,
also, pedigree. He would spend most of the second half of the year in
Simla. His coverage of the durbar had led to a pay raise and he carried
to classy Simla the title of specialcorrespondent: the summer capitals
high society of waltzing, dining out and concerts was now acces-
sible. The seeds of the stories (mostly on Simla society) that would
fill his first collectionPlain Tales from the Hillswere sown during
222 The Antioch Review

these months. But even in Simla, the most English town in the Eastern
hemisphere, the terrors of Afghanistan were inescapable.
The soldiers of all lands take a tender and proprietary interest in
the alien whom he wishes to slay, the special correspondent wrote
from Simla for the Gazette. Hence the possessive, your man, your
object, your prisoner. One could only speculate at the reasoning that
had led him to a lecture at the United Service Institute (the only other
attendees were military officers) on the best means whereby a Ghazi
might be stopped in mid rush with a revolver and sword. A strip of
chain, sewn from elbow to wrist into ones jacket, could serve well
during such an attack. But beyond that, the defender had some difficult
decisions to make. Even if you ran the attacker through the body with
your sword, he could still cleave you open with one mighty final
effort. The concern when, with a heavy sword, one tried to make col-
lops of the attacker, was that the standard-issue British army sword
broke easily. The lecturer had designed a new sword, good for both
cutting and thrusting, which he exhibited lovingly and tenderly.
Revolvers posed problems as well. The new standard-issue ammuni-
tion fitted badly into the standard-issue revolver and lacked the punch
to stop an attacker unless you hit your man in the eye. Delivered
in a low, even monotone, the lecture might have been on geology
[or on] river frontages in the Gangetic valley. It ended with a vote of
thanks by a geriatric general who, to the amazement and amusement
of all, spoke about his early days in the army when he had been trained
on flintlocks.
The fanfaronade of the Dufferin-Abdur Rahman durbar might
have stalled the Russians but it had changed nothing on the border.
Attacks on Britishers high and low were still common. In considering
this state of affairs, a sense of humor was essential. The frivolous tone
of the report on the Simla lecture appears next only several months
later (months spent partly in the flirtatious company of the petite, at-
tractive Mrs.IsabellaBurtonthe real-life Mrs. Hauksbeeand her
milieu of grass widows who populate Plain Tales from the Hills) when
Kipling was back in Lahore. It made its appearance in a letter to Lio-
nel Charles Dunsterville, that most intimate of USC chums (and the
model for Stalky in Stalky & Co.). Lieutenant Dunsterville had just
arrived in India and was making his way to his post at Rawalpindi. Af-
ter a page or two of old school banter, we get this: You may get your
chance of something festive here. In the past few days, a colonel had
been killed near the Khyber Pass. Retribution was inevitable. Nota
 The Unsentimental Education of Rudyard Kipling 223

Bene, the reporter cautioned, never close with an Afghan; plug him
from a distance. Theres no glory if he sticks you and precious little if
you pot him. I had an experience at Jamrud which brought this home
to me. I stood far off and heaved rocks at mine adversary like David
did and providentially smote him on the mouth insomuch that he lost
interest in me and departed. He had a knife and seemed to object to my
going on foot toward the Khyber.
It was the application of the knowing, experienced tone of the
lecturer in Simla to the report of an incident that, in all likelihood, had
been imagined, and that perhaps only for the edification of that most
admired of creaturesa Sandhurst man. In the approximately dozen
detailed reports Kipling had sent back from Peshawar and Rawalpin-
di, and in everything he had written in the ten months since, there had
been no mention of the attempt to enter the Khyber Pass from Jamrud,
as ill-advised and unlikely a venture as possible at a time when it was
crawling with armed tribals, and especially by that sleep-deprived and
edgy reporter. The conversion of personal experience into convincing
fiction was underway.

Early in 1887, Stephen Wheeler resigned as the editor of the Gazette.

His replacement, Edward Kay Robinsonan editor with experience
in England who would become Kiplings first champion outside his
own familychanged the format of the Gazette to accommodate the
prodigys fiction. Success, however, came at a price: a few months lat-
er Kipling was moved to The Pioneerin Allahabadanother paper
owned by the proprietors of the Gazette, and far more prestigious. By
the end of the year he closed a deal with Thacker Spink & Co., a respect-
able Calcutta publishing house, to publish Plain Tales from the Hills.
Kiplings final eighteen months in India were spent almost en-
tirely in Allahabad. Except for setting an actual date, the plan to re-
turn to England as a writer had been hatched. In Allahabada far
more expansive, cosmopolitan, and mainstream colonial setting than
Lahorethe stories really began to flow. Space was made available
for them in The Pioneers weekly supplement. Away from the critical
control, and censorship, of his parents, for the first time he was his
own man. He became a bit of a figure about town, at least as much as
his introverted nature would allow. The perspective gained by physi-
cally leaving behind the setting of the Punjab, and its Afghan issues,
perhaps had something to do with the literary loquacity of this period,
224 The Antioch Review

but the influence of another strong current was undeniable.

She was Edmonia Hillone of Kiplings three or four premari-
tal unrequited romantic interestsmarried, artistic, and a stimulating
muse and editor. He was twenty-two and balding. She, in her mid-thir-
ties, thought he looked forty. For this entire period, she read every-
thing he wrote very soon after he wrote it. Theres no evidence that she
even registered, let alone reciprocated, his strong feelings. But he was
writing mainly for her eyes and she believed his tales to be mainly de-
rived from his experiences in the Punjab and he enjoyedas with no
other womanplaying the man who had seen and experienced it all.
We will never learn from whom shed heard that Kipling could make
first-class love to the latest bell (sic) in Simla. When they separated
for a few weeks, he would write her long doleful letters in which ev-
ery passage held some disguised confession of infatuation. For the
eyes, first, of EdmoniaHill Kipling wrote stories like Dray Wara Yow
Dee, a grisly tale about a cuckolded Afghan tribals bloody quest for
revenge. Here Kipling introduced Mahbub Alithe Afghan horse-
trader and part-time British spy immortalized in Kim. For Mrs.Hills
eyes as well (he asked her to name the protagonist) he wroteargu-
ably his most famous novellaThe Man Who Would Be King, about
the bloody fate of two English adventurers in Afghanistan. Most of us
probably know the story best from the 1970s John Huston adaptation
starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine.
By the middle of 1888, Plain Tales from the Hills had been favor-
ably reviewed by the Saturday Review in London. By the end of the
year Kipling had a deal with Indian publishers for six small volumes to
be published under a mini-imprint called the Indian Railway Library
(to be sold mainly in bookstores at Indian railway stations). Most of
what he wrote for The Pioneer and for Mrs.Hillthese experimental
brush strokes in preparation for Kimcan be found in these six titles.
By the end of the year, months away from leaving India, Rudyard
Kipling, the writer, was a name recognized by Anglo-Indians across
north India. But, unbeknownst to him, courtesy of the still slack and
inconsistent copyright laws, his books had traveled ahead of him. The
next year, as he traveled the world, he would find plagiarized copies
of his books in Japan and America. By 1892, around the time he mar-
ried the, by all accounts, domineering American Caroline Balestier (to
begin a new, and completely different, phase of his life and career),
only twenty-seven, his was one of the most famous literary names in
the world.
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