Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling

by Charles Allen

Charles Allen traces the Indian experiences of Kipling's parents, Lockwood and Alice, and reveals what kind of culture the young writer was born into and then returned to when still a teenager.

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction, India, Biography Memoir, Asia

426 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2007

About the author

Charles Allen is a British writer and historian. He was born in India, where several generations of his family served under the British Raj. His work focuses on India and South Asia in general. Allen's most notable work is Kipling Sahib, a biography of Rudyard Kipling. His most recent work, Ashoka: the Search for India's Lost Emperor, was published in February 2012.

Selected works:

Plain Tales from the Raj: Images of British India in the Twentieth Century (1975)
Raj: A Scrapbook of British India 1877–1947 (1977)
Tales from the Dark Continent: Images of British Colonial Africa in the Twentieth Century (1979)
A Mountain in Tibet: The Search for Mount Kailas and the Sources of the Great Rivers of India (1982)
Tales from the South China Seas: Images of the British in South-East Asia in the Twentieth Century (1983)
Lives of the Indian Princes, with co-author Sharada Dwivedi (1984)
Kipling's Kingdom: His Best Indian Stories (1987)
A Glimpse of the Burning Plain: Leaves from the Journals of Charlotte Canning (1986)
A Soldier of the Company: Life of an Indian Ensign 1833–43 (1988)
Architecture of the British Empire, Ed. R. Fermor-Hesketh (1989)
The Savage Wars of Peace: Soldiers' Voices 1945–1989 (1990)
Thunder and Lightning: The RAF in the Gulf War (1991)
The Search for Shangri-La: A Journey into Tibetan History (1999)
India Through the Lens: Photography 1840–1911, Ed. Vidya Dehejia (2000)
Soldier Sahibs: The Men who Made the North-west Frontier (2000)
The Buddha and the Sahibs: The Men who Discovered India's Lost Religion (2002)
Duel in the Snows: The True Story of the Younghusband Mission to Lhasa (2004)
Maharajas: Resonance from the Past (2005)
God's Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad (2006)
Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling (2007)
The Buddha and Dr Führer: An Archaeological Scandal (2008)
The Taj at Apollo Bunder: The History of the Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai, with co-author Sharada Dwivedi (2011)
Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (2012)

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book left me feeling underwhelmed.

Firstly there was not enough insight into Kipling. This may well not be the fault of the author. Kipling was obsessed with keeping his privacy and went to great lengths to retrieve and destroy personal correspondence and other private documents. I suspect there was not much flesh on the bones for a biographer.

Secondly there was too much analysis of his writing. This relates to a personal foible. I dislike fiction nowadays. I wanted to know about India (which endlessly intrigues me), and about this iconic and peculiar man, who fell from grace in the 20th century. I did not want literary insights.

Finally, the book ended when he was 35 years old, whilst in fact Kipling lived until he was 71. Okay, so in the last 35 years he was not a popular writer, but having followed the trajectory of his life so far, it seemed very abrupt and peculiar to stop at 35.

But...... the book was certainly not without nuggets, and herewith some of the things that I found interesting. (Much of this is copied directly from the book.)

*Kipling, like many British children in Colonial India, led a life of completely luxury and spoiling until the age of five, when he was sent to England. In the case of him and his sister they didn't go to boarding school, but to an English foster mother, charged with teaching them to read and write. Her treatment of Kipling was abhorrant - subjecting him to beatings, solitary confinements in the cellar or attic, and threats of eternal damnation. He was constantly vilified. He was with her for six and a half years, and the experience brutalized him. Trix, his sister, got better treatment at her hands. In this harsh environment brother and sister grew incredibly close and protective of one another, and this was to last throughout their lives.

*Kipling's parents were alerted to his ill-treatment, when relatives he occasionally stayed with noticed how depressed he was. He was removed from the foster home and sent to school at The United Services College, run by a liberal headmaster, Cormell Price. Price gave him the security and encouragement that he needed to flourish. He read and studied with enthusiasm.


* Kipling revered many institutions and learnt to be accepted by them by writing about them. His school was the first of many institutions that he came to revere and whose approbation he always sought. It was there that he discovered that a means of gaining this much-desired acceptance was to give public expression to what might be described as the group psyche or mood.

* When he left school he was unable to follow his classmates into their military collages - being clumsy and non-athletic, nor could his parents afford to send him to university. He decided to become a journalist. This remained his favourite form of publication all his life. Even when he wrote novels or stories, they were often initially published by magazines or newspapers, in instalments.

*After finishing school he returned to his family in India, in Lahore, (which was then in India).

* Depression and bi-polar disorder ran in his family. The author feels that Kipling, his mother and his sister all showed signs of it. Trix his sister was hospitalized with psychosis, and Kipling was prone to periods of depression throughout his adult life.

* "He was an obsessive researcher and explorer of his environment. Observers of him at work said he worried at a subject like a terrier with a bone, not leaving off until the working of every nut, bolt and flange of its machinery was understood, along with every technical term, nuance, phrase and piece of slang that went with it. This rigorous investigation and note-taking also supplied him with a natural framing device for many of the two hundred or so stories he wrote in India. There are early tales where it is impossible to tell what is fact and what is fiction. He worked many of his personal experiences into fiction - and they come from scrupulously observed fact."

*At several different times in this book we hear about the overwhelming heat of summer, especially in Lahore.
16 September 1884: "His letters show that from this time on he continued to rely on opiates, in the form of opium, morphine and Indian hemp, medicinally taken, to get through Lahore's summer nights - nights of real horror, which as he confessed in Something of Myself he came to dread more and more with each passing year. This drug-taking was by no means as shocking then as it might appear today: heat induced 'night terrors' were recognised as a medical condition by such authorities as the Surgeon-General of India..."

*Kipling both loved and hated India. He was vastly prejudiced and xenophobic . Part of this was probably due to his admiration of British culture and institutions, and his great respect for the military. Relations between Indians and the British were still smarting after the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (now known in India as 'the First War of Independence'). On the positive side, he really did explore and mix with the people of India, he was not just a Colonial bystander. On the negative side he was horrendously prejudiced, even by the standards of the time. He preferred Muslims to Hindus, but his attitude to all Indians seems quite bizarre in the light of where we stand today. He believed passionately in Empire, and the benefits of Anglo-Saxon rulership.

* He became a Freemason.

*When twenty-three years old he left India and came to London. He was a huge literary success. But he never cultivated fame. He was always a very private man.

* In 1892 he married an American - Carrie Balestier - and lived for a while in America. He and Carrie had a happy marriage and three children, whom he loved greatly. Sadly his daughter died of measles in 1899, and his son was killed in the First World War.

* The book also discusses aspects of India that I found fascinating, like the terrible famines and droughts of the mid-1870s, and the appalling administration of Viceroy Robert Bulwer, first Earl of Lytton. "In the summer of 1876 the monsoon failed for a third year, leading to famine on a scale hitherto unknown in India. But when Lord Buckingham, Governor of Madras, instituted relief measures, such as work camps where refugees were given food in return for their labour, he was sternly rebuked by Lytton, who ordered that no grain was to be bought by the Government. So whilst hundreds of thousands died for lack of food in Madras and other famine-affected regions, surpluses of rice and wheat in other parts of India continued to be exported to England. In 1876 wheat exports to Britain doubled, and doubled again the following year. In 1877 the famine was even further extended...."

* Simla was also discussed at length - and as someone with a colonial history myself - to my embarrassment I find myself intrigued by this fantasy England perched up in the mountains above the plains of India. So for me those bits of the book were fascinating too.

[Elderberrywine · Rating 5 out of 5]

A biography of Kipling through his early '30s and the writing of The Jungle Books and Kim, written by a uniquely qualified author. Charles Allen is the great-grandson of the man who gave the 16-year old Kipling his first job as a journalist in Lahore, India. Not only that, but Allen was one of the last generation of "Anglo-Indians" to grow up in colonial India, in the '40s.

Young Ruddy was the spoiled son of non-aristocratic but artistic parents in mid-19th century India, only to be sent back, with his sister, to spend years in a brutal boardinghouse in England, not to mention being an outside in public school. When he got back to India, he was neither fish nor fowl, but his passion for and curiosity regarding India and all of its complexity was stronger than ever.

An excellent literary biography, and the rare one that knows when to say when.

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sort of hovering between 3/4. 4 for being an engrossing read and getting the contradictions of Kipling, but inclined to mark it down for author's pretty much dismissing anything Kipling wrote later than Kim. Is rather anti his mother, which may or may not be a justifiable position given the standards of and attitudes to parenting at the time - though at least Allen understands the whole thing about sending tiny children home from India to often horrible guardians (relatives or not) at 'Home', which I have come across some authors of biographies who do not.

[Edoardo Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging and interesting account of Kipling's childhood in India, his unhappy return to England at the age of six, and his return to the country of his birth after he left school, and the six and a half crucial years he spent there. But what comes across particularly clearly, from the quotations of Kipling's early teenage poetry and then the stories he wrote in his early twenties, is his quite extraordinary talent. Has there been a writer since Shakespeare more naturally gifted at conveying and creating language, not to mention his ability to form a landscape and culture in the reader's mind with a phrase. For anyone interested in Kipling, in particular his Indian stories, this is well worth reading.

[William DuFour · Rating 5 out of 5]

A interesting story on how he became famous for his poems and short stories with a lot of background information on India and how England treated its citizens and their natives as masters.

[Vansa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before I read this book, I hadn’t really read much of Kipling-‘Jungle Book’ when I was a kid ( deeply disappointing, too few singing animals, too much violence and nuance), ‘If’ was a poem we had in school, and after watching ‘The Man who would be King’ in my teens and absolutely loving it, I read the book of short stories this story’s from-bad decision again, it also had the short story ‘Baa Baa Black sheep’ which traumatized me for weeks, since it depicts in unflinching detail the abuse that Kipling and his sister were subjected to as boarders in England when they were children. So a biography of a writer I haven’t really read, and thought of as an evil racist warmonger, wasn’t a natural choice. My husband picked this out for me at random from my office library, and I have never been more grateful for a random selection! This book not just contextualizes Kipling, it’s also a nuanced look at that time period in North India, and I loved his descriptions of the founding and development of Bombay and Shimla. Allen includes references to Kipling’s work throughout, poems, or short stories, to give you background on what he was possibly going through when he wrote that, and that was interesting enough to make me want to read the relevant piece of work, which led me to realise that critics of Kipling don’t seem to have actually read his work, or have read just a few lines and not bothered with the rest. ‘The ballad of east and west’, for instance, with its famous first line, is a poem that goes on to show you how that point of view’s complete nonsense, apart from managing to be quite a moving elegy on a roving brigand accepting that his way of life might be coming to an end, and it’s not without sympathy. The work for which he’s most reviled, ’White man’s burden’, is less a call to arms and the glorification of a civilizing mission, than a tongue-in cheek sending up of gung-ho colonial propaganda, one of the lines in it is “The savage wars of peace—Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease;” , with many other lines in similar vein: I don’t think Kipling could help how people chose to interpret( or
misinterpret) his work.
Kipling was born in India, to parents who didn’t really quite fit into simple class categories: the Victorian Age saw a new educated middle class arise, who reached their social position because of their professions and not because of their lineage or parentage or connections to the Armed Forces. Kipling’s father was an architect and artist, and his mother was from a very progressive, artistic family: her family has an entire biography to itself because of the fascinating women and their work in the arts, and the men they married . They never really felt like they belonged in England, where it was difficult for Lockwood Kipling to find employment without patronage, and he did what all men in similar circumstances at the time did-move to India to make their fortune. Kipling and his sister were born in Bombay, and were almost entirely raised by several nannies and gardeners and other Indians who were part of the domestic staff of the house given to Lockwood Kipling at the JJ School of Art in Bombay. Kipling and his sister, Trix, grew up speaking fluent Marathi, Urdu and English, which explains a lot about his later life and vivid descriptions of places other foreigners wouldn’t really have been able to access. Kipling and Trix were sent back to England when they were around 8 years old, and sent to a peculiarly specific type of institution-a boarding house, specifically for what were known as ‘Raj orphans’- children of employees of the British Raj ,whose parents probably couldn’t afford to send them to school in England, but who also couldn’t be educated in village schools because of the invisible class barrier. The strange thing is that they could have been sent to any of Alice Kipling’s many siblings, but her misplaced ego wouldn’t let her do that, and sent off her children to a boarding house in Wales instead ( it was a different time, parents didn’t have any qualms about leaving their children in the care of adults, in a country halfway across the world, who might turn out to be sadistic.) This was a terrible experience for
Kipling and Trix, because the woman running it seems to have hated children, and threatened the
children with even worse consequences if they communicated their despair to anyone-with the sad
outcome that Kipling’s many aunts and uncles who visited left with the impression that they were doing fine. It’s taken a complete breakdown ( the first of many to follow, in Kipling’s life) for Alice Kipling to realise that her children were not fine, when they were taken away from there, and sent to live with an aunt instead, from where Kipling was enrolled in a school set up for children like him-the new Victorian middle class who still couldn’t afford the expensive public schools( vehemently not for most of the “public”). While Kipling writes fondly of his school, most of the children there were being trained to join the Army or the Civil Services, while that wasn’t a path that he could follow, being quite a frail child, and his parents not being financially well off enough to send him off to college to prepare for the bureaucracy, and this was another circumstance that led to him feeling like he didn’t fit in. When he left school at 16, he took up work immediately, at the Civil and Military Gazette, the newspaper at Lahore, and finally joined his parents there-Lockwood Kipling was the curator of the newly being set up Lahore Museum, the grounds of which housed the zam zama, featured in one of the best opening paragraphs ever to be written in fiction. Kipling’s strange upbringing, his obvious talent with languages and the difficulty of slotting him into one social class or another clearly helped him in his interactions, which would inform his writing. The characters who people his stories come from all sorts of backgrounds, professions and walks of life, and clearly he was good at getting along with people-possibly they were also indulgent to someone who was very nearly a child, 16 is very young to deal with the world with
maturity. I read Kim immediately after this, and apart from Kim sharing Kipling’s birth year, there seem to be other aspects of similarity. Since Kipling was exposed to such a variety of perspectives, his stories reflect this, apart from remarkable clear sightedness about the context. As my husband remarked about ‘Kim’, Kipling is clearly exhilarated about India-its diversity of cultures and languages and faiths, the widely varying landscapes, he people and their political and social contexts, it’s not superficial-he can see the dark heart within too, of the land, and the colonial project. I loved the historical context as well, particularly of the development of Shimla, and the attitudes of the colonial government and all the ancillary actors in this drama. This book is so interesting, that you want to instantly read the short story ,or the poem that Allen refers to, while describing the historical context, so I ended up reading a lot more Kipling than I ever had, and realizing that I had missed out on what have now become some of my favourite works-I don’t know any other writer with his reputation who wrote about the colonial project with such derision, for the tolls it was taking on mostly not well-off young subalterns, the cruelties inflicted on the colonies and the damage it was causing mentally . I usually read biographies or memoirs of writers I’ve already read -this is a unique biography that turns you into a fan of Kipling even if you’ve never read his work before. It serves both as an introduction to this complicated man who wrote so
sensitively, but not without humour, about a very different country.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

This biography is based on Kipling's life from his birth in 1865 in Bombay to his early years in India. As a precocious, opinionated six year old boy his parents had him leave India and travel to England for his education. Unfortunately he suffered greatly from physical/ mental abuse by his caregivers. He became deeply depressed, and later returned home to India which was the beginning of his writing career. Kipling lived in India for thirteen years. He suffered from insomnia (childhood struggles), so he would walk the streets which gave him the opportunity to observe life of the less fortunate to make into short stories, and poems. Excellent read.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always having been fascinated by the British Empire in India, I could not put this book down. It is important to note that this is not a full biography, as it only covers Kipling's life just up to the publication of Kim. Allen, a child of the Raj himself, is also not at pains to criticize the morality or ethics of the Empire. Within those boundaries, it is an excellent, well-researched account of Kipling's life in India.

[Nicholas Matthews · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent biography full of colour and excerpts from a wide range of Kipling's work. This book provides a wonderful insight into the young Kipling and the childhood events that helped form him into the writer he later became. I've been lucky enough to attend a lecture by Charles Allen on this subject and can assert that his passion for Kipling comes through into this fascinating book.

[Trisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an easy excellent read. Did so much to help me understand "Kim" and admire it even more. How fascinating that he sat down to write a rah-rah British raj book and came away with something so utterly different. Did he not know his own mind or what? Just fascinating for its real-life detail of life in India back then and for Kipling's connection with the Pre-raphaelites. Just great

[Salil Lavgankar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well researched book covering Rudyard Kipling's life in India. Also keep a nice balance between Kipling's professional and personal lives. Must read for anyone who wants to understand Kipling's works in more detail including his influences, motivations and the man behind the cover.

[Tim Stafford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most enjoyable.

[Anju Rani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable read. The book would be of interest to people having an inclination for Kipling or the British Raj.

[Sally Fouhse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bought this in a bookstore in Kathmandu. A good read.

[Aurélien Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book specifically focusing on Kipling's time in India was long over-due! India was not only where Kipling made his crucial apprenticeship in journalism and emerged as a very accomplished writer indeed (and at a relatively young age too!) but, also, had been the cradle of most his opinions on Britain, from its ruling elites and establishment to its supposed role to play in the world. Did Allen succeeded in shedding some light into this impactful period? Well...

First of all, when it comes to his life back-and-forth over there (e.g. his childhood in Bombay; his stays in Lahore, Allahabad, Simla and else; his travelling in Asia before settling in the USA for a while, and then go back etc.) I haven't learned very much here. It's not the author's fault: Kipling and his relatives have done their outmost to erase as much evidence as could be from this period of his life, and so there's not much material left to begin with. That said, it doesn't mean that, as a biography, this book is uninteresting.

Where it gets fascinating, for instance, is when Allen tries and explains how Kipling became the Kipling whom we know: the admirer of foreign cultures, yet who could be highly prejudiced when not downright patronising; the Jingoist in full support of colonial conquests, yet despising the ruling Establishment which was the backbone of the Empire; the Conservatives who sneered at Liberals and upheld obedience and traditions, while being quite the misfit and maverick himself; the massive celebrity using his fame as a drumbeat to his ideas, yet who was obsessed with privacy and otherwise quietness... His was a complicated personality (to say the least!) so how did the author managed to assess it all?

I understand that Allen is rather sympathetic to the man, especially given that he brilliantly succeeds in putting him back into the context of his time and, of course, place. Kipling's indeed owed a great deal to his Anglo-Indian heritage and background; and here was a microcosm whose views could align with Imperial England as much as its lifestyle could be completely alien to Victorian expectations. The picture offered of the Anglo-Indian world is, by the way, very detailed and engaging. It's fair enough. The thing is, I was left with the impression that he was too sympathetic. Was that an issue?

'The White Man's Burden'? Allen acknowledges that it's appalling from our vantage point, but stresses that Kipling was at a low point in his life when he wrote it and so that we shouldn't let it obscure the rest of his work. His support for Cecil Rhodes? Well, it was merely because he thought that the Dutch Boers were far worse colonialists than the British, and so eh! Don't hold it too much against him either. I could go on, but you get the gist. Now, it's not that Allen is completely blind to some of the appalling views otherwise entertained by Kipling. He, for example, reminds us of the meanings one can give to 'The Jungle Book', like he doesn't shy away from exposing his prejudices towards, especially, Hindus. He also refuses to call him an Orientalists, something that others have been rather blunt to do otherwise. It's just that he wants us to like the man as much as we like the writer, whereas, as far as I am concerned, I admire the writer but deeply dislike the man. As it is, then, the way you will receive this will depend entirely on what you think of Kipling's views in the first place (the mere product of his time? Or, on the contrary, on the wrong side of history even back then?).

All in all, here's a very engrossing portrayal of Anglo-Indian society and how it may have contributed into shaping Kipling's views and persona, no matter how complicated the subject matter. The thing is, because material are sparse to start with there is not much to learn further than what Kipling's readers would already know, if not for biographical details associated with his family and associates at the time. Was I interested in that? Quite frankly: no; and so because it ends by being a book dealing more about personalities around Kipling than about Kipling himself (e.g. his father's career; his social circles then; the people behind the newspapers he worked for...) I felt kind of cheated. It's great when it comes to portray British India, and it does a good job at showing Kipling morphing from an awkward boy to the man that (we think) we know. Sadly, I didn't find it any more deepening than that.

[Christiane · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Even though Charles Allen is one of my favourite authors I was wary of this book as 496 pages on my Kindle seemed excessive for the biography of a writer, even one as well-known and beloved in Britain (at the time) as Rudyard Kipling. In the end it wasn’t excessive as a lot of space is taken up by some of his poems and excerpts from his short stories and there is an extensive Glossary, Bibliography and Index. Still, the book was extremely detailed and having finished it I feel that I’ve learned as much about Kipling , his parents, his sister, the extended family, friends and a very large cast of newspapermen as I would want to know,

The highlights, of course, are Kipling’s years in India, his idyllic childhood in Bombay, his later life in Lahore - which he detested at first and came to love - and Allahabad and his extended stays in promiscuous Simla. He was the poet of the Raj who wrote of “the white man’s burden” and “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”, though according to Charles Allen those quotes were misunderstood. He saw viceroys come and go, among them the infamous Lord Lytton. He grew to respect Muslims, especially the proud Pathans, and despised Hindus (though he softened his attitude in later life) having a particular antipathy towards “hypocritical” educated and Westernised Indians who yet kept their women in purdah. He claimed to feel closest to the simple peasant toiling on his little plot. He was not a particularly attractive-looking man but charmed (most) people with his enthusiasm and sparkling wit. He was a hard-working journalist, poet and short story writer and nobody ever portrayed Anglo-Indian life better than him in his “Plain Tales from the Hills” and other unforgettable works.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this as background for a block on my MA in English I found this well written and informative. It draws in many sources and like most biographies there may have a degree of speculation or subjectivity but it is a powerful read and helped fill some gaps (shameful I know) of Kipling and what inspired the masterpiece that is Kim.

[Saumya · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read.
It became more relatable because of Simla.
The description of some of Kipling's work became a bit boring but it would be wrong to say that it could be entirely skipped.
I enjoy Charles Allen's work and his writing style so no complaints.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read. This book covers the first half of the author’s life. The book is quite well researched, a fact made more difficult by Kipling’s destruction of most of his correspondence!
A well written book, it’s not a bit dry.
It has inspired me to read “Kim.”

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nearly a four but not quite. Slightly dull. The book is 365 pages long, not including notes and I spent too much time seeing how far through I was.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting look at the life and times of Rudyard Kipling and how his life and experiences, that spanned India, Britain and America, influenced his writing.

[Indian]

Amazing book, the evocation of 1850-1900 India is arresting, Calcutta as the capital of India & Shimla as the summer capital of India as well the summer capital of British-Punjab, Punjab's capital is Lahore during winters. The books narrates the traivails of the sahibs & the Punjabis, Afghans, Buddhists... replete with Kipling's one-liners... must read to understand the India of that half-century, at Bombay (Kipling's father was working at JJ School or Arts Bombay) & later transferred to Lahore (As Curator for Lahore's museum) .. Kipling born at Bombay was shipped to england for 10 yrs of studies, came back to Lahore & worked for the Pioneer Lahore for 5-10 years, travelling in between to Allahabad, Benaras, Calcutta & Chittorgarh.
Kipling was one of the trumpeteerer of British-colonialism & initial held the natives (Hindus) in contempt & was fond of the Indian-Muslims, so be wary a bit of the chauvanism in his prose & verse, but he was a genius-poet neverthless!

[Sanjay · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the problems I have with biographies is that I tend to forget the reams of information about the author's life almost from the moment I put the book down. And so it is here as well -- which doesn't, of course, mean that it's a bad book. Allen takes pains to establish his hypothesis that India furnished Kipling with his literary raw material, and distance from the country led to an enervation of his imagination. (The biographer's take isn't uncritical; many of Kipling's particularly egregious Empire-praising ballads are singled out for censure.) Particularly absorbing are details of life in Lahore and Simla in the latter part of the last century, as well as Lokwood Kipling's contribution to the composition of 'Kim'.

[Pat · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well-written story. The rating is merely my reflection on how much I enjoyed it--not the quality of the book. I thought I would be more interested in Kipling's story because I've enjoyed his writing. Although I'm a fan of biographies, I found I just wasn't that interesting in his. Again, not a reflection of the author's talent and efforts. Just my take.

[Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating biography of Kipling emphasising the Indian years.

[Deb]

I'll have to check and see if I have already read this one...

[Seta Mergeanian]

both london and india defines him

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating story of the inspirations behind Kipling's writing.

[Anna Urbina]

loved this Book......a look into the Man who Broight Us The Jungle Book and Kim.