Rudyard Kipling's Novels Rudyard Kipling Was Born

¶ … Rudyard Kipling's novels Rudyard Kipling was born in India in 1865 and spent the first few years of his life blissfully happy in an India full of exotic sights and sounds. At the age of five, he was sent back to England and later described his later childhood years as terribly unhappy. Kipling's memories of a blissfully happy childhood in India and the influence of colonial England in his later formative years accounts for Kipling's dual theme of imperialism, yet strong portrayal and seemingly contradictory love and fascination of India.

This duality is evident in both Kim (1902) and Plain Tales (1888.) In Kim, Kipling's predilection for intertwining the logic and rationalism prided by the West with the subtlety and mystery of the East is reflected in Kim's adventures with the lama from Tibet, "bound to the Wheel of Things," and his employment in the Government Secret Service in the service of the "Great Game." Though both elements are made to co-exist, a note of imperialism is nevertheless retained while acknowledging a fascination of India.

Kim may speak fluent Urdu, and be treated as the "Little Friend of All the World" in the Indian world, but his identity is very clearly linked to that of the superior, ruling race. Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white - a poor white of the very poorest" (1).

Though Plain Tales is a collection of short stories, colonial life in India is very much a central theme while capturing all the richness of India's sights, sounds and smells. The tales Kipling tells resound with the cultural and racial barriers of the time but with a clear demarcation of the differences in race and communities. Yet, at the same time, Kipling freely allows the intermingling of the different communities and acknowledges the marked influence and impact that one had on the other.

In Lispeth, the first of the short stories in The Plain Tales, the principal character is the daughter of natives, who gets baptized as a Christian by her parents in order to gain protection from the missionaries. Though Lispeth was a Hill girl, she was fair and very lovely and with her English habits and name was not fully accepted by either the natives or the British.

Again, one sees here Kipling's tendency to weave a story of Colonial England's intermingling with native India with a thread of imperialism nevertheless present. This was the first mention Lispeth had ever made of her matrimonial views, and the Chaplain's wife shrieked with horror. However, the man on the sofa needed attention first.

He was a young Englishman..." (Lispeth, 1.1: Plain Tales.) In Miss Youghal's Sais from Plain Tales, where the central character - Strickland - believed that a policeman should know as much about the natives as the natives themselves, Kipling once again explores the interaction between the English in India and the natives. There has been a lot of debate over Kipling's Imperialistic stance in his books but equally the contrasts and contradictions in his ideology have also been remarked on.

Sandra Kemp, in her book Kipling's Hidden Narratives, refutes the popular view that Kipling was an out and out Imperialist by closely analysing the ambivalence of Kipling's narratives, the contrasts and conflicting realities depicted in his Indian fiction by stating that there is "no way of resolving the conflict of voices by reference to authorial intention" (6). Bonamy Dobree also acknowledged Kipling's paradoxical love for India in an important survey on Kipling.