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“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.
To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened.
But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
― Rudyard Kipling ―
Rudyard Kipling.
30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936
Rudyard Kipling — Writer, Poet and Storyteller
Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was a British writer, poet and journalist, born in Bombay in British India. Few English-language authors became so closely associated with the age in which they lived. Kipling wrote about empire, soldiers, childhood, India, duty and human character, producing works as different as The Jungle Book, Kim, Just So Stories and the poem If—. In 1907 he became the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. More than a century later, his political views remain controversial, but the imaginative power, rhythm and storytelling of his finest work continue to attract readers.
During his lifetime Kipling was regarded not merely as a writer of stories but as one of the leading poets of the English-speaking world. He was offered both a knighthood and the position of Poet Laureate, but declined them. His extraordinary popularity reached its height during the first decade of the twentieth century, when his books were read throughout the British Empire and far beyond it.
Childhood Between India and England
Kipling was born in Bombay, where his father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an artist and teacher at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art. His mother was Alice Macdonald. His unusual first name came from Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, a place associated with his parents’ courtship. India, with its languages, colours, religions, people and stories, made a profound impression on the young Kipling and would later provide the setting and inspiration for much of his finest writing.
At the age of six, however, Kipling and his younger sister were sent to England for their education while their parents remained in India. The separation was difficult, and his years away from his parents left a lasting impression on him. He later attended the United Services College in Devon, an experience that also found its way into his writing. In 1882, still only sixteen, he returned to India and began working as a journalist in Lahore.
Journalism, Travel and the Beginning of a Literary Career
Working first for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and later for The Pioneer in Allahabad, Kipling travelled widely through British India. Journalism gave him an extraordinary opportunity to observe people from many different levels of society: soldiers and administrators, railway workers and craftsmen, Indians and Europeans. These encounters supplied him with characters, settings and stories, and during the 1880s his reputation as a writer steadily grew.
In 1888 he published a series of collections of short stories that established him as a remarkable new literary voice. Among the stories from this period was The Man Who Would Be King, later famously adapted for the cinema with Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Kipling had discovered one of his greatest strengths: the ability to tell a story directly, vividly and with an extraordinary ear for spoken language.
In 1889 he left India and travelled through Burma, China, Japan and across the United States before crossing the Atlantic and settling in London. His fame grew rapidly. His first novel, The Light That Failed, appeared in 1891, while poems such as The Ballad of East and West helped establish his reputation as a poet.
The Jungle Books and International Fame
In 1892 Kipling married Caroline Balestier, the sister of his American friend and literary collaborator Wolcott Balestier, who had died the previous year. The couple settled for several years in Vermont in the United States. It was there that Kipling wrote some of the works for which he is still most widely remembered.
The Jungle Book appeared in 1894, followed by The Second Jungle Book in 1895. Their stories of Mowgli, Baloo, Bagheera, Shere Khan and the other inhabitants of the Indian jungle became classics of children’s literature. Although written far from India, the books drew deeply upon Kipling’s memories and imagination of the country in which he had been born.
After returning to England, Kipling published Captains Courageous in 1897 and Kim in 1901. The latter, set against the extraordinary human and cultural landscape of British India, is often regarded as one of his finest novels. Just So Stories for Little Children followed in 1902, adding another enduring classic to his work for younger readers.
Kipling at the Height of His Career
By the beginning of the twentieth century Kipling had become one of the most famous writers in the English-speaking world. His poems were memorised, recited and quoted by people who might never otherwise have considered themselves readers of poetry. His language could be direct and colloquial, but it was also strongly rhythmic, which gave many of his poems an almost musical quality.
In 1907 Kipling received the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first English-language writer to receive the award. He was only forty-one years old. His literary success continued with Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, the latter containing what became perhaps his most famous poem, If—.
The poem’s emphasis on courage, patience, self-control, resilience and remaining steady in both triumph and disaster has given it a life far beyond the circumstances in which it was written. Its view of character may belong partly to Kipling’s age, but its central question — how should we behave when life does not go as we hoped? — has hardly become less relevant.
Empire and the World of Kipling
Kipling cannot be separated from the British Empire. He wrote during the period when imperial power and confidence were approaching their height, and he frequently expressed views that reflected or defended that world. His poem The White Man’s Burden became one of the most famous expressions associated with imperialism and today inevitably forms part of the debate about his legacy.
Yet Kipling’s relationship with empire was more complicated than a simple celebration of British power. Poems such as Recessional warned against arrogance and national self-satisfaction, while many of his stories reveal a much more observant and ambiguous picture of colonial life. His writing could admire the machinery of empire while at the same time exposing vanity, incompetence and human weakness among those who administered it.
That complexity does not remove the attitudes in his work that modern readers may find objectionable. It does, however, make Kipling more interesting to read historically. His work offers not only stories and poems but also a window into the assumptions, contradictions and confidence of the age in which he lived.
War, Loss and a Changing World
The First World War changed both Europe and Kipling’s own life. His only son, John Kipling, was killed at the Battle of Loos in September 1915 at the age of eighteen. The loss devastated Kipling and cast a long shadow over his later years. The confident world with which he had been so closely associated had itself been shattered by industrialised warfare.
Kipling subsequently became involved with the Imperial War Graves Commission, now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. He helped shape the language used to commemorate the dead. Among the phrases associated with his work for the Commission is the biblical inscription “Their Name Liveth For Evermore”, used on the Stones of Remembrance in Commonwealth war cemeteries.
His experience of war also gave his later writing a darker quality. The themes of duty, sacrifice and courage remained, but were now accompanied more clearly by grief and an awareness of the terrible price that ideals and political decisions could demand from ordinary people.
The Later Years
Kipling continued to write during the 1920s and early 1930s, although his enormous pre-war popularity gradually declined. Literary fashions were changing, the British Empire itself was changing, and a younger generation of writers approached poetry and politics very differently. The world that had made Kipling one of its most celebrated literary figures was disappearing.
He died on 18 January 1936, aged seventy. His ashes were buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, close to the graves and memorials of some of the greatest names in English literature.
A Contested Legacy
Kipling’s reputation has probably changed more dramatically than that of almost any other major British writer of his generation. Once celebrated as a voice of empire, he later became a target for critics of colonialism. Passages in his poetry and fiction contain assumptions about race, civilisation and empire that are difficult to separate from the attitudes of the period in which he lived and that many readers today understandably reject.
At the same time, reducing Kipling entirely to imperialism does little justice to the range of his writing. He wrote with remarkable sympathy about soldiers, children, craftsmen, engineers and ordinary working people. He understood loneliness, fear, loyalty, courage and loss. Writers as different as T. S. Eliot and Jorge Luis Borges recognised qualities in his work that went far beyond the politics with which his name became associated.
A modern reader therefore does not have to choose between uncritical admiration and complete rejection. Kipling can be read in the context of his time, acknowledging aspects of his worldview that have not aged well while still recognising his extraordinary command of language, rhythm, character and narrative.
The Stories That Survived
Kipling belonged unmistakably to the world of the British Empire, and parts of his work cannot be separated from the assumptions of that age. Yet writers often outlive the world that formed them. Empires disappear, political certainties change and reputations rise and fall, while stories sometimes survive.
That is perhaps what happened to Kipling. The Jungle Book, Kim, Just So Stories and If— have continued to find new readers long after the imperial world in which they were written disappeared. One need not agree with Kipling’s view of the world to recognise the extraordinary storyteller behind it — or the lasting power of some of the books and poems he left behind.
