Kipling, Rudyard

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KIPLING, RUDYARD

KIPLING, RUDYARD (1865–1936), British poet and novelist Joseph Rudyard Kipling was Britain's greatest poet of the Raj. His works, including his "White Man's Burden" (1899) and Kim (1901), sought to extol the "virtues" of racial prejudice and imperial power. Born in India, where his father, John, worked as an architectural sculptor in the Bombay School of Art, Rudyard's first five years were carefree; but when shipped "home" to live with a mean-spirited "pious" family in Southsea, he suffered wretched "beatings and humiliations." His mother, Alice, returned from India in 1877 to rescue him from the tyranny of pious discipline, entering her brilliant son in the United Service College, Westwood Ho. Five years later, Kipling returned to India as a reporter, hired by Lahore's Civil and Military Gazette, for which he wrote Departmental Ditties (1886) and Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), as well as Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), which soon made his name and poetry more famous than any viceroy of India.

Nor was his fame limited to India, for in 1889, Kipling traveled to Japan and to the United States, living four years in Brattleboro, Vermont, where he wrote The Light That Failed (1891) and started his two Jungle Books (1894–1895), anticipating his later Just So Stories for Little Children (1902). Kipling believed so deeply in the virtues of British imperialism that he wrote his "White Man's Burden" to help Theodore Roosevelt persuade many doubting Americans to seize the Philippines in 1899.

Take up the White Man's burden—

Send forth the best ye breed—

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need.

When World War I started, Kipling pushed his own sixteen-year-old son to a tragically early grave on the Western Front, pulling strings with friends at the War Office, to hustle underage John off to Loos, where he was killed after less than a month of bloody combat.

Take up the White Man's burden—

The savage wars of peace—

Fill full the mouth of Famine

and bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest

The end for others sought,

Watch Sloth and heathen Folly

Bring all your hope to nought.

For Kipling believed that it was, indeed, to "civilize" India's darkly "benighted natives," not to exploit and bully them, that thousands of "selfless servants" of the British Raj hefted their daily "burdens."

"And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased," another of Kipling's popular poems reminded his comrades in the Great Game of shaking South India's "Trees" bare of their golden pagodas, and milking North India's sacred cows dry. "And the epitaph drear:/'A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.'" Born to India though he was, Kipling's contempt for its "natives" was imbibed with his ayah's milk, even as Jallianwala Bagh Brigadier Dyer's was. As Kipling put it: "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet!" That was the theme as well of his novel The Man Who Would Be King (1899).

In 1907 Kipling won the Nobel Prize for literature. He started to write his autobiography, Something of Myself, but died in London, on 18 January 1936, before it was finished.

Stanley Wolpert

See alsoBritish Impact