Rudyard Kipling - an Anglo-Indian? or a Brit in colonial India?

                                               

The term Anglo-Indians, I assumed, referred to people with mixed Ind­ian and British ancestry, an identifiable community of mixed ancestry. The Anglo-Indians formed a significant minority of the population during the British Raj, and were well represented in the British East India Company and subsequent colonial institut­ions. During the British centuries, the children born to British men and Indian women (and largely not vice versa) began to form a new and proud community. They spoke English, were vigorously Christian, and their trad­itions, cuisine and cloth­ing were European. While most of them married within their own Anglo-Indian circle, there were many who continued to marry expatriate Englishmen. Very few married Indians. Many thanks to Margaret Deefholts for Who Are The Anglo-Indians?

Top image: J Lockwood Kipling and his son Rudyard, 1889

photo credit: Bateman's Museum

When India gained independence in 1947 and the British left for home, 800,000+ people of mixed European and Indian descent remained. Many traced their ancestry from a British paternal line going back to the 18th or C19th, while others claimed French, Dutch or Portuguese ancestry. Yet The Folio Society and others routinely called Rudyard Kipling and his parents Anglo-Indian, even though they were all British. So who was correct?

Lockwood Kipling was born in North Yorkshire, son of Rev Joseph Kipling, and given a sound Methodist education in boarding school. Lockwood's wife Alice MacDonald was one of the Four Famous MacDonald Sisters, amongst 11 children of Wesleyan Methodist minister, Rev George B MacDonald. One sister Georg­iana married the famous painter Edward Burne-Jones. Another, Agnes, married the famous painter Edward Poyn­ter. Louisa was the mother of Stanley Baldwin, the famous Conserv­ative Prime Minister of Britain three times in the 1920s and 1930s.

Lockwood met Alice while working in Burslem Staffordshire in 1863, but they didn't have enough income to marry straight away. Only when Lockwood got a job as a lecturer in architect­ural sculpture at Jeejeebhoy School of Art Bombay in 1865, could the young Kiplings marry and move to India. As far as I know, no-one in either side of the family had ever lived and worked in India before. Later Lockwood Kipling was appointed the Principal of Mayo School of Arts in Lahore (then in India) and also became curator of the original Lahore Mus­eum. Lockwood Kipling retired in 1893 and the couple returned to Britain.

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was the writer who, more than anyone, moulded British perceptions of imperial and exotic India. He was born in Bombay and baptised in that city's colonial Protestant heart, St Thomas Anglican Cathedral. Young Rudyard also admired Bombay’s Victoria and Albert Museum as a young lad, possibly taken by his nanny.

Yet Rudyard did not live in India for long. He stayed there with his parents until he was 6. Dur­ing these formative years, Rudyard spoke Hindi as well as English. In 1871 Rudyard and his younger sister Alice were sent to live in England, fostered badly by a Ports­mouth couple who took in chil­d­ren of British nationals living in India. Fortunately the two chil­d­ren had relatives in England they could visit for a month every Christmas.

At the end of school, Rudyard could not get into Oxford on a schol­arship and his parents lack­ed the money to support him; so Lockwood Kipling got a job for his son in Lahore. In 1882 the teenager sailed to Bombay, then travelled by train to Lahore and became assistant editor of a small local newspaper, Civil & Military Gazette.

Rudyard was baptised in St Thomas Anglican Cathedral,

a beautiful church in Bombay (now Mumbai)

The Punjab Exhibition Hall/Tollinton Market in Lahore was originally intended as a temp­orary structure in The Mall, built for Governor Robert Montgom­ery’s Exhibition of Arts and Industry in 1864. But the building soon hous­ed the Lahore Museum, until 1890. Since the museum's curator during the 1870s and 1880s was J Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard often visited. This building became the model for the Ajaib Ghar house of Wonders, in the later novel "Kim".

In summer 1883, Kipling visited Simla, beloved hill station and summer capital of British India. Even the Viceroy of India and gov­ernment moved to Simla each summer, for ruling and relaxing. Rudyard and his parents returned to Sim­la each year from 1885-8, and the town figured prom­inently in many of the stories Kipling was writ­ing for the Gazette. In particular he loved the Gaiety Theatre, a classic of Victorian architecture that also included a library, a hall for British parties and exhibitions, and a police station.

Young Kipling was trans­ferred to the Gazette's larger sister newspaper, The Pioneer, in Allahabad. But in early 1889, The Pioneer ended Kipling’s contract (why?) He received six-months' salary in lieu of notice and decided to use the money to return to London, the centre of the literary universe. In Mar 1889, Kipling left India, travelling to USA and Canada via important Asian cities. 

Carrie and Rudyard Kipling searching hospitals and cemeteries on the Western Front for their son John. Photo credit: The Daily Mail

Having been in India from 1865-71 and from 1882-8, Rudyard Kipling never returned to India again. He married Carrie Balestier (1862-1939) in 1892 and their absolutely favourite home was in East Sussex. When they bought the estate in 1902, it already had 33 acres of land, a river, an old working mill, out-buildings, orchards and wild gardens. They bought more land as Rudyard Kipling made more money from his book sales and prize money, and the pond, rose garden and the yews were soon laid out according to his dream. With their three children, this was their heaven on earth.

I acknowledge that Rudyard’s colonialist reputation remains controv­ersial for post-colonial writers in India & elsewhere. George Orwell called Kipling as a prophet of British imperialism, a man so devot­ed to duty, service and Empire that his writing was bound to be full of prejudice, racism and a total belief in Britain’s mil­itary correctness. After all, Orwell said, look at The White Man's Burden (1899)!

Orwell was half right. Regardless of where Kipling was born, he was a British man totally devoted to colonial service and literature. That his books are filled with the sights and smells of India, the bazaars and animals, made his literary contribut­ion more empathetic to Indian culture, not less.