Rudyard Kipling

by John Palmer

India, who strikes out of a brazen sky; who poisons with her infected breath and is served to the death without reward; who physically cows her people with dust and fever and heat, and is possessed with devils who must be pacified; where successive civilisations have left their bones upon the soil and a hundred religions have decayed, leaving the old air heavy with exhalations—this India slowly takes shape in Mr Kipling's native stories. Her physical immensity and pressure is felt in stories like The End of the Passage and William the Conqueror. Her sleepless tyranny, which has made men intricate and incalculable, driving them to subterranean ways of thought and fancy, rules in every page of a tale like The Return of Imray. Imray was an amiable Englishman who incautiously patted the head of his servant's child. Bahadur Khan speaks of it thus to Strickland of the Police:

"'Walking among us, his servants, he cast his eyes upon my child who was four years old. Him he bewitched, and in ten days he died of the fever, my child!'

"'What said Imray Sahib?'

"'He said he was a handsome child and patted him on the head; wherefore my child died. Wherefore I killed Imray Sahib in the twilight, when he had come, and was sleeping. Wherefore I dragged him up into the roof-beams and made all fast behind him—the Heaven-born knows all things. I am the servant of the Heaven-born.… Be it remembered that the Sahib's shirts are correctly enumerated, and that there is an extra piece of soap in his wash-basin. My child was bewitched and I slew the wizard.'"

There is here just that blend of simplicity and incalculable darkness found in all Mr Kipling's native tales. If the premises of life in India are tortuous, conduct and reasoning are as naïvely innocent as a problem in geometry.

It follows that, when the devils are out of the story, no story breathes more delightfully of Eden than a story of the East. The white side of the black story of Imray Sahib is shown in Kim, and in all the hints and small studies for Kim that preceded Mr Kipling's best of all Indian tales.

But Kim is something of a paradox. It is the best of all Indian tales by virtue of qualities which have little to do with India. It is an Indian book only upon its least important side. It is true that Kim himself is upon one side the most cunning of Mr Kipling's studies of the meeting of East and West; but that, for us, is not his final merit. It is the final merit of Kim to be first cousin of Mowgli, the child of the Jungle. His first claim to our delight in him is that he is the quickest of young creatures, his senses sharp and clean, of a conscience untroubled, of a spirit that rejoices in nimble work, of a will in which loyalty and courage and the peace of self-confidence are firmly rooted. In a word, he is Mowgli among men.

Here, however, we approach Kim merely as a tale of India—as a link artfully used by Mr Kipling to connect and pass in review the whole pageant of Imperial India as it is revealed to Western eyes—priests, peasants, soldiers, civilians, people of the plains and hills, women of the latticed palanquin and the bazaar, Hindu and Mohammedan, Afghan and Bengali. The picture of the Grand Trunk Road in Kim is an almost unsurpassed piece of descriptive writing. The diversity of the picture dazzles and bewilders us at first. Then out of all this diversity there gradually comes a conviction that fundamentally India is unimaginably simple at heart in spite of her medley of religions and conquests and races; that it is precisely this simplicity which baffles the intruder. There is the simplicity of Bahadur Khan, whose child was bewitched: therefore he killed Imray Sahib and hid his body behind the ceiling cloth. There is the simplicity of the hunter of Daoud Shah, whose house was dishonoured: therefore he killed his wife and went upon the trail of her seducer. There is the simplicity of men who starve and are burnt with the sun: therefore they deprecate the wrath of devils and put food in the beggar's bowl. There is, above all, the simplicity of clean hunger, thirst, adventure, piety, friendliness and love that threads the whole story of the Lama and his Chela.

Kim is one of the few really beautiful stories in modern literature. The brain and fancy of thousands of readers to-day are richer and sweeter by that tale of the Master and his Friend of All the World. We would not leave him and his Wheel of Things, the River he sought in simple faith, the trust he had in the charity of men, the message that bade him seek release in Nirvana from the importunity of life quaintly warring with instinctive gestures of delight and sympathy with all that made life precious—we would not leave this exquisite story so soon, were it not that it brings forward the imperishable side of Mr Kipling's work to which we shall have shortly to return. Kim bridges the gap between the Indian stories and The Jungle Book, which means that Kim is all but the top of Mr Kipling's achievement.