Empire: World History - 312. Rudyard Kipling: Son of Empire (Part 1)

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

Rudyard Kipling was one of the most evocative writers of India, yet he was a jingoist and an imperialist until his dying day. So how do we grapple with this conundrum, why was Kipling such a man of contradiction? In this episode we explore his early life. How did he go from a spoiled child in India who spoke Hindustani with his nanny, to living in an abusive foster home in Portsmouth which he called The House of Desolation? William is joined by Andrew Lycett, author of Rudyard Kipling, to discuss Kipling’s colourful but turbulent early life. Make someone an Empire Club Member this Christmas – unlock the full Empire experience with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Just go to https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/gifts And of course, you can still join for yourself any time at empirepoduk.com or on apple podcasts. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Producer: Anouska Lewis Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. The influence of India on Kipling resulted in what has always struck me as a personality in conflict with itself. Part bizarre boy, part Saab. Kipling is a writer with a storm inside him and he creates a mirror storm of contradictory responses in the reader. I have never been able to read Kipling calmly. Anger and delight are incompatible emotions yet the stories do indeed have the power simultaneously to infuriate and to end trance. Well that was Salman Rushdie writing as a young critic around the time he wrote Midnight's children about Rajad.

Kipling, the subject of not just this week's pod, but an entire mini-series that we've been saving up as the climax of our writers in Empire series. And sadly, it's just me this week because Poronita has a bad back and is in A&E, so please say a prayer for her. And I'm going to particularly miss her this week because this subject is one that we talked about doing right from the first inception or conception of this pod. And it was always something that we disagreed on. Anita and I agree on most things. And Kipling is something. We disagree. read on. I'm rather a convert to Kipling and in middle age I've rather judged him anew as someone I'm very interested in. What I need to just hates him and thinks he's an old

bigot. Before I introduce our superstar guest who is waiting to say hello to all, I should just lay out my cards about why we're doing Kipling because like Rushdie, Kipling is a writer who fills me with contradictory emotions. The first thing to be said is that sort of Roger Kipling is sort of part of the furniture in England in an old sort of way. He's one of the writers sitting in Westminster Abbey. He's there along with Tennyson and Hardy and Tess Elliott as one of the great writers who lived in Britain. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yet today, I don't know whether he is so much read. And in India, where I'm speaking from, I actually had to ring around about four bookshops in order to get a copy of his short stories, which definitely would not have

been the case 20 years ago when I first started reading him, or 40 years ago maybe when I first started reading him. He's a writer that today probably is better known secondhand through the Disney version of the jungle book maybe, or through the terms that he coined, which are now in everyday speech, east as east and west west, the white man's burden, he who travels the fastest is he who travels alone, most ancient profession in the world, the female of the species is deadlier than the male and so on, going finally to obviously his poem, which is frequently voted still, Britain's favourite poem, if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. Because despite all that, I think Kipling is a writer that people

love to hate and in many ways with good reason. In all sorts of ways today, politically, Kipling's views seem absurd, xenophobic and ultra-racist. Not many people today hate the idea of Mahatma Gandhi. And Kipling did. he also donated money for General Dyer after he committed the Jullian Wallabag massacre. Kipling adored Rhodes, who has been an entire movement in Oxford to remove his statue. He unequivocally approved a wars of expansion, and he urged everyone to pick up the white man's burden. Why then should anyone bother reading him today? And I would argue that Kipling should be read because he was a writer of genius.

And he has an odd and surprisingly wide-based fan club, not just the kind of usual, aspects that would enjoy a sort of bit of ultra-racist Victorian prose. People like Edward Said, the post-clonial critic, he wrote Kipling would no more have questioned the right of white Europeans to rule than he would have argued with the Himalayas. Yet he was still, as Syed wrote, a major artist in his masterpiece, Kim, a remarkable, complex novel belonging to the world's very greatest literature. The postmodernist poet Craig Raines calls Kipling our very greatest short story writer. So when we re-Kippling, we have to hold these two things together in our head.

Even by the standards of his own time, he was ultra-reactionary. He believed, as the white man's burden says, the subject peoples of the empire were half-devil and half-child. Yet he's also, and simultaneously one of the greatest British writers and one who, in the words of Saeed, brought to a basically insular and provincial British audience, the colour, glamour and romance of the British overseas experience. So to conclude our writers on Empire, we're going to do this most contradictory and difficult of imperial writers, the man who, for better or worse, was regarded in his own lifetime as the laureate of Empire. And in this first episode today, we're going to deal with the Indian phase of his life. And in order to guide us through this very difficult writer, difficult in terms of how to stomach him and read him today, not that his work is particularly difficult, but it's trying to understand in the sense how to translate this very, very, very Victorian mindset to our own time. And to help us with this, we have his most talented of his many biographers, one of the writers I most admire. Hello, I'm Andrew Lysit, yes. Andrew Lyset, you're very, very welcome. Andrew has written many great biographies. I've strong-armed him to come in today because his work on Kipling, I think, has stood the test of time. And maybe we can

start, Andrew, by just telling us why he's someone that you thought you'd be willing to devote five years of your life, presumably, to reading every word that he'd written and analysing. Why, Kipling, yes, indeed. There was both the literary side and the political side and the journalistic side. Somehow the mix seemed to be just ripe for a new approach, and we're now talking about 20-odd years ago. But whenever I come back to him, it's always with great enthusiasm. Let's dive into his life. Before we do that, we should say that if you want to hear the whole of our Kipling three-part series in one big binge, then you can sign up to the Empire Club for early access. Head to EmpirePoduk.com to sign up or click the hyperlink in the episode description.

Anyway, let's now dive in. Andrew, do you want to talk about where he was born and when? Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, as it was then called Bombay now. It was end of 1865. His father was an architectural sculptor who had quite a distinguished career in England, studied in Staffordshire, Berzelam, where he'd met his wife, Alice, the daughter of the local Methodist minister. And, okay, this is perhaps a bit of a diversion, but Rudyard's father Lockwood had wooed his mother, Alice, at Lake Rudyard in Staffordshire near Burzellon. Hence the name.

And hence the name, of course, yeah, Lake Rudyard, Lockwood Kipling could have carried on in England, but somehow he was attracted to a post at the Sir Jamstitchie Gigi Boy School of Arts. in Bombay. Kipling is born there, very close today to the Gateway of India, the Taj Hotel, anyone that knows Bombay, the VT terminus, the absolute heart of Bombay. So, Alice, who described as the daughter of a Methodist minister, was also the sister of Byrne Jones's wife. I mean, they're kind of well-connected, arty world.

And Stanley Baldwin is the first cousin, so not only do have Byrne Jones on one side, but a three-times prime minister. They were a very formidable family, which actually helped propel Kipling. through his latter part of his life. This is although very distant from Kipling's childhood, which was entirely in Bombay, separated from all these people for his first years. And we have his own accounts of the kind of sensory impressions

that Bombay and India left for him, impressions of daybreak, light, colour, golden and purple fruits. And he was spending time with his ire, his nursemaid, speaking Hindustani as a first language. and we know from one account that she had to remind him to speak even in English, that Hindustani was his natural way of expressing himself as a baby. I mean, he used to love going out with his ire and taking walks along the esplanade. He took in the sights and the sounds, as you've said.

The light was very important in his early childhood. And then it was all taken away from him. In this dramatic way, which some biographers have seen as, you know, a psychological explanation of the kind of violence and nastiness and harshness of many of his stories. Tell us about the House of Desolation. Tell us about him moving to England and the trauma of this experience. At the age of six, he was taken by his parents to England when Lockwood went on leave. To my mind, one of the kind of weirdest parts of the story. The family went on a sort of mini holiday to Little Hampton. And then suddenly, Kipling found that he was taking.

away from Little Hampton, taken just down the coast there to Portsmouth and left with his sister at not very opulent house in Portsmouth's suburb of South Sea. It was called Lawn Lodge. South Sea was a strange kind of magnet for people who'd served in colonial places. Kippling was taken with his sister and they were more or less unceremoniously dumped with this family called the Holloways in South Sea. And this gradually, became what Kipling later called the House of Desolation, became the focus of a very unhappy period of his childhood. I mean, it was brutal. The woman into whose hands he was committed, punished him. These were his sort of foster parents.

They were called the Holloways. And there was quite an amiable old chap called Captain Pryser, Agar Holloway. Kipling got on quite well with him, and they used to take walks, and they used to go down to the dockyards in Portsmouth, and Holloway would show him ships and, you know, interest, Kipling

in naval life. But Holloway's wife, she was a very Chrissy evangelical character, and she took against Rudyard Kipling. She had a son called Harry, between the two, between... This was turned into one of his most famous short stories, wasn't it? Bar-Bah Blacksheet. Indeed. I've got it open in front of me. I'll just do a very quick little extracts to show how miserable the fictional version of Kipling is, you're a liar, a young liar, said Harry, with great enthusiasm and you're having tea down here because you're not fit to speak to us and you're not fit to speak to your sister again either till mother gives you leave you'll corrupt her we're only a fit to associate with the servant mother says so untrustworthy in one thing untrustworthy in all said auntie

Rosa and harry felt that black sheep was delivered into his hands who would wake him up in the night to ask him why he was such a liar i don't know punch would reply then you ought to get up and pray to god for a new heart and so on it goes on it It's one of those terrible Victorian tales of sort of the torture of children rather like something from Dickens. That was a psychological torture, but also he was beaten. Kipling liked to retreat into reading. He did quite a lot of his sort of early reading while he was there at the House of Desolation in South Sea. And he's eventually saved Andrew from this by Auntie Georgie Byrne Jones, who pulls the alarm cord after a year or two.

That is correct, yes. His mother's sister, Georgina, kept a bit of an eye on him there. And he was to go to the Byrne Jones house in Fulham and that was a bit of a respite for him. Georgie sends a sort of alarm call, doesn't she, to India? And his mother, who's more or less abandoned him. It hasn't particularly asked his sister to keep an eye on him. Potentially other families with family in England would have put the child in with a sister rather than with complete strangers. Yeah, that's right.

But the warning signs had gone out. And Kibling's mother, Alice, comes back to sort of see what's going on. She goes to him, he was lying in bed when she arrived. He sort of puts his arm up, to fend something off. He thought he was going to get beaten again by his mother. But she was able to extricate Kipling from there. It became a kind of great symbol of the hardship that Kipling endured, physical and psychological hardship that had scarred Kipling's early life.

But his sister, Tricks, stayed there after he'd gone. And I always find that a bit odd. If one child is being tortured, exactly. So after the horrors of the house of desolation, things are now looking up. as Kipling's mother rescues him and plans are made for his future. Welcome back. Before we go back to Kipling's life, let me tell you quickly about our future live show. On Saturday the 5th of September, 26th, we will be at the Southback Centre in London as part of a gollhanger takeover weekend from the 4th to the 6th of September, 26.

And our lovely Empire Club members will be emailed a presale link on the 4th of December at 10 a.m. That's this week. And if you want to join the club, it's Empirepoduk.com. If you haven't already, that's right. If you want early access for tickets, see us live at the inaugural Rest is Fest. It's Empirpodukuk.com if you aren't already a member. That's Empirapoduk. Anyway, back to Kipling.

Following the trauma of the House of Destilation, Alice Kipling's mother took the children to stay on a farm in Essex, near Epic Forest, and Rudyard ran around with his first cousin Stanley, Baldwin, later to be the three-time-Mbris prime minister. And then, at the age of 12, he starts off at the United Services College. At Westwood Ho in Devon, was it an improvement on the House of Desolation?

Couldn't be worse. This was a sort of step down from the main stepping stones to careers in the military, which was Sandhurst and Woolwich. She was Halebury. No, it was actually linked to Haleigh. But it wasn't Sandhurst. It was sort of reflected something that was happening in British society, which was that

commissions into the army couldn't actually be bought any longer. So there's much more competition. And competition was the name of the game. The United Service College at Westwood Hope, the headmaster was Crum Price, who was a friend of Alice Kipling in particular. He was the sort of coterie of artists who surrounded Alice and her sister. who sort of introduced them to the pre-Rafelites. He was a sort of very humane man.

It was kind of odd that he became headmaster of this military college, basically, because he nurtured Kipling. He encouraged him to read. He gave him the run of his own library. He introduced him to journalism. Got him to edit the school magazine. Exactly. Kipling got to edit the school magazine, which is great fun, I guess.

And he got to know about printing, et cetera, et cetera. It was a formative period. And Kipling was already showing signs by the time he was sort of 16 of being a subprogeny. He was writing extraordinary essays and his parents were quietly publishing without his permission, his poems that he was producing. I mean, definitely he was beginning to show the signs of that great talent. Well, he was obviously very talented from the start. But also he became part of a little group of three of them. He called them later the dusky crew.

He and a couple of his friends, Lionel Dunsterville and George Beresford, and they became a kind of little clique. And he later wrote about them. They became the basis of a series of stories that he wrote about school children. And the kind of awfulness they could manifest, and this was his stalky stories. But he was a happier time. I mean, he's had this miserable and traumatic time at the House of Desolation. He's been punished. He's almost gone blind.

And at school, he discovers himself. He discovers he's got talent. Crom takes a interest in him. But there's no money to send him to college. He was the top of the class. But while his friends were thinking of possibly going to university, for Kipling, it was straight back to Indeer age 16. There was no question of, there was no finance, was there.

There's no money to send him to university. There was a curious time, which is sometimes forgotten, that Kipling was actually going to study to be a doctor. And I think he did a little bit of training as a doctor, but very, very short time. but his father had moved to Lahore. He'd taken control of the museum there. That's Lockwood Kipling, was curator of the Lahore Museum.

Tell us about what it's like for Kipling to return to India, because this is a place he'd be very happy as a child. He has all these memories of the light and the color and the warmth and his relationship with his eye and so on. He arrives back in Bombay. He gets on the frontier mail. He starts to recognize Hindustani phrases that he's forgotten, he even can speak some Hindustani,

without remembering what it actually means. Correct, yeah. He was actually very excited by it all. You know, he sort of took to being a journalist in Lahore. It was an enterprise that didn't have much manpower to it. So he was plunged in... He was 50% of the stars, right. It was only him and one other.

That's exactly right, yeah. So, you know, he found himself sort of going out into the countryside, going out to the Amritsa Fair. He wrote an article about that. Now, Andrew, he's living. at home, he's with tricks and his parents, he's going out, covering these stories, sometimes dining in the club, he regarded as a bit bratty. Occasionally, people regard him as sort of slightly jumped up above himself. But his first fiction comes from the hill station of Simler,

doesn't it? Yes, there was columns to fill on the Civil and Military Gazette, and he used to go up with his parents initially, I think he went to Missouri, but then he went to Simla. This is a class difference. Missouri is there. the kind of second division hillside in time when everything in British India is very ordered by your rank and where you are in the social hierarchy. And Kipling and his wife initially are not very high in the hierarchy. So they go to Missouri. But similar is where the viceroy and the commander in chief and the fancy ADCs and all the glamour

goes to. It's like a sort of can or in Russian terms, Yalta maybe, the Crimea. This is sort of like Chekhov writing about ladies with lap dogs, walking. along the beaches in Crimea, Kipling at the same time is describing a similar sort of colonial world in the hill stations of the Himalayas. That's right. Kippling was actually appointed the correspondent of the Civil and Military Gazette in Simler. And he used to go out there and, you know, that had become, as you say, the sort of centre of government, and everything moved from Calcutta to Sima. Kind of bonkers to us. You have the whole of British India, this

sort of vast administration moving from Calcutta halfway across India to a ledge in the Himalayas connected by a goat path. It's almost as if they're sort of inviting insurrection. Well, it was something to do with the heat of Calcutta and, you know, they had to get out. They wanted to recreate or they wanted to experience something a bit more like home. And this was, you know, the milder climate of the Hill Station. And they do create, recreate home, don't they? They create these little bungalows with names like sort of Balmoral or Edgerton. That's right.

They have all these sort of these sort of very English names with English blooms in the garden. But what Kipling uniquely tells us, which we don't get in the other sources, is that this is a place of enormous sort of flirtation. All the wives are up there. Only the glamorous top rank of the men are there. And all these affairs are taking place. Kipling says, Jack's own Jill goes up the hill to Murray or Chakr. Crater, Jack remains and dies in the plains and Jill remarries soon after.

That's the sort of verse he's writing. That's right. Kipling immediately became very interesting in, you know, the life up there in the hills and it is sort of incorporated with his knowledge of what was going on down in the plains. And there was that sort of dichotomy between the two kind of existences. But he made his name, really. I suppose it's true to say. But writing about the intrigues of life up in the hills, started writing.

these stories for his paper about the marital discords that emerged and the ambitions that people had. The world that Kipling reveals that we don't really get in any other sources, because it's the sort of titletal, which obviously is not recorded in state papers and so on, is this world that Kipling presents of these, what he calls the grass widows, Mrs. Hawkesby or Mrs. Reaver, one of the town's carnivorous Memsarbs. He rode with her and walked with her and picnicked with her and tiffened at politis with her till people put up their eyebrows and said shocking. Yes, indeed. I mean, these were all printed in his newspaper and pretty soon he developed them into what became one of his first books, Plain Tales from the Hills, which collected

these stories about life in the Hill Station with the coming together of government affairs, marital affairs, marital affairs going wrong, all that in the context of the development of life in India because underneath it, there was understanding and an attempt to portray what was going on in the bazaar, because that's part of the Plaintaintones for the Hills as well. We have to end it there, but in the next episode, we are going to see Kipling's literary career suddenly explode. This young journalist writing short story turns into the chronicler of the British Raj, both within India and then to produce great. great books like The Jungle Book and Kim when he moves to Vermont and from the United States

continues to write about India. If you can't wait to hear that, then sign up to the Empire Club to binge the next episode right now at EmpirePod UK.com. Anita will be back soon, but for now it's goodbye from me, William Duremberg and the wonderful Andrew Lyset. See you soon.