Empire: World History - 313. Rudyard Kipling: Escaping India & Writing The Jungle Book (Part 2)

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

What inspired Kipling to write his two most famous works: The Jungle Book and Kim? Why did Kipling hate London and swiftly move to the US? How did Kipling develop such astute observational writing about Anglo-Indians in his early twenties? William is joined once again by Andrew Lycett, author of Rudyard Kipling, to discuss his rise to fame and how although he left India, his writing became evermore obsessed with the subcontinent…  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 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. Hello and welcome. There is no Anita, I'm afraid, in this episode, as she is still in A&E. So all your prayers, her back is giving her terrible pain. but with me is my great friend Andrew Lysett, the brilliant biographer of Roger Kipling,

who took us in the last episode, so brilliantly through Kipling's childhood and his early writings. Now, in this episode, we are going to follow Rudyard Kipling through his brilliant Indian short stories, including classic such as the man who would be king that became that famous movie with Michael Kane and Sean Connery. And then his move to America,

where improbably in Vermont he wrote the Jungle Book and Kim, two of the greatest volumes of British fiction about India. We last saw Kipling with Mrs. Hawksby and Mrs. Reaver, Andrew, up in similar dining in Pilates and involved in Himalayan flirtations. By the end of the summer, he's back on the plains and he's beginning to publish short stories in the Christmas annual of the Civil and Military Gazette. one of the first stories he writes, an extraordinary tale called the strange ride of Morubi

Jukes. And this tells the tale of an unimaginative engineer, a typical servant of empire, who is going out for an evening ride. He's got a slight fever, so he's trying to ride it off and wake himself up. And the horse careers off, and he ends up falling into a pit where, says Kipling, in this work of fiction,

the undead of India, those who recover on funeral powers, people who are suffering from cholera, but who suddenly get better on their way to the cremation gaps. They're not allowed back into society, according to Kipling. And they are put in this pit where they are living off crows and living this half-life, this life of almost like sort of the undead. And it's a strange and weird tale that reminded me some of the early H.G. Wells' son. It's not quite of this world. Andrew, what do you make of this story?

I agree with you. It is a very weird story. And it shows Kipling's sense of alienation from the society that he finds himself in. I mean, both the immediate society of Anglo-Indians, but also the wider India. He is finally helped out by, I think it's his bearer. Who puts a rope down and holds him out. Yes. who sort of faithfully has followed him and discovered what has happened to him and puts a rope down, as you say, and pulls him out from this nightmare. It shows the sense that Kipling is beginning to develop and which actually lies at the bottom of his stories, that India is a fascinating place, but it's also a harrowing place and it's full of pitfalls. His literature is really about how he as a sort of Brit in India,

negotiates these things and partly obviously one one way he negotiates it goes up to similar where Little Britain is recreated. Now after this he produces his first proper book in 1886 called departmental ditties not a title perhaps that would sell today but it actually is a huge hit isn't it 500 copies are printed at the Gazette and it sells out immediately. It's then republished by the pioneer and then by Thacker Spink and co and he becomes sort of standard railway reading for the Anglo-Indian community. He's their own sort of Chekhov or their Tolstoy recording their lives. And his work is terrifically popular. I mean, at the age of only, what is he now, 18? Still a teenage family. So this is the point at which he writes the man who would be king.

This is the more famous, I think now, as a movie with Sean Connery than it is as a short story. But it works very well. I've just reread it this week. And it stands up fantastically well. He's sitting in his newspaper in the fictional story when this man turns up with this tale. It's a sort of adventure story, really, and that's why it sort of translates very well into the cinema. It's about these two ne'er-do-wells. At least one of them has a military background. They sort of go out into French land, if you like. It's in kind of Afghanistan, I think.

It's Pici Dravo and Carnahan, the two protagonists, who, again, are kind of early versions of what will be very common in Kipling, which is this sort of, you know, the Irish common soldier who he makes a point of sketching and bringing to life. And basically these British-stroke Irish people try and make themselves the kings of this wayward people on the Northwest Frontier. They adopt the sort of mythology of kingship. Which is related to Freemason. It's got a whole Freemason thread running through it, isn't it?

Funny enough, that is perhaps one of the underestimated aspects of Kipling, that there is a sort of Masonic theme running through him because he became a member of the Masonic Lodg in Lahore, which he liked to present as a kind of multicultural environment. I think it was one of the very few places in the Raj that Indians and Brit could meet on the same social level. It really did have a levelling effect. Now, the man who would be king has a very gruesome ending.

I'll just read a little fragment from it. Do you know what they did to peachy between the two pine trees? They crucified him, sir, as Peachy's hands will show. They used wooden pegs for his hands and his feet, and he didn't die. He hung there and screamed, and they took him down the next day and said it was a miracle that he wasn't dead. They took him down, poor old Peachy that hadn't done any harm, that hadn't any damn to them. He rocked to and fro and wept bitterly, wiping his eyes with the back of his scarred hands and moaning like a child. That story seems to pick up on two real stories.

There's one of an American who set up a kingdom in Ghur in Afghanistan and another figure called Bari Wilson who set up a sort of kingdom in the Punjab Hills very briefly. But other of Kipling's stories mirrored more closely his own life. And I'm very intrigued by On the City Wall, Andrew, which is a story which sort of implies that Kipling's going out at night, wandering through Lahore and visiting the red light. district because he seems to have very intimate knowledge of the courtes, as they're called, the Tawafs or the courtisans. Tell us about on the city wall, 1889. Well, yes, Kipling found sleeping difficult. And when this became oppressive, he used to get up at night and he used to go and wander into the city and find what, I guess, was open at the time, which was opium shops and place like that. And he went into them and he wrote about them. And one of the

things that he wrote about was the world of the prostitutes who inhabited the darkness of Lahore. But he wrote very sympathetically about them. And one of the memorable things about on the city wall is his portrayal of this bejeweled, very gracious, very educated prostitute called Laloon. This is very much a British understanding of the ta waifs who are not prostitutes as such more courtesans, I think you'd call them probably. I think you're right. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. While there is definitely sex available, These places are hubs of gossip, places where young men get sent to learn manners and learn the way of the world. It's much more a salon than simply a place that people go for sex.

As well as focusing on the demi-monde and the world which most Brits would not have seen, this world of courtisans and opium dens and so on, he's also going into the barracks and recording the speech patterns and the ways of the simple squadies, the Irish and the British recruits who often get left out of the official records, but who were the backbone of the British Army. He liked to go to Myanmar, which was the barracks just out of the city, outside the city. He got to know the squadies. He wrote very sympathetically about them in stories like soldiers three.

He liked to have his groups of soldiers. So he had three soldiers, an Irishman and a Yorkshireman and a cockney. So that was very important in his world picture because he was, beginning to develop this sense of how the Raj operated. And this was also reflected in his stories because there were often appreciations, if you want to use that word, of the administrators. And this became, again, a sort of plank in his understanding of India. But within about two or three years, he becomes notably reactionary. He absorbed the world of the club. He was a member of the Lahore Club, and he used to go in there. They were...

incredibly reactionary. But on the other hand, he liked what they brought to India. He thought that they brought order. They were the people who made sure that the rowways ran, that law was administered. And he admires these people. There's no sense of speaking from de Omba, is there? He's not talking down to them. He admires the Irish squodies. He admires the engineers building the bridges, the guys in the public works department keeping the sewers clean. These are people that were very low on the Raj hierarchy, but he sort of turns them into heroes in his stories. Yes, indeed. And this, of course, contributed to the popularity of his stories because, you know, there was a wider constituency.

Because, you know, these were people who appreciated that. But, yeah, it was a conservative view of the Raj that, you know, he was in favor of the administration as it was. He was against any kind of fiddling with it. Now, in 1887, he's already at the... age of 22, the best-selling author in India. His stories are on sale on railways. He's read in the newspapers. And he's moved from being this sort of brattish 16-year-old, fresh from school, to this highly respected figure age 22, who's become a local celebrity. He moves from Lahore to Elhaban in central India. And this is the setting for his last years in India,

to the pioneer. Indeed. His boss, chief of the Civil and Manilatou Gazette, has fingers in lots of pies and one was a rather more popular paper, which was the pioneer in Ilaabad. He was also given a bit more license to sort of go and travel and such. It leads to some what you might call travel writing about Rydistan. This is the princely states, which are half outside of British control. They administer their own courts. There's a resident, but otherwise it's not British territory. So he writes interesting travel writing about the princely states, but he'd also upset some people, doesn't he? There's one character Hercsey who tries to horse weapon. What's that story, Andrew? That's to do with Kipling's sort of

burgeoning antipathy to the forerunner of the Indian National Congress, which was having a gathering, a meeting, one of their annual meetings in Labad. Kippling wrote about this, and he wrote pejoratively about Captain Hersey, who was of mixed race origin. Is there a distinguished Anglo-Indian family? The Hurses were like the Skinners. They were one of the sort of grandees of the Anglo-Indian community. Kipling wrote disparagingly and rudely about his dark skin. And Herssey came to the pioneer office. With his horsewhip.

Indeed. He was going to beat the living daylight out of Kipling. I don't think he did, actually. Kippling, I think it was luckily out when he had turned up, when it would have been his just deserts. Yes, right. It's interesting that this is indicative of Kipling's growing demonstrative conservatism.

He developed this idea that any kind of Indian self-expression in politics was going to be dangerous for the Raj. Yes, I mean, even by the standards of the time, people occasionally defend Kipling, say that by the standards of the time, he wasn't reactionary, but he actually was, wasn't he? I mean, there was many liberals in India that were trying to widen Indian self-ruled, Indian National Congress had been founded by an Englishman, Alan Octavian Hume, and Kipling thought this was anathema to him.

This was not what should be happening at all. So he was, even by the standards of the Raj, increasingly a reactionary. Absolutely right. So by the stage, Kipling is now ready to spread his wings. He's a celebrity in India, but he's not widely known outside. So in 1889, with Hersey and his horse whip, not far behind him, he's packing up his things and moving to London. But he decides to do so rather than the normal route of heading westwards by the Suez Canal back to Europe, he decides to take a long sea voyage by the Pacific and via America.

More on this after the break. Hello, I'm Professor Hannah Fry. And I'm Michael Stevens. Together we host The Rest is Science, a brand new show from Gollhanger. Every week we take a fresh look at the familiar. We're going to be exploring the forces, the theories and the phenomena

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not the polishing of answers, but the sharpening of questions. It's curiosity that sparks those, hey, wait, how does that actually work kind of a moment that changes the way we see the world? Yeah, I mean, science isn't a subject. It's a way of seeing it. It's a way of noticing

all of the extraordinary things that are hiding in plain sight and realizing that the familiar was never ordinary at all. Stick around until the end of this episode for a first listen. And if curiosity gets the better of you, join us every Tuesday and Thursday for new episodes of The Rest is Science.

Welcome back. So it's 1889 and the 23-year-old Rudyard Kipling is leaving India. He pays one last visit to India after this, but basically this is the end of his Indian phase of his life. And yet it's something he continues to write about for the rest of his life, but it's no longer a place that he will be based. And this is the moment, age 23, that he discovers his love of travel, particularly of the high seas. Tell us about his journey away from India. Kipling decides that he's going to travel back to England. He's been sort of seduced by the possibility of greater audiences for his increasingly popular stories and poems. He should go for the big market in Britain.

Does he have any audience at all in Britain at this point, Andrew? Is he just read in India? Very small. He's been just being picked up by one or two sort of critics in England. It's not an audience at all. So he wants to sort of crack that new market. He's decided that he's not going to go back to England via the sort of traditional route via Suez. Hong Kong he goes to, and is rather impressed by, is it?

He goes to Hong Kong famously goes to Burma and enthuses about the pagoda at Mandalay and the women, and that's the basis of one of his most famous poems. As quoted rather embarrassingly by Boris Johnson on a diplomatic visit to Myanmar. That is correct. Yes, I'd forgotten that, yes. Anyway, he sort of makes his way round.

Singapore, he sees for the first time Chinese people. And this impression is sort of continued when he makes his way up, Hong Kong, and goes to Japan. He idolizes not quite the right word. Yes, he realizes he's onto something completely different in Japan, that this is an Asia that he doesn't recognize. And he then heads to San Francisco, where, rather unflatteringly for America, as he heads through the Golden Gate and sees him. a blockhouse, he remarks, it could easily be silenced by two gunboats from Hong Kong. So he's going there very much with the eyes of a British imperialist, even when he's in San Francisco. This was at a time just after the civil war when sort of relations between Britain and

America was a bit icy. He makes his progress through the United States. He goes to Chicago and is appalled by the meat markets there. He goes to meet Mark Twain in upstate New York. Who he admires. He's a big fan of Mark Twain, isn't he? He greatly admires. And then comes back to England. Kippling in 1889 is back in London. And he is appalled by the place. This is the place that was going to be his making. What doesn't he like about London? It's too dirty, too crowded. What's wrong with it? The weather, yeah, sure, you could say that. Can't argue with that. There's something else about the cultural ambiance of the place that he doesn't like. He'd been thinking of going to visit every theatre in London while he's in India. But when he's in India, but when he's in he arrives. He doesn't at all what he imagines him. No, right. He doesn't like, you know, the sort of

emerging world of Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde would not be to Kipling's taste at all. He doesn't like the artistic world that he discovers in England. He begins to yearn for Indian certainties, the sort of the order of Indian society. Now, Andrew, he doesn't much take to literary London, but he does make friends with a man called Wolcott-Belestia. Tell us about him. Wolcott Ballastia was an American publisher, basically, or agent. He was over here touting for English talent for American publishers and American magazines. Kipling befriends him. They become quite close.

Kipling is going through a bit of a crisis. He really doesn't like it in London. It might almost be called a nervous breakdown. I'm interesting. So he's the certainties of Britain imagined from India, one thing, but the reality of Victoria in London, is another thing altogether. Yeah. Kipling is disappointed by London.

He likes the music halls. He enjoys the uproarious atmosphere behind Charing Cross, gets these songs into his work. But he's still looking back to India, isn't he? He's writing about Indian barracks, the backroom ballads are written at this point. He's uneasy in London. There's no doubt about that. And he meets this American publisher-stroke agent, walk at Ballastia. They actually write a novel together.

Not one of his better works? No, no, it's definitely not. Now Laka, a story of Eastern West. At one stage, Kipling sort of tries to escape London. He goes on a great voyage, goes down to Australia. And he's actually quite popular there in Australia already. But he wants to meet one of his great heroes, Robert Lewis Stevenson, who is not available. So he comes back, and he comes back via Nahor.

He makes that return visit to India for the last time that he goes to India. The last time he'll see it. He continued writing about it the rest of his life. But it's the last time age 25? 1891. Yeah, that's right. He goes to Lahore. It's a wonderful description of his journey from Ceylon Sri Lanka to Lahore. While he is in Lahore, he has this telegram from Wolcott Ballastier's sister, Caroline, who Kipling has got to know. Carrie, Carrie, yeah. And Carrie says, come back,

Walcott is dead. And this is a great shock to Kipling because Wolcott is a sort of bosom buddy of his. He rushes back from Lahore to London. I'm not even sure if he actually makes it for the funeral. I don't think he does. But the kind of shared. experience of the morning for Walcott, this charismatic figure, throws him together with Carrie. Absolutely. Brings him together with Walcott's sister, and within a very short time, they are married. People such as Henry James, who's a sort of mutual friend, kind of looks slightly askance on this union. Henry James makes a speech at the wedding, which doesn't sound like one of the, it sounds like the kind of the best man's speech from hell. He says it's a union of which

I don't forecast the future. That's not what you want to hear on your wedding day. I'm afraid that is true. This is something to do with a slight prejudice that there was within Kipling's family against him marrying an American woman. The fact is that she's a very powerful woman and becomes his mainstay throughout the rest of his life. What sort of marriage is it, Andrew? I mean, is Henry James right to be skeptical, or is she actually a rock that he relies on? Of course, she's a rock. She sort of runs his household and allows him to get on with writing, like most writers. They've got to have somebody a bit like that in their lives.

He describes her in his autobiography as the Committee of Ways and Means. And she is powerful enough to sort of entice him to go with her back to her home in America to Vermont. Do they have means? Are they a richer family than the Kipling's? I think they are. Yeah, they've got links to old families in the United States in Chicago and a statesman in Washington. But she is, I guess, adamant that they will live in. Vermont and he builds a house there.

One of his biographer says it's the only ugly house in Vermont. It's an acquired taste, let's put it. Because his later English house Batemans is absolutely charming, but this, I've seen pictures of Nalaka and it's horror. The Nau-Laka, as it's called, in memory of India and of Wolcott. His joint novel, yeah. He begins to understand America, which is a kind of another awakening for him because he finds that it's not all happy in America, that Americans are a bit too democratic for him.

It doesn't have the autocratic government that he admires in India. Yeah, right, exactly. But they have a daughter, don't they? 1892 Josephine is born, and it's a place where he manages to get a lot of work done. He's living in the countryside. He's healthy and energetic and productive. And bizarrely, it's in America that he writes his two greatest Indian books, or two, certainly the two books for which he's most famous. And in 1893, the year after Josephine

is born and dedicated to her, he writes the Jungle Book. The story of Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves. Is this at the time as big as success? I mean, today it's probably the single most famous book he wrote, thanks to Disney. At the time, is it a big success? I don't think it is amazing success that it has continued to be. But it is indicative of, you know, Kipling going through a period of incorporating his Indian experience. So those memories of India. After the Jungle Book comes Kim, which many people regard as his masterpiece. He doesn't finish it in America, but he does begin it. And I think it's probably my favourite Kipling book. It's a book which I enjoyed much more on a second reading later in life than I first did when I

came across it at school. It's the story of Kimball O'Hara, the son of an Irish colour sergeant, and you infer a Eurasian nursema he follows a Tibetan llama on religious pilgrimage to Benares the nama is trying to find the river that will wash away his sins but within the pages of Kim are some of the best description the most evocative description of India that we get in any British writing on India also some of the most sympathetic writing on India

it's almost as if despite his reactionary political views his innate love of the colour of India which he grew up with, is expressed in this extraordinary masterpiece. Tell us about the writing of Kim. I know it doesn't compete in America, but let's talk about it now, Andrew. It is Kipling's masterpiece, enduring masterpiece of literature. It's not a story, it's his attempt at a full-scale novel. And you hadn't had great success up to that stage in writing a novel.

He tried to incorporate his love of India in all its facets. and it starts with an amazing evocative picture of Lahore. I'll read it. I have it in front of me, this wonderful opening passage. He sat in defiance of municipal orders astride the gun Zamzama on her brick platform opposite the old Ajibgar, the wonder house, as the natives call the Lahore Museum, who holds the Zamzama, the far-breathing dragon holds the Punjab. For the great green bronze piece is a... always the first of the conquerors loot. The Wonderhouse in the background there is the museum where

his father was the curator. And there are all sorts of fascinating sort of allusions to the artefacts that Lockwood Kipling has accumulated there, the sort of Buddhist. Gandhara and sculpture, exactly. It is the colours, the lights, the smells that come alive, isn't it, Andrew? It's this wonderful portrait. That's right. So the story gets tied up with the great game, doesn't it, Andrew, that amid this sea of people with Kim and the Lama wandering around, Kim gets It's taken up by Colonel Creighton, who's the head of the, I suppose, the Secret Service. Is that right? That's right. And, you know, this is one of the great stories about the great game, the battle between Britain and Russia for control over the sort of wider Indusphere. Crichton sort of ensures that Kim is educated in the colonial ways. And Kim, who had been this sort of street boy, becomes part of the establishment. He wants to be still free.

Meanwhile, there's a sort of the llama following his path. Looking for the river that will give him eternal life and cleanse his sins. So it's a story of two paths to understanding and living in one's environment. You have the Sahib's way that Kim inculcated into at La Matineer. And then you've got the llama who Kim goes a long way with on the Tibetan Buddhist path, but eventually is pulled towards the colonial world. There's echoes of the previous book, the jungle book here. Mowgli, too, is living away from the Brits, but is pulled into that world. He again is at the end of the jungle book. He goes back to, quote, civilization. The two books have parallels, don't they? Well put. They're very interesting. Yes. You're absolutely right. I should read a little bit, Andrew, a small snippet here. This broad, smiling river of life, he considered, was a vast improvement on the cramped and crowded Lahore streets. There were new people and new. sights at every stride. Casts he knew and cast were altogether out of his experience.

They met a troop of long-haired, strong-scented sances, with baskets of lizard and other unclean food on their backs, their lean dogs sniffing at their heels. These people kept up to their side of the road, moving at a quick, furtive jog-trot. Then in a kali, a wild-eyed and wild-haired Sikh devotee in the blue check clothes of his face, with polished steel quoits glistening on the cone of his tall blue turban. Kim was careful not to irritate that man, for the Akali's temper is short and his arm quick. Here and there they were met or overtaken by the gaily dressed crowds of the whole villages, turning out at some local fare, the women with their babies on their hips, walking behind the men, the older men prancing on sticks of sugar cane, dragging rude brass models of locomotives that

they sell for halfpenny, or flashing the sun into the eyes of their bettors from cheap toy mirrors. one can see at a glance where each had brought. And if there were any doubt, it needed only to watch the wives comparing brown arms against brown arm, the newly purchased dull glass bracelets that come from the northwest. These merry makers stepped slowly,

calling to one another and stopping to haggle with sweetmeat stella. It goes on, it's a wonderful portrait of India in all its variety. I love that whole passage about the Grand Trunk Road, and it sort of brings up this strange paradox that Kipling, who so loved Indian and was so brilliant at describing it, is also the reactionary who is wanting the British to rule it, who doesn't think Indians are capable of running their own

show, who opposes Indian National Congress, and who ultimately is a fan of General Dyer. But that is the side of Kipling that we will see more of in the next episode, where we see Kipling return from Vermont to London and take up his unofficial position as laureate of the empire. Goodbye from me, William Durimple and sadly no, Anita, but goodbye also from our guest. Goodbye from me, Andrew Lyset. Okay, so here's a glimpse of what's to come. If it sparked something unexplainable, then you can join us every Tuesday and Thursday for new episodes of The Restis Science. I will figure it out together. You mentioned earlier that a cup of water is like a rock smoothie, right? Because you've

got rocks dissolved in it, magnesium and calcium. I would go a step further, though, and say that a glass of water is actually just a glass of lava. Right. Right. Because I've talked about this before and I bring it up whenever I can. Ice is a rock. Sure. Because, well, hold on, ice is a mineral because a mineral is just an inorganic material that is solid and has a definite crystal structure, which ice does. Water is important for life, but it's inorganic, actually. It would exist here or whether there was life or not. And what that then means is that a cube of ice is made of a mineral. So it's a monomerolic rock. So melted ice is molten rock. lava. So water is lava. I'm here for this. And this is not a joke. Ice won the

Mineral Cup back in 2015, I believe. Like some geologists all voted on their favorite mineral and ice finally got the recognition it deserves. Got the prize. Yeah. I mean, sure. I'm, I'm happy with that classification. If the if the rock people say it so, then then I'm happy with it. They also move the same way. I mean, when lava gets spurted out of volcano, it uses the The way that it moves and behaves is exactly the same. The fluid dynamics of lava. The fluid dynamics of lava is the same as water at that stage. Yeah.

A bit later on when it cools down, then it changes. Is it more like ice? More like ice. There's a transition phase where it's more like toothpaste, where it needs a certain amount of sheer forces in order for it to flow. But that would be analogous to like slush maybe? Maybe. Yeah.