Kipling for me was also Akela, the leader, Mowgli, Baloo, Bunderlog, Bagheera and Shere Khan. As a Wolf Cub, part of Lord Baden-Powell’s scouting movement, these characters of Jungle Book were all part of the hierarchy.
Kipling Sahib— India and the making of Rudyard Kipling reminded me that Kipling was not all light stuff but an author of essays, stories, verses and ballads— a real human being whose life went through different countries and different phases.

The book was to me heavy reading, weighty with facts, author’s views on Kipling as a man and on his life, most of which appeared to attract Charles Allen’s veiled disapproval.

The Introduction opens with a quote from the humourist Jerome K Jerome (famous for his Three Men in a Boat) which says, “I am getting just a wee bit tired of Mr Kipling” and goes on to suggest that “he has grown into a sort of nightmare”. Why then did Charles Allen write such a detailed biography of Kipling— so detailed as to cover not only every aspect of Rudyard Kipling’s private and public life but also two generations of his forbears?

Shared interests
Charles Allen and Rudyard Kipling were both born and lived in India in the period of the British Raj though separated by years. There was a shared common interest. The other connection was that Allen’s grandfather was a playmate of “Ruddy” as Rudyard was known. It was Allen’s great-grandfather, a newspaper magnate, who employed Ruddy as a reporter in his Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore.

Apart from the detailed account of Kipling’s life with its many moments of success and personal adversity Charles Allen gives interesting glimpses of the different relationships which the ‘sahibs’ had with the locals. In fact the British in those days referred to themselves as Indians and to the locals as ‘natives’.

Young Rudyard himself was fond of the army of servants who attended to his needs and pampered him. But then, the British soldiers who stayed in India on tours of duty had nothing but disdain for the local population as this verse written by one such soldier would indicate.

Old Colonel Thunder used to say
And fetch his bearer’s head a whack
That if they'd let him have his say
He'd murder every mortal black.

Charles Allen takes the reader through Kipling’s early life in India, his return to England, his school and college education, his family life which had its painful phases. Kipling had a second stint in India after which he went back to his country. His support for the Boer War and his stay in USA are chronicled in considerable detail. Kipling’s jealous protection of his privacy and his resistance to any breach of it are two strong facets of his character.
In terms of years Kipling spent only a small part of his life in India but this country made a huge impact on his life. There is even a view that his book Kim with its elements of spying and mystery was a symbol of his obsession with the Raj and the fears of those years about Russian designs on the Empire.

I wonder if it is a coincidence that Charles Allen happened to conclude the book on the same disapproving note as his Introduction. The conclusion says that apart from his writings for children there is “very little that really holds the imagination except in fits and starts and absolutely nothing of worth linked to India”— a strange valediction for one’s own product  of  deep study, much research and penetrative interest in the subject.
The book makes ideal reading for someone who wishes to explore Rudyard Kipling from an academic point of view.