The Kipling File Read online

  SUDHIR KAKAR

  The Kipling File

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  By The Same Author

  Fiction

  The Devil Take Love

  The Crimson Throne

  Mira and the Mahatma

  Ecstasy

  The Ascetic of Desire

  Non-fiction

  Young Tagore: The Makings of a Genius

  A Book of Memory: Confessions and Reflections

  The Indians: Portrait of a People (with K. Kakar)

  Kamasutra: A New Translation (with W. Doniger)

  The Essential Writings of Sudhir Kakar

  Culture and Psyche

  The Analyst and the Mystic

  The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict

  Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality

  Tales of Love, Sex and Danger (with J.M. Ross)

  Shamans, Mystics and Doctors: A Psychological Inquiry into India and Its Healing Traditions

  The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India

  Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation

  Editor

  Imaginations of Death and the Beyond in India and Europe (with G. Blamberger)

  On Creativity (with G. Blamberger)

  Death and Dying

  Seriously Strange: Thinking Anew about Psychical Experiences (with J. Kripal)

  On Dreams and Dreaming

  Identity and Adulthood

  Indian Love Stories

  Praise for The Devil Take Love

  ‘Kakar’s impeccable research is faultless . . . A superbly crafted novel’—Indian Express

  ‘The ease with which the narrative flows is a testimony to his feat of imagination . . . Peppered with insights into poetics’—The Hindu BusinessLine

  ‘Kakar has imaginatively recreated the life of Bhartrihari, the greatest Sanskrit poet of love, renowned for vacillating between an exuberant life of pleasure and one of world-weary austerity’—Outlook

  ‘The Devil Take Love is an ambitious fictional experiment . . . That Kakar is mostly successful is a testimony to his skill and passion . . . Kakar already has a vastly impressive oeuvre . . . His latest novel is a worthy addition to that list’—Mint Lounge

  ‘[The] vivid description of market places, caravans, dresses, trade, rituals, customs and the languages interspersed in the story [make] the reading engaging—a trait not many novels can boast [of]’—The Hindu

  ‘Sudhir Kakar has written a wonderfully imagined novel . . . A farewell note written by the great love poet to the whole of posterity’—Sunday Guardian

  ‘One foot as a historian, and the other in the imaginative eroticism of the age . . . A comment on our contemporary struggle between traditionalists and devotees of pleasure’—India Today

  Praise for The Crimson Throne

  ‘Kakar’s own depth of understanding of the human mind and of every varied character in The Crimson Throne, together with his skill as a storyteller, makes this such a convincing and outstanding novel’—India Today

  ‘It is the economy of the overall narrative, rife with little miniatures of insight, that makes the book a wonderfully sensual read’—Tehelka

  ‘High up on my must-read list of a handful of Indian authors is Sudhir Kakar . . . The Crimson Throne is Sudhir Kakar at his best’—Khushwant Singh, Outlook

  ‘[A] well-crafted historical novel on the power struggle among Shah Jahan’s sons . . . Those looking for a great story will find it in The Crimson Throne . . . Riveting’—Times of India

  ‘The author has . . . conjured up an enthralling panorama of an empire in crisis. It presents a vivid picture of the life and culture of the Mughal elite at a time when the empire was past its Akbarean glory’—Week

  ‘The Crimson Throne, with its plethora of details, offers us a veritable picture of the Mughal period along with the gory reflections of father-son-brother relationships’—Statesman

  ‘Kakar has written a truly superb novel about the goings-on in the court of Shah Jahan towards the end of his reign’—The Hindu BusinessLine

  ‘An enchanting storyteller . . . an enthralling mélange of an empire in crisis . . . It is lusciously imagined fiction, by far Kakar’s finest’—Open

  ‘A great read . . . [a] wonderful story . . . All in all, a great study of life and history and a truly entertaining piece of writing’—Life Positive

  Praise for The Ascetic of Desire

  ‘A lushly sensual and thoughtful debut novel . . . Kakar offers a tantalizing view of how sex is constructed, dreamed, subdued and performed in culturally specific contexts and through history, rich folklore and marvellous parables’—Publishers Weekly

  ‘Fascinating reading . . . Sudhir Kakar has reconstructed [Vatsyayana’s] life and times with the consummate skill of a master-craftsman’ —Khushwant Singh, Tribune

  ‘A journey into the furthest past, an ecstatic dream beyond all time’—Vogue, Germany

  Praise for Ecstasy

  ‘This novel dramatizes, as only good fiction can, that even in reading about transgendered breasts and transcendent visions we are, finally, reading about aspects of ourselves’—Washington Post Book World

  ‘What holds the narrative together is Kakar’s sympathetic descriptions of religious life—the set piece in a temple that specializes in exorcism is a classic. His prose is clear and evocative’—The Hindu

  ‘A mesmeric and readable book about a mysticism which tantalises as it recedes in a haze and dust of contemporary revivalism’—Deccan Chronicle

  ‘Eminently readable . . . deserves the attention of all serious-minded people’—Khushwant Singh, Telegraph

  ‘With sensitivity and intelligence, Kakar’s Ecstasy offers a poetic view of the place where flesh and spirit meet’—Seattle Times

  Praise for Mira and The Mahatma

  ‘Skilful manipulation of time enables Sudhir Kakar to reclaim a space between history and imagination . . . a beautifully written novel’—Telegraph

  ‘Mira and the Mahatma is [Kakar’s] best book. It makes one fall in love with Bapu’—Khushwant Singh, Tribune

  ‘Not only brilliantly researched but also grippingly narrated. With his third novel, [Kakar] has established a unique niche for himself in the world of Indian English fiction’—India Today

  ‘A love story, made all the more poignant by the agony it caused both . . . Kakar’s Gandhi is supremely relevant for today’—Mark Tully, Outlook

  ‘A sublime, sensual portrait of the Mahatma’—Hindustan Times

  ‘Kakar weaves a vivid portrait of those extraordinary years in India’s history . . . a must for all those fascinated by the freedom movement and its moral underpinnings’—Business Standard

  ‘Perhaps the most passionate of platonic love relationships of all times’—Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich

  For Elsie, Amna and Mia

  ONE

  It is with a mix of admiration for the writer, fondness for the youth and revulsion for the man he has now become that I have finally decided to pen my recollections of Ruddy. After that distasteful and annoying exchange ten years ago—‘betrayer of trust’ and ‘Judas’ were two of the milder epithets Ruddy had hurled at me in his letter—I had resolved never to write about him again. I was so distraught that when Ruddy demanded I return his letter, from which I had liberally quoted in my article ‘Rudyard Kipling as jou
rnalist,’ I wrote back in pique that he could have it on the condition that he pay me 50 pounds for it. His note accompanying the cheque read: ‘I’d have gladly paid six times more for the pleasure of never speaking to you again.’

  But by then I had calmed down. Loath to end a friendship that had meant so much to me on this childish note of petulance, I tried again: ‘All that I have written has been in the spirit of the warmest friendship and admiration; and I was naturally proud that, although everyone used to laugh both in Allahabad and Lahore, when I said you would be quickly recognized as one of the greatest poets of recent times, my judgement has been so completely justified. Our first English winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature!’

  There was no answer. I am glad I returned only that one letter and kept the others.

  I knew that Ruddy’s delightful humour could easily slip into cynical cruelty; the tongue that tripped with sparkling wit could also be caddishly dirty and malicious. I had long forgiven his disgraceful conduct after that summer in Simla with the Kiplings, the most glorious two months of my life whose colours have not faded, nor its details blurred, even after the passage of twenty years. I had ignored the cold and exceedingly nasty letter he had written after I came down from the hills to Lahore, ending with the threat—disguised as light-hearted banter—that he would not hesitate to shoot me.

  Ruddy is a genius, I had said to myself at the time. He must be forgiven his eccentricities, even when they cross the line of decency we normal human beings are careful not to trespass. Did Aristotle not say that unpredictability and bouts of melancholia are an essential part of the temperament of poets who become eminent? Poets of genius cannot be judged by conventional standards. Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi—meaning, ‘What is permissible for Jove is not permissible for an ox.’

  But now I hear from friends that Ruddy has been burning all his correspondence. Thousands of letters, even from the people who were closest to him—his parents, Trix, his aunt Mrs Burne-Jones, at whose home he had found succour during the harrowing years of his boyhood.

  ‘Writing letters to people I love has been a lifeline in this wretched country,’ he had once confessed to me in a letter, when he had been feeling especially low during a Lahore summer. ‘I do not stop to think when I am writing one. I am carried away by the sheer pleasure of connecting, of breaking out of the armour of my loneliness. Pater has often warned me that in my letters to him I am over-impassioned in my opinions, fiercely judgemental and unforgiving of people who do not share my political convictions about our rule in India. But this worries me less than the fact that I reveal far more of myself in letters than I do in person. Like a young girl in the throes of first love who pours her heart out to her lover in conversations carried out solely in her head but becomes tongue-tied in his presence, I pour out my disappointments and bitterness in my letters, leaving me vulnerable.’

  Vulnerable to what, I had wondered. To be exploited or harmed by the very people who are closest to you? But, then, though most of the time Ruddy was buoyed by his wonderful humour and all-encompassing curiosity to explore the world he was living in, there were times when he was pulled down by an undertow of what his mother called his ‘blue devils’ and what alienists now call ‘depression’, their new label for melancholia.

  Ruddy seems determined to erase all records of his boyhood and youth, as if they hide a dark secret which, if revealed, will irretrievably dent the image of the ‘great writer’ he currently enjoys across the length and breadth of the English-speaking world.

  ‘No one is going to make a monkey out of me after my death,’ he is reported to have said, as he proceeded to destroy his letters with the same energy that he employed in writing them.

  Does he fear that by writing about his youth in Lahore I shall lay bare secrets which will embarrass him? If so, then his misgiving is unwarranted. England has always been tolerant of wild oats sown in youth, even when they were sown in an alien soil. Except that in Ruddy’s case there were persistent rumours about his partiality to ‘dark meat’, that his sowing took place in some of the most disreputable native establishments in the old city.

  My recollections of Ruddy, then, are of a time when we were both young and the best of friends, in Lahore, sharing an intimacy that came from working at the same newspaper in an Indian city where the few other British residents were mostly older men with families, engaged in the serious professions needed to administer the Empire. These men looked down on us journalists as purveyors of entertainment at best, and dangerous, meddling fools at worst.

  As his editor in Lahore and not only as his friend, I am proud that I played a small part in honing his genius. I am aware that success has many fathers. There are many men who speak of friendship with Ruddy during his Lahore years and make claims of how they helped him in one way or the other to achieve the literary eminence he now enjoys. But in spite of our present estrangement, Ruddy will not deny that except for a couple of subalterns serving with the British regiments temporarily stationed in Lahore, I was his only friend. When I took over from Stephen Wheeler, I had already known Ruddy from an earlier visit. It was easy for me to dismiss Wheeler’s comment about my new assistant, ‘A very lazy chap, who spends the whole day scribbling rotten verse!’ I knew better.

  I should emphasize that my admiration for Ruddy never slipped into idealization. I could help because I could criticize as well as praise his work, both from unalloyed friendship. When I looked at his journalism, some of it was poor, the merest journalese. Some of it was rankly bad from the point of view of good taste, and some of it was startlingly, wonderfully, splendidly original. Here, in India, working on a paper which was far from flourishing, I discovered a journalist who had the power to make the fortunes of a London newspaper. I encouraged Ruddy to write ballads, some of which are now familiar to every schoolboy in the Empire. I pointed out to him how the simplest hack work and padding of the paper could be made bright and entertaining if he would only treat it from his own point of view and not struggle to copy age-old methods of dull and orthodox journalism. Often, I was proud of what he could do with even the most routine piece of reporting. For instance, when I sent him to write about the problems faced by travellers at the Lahore railway station, he did not deliver a dull piece based on quotes from interviews with railway officials and assorted travellers. Instead, it began:

  We seem to be all agreed to praise our Railway management and nobody will deny that, if a Briton wished to swagger—and at times this duty is incumbent upon him—he might challenge the world to match our achievements in this line. But there are spots on the sun, and I humbly venture to submit that the native subordinate staff does not, as a rule, know its business. Why should a booking office clerk take six minutes and a half by a Shrewsbury clock, to get two first-class tickets and a third, to Ambala? Why should he tell passengers to go to distant parts of the station for tickets to Dinanaggar on the new Pathankot line, and why, oh why, does he make mistakes with your change? I am perfectly aware that you cannot buy an extensive range of accomplishments for fifteen rupees a month, but, surely, in an important station like Lahore, some pains might be taken to teach Nubbi Baksh his business.

  I deleted his next lines, which I thought were unnecessarily provocative of Eurasians, a race that has been most loyal to the Empire and has stood with us through thick and thin, but reinserted them after Ruddy’s vehement opposition—a pattern that often followed our disagreements as far as his contributions to the Civil and Military Gazette, or the CMG, were concerned.

  At the Punjab College, they teach Milton and Chaucer—and if report be true, squabble over these worthies at times—and other branches of learning may be studied at the High Schools, but nobody seems to give any instruction in Railway work. There are a number of decorative persons, mostly of the Eurasian persuasion, in Lahore Railway Station, whose business seems to be only to emerge from the recesses of the Station building a few minutes before the arrival of a train, and to exist beautifully until its
departure, after which, they seem to vanish into thin air.

  *

  It all began one cool March morning in Allahabad in 1885 or 1886—thirty years later, I am not sure of the exact year, although I remember the month and the morning being cool—when the office peon came to my room with the message that Allen Sahib, the co-owner of the Pioneer where I had just begun to work as a subeditor, had summoned me to his feared presence.

  ‘Ah, Kay,’ George Allen said after removing the foul-smelling pipe from the side of his mouth, usually a prelude to a bollocking by our foul-mouthed boss. ‘We need you to go up to Lahore to check on the young pup, Kipling. Seems the bugger is a slacker. Wheeler writes that the boy is averse to routine, writes his own doggerel instead of foraging for pieces to fill the CMG’s pages. The boy needs his butt kicked if he thinks he can squat on his arse the whole day and yet draw the salary of an assistant editor. Cocky and insubordinate too, I imagine. May as well have a look at what the editorial staff at the Gazette is up to.’

  The order to go to Lahore could not have come at a more opportune time. I had been living in Allahabad for over a year but my homesickness for England had not abated. Every day I told myself that it was just a question of time. Ten years out of India—first at school in Cheltenham and then beginning my journalistic career with the Globe on Fleet Street—had wiped out all my childhood memories of our Allahabad home, as also my initial homesickness for India that had made me weep silently in my bed at night in the first weeks of boarding school in England.

  My family is what is called ‘old India hands’. My father had been a chaplain of the East India Company, and had lived through the turbulent events of the 1857 Mutiny. Perhaps it was the aftermath of the Mutiny, when the British exacted terrible vengeance for the unspeakable barbarity of the native mutineers, that made him decide to switch over to journalism. He felt he could thus teach the British in India more about India and its people. He remained a clergyman but ceased to officiate. For some months, at the request of his old friend George Allen, he had also edited the Pioneer. As had my elder brother, Phil, who has made a name for himself as the author of the In My Indian Garden series.