Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling 1865-1900

Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling 1865-1900

by Charles Allen (Author)

Synopsis

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and spent his early years there, before being sent, aged six, to England, a desperately unhappy experience. Charles Allen's great-grandfather brought the sixteen-year-old Kipling back out to India to work on The Civil and Military Gazette with the words 'Kipling will do', and thus set young Rudyard on his literary course. And so it was that at the start of the cold weather of 1882 he stepped ashore at Bombay on 18 October 1882 - 'a prince entering his kingdom'. He stayed for seven years during which he wrote the work that established him as a popular and critical, sometimes controversial, success. Charles Allen has written a brilliant account of those years - of an Indian childhood and coming of age, of abandonment in England, of family and Empire. He traces the Indian experiences of Kipling's parents, Lockwood and Alice, and reveals what kind of culture the young writer was born into and then returned to when still a teenager. It is a work of fantastic sympathy for a man - though not blind to Kipling's failings - and the country he loved.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 448
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Published: 01 Nov 2007

ISBN 10: 0316726559
ISBN 13: 9780316726559

Media Reviews
For PLAIN TALES FROM THE RAJ: 'One of the most enjoyable books I have read ... It is an authentic record of the survivors of British India ... a book which takes on where Kipling left off' ANTONIA FRASER *** 'Both a guide and an entertaining companion ... Humour, drama and regret fill its pages' MAIL ON SUNDAY *** 'A lovely and compelling account of what India meant to the British between 1900 and 1947 ... One of the best' THE TIMES
Author Bio
Charles Allen is the author of a number of bestselling books about Indian and the colonial experience elsewhere. A traveller, historian and master storyteller he is one of the great chroniclers of India.