312. Kipling: An Idyllic Indian Childhood That Became A Nightmare (Part 1)

Summary

Empire Podcast Ep. 312 Summary

Title: Kipling: An Idyllic Indian Childhood That Became a Nightmare (Part 1)
Host: William Dalrymple
Guest: Andrew Lycett (Kipling Biographer)
Theme: The Contradictory Life and Legacy of Rudyard Kipling—From a Sensory-Rich Childhood in India to Trauma in England

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Episode Overview

This episode inaugurates a miniseries on Rudyard Kipling, focusing on the formative years of his life: his blissful early childhood in Bombay, followed by harrowing trauma in England. William Dalrymple, joined by preeminent Kipling biographer Andrew Lycett, delves into the conflicting legacy of a writer revered as both a British literary genius and an unapologetic advocate of empire and reactionary politics. The episode explores how Kipling’s early experiences of wonder and loss became the bedrock for both the beauty and violence in his writing.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Kipling’s Paradoxical Legacy

• Dalrymple opens the episode by quoting Salman Rushdie, highlighting Kipling’s conflicted personality—part “Bazaar boy, part Saab” (02:38).

  “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 entrance.”
  —Salman Rushdie, quoted by William Dalrymple (02:38)

• Dalrymple addresses the deep divide in Kipling’s reputation: celebrated as a literary giant and fiercely criticized as a bigot and imperial apologist.

  “People love to hate him, and in many ways, with good reason... Kipling’s views seem absurd, xenophobic, and ultra racist.”
  —William Dalrymple (04:37)

• Even so, critics such as Edward Said and Craig Raine recognized Kipling’s literary brilliance, with Said admitting Kim “belongs to the world’s very greatest literature.” (05:56)

2. Why Read Kipling Today?

• Dalrymple argues for grappling with Kipling’s dual legacy:

  “We have to hold these two things together in our head. Even by the standards of his own time, he was ultra reactionary... Yet he’s also, and simultaneously, one of the greatest British writers.”
  —William Dalrymple (06:49)

3. Kipling’s Elite, Artistic Family Origins

• Birth and Parentage (08:54)
  • Born in Bombay at the end of 1865, to Lockwood Kipling (architectural sculptor) and Alice (daughter of a Methodist minister).
  • The family was connected to leading artists (Burne-Jones) and politicians (Stanley Baldwin, future prime minister).
• The name “Rudyard” comes from Lake Rudyard, where his parents courted (09:26).

4. Bombay: A Sensory Wonderland (1865–1871)

• Kipling’s earliest years were spent in a vibrant, multicultural Bombay, saturated with color, language, and sensation.

  “We have his own accounts of the kind of sensory impressions that Bombay and India left for him...he was spending time with his ayah, his nursemaid, speaking Hindustani as a first language.”
  —William Dalrymple (10:10)

• His ayah was so integral that she had to remind him to speak English (10:25).

5. Trauma in England: The “House of Desolation” (Aged 6–11)

• At six, Kipling and his younger sister Trix were sent from their idyllic life in Bombay to England, dumped with total strangers—the Holloways in Southsea (11:17).
• Mrs. Holloway was cruel; this darkness fueled Kipling’s later stories:

  “It gradually became what Kipling later called the House of Desolation, became the focus of a very unhappy period of his childhood.”
  —Andrew Lycett (11:59)

• The experience is immortalized in Kipling’s story “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” where fictional abuse mirrors reality (12:43).

  “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...” —Kipling, read by Dalrymple (13:06)

• Physical and psychological abuse—combined with neglect from his parents—had lasting impacts (13:35).

6. Rescue and Schooling in England

• His Aunt Georgina Burne-Jones eventually sounded the alarm, prompting Kipling’s mother to return from India and remove him from the Holloways (13:52).
• The trauma, however, lingered—and his sister Trix remained in the hostile home even after Kipling left (14:49).

7. The United Services College, Westward Ho! (Ages 12+)

• Kipling attended the United Services College in Devon, a school for future imperial administrators and soldiers.
  • The school’s headmaster, Crom Price, was empathetic and encouraged Kipling’s literary ambitions (17:52, 18:37).
  • Kipling edited the school magazine; his poems were published (often without his permission) by his parents (18:50, 19:01).

  “He was obviously very talented from the start, but also he became part of a little group… he later wrote about them…the Stalky stories.”
  —Andrew Lycett (19:14)

• Despite harsh discipline, this period marked Kipling’s creative flowering and escape from previous misery.

8. Return to India: Journalism in Lahore and the Hill Stations

• With no money for university, Kipling returned to India at 16. His father was running the Lahore Museum (20:18).
• Kipling’s early journalism for the Civil and Military Gazette was hands-on and immersive—half the staff, covering fairs and frontier stories, reacquainting himself with Hindustani and Indian life (20:59).

  “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.”
  —Andrew Lycett (20:59)

• The family would summer in hill stations: first Mussoorie (less prestigious), then Simla (the seat of British government during the hot season) (21:55).
  • Simla was a world apart, rife with intrigue and flirtation; Kipling chronicled it with a uniquely incisive and sometimes satirical eye, unmatched by other sources.

  “What Kipling uniquely tells us...is that this is a place of enormous sort of flirtation. All the wives are up there…all these affairs are taking place…”
  —William Dalrymple (23:32)

• He became famous for his “Plain Tales from the Hills”—stories that combined society gossip with social commentary and keen observation of Anglo-Indian life (24:34).

9. The Genesis of Literary Success

• Kipling’s Simla stories, first published in the newspaper and then collected as “Plain Tales from the Hills,” made his name as a chronicler of the British Raj’s intrigues and contradictions (24:34–25:35).
• The episode ends by teeing up the next installment: Kipling’s global renown with books like “Kim” and “The Jungle Book.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On why Kipling demands such emotional response:

  “Anger and delight are incompatible emotions, yet the stories do indeed have the power simultaneously to infuriate and to entrance.”
  —Salman Rushdie (quoted by Dalrymple) [02:38]

• On Kipling’s conflicted legacy:

  “People love to hate him, and in many ways, with good reason... Kipling’s views seem absurd, xenophobic, and ultra racist.”
  —William Dalrymple [04:37]

• On early Indian childhood:

  “He was spending time with his ayah, speaking Hindustani as a first language… Hindustani was his natural way of expressing himself as a baby.”
  —William Dalrymple [10:10]

• On abuse in the House of Desolation:

  “It was brutal. The woman into whose hands he was committed punished him.”
  —William Dalrymple [12:10]

• On Simla’s elite world:

  “They have all these sort of…very English names with English blooms in the garden. But what Kipling uniquely tells us…all these affairs are taking place.”
  —William Dalrymple [23:31]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Kipling’s Literary Paradox and Episode Setup – [02:38–06:58]
• Family and Early Childhood in Bombay – [08:54–10:45]
• England and the House of Desolation – [11:17–14:49]
• United Services College and Early Writing – [17:52–19:48]
• Return to India: Robert Kipling as Young Journalist – [20:18–21:15]
• The Hill Stations, Simla, and ‘Plain Tales’ – [21:55–25:35]
• Preview of Next Episode/Wrap-Up – [25:35–26:15]

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Tone & Language

• The episode maintains an analytical, but empathetic tone. Dalrymple is candid about his conflicted admiration for Kipling, often quoting directly and using literary criticism to frame Kipling's genius versus his prejudices. Andrew Lycett’s contributions are measured and rich in detail, helping to ground the narrative in biography while also drawing out its emotional undercurrents.

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Conclusion

This first part deftly examines the dualities at the heart of Kipling’s early life and sets the stage for his development into both a problematic figure and a uniquely important writer. The discussion is lively, deeply informed, and sensitive to both Kipling’s personal suffering and the controversial legacy he would go on to leave in the world of literature and empire.

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Transcript

[William Dalrymple]

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[William Dalrymple]

The influence of India on Kipling resulted in what has always struck me as a personality in conflict with itself. Part Bazaar 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 entrance. Well, that was Salman Rushdie writing as a young critic around the time he wrote Midnight's Children about Rudyard Kipling. The subject of not just this, this week's pod, but an entire miniseries that we've been saving up as the climax of our writers in Empire series. And sadly, it's just me this week because Puranita has a bad back and is in A and 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 disagreed 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. One Anita just hates him and thinks he's an old bigot. Before I introduce our superstar guest who is waiting to say hello to you 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. First thing to be said is that sort of Rudyard Kipling is sort of part of the furniture in England in an odd sort of way. He's one of the writers sitting in Westminster Abbey. He's there along with Tennyson and Hardy and T.S. eliot, as you know, 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 round about four bookshops in, 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 is east and west is 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. 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 Jolly and Wallabad massacre. Kipling adored Rhodes, who there's been an entire movement in Oxford to remove his statue. He unequivocally approved of 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 base fan club, not just the kind of usual suspects that would enjoy a sort of bit of ultra racist Victorian prose. People like Edward Said, the postcolonial 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 Said 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 read Kipling, 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 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 Said, brought to a basically insular and provincial British audience the colour, glamour and romance of the British overseas experience. So to conclude our writers and 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 a sense, how to translate this 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.

[Andrew Lycett]

Hello, I'm Andrew Lycett.

[William Dalrymple]

Yes, Andrew Lycett. 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 could start, Andrew, by just telling us why he's someone that you thought you be willing to devote five years of Your life presumably to reading every word that he'd written and analyzing him.

[Andrew Lycett]

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.

[William Dalrymple]

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?

[Andrew Lycett]

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'd had quite a distinguished career in England, studied in Staffordshire, Burslem 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 Kipling's father Lockwood had wooed his mother Alice at Lake Rudyard in Staffordshire near Burslem.

[William Dalrymple]

Hence the name.

[Andrew Lycett]

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 Jamsitchi Jijiboy School of Art in Bombay.

[William Dalrymple]

Kipling is born very close today to the Gateway of India, the Taj Hotel, anyone that knows Bombay, the VT Terminus, absolute heart of Bombay. So Alice, who described as the daughter of a Methodist minister, was also the sister of Burne Jones's wife. I mean they're kind of well connected, arty world. And Stanley Baldwin is a first cousin. So not only do we have Burne Jones on one side, but a three times Prime Minister they were a very.

[Andrew Lycett]

Formidable family which actually helped propel Kipling through his latter part of his life.

[William Dalrymple]

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 ayah, 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 he was. That Hindustani was his natural way of expressing himself as a baby.

[Andrew Lycett]

I Mean. He used to love going out with his ayah 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.

[William Dalrymple]

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.

[Andrew Lycett]

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 Littlehampton, and then suddenly Kipling found that he was taken away from Littlehampton, taken just down the coast there to Portsmouth, and left with his sister at not very Opul House in Portsmouth's suburb of Southsea. It was called Lorne Lodge. Southsea was a strange kind of magnet for people who'd served in colonial places. Kipling was taken with his sister and they were more or less unceremoniously dumped with this family called the Holloways in Southsea. And this gradually became what Kipling later called the House of Desolation, became the focus of a very unhappy period of his childhood.

[William Dalrymple]

I mean, it was brutal. The woman into whose hands he was committed punished him.

[Andrew Lycett]

These were his sort of foster parents. They were called the Holloways, and there was quite an amiable old chap called Captain Pricer 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 certain, you know, interest Kipling in naval life. But Holloway's wife, she was a very prissy, evangelical character, and she took against Rudyard Kipling. She had a son called Harry between the two. Between.

[William Dalrymple]

This was turned into one of his most famous short stories, wasn't it? Baa Baa. Black sheep indeed. I've got it open in front of me. I'll just do a very quick little extract 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 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. He 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's one of those terrible Victorian tales of sort of the torture of children. Rather like something from Dickens that was.

[Andrew Lycett]

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 Southsea.

[William Dalrymple]

And he's eventually saved Andrew from this by Auntie Georgie Burne Jones, who pulls the alarm cord after a year or two.

[Andrew Lycett]

That is correct, yes. His mother's sister Georgina kept a bit of an eye on him there, and he used to go to the Burne Jones house in Fulham, and that was a bit of a respite for him.

[William Dalrymple]

Georgie sends a sort of alarm call, doesn't she, to India and his mot, who's more or less abandoned him, 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.

[Andrew Lycett]

Yeah, that's right. But the warning signs had gone out and Kipling'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 Trix stayed there after he'd gone, and I always find that.

[William Dalrymple]

A bit odd if one child's 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.

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[William Dalrymple]

Welcome back. Before we go back to Kipling's life, let me tell you quickly about our future live Show. On Saturday 5th September 2026, we will be at the Southbank Centre in London as part of a Goal Hangar takeover week from the 4th to the 6th of September 2026 and our lovely Empire Club members will be emailed a pre sale link on the 4th of December at 10am 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 empirepoduk.com if you aren't already a member, that's EmpirePod UK. Anyway, back to Kipling. Following the trauma of the House of Desolation, Alice, Kipling's mother, took the children to stay on a farm in Essex near Epping Forest and Rudyard ran around with his first cousin Stanley Baldwin, later to be the three times British 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.

[Andrew Lycett]

This was a sort of step down from the main stepping stones to careers in the military, which was Sandhurst and Woolwich. No, it was actually linked to Haileybury, 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 Crom Price who was a friend of Alice Kipling in particular. He was the sort of coterie of artists who surrounded Alice and her sisters, who sort of introduced them to the Pre Raphaelites. 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.

[William Dalrymple]

Got him to edit the school magazine.

[Andrew Lycett]

Exactly. Kipling got to edit the school magazine, which was great fun, I guess. And he got to know about printing, et cetera, et cetera. It's a formative period.

[William Dalrymple]

And Kipling was already showing signs by the time he was sort of 16, of being some progeny. He was writing extraordinary essays, and his parents were quietly publishing, without his permission, his poems that he was producing.

[Andrew Lycett]

I mean, definitely he was beginning to show the signs of that great. 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.

[William Dalrymple]

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 endear. Age 16. There was no question of. There was no finance, was there? There was no money to send him to university.

[Andrew Lycett]

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.

[William Dalrymple]

Tell us about what it's like for Kipling to return to India. Cause 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 Isaiah and so on. He arrives back in Bombay he gets on the frontier mail. He starts to recognize Hindustani phrases that he's forgotten. Even can speak some Hindustani without remembering what it actually means.

[Andrew Lycett]

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.

[William Dalrymple]

He was 50% of the staff.

[Andrew Lycett]

That's right.

[William Dalrymple]

It was only him and one other.

[Andrew Lycett]

That's exactly right, yeah. So, you know, he found himself sort of going out into the countryside, going out to the Amritsar Fair. He wrote an article about that.

[William Dalrymple]

Now, Andrew, he's living at home. He's with Trix and his parents. He's going out covering these stories, sometimes dining in the club, 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 Simla, doesn't it? Yes.

[Andrew Lycett]

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 Mussoorie, but then he went to Simla.

[William Dalrymple]

This is a class difference. Mussoorie is the kind of second division. He'll take 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 Mussoorie. 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 khan 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.

[Andrew Lycett]

That's right. Kipling was actually appointed the correspondent of the Civil and Military Gazette in. And he used to go out there and, you know, that had become, as you say, the sort of center of government. Everything moved from Calcutta to similar kind.

[William Dalrymple]

Of bonkers to us that 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.

[Andrew Lycett]

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.

[William Dalrymple]

And they do create. Recreate home, don't they? They create these little bungalows with names like sort of Balmoral or Egerton.

[Andrew Lycett]

That's right.

[William Dalrymple]

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. Of enormous sort of flirtation. All the wives are up there. There's 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 Chakrata. Jack remains and dies in the plains, and Jill remarries soon after. That's the sort of verse he's writing.

[Andrew Lycett]

That's right. Kipling immediately became very interested in, you know, the life up there in the hills and, you know, sort of incorporated in 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.

[William Dalrymple]

The world that Kipling reveals that we don't really get in any other sources because it's the sort of tittle tattle 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. Hauksbee or Mrs. Reaver, one of the town's carnivorous memsabs. He rode with her and walked with her and picnicked with her and tiffened at polites with her till people put up their eyebrows and said, shocking.

[Andrew Lycett]

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, you know, what was going on in the bazaar. Because, you know, that's part of the plaintiffs of the Hills as well.

[William Dalrymple]

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 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 atempire podcast uk.com Anita will be back soon, but for now, it's goodbye from me, William Durimple and the wonderful Andrew Lysip.

[Andrew Lycett]

See you soon.

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[Andrew Lycett]

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