‘The Kipling File’ by Sudhir Kakar
In the time of Brexit, when questions of ‘Englishness’ are popping up, the Raj days seem to be undergoing a re-examination, if the new crop of books about the Empire in India is anything to go by. Since Rudyard Kipling fashioned himself as the great apologist for the Raj once he settled in England after leaving India in 1889, his life lends itself to a case study of the white and brown man’s mutual burden in the Raj era. Sudhir Kakar chooses to do this through fiction in The Kipling File : here Kay Robinson, editor of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore in the 1880s, narrates the tale of the young, brilliant and unpredictable “Ruddy”, who worked as his understudy. Among the last studies to come out on him is Charles Allen’s Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling in 2007, to which Kakar acknowledges his “biggest debt”. With letters, interviews, Kipling’s fiction, Allen had pieced together an account of Kipling’s India years which left almost no gap to be filled.
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