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Addition of Kipling sahib
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* Allen, Charles
''Kipling sahib : India and the making of Rudyard Kipling''.
London: Little, Brown, 2007
This illuminating biography fulfills its subtitle in bringing to life the young Rudyard Kipling and the world which shaped him. Much about 'Ruddy' was typical of the time; born in Bombay in 1865, this "noisy and spoilt" child, along with his younger sister, was exiled to England for an education and returned to India as a teenager to pursue a career. It is the particulars of this troubled, self-opinionated, literary genius which fascinate, along with the wealth of background material such as the family connections to the Pre-Raphaelite group, the Bombay financial crash in 1865, J. Lockwood Kipling's position as a teacher of architectural sculpture and modelling at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay, the United Services College at Westward Ho! in England, British society in the hills, and the world of newspapers in India (at 16 years-old Kipling became assistant editor of the ''Civil and military gazette''). Kipling's imperialism and, in particular, the antipathy he expressed in his journalism towards Western-educated Indians contributed towards his early departure from India, but Charles Allen balances this by showing how it is Kipling's understanding and empathy for those who lived at the bottom of Indian society -such as the peasant, the prostitute, and the ordinary British soldier - which infuses the most memorable of his writing.
With illustrations, notes, glossary, select bibliography, and index.
