KIPLING - AN ENIGMA


(30 Dec 1865 - 18 Jan 1936)

Born in Bombay (now Mumbai), Joseph Rudyard Kipling went to England for studies at the age of 7, where he did encounter some troubled times. He returned to India in 1882 to spend another 7 years as a writer before returning to England...

Writing to fame and world importance at the turn of the 20th century, Kipling rubbed shoulders with the affluent which included King George V, Cecil Rhodes and Theodore Roosevelt. The highest paid writer of his times, Kipling was called ‘A Prophet of British Imperialism’ by another Indian born renowned writer, George Orwell...

Kipling is said to have introduced the word 'cushy' to English, to mean 'comfortable', probably derived from the Hindi word 'khushi' meaning 'happy', with his Bombay and Lahore connections. He is also credited with coinage of words like 'squiggly, 'righto', 'lunchless', 'grinch', 'svengali' etc...

Kipling's works, considering the order of his times, on race and imperialism, courted controversy. Known to be a religious person, believing in one God and divinity, Kipling reportedly never proclaimed himself to be of Christian faith...

With vanquished Spain ceding her colony Philippines to America after the Treaty of Paris in 1898, Kipling hinted on America administering Philippines on the lines of the British Empire upon the coloured of Africa and the Indian subcontinent...

Kipling is credited with helping the British Empire counter the Indian Ghadar uprising by expats returned from US, close to WW1, which had it's roots in the unsuccessful Sepoy mutiny of 1857...

In the words of Salman Rushdie, Kipling could only be read with a mixture of delight (his storytelling prowess) and anger (racist leanings) unsettling the calm of one's mind...

The youngest literary Nobel Prize awardee of 1907 who supported British colonisation, but opposed the Suffragette and Home Rule for Ireland movements, passed away in London this day in 1936, postoperatively following an abdominal catastrophe...

🙏🙏🌹💐





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