THE KNOWING WRITER

The young Kipling writes, notoriously, as a knowing insider of colonial India hailed by Victorian contemporaries as ‘the Revealer of the East’. The early reviewer Charles Whibley wrote approvingly that he knew ‘the native of India as he has never been known before’; Margaret Oliphant thought he would ‘roll away from us the veil that covers that vast and teeming world.’ His narrative statements about India invariably refer to matters of ‘common knowledge’. He knows that life is unfair on conscientious officers: ‘Good work does not matter, because a man is judged by his worst output, and another man takes all the credit of his best as a rule. Bad work does not matter, because other men do worse, and incompetents hang on longer in India than anywhere else…. Sickness does not matter, because it's all in the day's work, and if you die, another man takes over your place and your office in the eight hours between death and burial.’ (‘Thrown Away’, PTH, 17).

He knows about Simla's unpredictable tolerance for illicit liaisons: ‘Certain attachments which have set and crystallised through half-a-dozen seasons acquire almost the sanctity of the marriage bond, and are revered as such.’ (‘At the Pit 's Mouth’, WWW, 35–6). He knows why India must be held by force: ‘Asia is not going to be civilised after the methods of the West. There is too much of Asia and she is too old. You cannot reform a lady of many lovers, and Asia has been insatiable in her flirtations aforetime. She will never attend Sunday school or learn to vote save with swords for tickets’ (‘The Man Who Was’, LH, 98). With studied ease, he drops little details of the familiar hardships of colonial life: ‘Each well-regulated Indian Cemetery keeps half-adozen graves permanently open for contingencies and incidental wear and tear. In the Hills these are more usually baby's size, because children who come up weakened and sick from the Plains often succumb to the effects of the Rains in the Hills or get pneumonia from their ayahs taking them through damp pinewoods after the sun has set. In Cantonments, of course, the man's size is more in request: these arrangements varying with the climate and population.’