Kipling's Indian Adventure English Subtitles

[Music] budget Kipling left Tilbury to sail to Bombay in September 1882 he was 16 one of thousands of young people sailing away every year to take advantage of a world brimming with new possibilities the British Empire was at its peak it would never be as powerful or as confident again India was its beating burning heart like so many others Kipling was a teenager without the education or the wealth or the connections to stand much chance of making it back home he was seizing the opportunities of a new world just seven years later he was to sail back to London lionized has one of the most famous and celebrated writers in the English language but today is unfashionable and I think misunderstood people think of him as a stuffy reactionary at best politically incorrect at worst an apologist for all the ills of the British Empire but the writer I know and love is more complex in truth the young Kipling was an outsider and even something of a rebel this was a teenager drawn to the dark side and in colonial India he broke every rule in the book [Music] experimenting with mind-altering drugs looking for sex where he shouldn't and writing about his experiences with unparalleled honesty in some of the most original and innovative stories ever written but it was not a picture of Imperial India the colonialists wanted to read in his rebellion which is really what it was he does expose the dirty side of British India as a writer and a former soldier Kipling has always fascinated me now I want to go back and find out how this extraordinary rite of passage transforms the teenage Kipling and how in the process it changed our understanding of India forever [Music] what must have been like to disembark at Bombay on the evening of the 18th of October 1882 Kipling had lived here before as a child but have been sent away for 11 miserable years now he was coming home to his beloved India for Kipling later wrote that he returned to India as a prince entering his kingdom and the contrast with the gray monotony of his childhood years in South Sea couldn't have been any greater [Music] there was the noise a certain heat like opening another door that wood smells there was the brilliant color sarees fuchsia pink blue emerald green and masses of people a Kipling's destination was to an outpost 900 miles away in Lahore where his family lived a frontier town ruled over by just 70 Colonials the [ __ ] had been in British hands for less than 35 years it was the last major Indian city to become part of the Empire but although they were far from home the Victorians who came here were keen to create a very distinctive little England in the Punjab there are two quite different laws there's these civil lines which is where the British lived this is well laid out with nice big bungalows and with large gardens and everybody's living there very safely and then there's a wall and then within that wall is the old city and this is a place of squalor and dirt and disease where the people are living cheek by jowl and it's a place where the British do not go [Music] ignoring the culture of India the British here were obsessed with preserving the rituals of home at work and at play in what they act and of course in what they wore my guess this scent with the British in India of the constant fight for standards in dress it's part of their fight against the country itself it certainly took on a psychological aspect it took on it was partly a fight against the country itself and partly an expression of being the ruling caste they actually did change for dinner when they were in the jungle it wasn't a fallacy they were keeping up standards in front of the Indians [Music] Lavar had a Victorian railway and an elegant Town Hall it had museums and public gardens that equalled those in Brighton or Leeds and it even had a school of art where Kipling's father was the principal but Lockwood Kipling was very different from his colonial peers instead of turning away from Indian culture he studied it Rudyard Kipling's father was one of the key champions of Indian art and Crafts movement in all of India one of his daughters said about Lockwood Kipling that he knew something about anything and everything about something and it is only logical that his son with his literary sort of kind of a genius in him would be inspired and his imagination will be kind of you know walked by the kind of images that he sort of kind of confronted and lived with in India his father was an important influence on him but Kipling wasn't an academic and his first challenge was to find a job luckily there was an opening that would suit him well working on the local newspaper the civil and military Cosette's and Charles Allen's great-grandfather was the man who gave him the job my grandfather suppose you could say he was a Murdoch of his of his age in India he had two newspapers one where the Pioneer which was the biggest newspaper in India and then there was a strange little newspaper right out in Lahore right out on the frontier which really the civil and military Gazette and that sums up exactly it was for a tiny community of civil administrators and military men and that really was its clientele but it had to have an editor and it had to have an assistant editor so young ruddy at 16 he's appointed the second most important man on the newspaper and he was in charge with putting it to bed every night as if strong astonishing responsibility you could say for 16 year old dropped into the deep end of newspaper publishing without any training Kipling had to learn quickly to write and subedit up against tight deadlines Kipling would later describe his time at the CMG as his seven years hard hard labour perhaps but a fantastic apprenticeship for an aspiring writer [Music] to begin with Kipling wasn't allowed to write about the real India he was confined instead to the narrow world of the anglo-indians like a cub reporter in a Home Counties small town he was first assigned to write up accounts of Jim Connors tea parties and polo why will the Hall not officially recognize a Gymkhana on Thursday evening for instance the attendance was of the thinnest and the ladies present might have been counted on ones fingers be on comparing symptoms of cold and influenza or discussing the comparative merits of Quinn pills versus Quinn in raw we have little left to talk about Kipling's earliest reports reflected back to the anglo-indians in Lahore the image of themselves that they liked the best confirming that they were more British than the British back home their social centre was here the Punjab club the club was an all-male preserve for Europeans only and there were fewer than a hundred people eligible in the whole of Lahore Kipling wrote of the club rather disparagingly it was a place where bachelors mostly gathered to eat meals of no merit with men whose merits they knew well still only a teenager Kipling was mixing with some of the most important men in the Punjab but he found their company dreary there was no one his own age and the other members felt that young Rudyard had a Kaddish li dirty tongue he would later write there is no society in India as we understand the word there are no books no pictures no conversations worth listening to for recreations sake no one talks lightly and amusingly as they do in England they don't seem to realise any of the beauties of life perhaps they haven't the time this is absurd gentlemen members only the Punjab Club is still open for business but of course the members are now Pakistani and 12 years ago they admitted the first woman journalist Nell afar backed here Kipling writes in his memoirs that the club became the whole of my outside world because he would toil at the offices of the civil and military Gazette and then come here at the club for his dinners he would be heckled mercilessly at times for what was published in the paper even though at that time he was just an assistant editor and he really had no control over the editorial policy Kipling would have to apologize for the mistakes that his editor made and the editor was married so he never used to come to the club but Kipling yes he bore the brunt of it he spent only five of his 70 years in Lahore but those five years were extremely crucial in his development as a writer and all of this happened because he had the innate curiosity as it were to step out of the bubble in which he at first entered here were the people sitting in their clubs and really not bothering to look out of their window as it were while this whole colorful sort of circus is going past and they are completely immune to it [Music] it wasn't just lack of interest that was keeping the ruling class locked away in the club it was also fear the Indian Mutiny which had bought colonial rule in India to the brink of collapse was only a generation away to maintain order 30,000 soldiers were now stationed across India the [ __ ] was one of the most important military outposts bored by the old men in the club the young soldiers were the only men of Kipling's age in the city there was a become an important inspiration for his writing Kipling was fascinated by the military it's been suggested that he always regretted his poor eyesight prevented him from going to Sandhurst so it's no surprise that he was impressed by and enjoyed socializing with the junior officers who were stationed here in the lahore fort waiting to be deployed up to the northwest frontier provinces these were men with exciting stories to tell and Kipling writes of long hot drunken evenings that went on late into the night [Music] the soldiers on fort duty or confined to barracks had a hard time of it in the Indian summer boredom disease and heat who claimed more victims and a skirmish on the Afghan frontier reporting for the CMG Kipling wrote about fights between soldiers ending in them killing each other arising from temper in the heat and in his early stories Kipling would write of soldiers cracking up with the boredom and isolation of Indian barracks life Kipling's first exploration of this subject was in some verse written just over a year after arriving in India in Kipling's poem on fort duty the soldiers cooped up here in the lahore fort dream of action on the frontier where the past is ringed with rifles and the sound of Afghan raids I look across the ramparts to the northward and the snow to the Far chair at cantonment but alas I cannot go oh it's everlasting gun drill an eight o'clock parades it's cleaning up of mortars likewise of Karin aides while the pass is ringed with rifles and the noise of Afghan raids and I look across the ramparts to the river broad and and I think of Mary England where the festive horse cards play Kipling may have been impressed by the officers but it was the ordinary soldiers he was really interested in unusually for someone of his background at the time Kipling socialized with private soldiers and over beer he studied the way they talked and the way they thought I think we've got also got to remember that young Kipling is an outsider look at him he's a runt he's very short he's myopic he can hardly see without his glasses and on top of that he's dis praxic he's totally disjointed he keeps falling off his horse he can't play sports you know he's really as an outsider the people he admires most of all are the upright British soldiers the officers in particular but in that process he learns by this other community this other group of outsiders the ordinary soldier Kipling would later immortalized these men as Tommy Atkins Danny Deever and his three musketeers Leroy Mulvaney an authoress Kipling seemed to get along with the soldiers but whether or not he got along with the officers is another matter one member of the General Staff would write disparagingly of Kipling but he was disapproved of as being mutinous and above his station polo is still played at the hall and while there are no British soldiers here there are plenty of old soldiers from the Pakistani army who know Kipling's work well Kipling loved soldiers and he loved the benches I'll say major miles you had the sort of adventures by the sound of it that Kipling would have written a story about he's bitten by the most poisonous snake and in the desert I said later I had three bullets in my body I survived I was missing believed killed a survivor then I supposed to be killed by these monkeys and minions and you know how the monkeys did it they would take your eyes out they'd cut your ears and then huh that's how they killed I had been told three times that your time is it tomorrow in the mornings that's what's gonna happen to you so by all standards I should have been dead long time ago but if he somebody up there likes me the unbreakable soldier I'm here trying to follow in young Kipling's footsteps and it's strange because his reputation today is maybe not as popular as it once was I think people think that he represents the part of the British Empire which is bad but actually there was it it says you see as we growing the generations of changing and all stories go away they die but if you ask older people my age of his age or well they all know Kipling don't know we was associated with the earth use very much a part of this country for seven eight years [Music] spending time with soldiers made Kipling more determined than ever to get out from behind his desk his chance came at the age of 18 he was made special correspondent for The Gazette and allowed to go out and report on the real India for the first time so soon as my paper could trust me a little and I had behaved well at routine work I was sent out communal riots under the shadow of the mosque of Wozzeck on visits of Viceroy ins to neighboring Prince's on the edge of the great Indian desert reviews of armies expecting to move against Russia next week [Music] given license to travel and report across India a new world was opening up no longer confined to writing reports of Jim Connors Kipling enjoyed the real freedom of being a journalist for the first time as the outsider looking in making sense of what he sees [Music] he seems to be so good at going out looking at a subject studying it from all its aspects asking the right questions finally the essence of that particular skill that particular subject and then keeping it in his head he does have prefer like all the great writers an extraordinary memory all the information he needs is tucked away there and he brings it out you know he learned how to be short and to be brief and to be accurate and those qualities helped him in great stead the other thing he had a huge gift for observation as a writer he was finding his subject and growing fast but Kipling's opportunities for travel came to an end when the weather turned hot like most Europeans his editor would flee from the unbearable the [ __ ] summers taking trains too much cooler hill stations [Music] Kipling was stuck in the city turning out the civil and military Gazette sometimes single-handedly he was isolated and alone and his nervous disposition started to get the better of him often sick and terrified of catching a fatal illness he couldn't sleep his night terrors grew worse and he started pacing about outside increasingly curious about the city at night inevitably he was drawn like a magnet to the medieval city of inner Lahore and the wall that separated East from West it was a dividing line that few English people had ever crossed [Music] he hated the hot weather he hated being alone his parents that he's been living with have disappeared to the hills and he suddenly he's alone in this huge house and he starts to have breakdowns he's really really frightened that he's gonna catch a disease and die or that he's going to overheat and die and he walks room to room he gets his servants to throw water over him and he cannot get any sleep and this is part of what makes him tick up his night walks when he starts to wander in the night what he found when he crossed the wall was a hidden city that never sleeps [Music] often the night got into my head and I would wonder till dawn in all manner of odd places liquor shops gambling and opium dens wayside entertainment such as puppet shows native dances or in and about the narrow gullies under the most of Wozzeck on for the sheer sake of looking sometimes the police would challenge but I knew most of their officers having no position to consider and my trade enforcing it I could move at will in the fourth dimension having crossed the barrier that separated the two cultures Kipling discovered as he wrote that much of real Indian life goes on in the hot weather nights [Music] it wasn't just in Kipling's time that Europeans didn't really come into the walled city we've been advised to be very careful when we're wandering about and even in the space of this little exploration we've picked up a policeman wielding an ak-47 who's clearing people off behind us it feels quite unusual to have a sense of people watching you in that regard and it must have been what Kipling felt like when he first came down here is the possibly the only white face that most people had ever seen what Kipling saw here fascinated them [Music] the yard wide gullies into which the moonlight cannot struggle a full of mystery stories of life and death an intrigue of which we the Malibu dine open windowed pardalis English know nothing and believe less properly exploited our city would yield a store of novels [Music] and as this teenager started to break one taboo others would follow it wasn't long before he began another form of experimentation [Music] in the middle of one particularly stifling night on September the 16th 1884 Kipling was woken with terrible stomach pains his manservant bought him an opium pipe to relieve the pain Kipling describes the effect presently I felt the cramps in my leg dying out and then my tummy rested and a minute or two later it felt as though I fell through the floor [Music] they continue to rely on drugs in the form of opium morphine and Indian hemp to get him through the [ __ ] hot summer nights the dense wet heat that hung over the face of land like a blanket prevented all hope of sleep it was impossible to sit still in the dark empty echoing house and watch the punker beat the dead air so at 10 o'clock of the night I set my walking stick on end in the middle of the garden and waited to see how it would fall they pointed directly down the moon it road that leads to the city of dreadful light the city of dreadful night kept drawing Kipling back in the opium dens have now gone but inside the medieval city it conceals sometimes be possible to recapture some of the drug fuelled excitement of Kipling's the hall I've come to a Sufi shrine to see a festival of drumming and dancing it's the sort of mystical side of religion here that even in Kipling's day was noted for being and quite wild it has a reputation even today of people getting spiritually and also physically off their head and the atmosphere is a little bit like I'm coming to a festival that we've been fostered in the street by people who come up to us and said we're very excited that you're here you're going to see the real Pakistan this is a Pakistan of peace and love not the Pakistan of international terrorists and this the dancing the excitement this is apparently the real Pakistan and I can't help but think this is probably than the hall that Kipling found and that excited him and that probably inspired some of his own nocturnal activities [Applause] the dropping which is amazing and the crowd sort of building up into this chant a bit like before the biggest and a night at a club comes on ever in the dark corners you can see people rolling up by the main center ever getting ready into this really predict Josh [Applause] an anonymous article in the CMG attributed to Kipling seems to describe an opium trip here you are alone utterly alone on the verge of a waste of moonlit sand hundreds and thousands of miles away lies a small silver pool not bigger than a splash of rainwater a stone is dropped into its bosom and as the circles spread the silver lines broaden from east to west and rush up with inconceivable rapidity to the level of your eyes you shudder and attempt to fly [Music] you think of Timothy Leary and drugs and awakening of consciousness you really feel that something like this happens with this youngster this process of hallucination opens up his mind and it stays open it's almost as if he's kind of thrown off all his fears have been gone through this process and he seems to now to write from this time onwards with a great freedom but in particular he seems to revel in the squalor and the dirt and the disease and he says I am in love with India I am in love with all the dirt and the smells and the sounds and this is a complete change in attitude and he even says I'm now feel like a [ __ ] crowing on a dunghill that this is my Empire and that I can write about this land I really feel like a king in his own country Kipling's experience of opium inspired his first published short story the tale of an opium addict eking out his last days in a drug den I've seen so many common and out and I've seen so many die here on the mat that I should be afraid of dying in the open now I've seen some things that people would call strange enough but nothing is strange when you're on the black smoke except the black smoke and if it was it wouldn't matter the gate of the hundred sorrows is the story that changed everything for Kipling I think it's the first time he realizes the power of fiction as opposed to journalism to tell us truths it's the first of his tales of outcasts and derelicts Europeans have slipped through the cracks in India it's the first example of his original vision of the dark side of Indian life and it's all the more remarkable that he managed to publish it in the civil and military Cosette opium gave Kipling access to layers of Indian life which the British had so willfully ignored Kipling wrote underneath our excellent administrative system under the piles of reports and statistics the thousands of troops the doctors runs totally untouched and unaffected the life of the people of the land a life as full of impossibilities and wonders as the Arabian Nights immediately outside of our own English life is the dark and crooked and fantastic and wicked and/or inspiring life of the native to understand this dark India and conquer ones fear a bit when putting one's prejudices to one side and reaching out [Music] it wasn't just drugs that were enticing Kipling to a darker more exciting side of Indian life here in the shadow regardons prostitutes plied their trade amongst the toons and in the shadows and a young Kipling only 18 at the time escaped the city in search of adventure and distraction [Music] he is a teenager and his hormones are raging and he's a very horny young man and he wants to you know you almost feel his hormones are dragging him into the city we know this from a series of coded entries in his journals and letters to friends 21st of August 1885 at the height of the heat when most of the Anglo Indians would have been away in Shimla Kipling writes usual Philander in the gardens hoping to count the risks of my resolution clearly worried about the after-effects of his encounter elsewhere one of his codes five initials WR WMT whatever that meant or whoever that was a thoroughly satisfactory conclusion in a letter to a friend at the same time he writes I am no more capable of abandoning my writing that I can put aside the occasional woman which is good for health and the softening of ferocious manners it is my amusement and like all amusements the nicer for being discouraged Kipling may have enjoyed the illicit nature of his encounters but it's clear the other men of the station knew his wanderings in the old city and they didn't approve one of them saying at the time everyone thought he was going for a mucker with the harlotries therein [Music] there's no doubt at all that one of the ways that young ruddy keeping learns about India is through the prostitutes of Lahore the phrase that we all now use the oldest profession in the world it comes from Kipling's let me talk about prostitutes in Lahore why don't you talk about a very sophisticated group of women they're more like the geishas of Japan they're there to entertain men and so they entertain them with music and dancing they have poetry and the young men would go to prostitutes and sit at their court as it won and swap stories they would smoke bong and they would recite poetry to each other and listen to music and young kipling breaks into that circle and he writes with huge sympathy about these women the girls in question would have been in these mountains yes indeed there were entertainers Patrick whose function was to both example recite poetry or music they were all challenging as singers as dancers so if there's a wider range of services they offer than simply physical gratification this feels to me a little sanitized now it doesn't quite have the edge that a proper red-light district would have yes well red-light districts an offensive proper but on the assumption of being improper when you think about it Kipling's own writing and don't forget he was writing in the victorian time and then prudery was the mantra there was an element of sanitization in his writing and so it was quite understandable that whatever he said would have elliptical meanings and enough to be there today most of the people who are the denizens of this place use this as their offices but they live elsewhere but it's still striking that we've got the huge mosque right here and then the red-light district on its laughs yes indeed the court used to be here and the residents as well on the other side I think it was probably an element of temptation if you could resist temptation and why not do you think it was part of the hall which made it easy thing to do that had he been somewhere like Bombay there have been more of a temptation to stick with the English had he been in Bombay he would have much more circumscribed in his ability to move around the city and certainly at the levels that he wanted to savor the hall the stories that he came up with in the hall were obviously born of his own personal experience and born of his personal investigation into areas that young boys of that age young men of that age and particularly English boys we're not really exposed to so in a way it was quite felicitous that not only did Kipling arrive there at this age where he was open to all these adventures but Lahore was a city that was open to being adventured in it is a perfect matter for him he was in the right place at the right time at the hall one has to be honest far it's voice whilst Kipling enjoy taking a walk on the wild side in the walled city when he came to write about similar transgressions the results were invariably much darker beyond the pale is the story of tragic Oh an Englishman who not unlike Kipling knew too much and saw too much stumbling through the walled city one night Trojans himself in a dark alley at a dead end beguiled by a beautiful singing voice the voice turns out to belong to piss a sir a widow of only 15 with whom forge a go begins an extraordinary love affair that night was the beginning of many strange things and of a double life so wild that Roger go today sometimes wonders if it were not all a dream Raja Goud returns to the walled city for the fifth time in three weeks desperate for a sign from his lover finding himself underneath the same grating on which he first heard her beautiful singing he shouts and is answered to his horror two arms are thrust through the grating hands cut off revealing bloody stumps as he recoils a spear is thrust at him missing him by a fraction but wounding him in the groin jo jo limps off into the night cursing his lost love in Kipling's world despite his own adventures it invariably ends in tragedy and his characters crossed the limits of what he knowingly refers to as decent society this young man has broken it to boot he has fallen in love with a native woman from the red-light district and it's going to end in tragedy and these stories nearly always do end in tragedy but this is the first man to want to write about this here is a European writing about love across the racial divide characters like tragic are no longer the hopeful young men arriving from England to make their fortune India has changed them just as it was changing Kipling he was starting to see the contradictions and the tragedies of the Raj [Music] then in 1885 just as Kipling was starting to find his subject in Lahore he was diverted and given an opportunity to observe Anglo Indian high society up close he was sent by the Gazette to be the special correspondent for the summer season at the hill town of Shimla the posting would allow him to get under the skin of the ruling elite and explore a world that was as strange as that of the walled city it would offer a new direction for him as a writer of short stories [Music] Kipling would take the train from the [ __ ] to Ambala and then a horse some cars up the steep mountain road to Shimla sadly these days you can't take the train from Pakistan to India I've had to come across the land border crossing at Wagga I'm coming up on the lush foothills of the Himalayas now must been an incredibly welcome sight to Kipling and the other Europeans escaping the dusty plains looking forward to getting up out of the heat in 1903 they finally built a railway up to Shimla I'm going to take the train rather than take my chances with a horse and cart [Music] perched 7,000 feet up in the Himalayas Shimla was the summer capital of the British Raj and every spring hundreds of civil servants Clark's and administrators made the 1200 mile journey from Calcutta to rule India in a more temperate climate [Music] one viceroy regarded this mountain retreat as a preposterous place that the capital of the indian empire should be thus hanging by its eyelids to the side of the hill is too absurd Shimla was an exclusive world of expensive guest houses and hotels like all the hill stations it was designed to be an oasis of Englishness with home county style architecture rose gardens picnics Lawn Tennis and Croquet similar was probably the most English town in India all the houses were sort of I think I can best describe them as children Beeson although they did have corrugated iron moves the flowers in the garden where English flowers are as his sweet peas roses that was afternoon tea log farce when you first went there everything was as English as it could be and the cathedral was English looking people quite often got married there unlike Lahore with its small stuffy world of 70 administrators this was a bustling playground for the cream of Anglo Indian society it was the court wasn't it where deals were done and where there was an enormous amount of the kind of life that you do have in a court balls for example balls and parties and people paying visits on each other and it being important who comes and visits you and who doesn't and really the top of a tree is if you can be intimate with the Viceroy the Queen's representative and her family which Kipling's parents were of course Roger Bassin is a writer and historian who is an expert on the British and Shimla during the Raj what was this place I can kick things down for one the number of people would have been perhaps a 50th or what they are there now what would that have been in the 1880s maybe about 20,000 people and after that maybe three or four thousand Europeans and the rest Indians [Music] and this we've been the main thoroughfare for the British up and down absolutely absolutely the Anglo Indians who couldn't make it to Shimla in the season were dying to know what was happening there and Kipling sent regular reports on the festivities to the civil and military Gazette this week's list of amusements includes the usual Monday pop a dance at Government House on Wednesday two nights theatricals a variety entertainment at the Gaiety theatre this afternoon and the trade ball at Ben Moore tonight amateur theatricals were a high point to the Shimla season and here at the Gaiety theatre Kipling appeared in a French farce called a scrap of paper though one observer described his performance as horrid and vulgar I'm sure you do as far as I'm concerned today the theatre still performs every other play in English out of my way you bet in department gigolo squirrels squealing look what you've done to my squirrel do you know before I call the manager amateur dramatics played an important role in British Indian life beyond just giving vent to the frustrated and no doubt misplaced theatrical ambitions of the bored wives Kipling enjoyed acting because it allowed him to get close to women theatre whether it was putting on a play in an officer's mess or in a purpose-built venue like this one in Shimla was really one of the only chances within the confines of the Victorian society that the British imposed here where men and women could get clothes for flirting and romance after his first stay in Shimla Kipling writes the month was a round of picnics dances and theatricals and so on and I flirted with the bottled up energy of the year on my lips while Shimla had the outward appearance of English respectability in fact it was a hotbed of intrigue and scandal the town was a celebrated destination for the fishing fleet girls who had traveled from Britain on the lookout for husbands and for its grass widows wives who could misbehave while their husbands work down on the plains cinema was really full of grass widows because anybody who could afford it sent their wife and children they sent them up the hills so they didn't have to suffer the horrible hot weather in the plains and most people were between about 25 and 45 and when they went up to Simla there were these attractive young women there were the officers who wouldn't coming up on leaves they come up on three weeks leave and there they were in this town with loads of proximity and husbands not there you can lady reading once described similar as place where every jack has someone else's Jill [Music] the young unmarried wipes junior members of the administration and the military could go and do what's called poodle faking which is to make love to the married wise now their husbands are in the plains you have this great phrase duty and red tape that's life down in the plains picnics and adultery that's life up in the hills and there's a huge contrast standards start to slip and he up in the Hills you can get away with it and kipping sees it as a paradise and he says this is like Elysium they knows where the gods live everything goes hip Ling was able to rub shoulders with the power elite of British India at work and at play and the pretensions and foibles of their world would provide fertile material for his fiction at first he was intoxicated by it describing it as a place of glamour wine and witchery the MAL was the place to be seen and every afternoon Kipling with promenade here with the other anglo-indians picking up political and social gossip for the newspaper this is where the world and its dog came to eat the air of Arcana of Arcana eat in the air you to know and that was their promenade clean fresh air throw in a few flirtations for good measure it would make a good promenade there was even a part of town known as scandal point so this was the central hub of gossip for the whole of Shimla absolutely this is where all the townspeople gathered especially the women for the traffic jam of rickshaws all crowding this place exchanging scandal and all these elegantly dressed middle-aged ladies trying to figure out who's going to run off with whom who would like to run off with whom and the way Kipling presents it it's not the kind of conception of Victorian society where you have I mean there was a lot of sexual intrigue it seems much more free than we would imagine these days it most certainly was if anything similar was a stealing place [Music] and after three months of what he called the gay season in the hills Kipling was beginning to see through it always more comfortable as an outsider he was now turning what he saw into biting satirical short stories similar is the place where people that they hair down but even bloody Kipling realizes that actually it's a kind of false society it's not really genuine and he very quickly gets jaded by it and it's very fascinating here's a youngster thought he could you know this was going to be paradise but he very quickly turns his pen his pen becomes very waspish and he starts to criticize this society more and more to the extent of the stories he writes about similar society are really they're letting the side down terribly there was a commissioner in Shimla in those days an ugly man the ugliest man in Asia with two exceptions his name was Saget bar Saget Anthony bar Saget and six letters to follow departmentally he was one of the best men the government of India owned and socially he was likened to a bland dashing gorilla mrs. house B was clever witty brilliant and sparkling beyond most of her kind four possessed of many Devils of malice and mischievousness she could be nice though even to her own sex but that is another story he's a very thinly veiled portraits of quite important people he must have had portals to write as he did about them or steal all of Kipling little stories are true and anything here and again comes into Kipling as a writer his ability to sort of take off from real-life situations Semih is perhaps a perfect case in point where he was able to do managing Kipling's disillusionment with Shimla comes through in many of the satirical short stories of life there during the summer season and they're different in style to the other stories he was writing at the time what I think I've understood more clearly since coming out here is that Kipling's real genius was in getting close to his subject perhaps that was because of his grounding as a journalist he writes the common soldier so well because he spent these long hours chatting drinking beer with the soldiers stationed in Lahore he writes the walled city well because he was one of the few Europeans who really explored it and he's able to portray with a slightly acid tongue the British and Shimla because he was part of that society many of Kipling stories were published alongside his journalism in the civil and military Gazette but it wasn't until 1887 when he was 21 but he started grouping them with new and more ambitious pieces into a single book its title plain tales from the hills was opposite these were deceptively simple stories that aimed to tell readers about life in Anglo India as it really was [Music] Kipling liked to head out of town on horseback visit the rural villages and see the real India one such trip gave him the idea for the short story lisper in which a young Englishman Falls from his horse and is rescued by beautiful Hill girl when a hill girl grows lovely she is worth traveling 50 miles over bad ground to look upon Lisbeth had a Greek face one of those faces people paint so often and see so seldom the hill girl a convert to Christianity falls passionately in love with the Englishman and declares her intention to marry him much to the horror of the missionaries who raised her the portrayal of Lisbeth is treated sympathetically by Kipling and the English are portrayed as untrustworthy contraries the received idea of Kipling as the bigoted Victorian here it is the West that lets down the east [Music] only eight pages long Lizbeth is a story that retains its power to unsettle it was a provocative opening to his first book grouped together the stories that follow of adultery loneliness and betrayal did not add up to a flattering portrait of the Raj I don't think people knew what they were getting in and who they were shocked by what he said there was the sense that he'd let the side down and that he shouldn't have published the stories and you know the Viceroy is telling mrs. Kipling you really shouldn't have let your son do these stories and I think people were very startled when that book came out because they were so subversive they were so cynical in describing the realities of Anglo Indian experience in writing plain tales from the hills nothing was taboo Kipling knew that some who came to find a new life in India found despair instead suicides were not uncommon but always covered up [Music] in thrown away a young soldier new to India fails to cope because he doesn't seem to understand that India is a country where you shouldn't take anything too seriously after he blows his brains out his senior officer has to bury the body covering up the evidence and pretending to his family back home that he died of cholera Kipling knew all about what happened to people when they were young and new to the country to survive he seems to be saying you had to live by a new moral code the real India was unfamiliar and threatening not that the fools back home understood that they were fed made-up stories of honor and bravery thrown away is one of the few plain tales from the hills that was never published in the civil and military cassette and it marks an important change this dark brilliant story proving Kipling so different from the reactionary he's made out to be was written not just for the anglo-indians but the armchair imperialists back in Britain [Music] plain tales didn't make Kipling popular with the British in India and as word about the new stories spread and he grew less respectful towards his hosts his Indian education was coming to an end [Music] his proprietor George Allen starts to get pretty worried to the extent that eventually kipping is too hot to handle he's being so rude about people like the Viceroy the commander in chief British society in general that Allen basically system look young Kipling I think it's time he went to England we can't handle you here seven years after he had first arrived Kipling went back to Lahore to say goodbye to his family and to reflect on an extraordinary seven years I've had a good time I've tasted success in the beauty of money I've mixed with fighters and statesmen administrators and women who control them it was vivid and lively and gloomy and savage I tried to get to know folk from the barrack room and the brothel to the ballroom and the Viceroy council and I have in a little measure succeeded my training has been extensive and peculiar and now I'm going to come home see how it will work [Music] Kipling left the hall on the 3rd of March 1889 destined for fame and fortune his reputation would wane with the Empire and his politics would alienate later generations but it was the stories that grew out of his experiences here in Lahore and in the foothills of the Himalayas in Shimla which remained his master works works which are far more modern and complex far more sympathetic to the layers of Indian life and Kipling is usually given credit for arriving back home in October he found that Britain had changed too the Empire was more cherished and celebrated than ever and the reading public were fascinated to find out what life was really like out in the colonies Kipling found that his plain tales were a popular as well as a critical sensation the eternal outsider had discovered a welcoming audience people said now we have somebody who will tell us about India and there's Oscar Wilde's famous review but when you're reading plane tales from the hills one feels as if one was sitting under a palm tree reading by superb flashes of vulgarity but Kipling was the hottest thing and Kipling was really the first hottest thing ever because he arrived in London at a time when mass media were really beginning to be developed and so it was a first writer to have a kind of global fame and I think anything he wrote he could publish and publishers were just queuing up to publish his work it was the boldness of his stories that shocked and enthralled his British readers and they couldn't get enough Dinkelman Lord Byron Singh I was a comet of the season you Rudyard Kipling he is the comet of the season he astonishes everybody because this is a new kind of realism that they haven't known in in in London and he really has an astonishing impact [Music] [Applause] no writer not Shakespeare not Dickens has ever enjoyed such Fame in their own lifetime after a period in America he was to live out his life here in the Sussex countryside he became the literary lion of the Empire as the Empire itself fell into decline and his fame has never waned Kim his story of an orphaned boy growing up on the streets of Lahore would be his literary masterpiece and win him the Nobel Prize [Music] but everything he achieved was founded on his teenage adventures as a cub reporter who broke all the rules writing short stories that would change forever the way India is imagined [Music] Bollywood actresses talk about the impact the nineties had on their careers with the BBC Asian Network that's tomorrow at 1:00 and famous faces try out retirement in India as the real marigold hotel now on BBC iPlayer next they're the most uncomfortable love song ever performed Nick helm joins Russell cane live at the Apollo

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Id: VGW-AZ-bucc

Length: 59min 30sec (3570 seconds)

Published: Sun May 20 2018