The Prosveta Library was my magic box. In the late sixties, I freely borrowed children's books from a set my mother had bought from a traveling salesman. I read them in order. Title number 23 was unusual. "The Jungle Book." The name on the cover was also unusual. Joseph Rudyard Kipling. There was no one with that name in my childhood.
And only the characters from the world between the covers! The human cub Mowgli. He was my best friend. A brave and cheerful boy in the middle of the wilderness. My Bosnian town was not a jungle, but it had something wild in it - both wild and dangerous and beautiful. I could understand Mowgli's world.
I belong to the last generation lucky enough to read the book before Disney offered its cartoon version, in which Mowgli, Bagheera the panther, Shere Khan the tiger, and Baloo the bear were visually frozen for all other generations. On my inner canvas, they looked different.
Mowgli was a boy who grew up among wolves. He was rejected by the pack. He was not accepted by humans. Mowgli - a man who spoke the languages of beasts, snakes and birds - paid the price for being different. In the end, he belonged to no one. Freedom was the same as loneliness. I was a stranger too. I no longer belonged where I came from, and I did not yet belong to the community of origin. But Mowgli helped me understand that this story was not just happening to me.
RUDDARD KIPLING - CHILD OF EMPIRE
It was only much later that I learned something about the author. In my childhood, the characters in the books were real and alive, and the author's name was just a strange inscription on the cover.
Kipling was born in British India in 1865, in a city then called Bombay, now Mumbai. And my mind immediately wanders to another writer - Lewis Bromfield - and his novel "A Night in Bombay". I shake off the thought of a long-read book that has been buried by time - that flour of oblivion. I return to Kipling.
He was the first child of Alice and John Lockwood Kipling. His father was a sculptor, illustrator, and author. The couple moved to Bombay so that his father could become a lecturer at the Art School founded by the Iranian-Indian entrepreneur Jijiboy Jamsetji. He was the first man in British India to be given a peerage and addressed as "Sir".
The boy Rudyard and his younger sister Alice had a Portuguese nanny and an Indian servant. Although the servant belonged to the lowest Hindu caste, and employing such staff was considered indecent, the family had financial difficulties and disregarded caste conventions. It will be noted that the boy felt English was a foreign language.
The parents sent their children to Great Britain for ten years of schooling when Rudyard was five. For the boy, it was an expulsion from paradise. The young Mr. Kipling, who returned to India in 1882, immediately began working as a journalist. He experienced his arrival in Bombay as a relief. His mother published his poems at her own expense. He found out about this later.
He traveled through India and published articles about it. He soon made a name for himself as a chronicler of British India. He joined the Masonic lodge. The symbolism of Freemasonry permeates some of his works.
LITERARY FAME
He returned to England as an already well-known journalist and author of six books of short stories, and in 1890 published his first novel, The Light Went Out. This work went unnoticed, and it was only the author's later fame that drew attention to him.
The story from that time, "The Man Who Would Be King," served as the basis for the eponymous film by the notable film director John Huston, filmed in 1975.
In England, he was immediately accepted into important literary circles, and famous writers such as Henry Rider Haggard and Henry James advocated for him. His participation in Masonic lodges should not be underestimated.
In 1892, he married an American woman, Caroline Balestier. Everyone called her Carrie. The young couple set out on a trip around the world, but only made it as far as America, having lost a lot of money on the stock market. They had three children. For the next four years, they lived on a farm in Vermont, where both parts of The Jungle Book were written in 1894 and 1895.
In 1896, the Kiplings returned to England. The reason was an unpleasant family dispute over inheritance, which was being circulated in the tabloid press - the writer Kipling was already a kind of literary pop star under constant scrutiny by journalists.
In 1898, Kipling went on a trip to Africa. There he befriended Cecil John Rhodes, the founder of the white state in southern Africa, which was named after him - Rhodesia. Quite in the spirit of the times, Rhodes considered the British to be the first race of the world. His political ideal was the unification of the Anglo-American world under a common imperialist rule. Kipling undoubtedly thought similarly. That year, with his patriotic poems such as "The White Man's Burden", he became a celebrated, and later disputed, fighter for the British Empire.
THE DEATH OF A GIRL WHO MADE HIM WRITE BOOKS FOR CHILDREN
His wife insisted on a family visit to America in the winter of 1899. The father and children fell seriously ill on the journey through an unusually harsh winter. Kipling lay sick in a New York hotel, besieged by fans and journalists. Wishes for a speedy recovery came from all sides. They were sent by colleagues such as Arthur Conan Doyle, but also by sovereigns such as the German Emperor Wilhelm II. Fame did not help. The eldest daughter died. Kipling blamed his wife for her death for the rest of his life.
His escape into writing was successful. A series of short stories such as "The Lost Legion" earned him a reputation as a master of the form.
The novel "Kim" was written in 1901. The story takes place in Lahore, the capital of what is now the Pakistani part of Punjab. An Irish boy who grows up as an orphan on the streets of that city is seen by everyone as a "native." Kim has traveled throughout India.
This novel is Kipling's most complex work. It solidified his world fame. Suffice it to say that it was the favorite book of Jawaharlal Nehru, who, after Gandhi, is the most important fighter for Indian independence.
During the Second Boer War, in which Great Britain annexed the Boer territories in southern Africa, thus gaining access to diamond deposits, Kipling spent a considerable amount of time in the area as a war correspondent from 1900. He also published collections of poetry. One of his most popular poems, "If," was written during this period.
The crowning glory of his literary work came early - he had only just entered his fifth decade of life. In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
ACCEPT THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN
How did the author of the all-time children's book, the first English-language writer to win the Nobel Prize at the age of 42, become the poet of British imperialism? And a repulsive figure for all anti-imperialist and anti-colonial intellectuals? Indications that Kipling was deeply imbued with ideas of white Anglo-Saxon superiority could be read even earlier in his work. His "Ballad of East and West" was quite clear: "Oh, East is East, West is West, and never shall they meet." It seems to me that a visible path of thought leads from this verse to Samuel P. Huntington's dark hypothesis of the inevitable clash of civilizations.
In 1899, Kipling published an imperialist anthem with racist overtones: The White Man's Burden. Few people today know that Kipling is actually addressing the rising United States in the poem. Washington had just driven Spain out of the Philippines and Cuba by force of arms, assuming a hegemonic role where the spent European colonial powers had to give way. From the Spanish and the British, the Americans must take over the "white man's burden," the civilizing of those peoples who, as Kipling says in the poem, are "half children, half devils." To receive their reward:
The reproach of those you promote,
The hatred of those you protect
These "grumpy peoples" will not be able to appreciate the sacrifice made by the white man, leading them. "Take up the White Man's burden". It is a mixture of ethical missionaryism and imperial-patriotic kitsch with which British soldiers and colonists consoled themselves in exotic spots on the planet, where they planted the British flag with bare force. In fact, the song is reduced to a cultural alibi for cruel imperialist practices.
WORLD WAR I - DEATH OF A BOY
At the beginning of World War I, Kipling placed himself at the disposal of the London Propaganda Department. There he was in the company of the cream of literary Britain. He persuaded his still-underage, nearsighted son to volunteer, helping him to give a false date of birth in order to be accepted. His son John was killed in the first action in France in 1915. Tormented by remorse, Kipling left an inscription on his son's tombstone: "If anyone asks why we died, tell him - because our fathers lied."
If we look back at the time and historical context in which the poem was written, we will be surprised by the fact that, for example, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the two-term American president who was celebrated after World War I as the apostle of the right of peoples to self-determination, applied this right exclusively to European peoples. People in India, Egypt, and many other countries had hope. But he denied everyone else the right to adulthood: “They are children, and we are adults.” Such an American elite only occasionally dressed American interventionism in a moral garb in the decades that followed, learning from their former colonial masters, the British.
On the other hand, Kipling followed the rise of the German Empire and its imperial ambitions with disgust. When the Nazis in Germany adopted Far Eastern symbols such as the swastika, the writer immediately ordered all Indian sun wheels - the original swastikas - to be removed from his books. Hitler was disgusted by him.
The great, controversial writer was not left alone by the tabloids. They even announced his death during his lifetime. He cynically commented that they should not forget to remove him from the subscriber list. In a growing misunderstanding with the world, he burned numerous manuscripts, letters, and diaries towards the end of his life.
Who knows what all went up in smoke.
IN DOUBT YOU SEE A TRACE OF TRUTH
When he died in 1936, Kipling was buried in Westminster. As befits one of the most important poets of the period known as Pax Britannica - British Peace. He was accompanied by Dickens, Handel, Newton, Darwin, Stephen Hawking. And British kings. The British Empire outlived him by only a few more decades. In India, a man emerged who refuted imperial prejudices about enslaved peoples - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore called him Mahatma - Great Soul. Gandhi was only four years younger than Kipling and buried British rule in India with nonviolent resistance. It was the beginning of the end of the Empire. Would Kipling have understood the changes in that world?
What would you say about today's politicians who do not respect any laws, not even the law of the jungle, let alone international law. They once again rely on naked force, the law of the stronger without any code.
James Joyce compared him to Tolstoy. George Orwell called him “the good bad poet.” Borges considered him “the critical bard of the British World Empire.” The Argentine was perhaps most accurate, recognizing the British reflex of repression: “His countrymen never fully forgave him for his constant appeal to Empire.”
A few years ago, activists in England painted over graffiti with Kipling's famous poem: "If", although the poem does not have the direct imperial connotations of "The White Man's Burden". It turned out in the end that Kipling's work carried into the future the burden of his own delusions. The British Empire was his home. Kipling's literature is therefore, in a specific way, a kind of epitaph to the former empire.
If you can keep your sanity, when around you
Everyone else is losing it and they blame you for it,
When they doubt if you believe in yourself,
And in doubt you see a trace of living truth
One of the messages from the beginning of the song is completely acceptable to me. In every doubt, the truth lives. Even when I doubt the creator of one of my best childhood friends - Mowgli.
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