The Balladeer of East and West

SPEAKING VOLUMES

James Kenneth Stephen had two tenuous claims to fame "" the minor poet was once considered a possible suspect in the Jack the Ripper case, and he wrote at least one poem that still survives.

'To R.K.' contains the well-known lines: "Will there never come a season/ Which shall rid us from the curse/ Of a prose which knows no reason/ And an unmelodious verse...When the Rudyards cease from Kipling/ And the Haggards Ride no more." Stephen's lament was in vain; Kipling, already a prolific and much-lionised writer at the age of 34, survived another 37 years.

Over the decades, Kipling's reputation has been revised in the light of political correctness. Kim, The Jungle Book, Puck of Pook's Hill, Just So Stories, Plain Tales From The Hills, the maudlin but relentlessly popular 'If' and perhaps The Man Who Would be King still survive; much of his more embarrassing work, from Gunga Din to 'Fuzzy-Wuzzy' have been tactfully forgotten.

In 1987, Charles Allen was asked to compile an anthology of the best of Indian stories. "I made two important discoveries," he writes. "First, that a large corpus of Kipling's early writing remained unread and awaiting rediscovery, and, secondly, that he wrote as much about Indian India as British India." Allen's Kipling Sahib is "a biography of Kipling in India and India in Kipling", and his two decades of research have resulted in a richly satisfying, revelatory work.

One of the most pleasurable ways to read this book is to look for Allen's insights into the characters in Kipling's work. Kim, for example, is reputed to be based on "a white adolescent boy" who roamed the Anarkali bazaar area "hatless and barefooted, with the cunning of a street Arab". Allen, always the careful historian, notes that Kim may have had a more prosaic origin in Meerut lawyer John Lang's 1859 novel, Who Was the Child?, about the orphaned son of a sergeant who was raised by Indians and restored to European society much later in his life.

Mowgli may have been inspired by H Rider Haggard, a writer with whom Kipling felt a natural kinship: Haggard's 1892 story Nada the Lily took inspiration from "a Zulu story of a wild boy who ran with a pack of wild dogs". Kipling, a voracious researcher, must also have been aware of the "wolf boys" found in Sekandra in 1867 and 1872 and the "wolf boys" of Sultanpur and Chupra "" in 1892, coincidentally, reports of a girl brought up by bears came from Jalpaiguri.

Perhaps the most interesting of Allen's stories concerns Mirza Moorad Alee Beg 'Gaekwaree' (also spelled Mirza Moorad Alibeg and Mirza Murad Ali Beg, depending on the source). The young Kipling's dark skin led to unkind whispers that he was "eight annas to the rupee", or half-Indian, and perhaps this created a kind of sympathy in him for those on the cusp of British India and Indian India, from Mowgli to Kim. Allen astutely traces Kipling's "growing interest in Indian India" partly to a novel called Lalun the Beragun, or The Battle of Panipat: A Legend of Hindoostan, by Mirza Moorad Alee Beg, published in 1884.

Mirza Murad Ali Beg captured the imagination of at least one other writer "" T S Eliot named his cat after him. It may have taken a while before Kipling discovered the truth: the Mirza was the pseudonym of a theosophist called Godolphin Mitford. He was an Englishman born in Madras who converted to Islam, became an atheist, dabbled in mysticism, joined the Theosophical Society, wrote a few disturbing and brilliant articles, and then went insane. He attempted to kill H P Blavatsky with a sword; Blavatsky and Mitford both survived the consequences of this attack. Mitford subsequently joined the Roman Catholic Church. His novel inspired several of Kipling's works, from The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows to On the City Wall and A Song of Kabir.

In Allen's view, "Kipling Sahib" lost the best part of himself as a writer and a person when he left India. "Kim was the last real victory of the intuitive, Indian side of [Kipling's] head," he writes. "It was also Kipling's farewell to India, to his childhood, perhaps even to his Daemon... Leaving India behind, he remained bound to India, so that the best of what he imagined and wrote had its roots in the dark side of his head and what he had seen and heard in India."

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com

The author is chief editor, Westland and EastWest Books; these are her personal views