Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University
"A Sahib's War"
(1901)
Rudyard
Kipling
(December 30, 1865– January 29, 1963)
Notes
"A Sahib's War" was first published in Windsor Magazine in December 1901 and later collected in Traffics and Discoveries.
11 Kaffirs:
Letter
To H. A. Gwynne, [November? 1901]
Dear Old Man—
[...]
The people are as usual miles ahead of the govt both in their outlook on the war and in their attitude as regards the necessity for conscription. I must say I am proud and pleased with the common ordinary gordam average white man—neither philosopher nor politician,—who has set his teeth to see this job through. [...]
—Rudyard Kipling, To H. A. Gwynne, letter, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. Vol. 3: 1900–10,
edited by Thomas Pinney, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, p. 80.
Life
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was bom in Bombay, India, on December 30, 1865. The son of John Lockwood Kipling and Alice Kipling (née Macdonald), he was named after Lake Rudyard in Staffordshire, where his parents became engaged.
[...]
During his first
five years, Kipling led a blissfully happy life in India, then the jewel
in the crown of the British Empire. As he later recalled: ‘Far across
green spaces round the house was a marvellous place filled with smells of
paints and oils, and lumps of clay with which I played. That was the
atelier of my Father’s School of Art, and a Mr “Terry Sahib” his
assistant, to whom my small sister was devoted, was our great friend.’
In 1868, the young boy made his first visit to England, where his sister
Alice (‘Trix’) was born. Three years later, six-year-old Rudyard Kipling
and his sister were again taken to England, this time to be educated. They
were left there for six long years, boarded as paying guests with Captain
andMrs P.A. Holloway at Lome Lodge, a foster home in South-sea, near
Portsmouth, while their parents returned to India. They gave their
children no explanation.
Kipling described Captain Holloway as ‘the only person in that house as
far as I can remember who ever threw me a kind word’. However, after the
Captain died, the deeply religious Mrs Holloway apparently took a dislike
to the young Kipling and allowed her teenage son to bully him.
‘I had never heard of Hell,’ wrote Kipling, ‘so I was introduced to it in
all its terrors – I and whatever luckless little slavey might be in the
house, whom severe rationing had led to steal food … Myself, I was
regularly beaten.’
[...]
After leaving school at the age of sixteen, Kipling returned to India in October to join his parents in Lahore, the principal city of the Punjab. Kipling’s father Lockwood had become curator of the Lahore museum (later described as a ‘wonder house’ in the opening chapter of Kim).Outside the walled city, one of the oldest in Islam, were stationed a battalion of infantry and an artillery battery. Inside, around seventy British civilians lived in neat bungalows alongside 200,000 people from all the Asiatic races.
[...]
The following Christmas, the newspaper produced a 126-page ‘Christmas
Annual’ entitled Quartette,written by ‘fourAnglo-Indian writers’. In fact,
the stories and poems were by Kipling, his mother and father, and his
sister Alice. Kipling contributed three supernatural tales: ‘The Strange
Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’, ‘The Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau’and, most
notably, The Phantom ’Rickshaw’.
[...]
‘Mercifully, the
mere act of writing was, and always has been, a physical pleasure to me,’
Kipling later recalled. ‘This made it easier to throw away anything that
did not turn out well.’
Kipling obsessively read and re-read his work, editing it as often as he
thought necessary until he had pared it down to a final draft that he was
satisfied with. ‘I have had tales by me for three or five years which
shortened themselves almost yearly,’he revealed.
[...]
Encouraged by his
parents and his editor-in-chief, Edward Kay Robinson, in the autumn of
1889 Kipling left India to become a roving correspondent and try to make a
career for himself as an author.
‘After all, there was no need for me to stay here for ever,’Kipling later
recalled, ‘and I could go away and measure myself against the doorsills of
London as soon as I had money.’
He travelled with the Hills to Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong and Canton,
Japan and San Francisco. While crossing the United States, they visited
Mrs Hill’s family home in Beaver, Pennsylvania, where he met her sister
Caroline Taylor, to whom he became informally engaged.
The group finally arrived in London in September and took rooms in
Villiers Street, off The Strand. Kipling’s reputation had preceded him,
and within a year he was already being acclaimed as one of the most
brilliant authors of his time and a literary heir to Charles Dickens.
[...]
Just eight days later, Kipling married Balestier’s sister Caroline in a London gripped by an influenza epidemic. ‘The undertakers had run out of black horses,’ observed Kipling, ‘and the dead had to be content with brown ones. The living were mostly abed.’
[...]
In America,
Scribner’s published a collection of Kipling’s work by subscription. The
stories were rearranged by topic, and some uncollected material was added.
At the age of thirty-two, he was now the highest-paid writer in the world.
During the first of many winter holidays in South Africa, Kipling
travelled to Rhodesia in 1898, where he struck up a friendship with the
diamond magnate and statesman Cecil Rhodes, who presented him with a house
near Cape Town.
This association only strengthened Kipling’s imperialist and racist
persuasions, which grew stronger with the passing of years. He genuinely
believed that it was the duty of every Englishman – or, more likely, every
white man – to bring European culture to the uncivilised natives who
populated the rest of the world. This glorification of Britain as a
colonial Empire reached its apogee in his poem ‘The White Man’s
Burden’(1899).
[...]
Kipling returned to South Africa for the first three months of 1900, where he continued war work and writing, including two weeks in Bloemfontein on the newspaper The Friend,published by the British Army. At the time, Kipling was criticised by many liberals for his support of the British military campaign against the Boers.
[...]
In 1907, Kipling was the first Englishman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. ‘It was a very great honour,’revealed the author, ‘in all ways unexpected.’ He travelled to Stockholm, Sweden, to accept his prize from the new King.
—Stephen Jones, "Rudyard Kipling: A Life in Stories," afterword, Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy,
introduction by Neil Gaiman, edited by Stephen Jones, Pegasus Books, 2006.
Study Questions
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Review Sheet
Characters
Umr Singh – "I am a Sikh" (11); “my name is
Umr Singh; I am—I was servant to Kurban Sahib” (11); "I had risen to a
Lance-Duffadar" (12); "God knows what they called me—orderly, chaprassi
(messenger), cook, sweeper" (28)
Walter Decies Corbyn,
Kurban Sahib –
"my Kurban Sahib—dead these three months!" (12); "Young—of a reddish
face—with blue eyes, and he lilted a little on his feet when he was
pleased, and cracked his fingerjoints" (12); "the baba put his hand
into mine—eighteen—twenty-five—twenty-seven years gone now" (13);
“‘Ho, Dada, I am sick, and the doctor gives me a certificate for many
months’” (14); "Late Captain 141st Punjab Cavalry" (28)
Sikandar
Khan
– “Sikandar Khan was his cook”; “nosing like a jackal on a lost scent”
(22)
Places
South
Africa –
"in this country, notably at the city of Yunasbagh (Johannesburg)" (13);
"we came to this country, even to Cape Town" (15)
train – "Is there any Sahib on this train" (11); "I will arrange this hay thus" (11)
Time
night –
"So it feel stark dark" (24)
noon –
"About noon we saw a thin, high smoke to the southward" (24)
Sample Student Responses to Rudyard Kipling's "A Sahib's War"
Response 1:
Study Question:
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Reference
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Media
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Rudyard Kipling |
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Kipling, Rudyard. “A Sahib’s War.” 1901. Short Stories 1: A Sahib’s War and Other Stories, edited by Andrew Rutherford, Penguin, 1982, pp. 11–29.
Further
Reading
Kipling, Rudyard. The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. Vol. 3: 1900–10, edited by Thomas Pinney, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Kipling, Rudyard. Selected Stories. Edited by Andrew Rutherford, Penguin Books, 2001.
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Last updated March 15, 2021