"A Sahib's War" by Rudyard Kipling

"A Sahib's War" was first published in Windsor Magazine in December 1901 and later collected in Traffics and Discoveries.

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,

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,

Study Questions

How does Kipling reveal that the first person narrator is not British?
In what way is Umr Singh's narrative unreliable? How is this conveyed?
"A Sahib's War" presents many kinds of sahibs and locals. How are each type portrayed? What distinguishes characters of the same race or ethnicity?
What does Kipling achieve by having the Boer War viewed through the eyes of a non-Sahib?
What character qualities are valued and which disapproved?
How does Kipling convey the sense that this story is spoken word? What oral characteristics does he use? What effect does this orality have on the story?

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)

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)

Student Name

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

June 12, 2010

Reading Response 1

Title

Text.

Media		Melvyn Bragg, "Rudyard Kipling," In Our Time, BBC (2014; audio clip, 45:52 min.)
Media		The Boer War, directed by Jonathan Lewis, Twenty Twenty Television, Channel Four (1999) 1: "Black, White and Gold" (46:03 min.) 2: "Turning Point" (49:08 min.) 3: "Behind the Wire" (1:31:20 min.) 4: "The Bitter End" (1:34:25 min.)

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.

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.