"East is East, and West is West." Rudyard Kipling

“Do you like Kipling?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never kippled.”

“Rudyard Kipling.”

“Is it?”

This ancient and hand-tooled joke was useful to me; it taught me how to say ‘Rudyard’. (I learnt how to pronounce John Geilgud’s name when I read of him turning down a social invitation by saying ‘Geilgud doesn’t feel good”.) But I have never really Kippled until recently. I have read ‘If’, still one of the best formulas for manhood extant, and I have seen Disney’s "The Jungle Book", but for me Kipling was a little more than a name associated with Empire and the White Man’s Burden; a concept rather than a writer.

Which is perhaps how he is for most modern readers. Kipling was one of the last writers who enjoyed a mass audience, but he is not nearly as widely read now. He has attracted the attention of the big screen: ‘The Jungle Book”, “Kim” and “Gunga Din” have all been made into films and television. Another big-screen adaptation of his work was John Huston’s film  "The man who would be king"with Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer, and the wonderful Indian actor Saeed Jaffrey. I saw this movie some years ago (presented by Bill Collins as I recall) and its story surprised me. It is a boy's own adventure with two adventurers, British rogues, who head to Kafiristan, Ruritania of the East, to become kings to gain power and riches. They conquer many tribes and get their gold and a throne. It starts to go wrong when one of them decides their actions are in fact ordained by fate, a spiritual quest.  The ending is devastating. 

I was surprised because it seemed to me, amid the adventure, humour and derring-do, there was a searing critique of the British Empire, and this from the pen of a man who has the reputation of being the Empire’s chief booster. It was he after all who coined the phrase “white man’s burden”. This was a story of men driven first by greed to conquer a country, who then decide they are the tools of God, and are destroyed by their ambitions. I cannot think of a better potted history of the British Empire, particularly in India. Perhaps, I thought, Huston and his screen writers had changed Kipling’s story to better suit modern values. So when I spotted "The man who would be king; and other stories” in my local library, I  decided to finally read the story. Surprisingly, the film is faithful to the short story, if a little more fun. The criticisms of British Imperialism were all in the story as Kipling wrote it. More astonishingly, he was only twenty-three at the time. If Kipling was ever a jingoistic Empire man, it was an attitude he lost early.

All the stories in this collection were written in the one year, which is also shows what a hard worker Kipling was. His experience as a journalist comes through strongly with his gift for observation, with characters drawn from all levels of Anglo-Indian life, including the natives. Most of the stories are told by a detatched observer, but some from first-person. It is a fascinating glimpse of a world that while not entirely lost, is utterly changed. This Oxford edition comes with plenty of endnotes, explaining the many references to Indian language, regions and British Raj patois and customs now all lost in the mist.

My false impression of Kipling was of course based entirely on ignorance. I wonder how often we make judgements not only on artists but also on politicians and other public figures not on what they said or do, but what we hear they have said or done. Kipling, the apostle of the Empire was in fact a perceptive critic. The literary heir of this political conservative is George Orwell, the socialist. Both men experienced life in the British Raj and both wrote about it clear-eyed, showing us not only the exoticism of the sub-Continent and its people, but the inequities of British rule, Orwell using the essay, Kipling the short story and longer works. Both are definitely worth reading.

It also made me think how much better a short story or novella is for adaptation to the big screen.  “Million dollar baby” and “Brokeback Mountain” were also based on short stories and the adaptations were able to be faithful to their sources. It makes sense – a short story can be used in full in a feature film, whereas with novels it is always a case of what do they leave out. Not that adapting a novella means you will always have a successful adaptation. ‘The Great Gatsby” has always defied filming, and I do not believe Buz Lurhman using 3D is going to change that trend. But I may yet be proved wrong.

Update: Since I wrote this, I have discovered that Kafiristan was in fact a real country. 'Kafir' means 'infidel' as this was a small independent non-Muslim country. It forms part of modern day Afghanistan.