Rudyard Kipling and the English journalism in India

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English short-story writer, poet and novelist, chiefly
remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, his tales and poems of British soldiers in
India and his tales for children. Becoming the highest paid writer in the world, Kipling was
recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.
He was born in Bombay, India and he spent his childhood there until the age of 6. After that,
Kipling was taken to England by his parents and was left for five years at a foster home at
Southsea, the horrors of which he described in the story Baa Baa, Black Sheep. Having such
an unhappy chidlhood, Kipling's solace came in books and stories. With few friends, he devoted
himself to reading. He particularly adored the work of Daniel Defoe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Wilkie Collins.
He then went on to the United Services College at Westward Ho, North Devon, an inexpensive
and inferior boarding school. It haunted Kipling for the rest of his life - an unruly paradise in
which the highest goals of English education are met amid a tumult of teasing, bullying, and
beating.
Kipling returned to India in 1882. His parents, although not officially important, belonged to the
highest Anglo-Indian society and Rudyard thus had opportunities for exploring the whole range
of that life. All the while he had remained keenly observant of the thronging spectacle of native
India, which had engaged his interest and affection from earliest childhood. For Kipling, India
was a wonderful place. Along with his younger sister, he was delighted to explore the local
markets with his nanny. He learned the language, and in this bustling city of Anglos, Muslims,
Hindus, Buddhists and Jews, Kipling fell in love with the country and its culture.
With the help of his father, he found a job with a local newspaper. He was quickly filling the
journals he worked for with prose sketches and light verse. All Kipling's experiences during this
time in India formed the backbone for a series of stories he began to write and publish. They
were eventually assembled into a collection of 40 short stories called Plain Tales from the Hills,
which gained wide popularity in England.
In 1889, seven years after he had left England, Kipling returned to its shores in hopes of
leveraging the modest amount of celebrity his book of short stories had earned him. In London,
he met Wolcott Balestier, an American agent and publisher who quickly became one of Kipling's
great friends and supporters. The two men grew incredibly close and even traveled together to
the United States.
Around this time, Kipling's star power started to grow. In addition to Plain Tales from the Hills,
Kipling also published a second collection of short stories, Wee Willie Winkie and American

Notes, which chronicled his early impressions of America. In 1892, he also published his first
major poetry success, Barrack-Room Ballads.
After Wolcott dies of typhoid fever, Rudyard grows closer to his sister, Carrie, and marries her.
After travelling to Canada and Japan, they eventually settle in America and Kipling falls in love
with the country. His personal life flourished, as they had three children, but also his professional
life. His work during this time included The Jungle Book (1894), The Naulahka: A Story of the
West and East (1892) and The Second Jungle Book (1895), among others. Kipling was delighted
to be around childrena characteristic that was apparent in his writing. His tales enchanted boys
and girls all over the English-speaking world. By the age of 32, Kipling was the highest-paid
writer in the world.
Problems soon started to appear in his life and changed his writing style. First, he got into a fight
with his brother-in-law and attracted a lot of pressure from the press who followed the subject.
Later, he lost his daughter Josephine who died from a severe pneumonia. In 1915, during the
First World War, he pushed his son John to become a soldier, but all turned against him when his
son had gone missing.
With a lot of pain and guilt in his soul, he continued to write for the next two decades, but he
never again returned to the bright, cheery children's tales he had once so delighted in crafting.
Health issues eventually caught up to both Kipling and Carrie, the result of age, but also of grief.
Over his last few years, Kipling suffered from a painful ulcer that eventually took his life on
January 18th, 1936. Kipling's ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey in Poets' Corner next to
the graves of Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens.