So it must be remembered that Kipling’s India was the impression of a youth (from the age of seventeen to twenty-four) with ‘quick observation but few scruples, great assurance but little conscience, eager enthusiasm but a judgement immature,’ to quote an early biographer, Hilton Brown, who had spent many years in India.
It is Kipling’s brilliance as a story-teller and stylist that carries the reader along and obscures some of his faults. He was an enthusiastic and unapologetic chronicler of the British Empire at the zenith of its power. As that power declined, Kipling was reviled by liberals at home in England, and the quality of his work was better appreciated in Europe; he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907. This distressed and annoyed a number of Kipling’s British contemporaries. They called him a jingoist, a music-hall entertainer. The French hailed him as ‘the Professor of Energy’!
Perhaps it is time to say that Kipling described India not as it was, but as he wanted it to be, and this is particularly true of the books he wrote after leaving India, such as Kim and The Jungle Books. He saw India in bright, vivid colours and beguiled us into seeing it the same way. But in his short stories, the stories he wrote during his ‘seven years hard’, he looks at British colonial society with a sharply satirical eye; his sympathy is with the ordinary soldier, the railwayman, the cultivator, the ascetic, the eccentric, the Lama in search of his river, the opium-addict in search of his rainbow . . . As V.S. Naipaul says in An Area of Darkness: ‘No writer more honest or accurate (than Kipling), no writer more revealing of himself and his society.’ It is 125 years since these stories were first published, and the fact that they are still being read today is proof of their timelessness. Some of Kipling’s work may have been mannered and didactic; but he had an infallible eye and an infallible ear. At times his own heart may have remained hidden, but he looked closely into the hearts of others. And the rest was genius.
Landour, Mussoorie
Ruskin Bond
Preface to the Original Edition
THIS IS NOT exactly a book of downright ghost-stories as the cover makes believe. It is rather a collection of facts that never quite explained themselves. All that the collector is certain of is, that one man insisted upon dying because he believed himself to be haunted; another man either made up a wonderful lie and stuck to it, or visited a very strange place; while the third man was indubitably crucified by some person or persons unknown, and gave an extraordinary account of himself.
The peculiarity of ghost-stories is that they are never told first-hand. I have managed, with infinite trouble, to secure one exception to this rule. It is not a very good specimen, but you can credit it from beginning to end. The other three stories you must take on trust; as I did.
The Phantom Rickshaw
May no ill dreams disturb my rest,
Nor Powers of Darkness me molest.
Evening Hymn
ONE OF THE few advantages that India has over England is a great Knowability. After five years’ service a man is directly or indirectly acquainted with the two or three hundred Civilians in his Province, all the Messes of ten or twelve Regiments and Batteries and some 1500 other people of the non-official caste. In ten years his knowledge should be doubled, and at the end of twenty he knows, or knows something about, every Englishman in the Empire, and may travel anywhere and everywhere without paying hotel-bills.
Globe-trotters who expect entertainment as a right have, even within my memory, blunted this open-heartedness, but none the less today, if you belong to the Inner Circle and are neither a Bear nor a Black Sheep, all houses are open to you, and our small world is very, very kind and helpful.
Rickett of Kamartha stayed with Polder of Kumaon some fifteen years ago. He meant to stay two nights, but was knocked down by rheumatic fever, and for six weeks disorganized Polder’s establishment, stopped Polder’s work and nearly died in Polder’s bedroom. Polder behaves as though he had been placed under eternal obligation by Rickett, and yearly sends the little Rickett a box of presents and toys. It is the same everywhere. The men who do not take the trouble to conceal from you their opinion that you are an incompetent ass, and the women who blacken your character and misunderstand your wife’s amusements, will work themselves to the bone in your behalf if you fall sick or into serious trouble.
Heatherlegh, the Doctor, kept, in addition to his regular practice, a hospital on his private account—an arrangement of loose boxes for Incurables, his friend called it, but it was really a sort of fitting-up shed for craft that had been damaged by stress of weather. The weather in India is often sultry, and since the tale of bricks is always a fixed quantity and the only liberty allowed is permission to work overtime and get no thanks, men occasionally break down and become as mixed as the metaphors in this sentence.
Heatherlegh is the dearest doctor that ever was, and his invariable prescription to all his patients is, ‘lie low, go slow, and keep cool’. He says that more men are killed by overwork than the importance of this world justifies. He maintains that overwork slew Pansay, who died under his hands about three years ago. He has, of course, the right to speak authoritatively, and he laughs at my theory that there was a crack in Pansay’s head and a little bit of the Dark World came through and pressed him to death.
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