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Unit 8: Before a Midnight Breaks in Storm by Rudyard Kipling

Kipling’s subsequent reputation has changed according to the political and social climate of the Notes
age and the resulting contrasting views about him continued for much of the 20th century. George
Orwell called him a “prophet of British imperialism”. Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote: “He
[Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and
cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised
as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an
increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned
with.”

Did u know? The most famous quote written by Rudyard Kipling is “He wrapped himself
in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”

8.1.1 Early Life

Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British
India, to Alice Kipling (née MacDonald) and (John) Lockwood Kipling. Alice (one of four
remarkable Victorian sisters) was a vivacious woman about whom a future Viceroy of
India would say, “Dullness and Mrs. Kipling cannot exist in the same room.” Lockwood Kipling,
a sculptor and pottery designer, was the Principal and Professor of Architectural Sculpture at the
newly founded Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Bombay.
John Lockwood and Alice had met in 1863 and courted at Rudyard Lake in Rudyard, Staffordshire,
England. They married, and moved to India in 1865. They had been so moved by the beauty of
the Rudyard Lake area that when their first child was born, they included a reference to the lake
in naming him. Alice’s sister Georgiana was married to painter Edward Burne-Jones, and her
sister Agnes was married to painter Edward Poynter. Kipling’s most famous relative was his
first cousin, Stanley Baldwin, who was Conservative Prime Minister of the UK three times in
the 1920s and 1930s. Kipling’s birth home still stands on the campus of the J J School of Art in
Mumbai and was used as the Dean’s residence for several years. Bombay historian Foy Nissen
points out, however, that although the cottage bears a plaque stating that this is the site where
Kipling was born, the original cottage was torn down decades ago and a new one was built in its
place. The wooden bungalow has been empty and locked up for years.
Of Bombay, Kipling was to write:
Mother of Cities to me,
For I was born in her gate,
Between the palms and the sea,
Where the world-end steamers wait.
According to Bernice M. Murphy, “Kipling’s parents considered themselves ‘Anglo-Indians’
(a term used in the 19th century for people of British origin living in India) and so too would
their son, though he spent the bulk of his life elsewhere. Complex issues of identity and national
allegiance would become prominent features in his fiction.”

Example: Kipling referred to such conflicts; “In the afternoon heats before we took our
sleep, she (the Portuguese ayah, or nanny) or Meeta (the Hindu bearer, or male attendant)
would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-
room after we had been dressed, with the caution ‘Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.’
So one spoke ‘English’, haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and
dreamed in”.

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