CHEERING
Rudyard Kipling left Tilbury to sail to Bombay
in September, 1882.
He was 16 -
one of thousands of young people sailing away every year
to take advantage of a world brimming with new possibilities.
The British Empire was at its peak.
It would never be as powerful or as confident again.
India was its beating, burning heart.
Like so many others, Kipling was a teenager
without the education or the wealth or the connections
to stand much chance of making it back home.
He was seizing the opportunities of a new world.
Just seven years later, he was to sail back to London,
lionised as one of the most famous and celebrated writers
in the English language.
But today, he's unfashionable and, I think, misunderstood.
People think of him as a stuffy reactionary -
at best, politically incorrect,
at worst, an apologist for all the ills of the British Empire.
But the writer I know and love is more complex.
In truth, the young Kipling was an outsider
and even something of a rebel.
This was a teenager drawn to the dark side
and, in Colonial India, he broke every rule in the book...
..experimenting with mind-altering drugs,
looking for sex where he shouldn't
and writing about his experiences with unparalleled honesty
in some of the most original and innovative stories ever written,
but it was not a picture of Imperial India
the colonialists wanted to read.
In his rebellion, which is really what it was,
he does expose the dirty side of British India.
As a writer and a former soldier, Kipling has always fascinated me.
Now I want to go back and find out how this extraordinary
rite of passage transformed the teenage Kipling
and how, in the process, he changed our understanding of India forever.
What must it have been like to disembark at Bombay
on the evening of the 18th of October, 1882?
Kipling had lived here before as a child,
but had been sent away for 11 miserable years.
Now he was coming home to his beloved India...
..for Kipling later wrote that he returned to India
as a prince entering his kingdom.
And the contrast with the grey monotony of his childhood years
in Southsea couldn't have been any greater.
There was the noise, the sudden heat, like opening an oven door,
there were the smells,
there was the brilliant coloured saris - fuchsia pink,
blue, emerald green - and masses of people.
TRAIN WHISTLES
But Kipling's destination was to an outpost 900 miles away,
in Lahore, where his family lived...
..a frontier town ruled over by just 70 colonials.
Lahore had been in British hands for less than 35 years.
It was the last major Indian city to become part of the Empire.
But, although they were far from home, the Victorians who came here
were keen to create a very distinctive little England
in the Punjab.
There are two quite different Lahores.
There's the Civil Lines, which is where the British lived.
This is well laid out with nice big bungalows
and with large gardens and everybody is living there very safely.
And then there's a wall and then within that wall is the Old City
and this is a place of squalor and dirt and disease, where the people
are living cheek by jowl and it's a place where the British do not go.
# He's an Englishman... #
Ignoring the culture of India,
the British here were obsessed with preserving the rituals of home,
at work and at play, in what they ate
and, of course, in what they wore.
# That he is an Englishman
# That he is an Englishman... #
One gets this sense with the British in India
of a constant fight for standards in dress.
It's part of their fight against the country itself.
It certainly took on a psychological aspect.
It was partly a fight against the country itself
and partly an expression of being the ruling caste.
They actually did change for dinner when they were in the jungle.
It wasn't a fallacy.
# He remains an Englishman... #
They were keeping up standards in front of the Indians.
# E-E-E-E-E-E
# Englishman. #
Lahore had a Victorian railway and an elegant town hall.
It had museums and public gardens that equalled those
in Brighton or Leeds and it even had a school of art
where Kipling's father was the principal.
But Lockwood Kipling was very different from his colonial peers.
Instead of turning away from Indian culture, he studied it.
Rudyard Kipling's father was one of the key champions
of Indian art and craft movement
in the whole of India.
One of his daughters said about Lockwood Kipling that
he knew something about everything and everything about something.
And it is only logical that his son,
with this literary sort of genius in him, would be inspired
and his imagination will be, you know, evoked
by the kind of images that he sort of confronted
and lived with in India.
His father was an important influence on him, but Kipling
wasn't an academic and his first challenge was to find a job.
Luckily, there was an opening that would suit him well,
working on the local newspaper - The Civil and Military Gazette.
Charles Allen's great-grandfather was the man who gave him the job.
My grandfather, I suppose you could say he was the Murdoch of his age
in India. He had two newspapers - one, The Pioneer,
which was the biggest newspaper in India,
and then there was a strange little newspaper right out in Lahore,
right out on the frontier, The Civil and Military Gazette,
and that sums it up exactly.
It was for a tiny community of civil administrators and military men
and that really was its clientele.
But it had to have an editor and it had to have an assistant editor,
so young Rudy, at 16,
he's appointed the second most important man on the newspaper
and he's in charge with putting it to bed every night.
It's an astonishing responsibility, you could say, for a 16-year-old.
Dropped into the deep end of newspaper publishing without
any training, Kipling had to learn quickly to write and sub-edit
up against tight deadlines.
Kipling would later describe his time at the CMG
as his "seven years' hard".
Hard labour, perhaps, but a fantastic apprenticeship
for an aspiring writer.
To begin with,
Kipling wasn't allowed to write about the real India.
He was confined instead to the narrow world of the Anglo-Indians.
Like a cub reporter in a Home Counties small town,
he was first assigned to write up accounts of Gymkhanas,
tea parties and polo.
"Why will Lahore not officially recognize a Gymkhana?
"On Thursday evening, for instance, the attendance was of the thinnest
"and the ladies present might have been counted on one's fingers.
"Beyond comparing symptoms of cold and influenza
"or discussing the comparative merits of quinine pills
"versus quinine raw, we have little left to talk about."
Kipling's earliest reports reflected back to the Anglo-Indians in Lahore
the image of themselves that they liked the best,
confirming that they were more British than the British back home.
Their social centre was here - the Punjab Club.
The club was an all-male preserve for Europeans only
and there were fewer than 100 people eligible in the whole of Lahore.
Kipling wrote of the club rather disparagingly.
It was a place where "bachelors mostly gathered to eat meals
"of no merit with men whose merits they knew well."
Still only a teenager, Kipling was mixing with some of the most
important men in the Punjab, but he found their company dreary.
There was no-one his own age and the other members felt
that young Rudyard had a caddishly dirty tongue.
He would later write,
"There is no society in India as we understand the word.
"There are no books, no pictures,
"no conversations worth listening to for recreation's sake.
"No-one talks lightly and amusingly as they do in England.
"They don't seem to realize any of the beauties of life.
"Perhaps they haven't the time."
This is obviously gentleman members only.
'The Punjab Club is still open for business but, of course,
'the members are now Pakistani.
'And 12 years ago, they admitted the first woman,
'journalist Nelofar Bakhtyar.'
So here we are.
Kipling writes in his memoirs that the club became
"the whole of my outside world"
because he would toil at the offices of The Civil and Military Gazette
and then come here at the club for his dinners.
He would be heckled mercilessly at times
for what was published in the paper,
even though, at that time, he was just an assistant editor
and he really had no control over the editorial policy.
Kipling would have to apologize for the mistakes that his editor made
and the editor was married so he never used to come to the club.
So Kipling bore the brunt... Yes, he bore the brunt of it.
He spent only five of his 70 years in Lahore
but those five years were extremely crucial
in his development as a writer.
And all of this happened because he had the innate curiosity,
as it were, to step out of the bubble
in which he had first entered.
Here were the people sitting in their clubs
and really not bothering to look out of their window, as it were,
while this whole colourful circus is going past
and they are completely immune to it.
CHANTING
locked away in the club -
it was also fear.
The Indian mutiny which had brought colonial rule in India
to the brink of collapse was only a generation away.
GUNFIRE
To maintain order, 30,000 soldiers were now stationed across India.
Lahore was one of the most important military outposts.
Bored by the old men in the club,
the young soldiers were the only men of Kipling's age in the city.
They were to become an important inspiration for his writing.
Kipling was fascinated by the military.
It's been suggested that he always regretted his poor eyesight
prevented him from going to Sandhurst,
so it's no surprise that he was impressed by and enjoyed socialising
with the junior officers who were stationed here in the Lahore Fort,
waiting to be deployed up to the north-west frontier provinces.
These were men with exciting stories to tell
and Kipling writes of long, hot, drunken evenings
that went on late into the night.
The soldiers on fort duty or confined to barracks
had a hard time of it in the Indian summer.
Boredom, disease and heat could claim more victims
than a skirmish on the Afghan frontier.
Reporting for the CMG, Kipling wrote about fights between soldiers
ending in them killing each other, arising from temper in the heat.
And in his early stories, Kipling would write of soldiers
cracking up with the boredom and isolation of Indian barracks life.
Kipling's first exploration of this subject was in some verse
written just over a year after arriving in India.
In Kipling's poem, On Fort Duty,
the soldiers cooped up here in the Lahore Fort
dream of action on the frontier
where the passes ring with rifles and the sound of Afghan raids.
"I look across the ramparts to the northward and the snow,
"to the far Cherat cantonments
"but, alas, I cannot go.
"Oh, its everlasting gun-drill and eight o'clock parades,
"its cleaning up of mortars, likewise of carronades,
"while the passes ring with rifles and the noise of Afghan raids.
"And I look across the ramparts to the river, broad and grey,
"and I think of merry England
"where the festive Horse Guards play."
Kipling may have been impressed by the officers,
but it was the ordinary soldiers he was really interested in.
Unusually for someone of his background at the time,
Kipling socialised with private soldiers and, over beer,
he studied the way they talked and the way they thought.
I think we've also got to remember that young Kipling is an outsider.
Look at him, he is a runt.
He's very short, he's myopic, he can hardly see without his glasses
and, on top of that, he's dyspraxic.
He's totally disjointed. He keeps falling off his horse.
He can't play sports. He really is an outsider.
The people he admires most of all are the upright British soldiers -
the officers in particular.
But, in that process, he learns about this other community,
this other group of outsiders - the ordinary soldier.
Kipling would later immortalise these men
as Tommy Atkins and Danny Deever
and his three musketeers, Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris.
Kipling seemed to get along with the soldiers,
but whether or not he got along with the officers is another matter.
One member of the general staff would write disparagingly of Kipling
that he was disapproved of as being mutinous and above his station.
'Polo is still played in Lahore
'and, while there are no British soldiers here, there are plenty
'of old soldiers from the Pakistani Army who know Kipling's work well.'
Kipling loved soldiers and he loved adventure
so, Major Mawaz, you had the sort of adventures, by the sound of it,
that Kipling would have written a story about.
I was bitten by the most poisonous snake in the desert, I survived.
I had three bullets in my body, I survived.
I was missing, believed killed, I survived.
Then I was supposed to be killed by these Muktis and Indians.
And you know the Muktis would take your eyes out,
they would cut your ears - that's how they killed you.
I had been told three times, "Your time is tomorrow.
"In the morning, that's what's going to happen to you."
So, by all standards, I should have been dead a long time ago,
but...
somebody up there likes me, you know?
You're the unbreakable soldier.
Yes. Can't do anything to him.
LAUGHTER
I'm here trying to follow in young Kipling's footsteps
and it's strange because his reputation today
is maybe not as popular as it once was.
I think people think he represents the part of the British Empire
which is bad, but actually... No, no, no.
You see, as we're growing, the generations are changing,
and all stories go away - they die.
But if you ask older people my age or his age,
they all know Kipling.
They all know he was associated with us,
he was very much a part of this country for seven, eight years.
TRAIN WHISTLES
Spending time with soldiers made Kipling more determined than ever
to get out from behind his desk.
His chance came at the age of 18.
He was made special correspondent for the Gazette
and allowed to go out and report on the real India for the first time.
"So, soon as my paper could trust me a little
"and I had behaved well at routine work, I was sent out.
"Communal riots under the shadow of the Mosque of Wazir Khan,
"visits of viceroys to neighbouring princes
"on the edge of the great Indian desert,
"reviews of armies expecting to move against Russia next week."
Given licence to travel and report across India,
a new world was opening up.
No longer confined to writing reports of Gymkhanas,
Kipling enjoyed the real freedom of being a journalist
for the first time
as the outsider looking in, making sense of what he sees.
He seems to be so good at going out, looking at a subject,
studying it from all its aspects, asking the right questions,
finding the essence of that particular skill,
that particular subject, and then keeping it in his head.
He does have, like all the great writers, an extraordinary memory.
All the information he needs is tucked away and he brings it out.
He learned how to be short and to be brief and to be accurate
and those qualities helped him.
The other thing, he had a huge gift for observation.
As a writer, he was finding his subject and growing fast.
But Kipling's opportunities for travel came to an end
when the weather turned hot.
Like most Europeans, his editor would flee from the unbearable
Lahore summers, taking trains to much cooler hill stations.
Kipling was stuck in the city,
turning out The Civil and Military Gazette, sometimes single-handedly.
He was isolated and alone
and his nervous disposition started to get the better of him.
Often sick and terrified of catching a fatal illness, he couldn't sleep.
His night terrors grew worse and he started pacing about outside,
increasingly curious about the city at night.
Inevitably, he was drawn like a magnet to the medieval city
of inner Lahore and the wall that separated east from west.
It was a dividing line that few English people had ever crossed.
He hated the hot weather, he hated being alone.
His parents that he's been living with have disappeared to the hills
and suddenly he's alone in this huge house
and he starts to have breakdowns.
He's really frightened that he's going to catch a disease and die
or that he's going to overheat and die
and he walks from room to room,
he gets his servants to throw water over him
and he cannot get any sleep and this is part of what makes him
take up his night walks, when he starts to wander in the night.
What he found when he crossed the wall
was a hidden city that never sleeps.
"Often the night got into my head
"and I would wander till dawn in all manner of odd places...
"liquor-shops, gambling and opium-dens,
"wayside entertainment such as puppet-shows, native dances
"or in and about the narrow gullies under the Mosque of Wazir Khan
"for the sheer sake of looking.
"Sometimes the police would challenge,
"but I knew most of their officers.
"Having no position to consider and my trade enforcing it,
"I could move at will in the fourth dimension."
Having crossed a barrier that separated the two cultures,
Kipling discovered, as he wrote,
that "much of real Indian life goes on in the hot weather nights."
It wasn't just in Kipling's time that Europeans didn't really come
into the walled city. We've been advised to be very careful
when we're wandering about
and, even in the space of this little exploration,
we've picked up a policeman wielding an AK-47
who's clearing people off behind us.
It feels quite unusual to have a sense of people watching you in that
regard and it must have been what Kipling felt like when he first came
down here as possibly the only white face those people had ever seen.
What Kipling saw here fascinated him.
"The yard-wide gullies into which the moonlight cannot struggle
"are full of mystery, stories of life and death
"and intrigue of which we, the Mall abiding, open-windowed,
"purdah-less English know nothing and believe less.
"Properly exploited, our City would yield a store of novels."
And, as this teenager started to break one taboo,
others would follow.
It wasn't long before he began another form of experimentation.
In the middle of one particularly stifling night,
on September 16th, 1884, Kipling was woken with terrible stomach pains.
His manservant brought him an opium pipe to relieve the pain.
Kipling describes the effect -
"Presently, I felt the cramps in my leg dying out
"and then my tummy rested
"and a minute or two later it felt as though I fell through the floor."
INTENSE MUSIC
He continued to rely on drugs, in the form of opium, morphine
and Indian hemp, to get him through Lahore's hot summer nights.
"The dense, wet heat that hung over the face of land like a blanket
"prevented all hope of sleep.
"It was impossible to sit still in the dark, empty, echoing house
"and watch the punkah beat the dead air,
"so, at ten o'clock of the night, I set my walking-stick on end
"in the middle of the garden and waited to see how it would fall.
"It pointed directly down the moonlit road
"that leads to the City of Dreadful Night."
The City of Dreadful Night kept drawing Kipling back in.
The opium-dens have now gone but, inside the medieval city,
it can still sometimes be possible to recapture
some of the drug-fuelled excitement of Kipling's Lahore.
I've come to a Sufi shrine to see a festival of drumming and dancing.
It's the sort of mystical side of religion here
that even in Kipling's day was noted for being quite wild.
It has a reputation even today of people getting spiritually
and also physically off their heads.
And the atmosphere is a little bit like coming to a festival.
We've been accosted in the street by people who have come up to us
and said, "We're very excited you're here.
"You're going to see the real Pakistan."
A Pakistan of peace and love,
not the Pakistan of international terrorism.
This, the dancing, the excitement,
this is apparently the real Pakistan and I can't help but think
this is probably the Lahore that Kipling found and that excited him
and that probably inspired some of his own nocturnal activities.
LOUD RHYTHMIC DRUMMING
It's absolutely awesome.
The drumming, which is amazing,
and the crowd building up into this chant,
a bit like before the biggest act in a night at a club comes on.
And, over in the dark corners, you can see people rolling up.
But in the main centre, everyone is getting ready
into this frenetic dance.
An anonymous article in the CMG attributed to Kipling
seems to describe an opium trip.
"Here you are alone,
"utterly alone on the verge of a waste of moonlit sand.
"Hundreds and thousands of miles away lies a small, silver pool
"not bigger than a splash of rain water.
"A stone is dropped into its bosom.
"and, as the circles spread,
"the silver lines broaden from east to west
"and rush up with inconceivable rapidity to the level of your eyes.
"You shudder and attempt to fly."
DRUMMING
You think of Timothy Leary and drugs and awakening of consciousness -
you really feel that something like this happens with this youngster.
This process of hallucination opens up his mind and it stays open.
It's almost as if he's kind of thrown off all his fears,
having gone through this process, and he seems to now to write
from this time onwards with a great freedom
but, in particular, he seems to revel
in the squalor and the dirt and the disease
and he says, "I am in love with India,
"I am in love with all the dirt and the smells and sounds,"
and this is a complete change in attitude.
And he even says, "I now feel like a cock crowing on a dunghill,
"that this is my empire and I can write about this land.
"I really feel like a king in his own country."
Kipling's experience of opium
inspired his first published short story,
the tale of an opium addict eking out his last days in a drug den.
"I've seen so many come in and out
"and I've seen so many die here on the mats
"that I should be afraid of dying in the open now.
"I've seen some things that people would call strange enough
"but nothing is strange when you're on the black smoke,
"except the black smoke.
"And if it was, it wouldn't matter."
The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows
is the story that changed everything for Kipling.
I think it's the first time he realizes
the power of fiction as opposed to journalism to tell us truths.
It's the first of his tales of outcasts and derelicts -
Europeans who've slipped through the cracks in India.
It's the first example of his original vision
of the dark side of Indian life.
And it's all the more remarkable that he managed to publish it
in The Civil and Military Gazette.
Opium gave Kipling access to layers of Indian life
which the British had so wilfully ignored.
Kipling wrote, "Underneath our excellent administrative system,
"under the piles of reports and statistics,
"the thousands of troops, the doctors,
"runs wholly untouched and unaffected
"the life of the people of the land.
"A life as full of impossibilities and wonders as the Arabian nights.
"Immediately outside of our own English life
"is the dark and crooked and fantastic and wicked
"and awe-inspiring life of the native.
"To understand this dark India and conquer one's fear of it
"meant putting one's prejudices to one side and reaching out."
It wasn't just drugs that were enticing Kipling
to a darker, more exciting side of Indian life.
Here, in the Shahdara Gardens, prostitutes plied their trade
amongst the tombs and in the shadows
and the young Kipling, only 18 at the time,
escaped the city in search of adventure and distraction.
He is a teenager and his hormones are raging.
And he's a very horny young man.
And he wants to...
You almost feel his hormones are dragging him into the city.
We know this from a series of coded entries in his journals
and letters to friends.
21st of August, 1885, at the height of the heat,
when most of the Anglo-Indians would have been away in Shimla,
Kipling writes, "Usual philander in the gardens.
"Home to count the risks of my resolution."
Clearly worried about the after-effects of his encounter.
Elsewhere, one of his codes - five initials.
W-R-W-M-T.
Whatever that meant or whoever that was,
"A thoroughly satisfactory conclusion."
In a letter to a friend at the same time, he writes,
"I'm no more capable of abandoning my writing
"than I can put aside the occasional woman,
"which is good for health and the softening of ferocious manners.
"It is my amusement and, like all amusements,
"the nicer for being discouraged."
Kipling may have enjoyed the elicit nature of his encounters,
but it's clear the other men of the station
knew of his wanderings in the Old City and they didn't approve,
one of them saying at the time,
"Everyone thought he was going for a mucker with the harlotries therein."
There's no doubt at all that one of the ways that young Rudy Kipling
learns about India is through the prostitutes of Lahore.
The phrase that we all now use,
"The oldest profession in the world", it comes from Kipling.
When we talk about prostitutes in Lahore,
we're talking about a very sophisticated group of women.
They're more like the Geishas of Japan.
They're there to entertain men and they entertain them with music
and dancing, they have poetry,
and young men would go to prostitutes and sit at their court
and swap stories, they would smoke bhang
and they would recite poetry to each other and listen to music.
And young Kipling breaks into that circle
and he writes with huge sympathy about these women.
The girls in question would have been in these balconies?
Yes, indeed. They were entertainers, Patrick,
whose function was to both...
for example, recite poetry or music.
They were all talented as singers, as dancers.
So, it was a wider range of services they offered
than simply physical gratification.
This feels, to me, a little sanitised now.
It doesn't quite have the edge
that a proper red-light district would have.
Yes, well, red-light districts are not necessarily proper! Well, yes...
On the assumption of being improper,
when you think about it, Kipling's own writing...
And don't forget, he was writing in the Victorian time,
and, then, prudery was the mantra.
There was an element of sanitisation in his writing,
and so, it was quite understandable that whatever he said
would have elliptical meanings and, inevitably,
today, most of the people who are the denizens of this place
use this as their offices.
But they live elsewhere.
But it's still striking that we've got the huge mosque right here,
and then the red-light district on its lap. Yes, indeed.
The court used to be here,
and the residence, as well, on the other side.
I think it was probably an element of temptation.
If you could resist temptation, then why not?
Do you think it was part of Lahore
which made it easier for him to do that?
Had he been somewhere like Bombay, there'd have been more
of a temptation to stick with the English?
Had he been in Bombay, he would have been much more circumscribed
in his ability to move around the city.
And, certainly, at the levels that he wanted to savour Lahore,
the stories that he came up with in Lahore
were obviously born of his own personal experience
and born of his personal investigation
into areas that young boys of that age, young men of that age,
and, particularly, English boys,
were not really exposed to.
So, in a way, it was quite felicitous
that not only did Kipling arrive here at this age
where he was open to all these adventures,
but Lahore was a city that was open to being adventured in.
It was the perfect marriage for him.
He was in the right place at the right time.
And Lahore, one has to be honest, found its voice.
MARKET BUSTLE
Whilst Kipling enjoyed taking a walk on the wild side
in the Walled City, when he came to write about similar transgressions,
the results were invariably much darker.
Beyond The Pale is a story of Trejago, an Englishman who,
not unlike Kipling, knew too much and saw too much.
Stumbling through the Walled City one night,
Trejago finds himself in a dark alley, at a dead end,
beguiled by a beautiful singing voice.
The voice turns out to belong to Bisesa, a widow of only 15,
with whom Trejago begins an extraordinary love affair.
"That night was the beginning of many strange things,
"and of a double life so wild
"that Trejago today sometimes wonders if it were not all a dream."
Trejago returns to the Walled City for the fifth time in three weeks,
desperate for a sign from his lover.
Finding himself underneath the same grating
from which he first heard her beautiful singing,
he shouts, and is answered.
To his horror, two arms are thrust through the grating -
hands cut off, revealing bloody stumps.
As he recoils, a spear is thrust at him, missing him by a fraction,
but wounding him in the groin.
Trejago limps off into the night, cursing his lost love.
In Kipling's world, despite his own adventures,
it invariably ends in tragedy when his characters cross the limits
of what he knowingly refers to as "decent society".
This young man has broken a taboo.
He has fallen in love with a native woman from the red-light district
and it's going to end in tragedy.
And these stories nearly always do end in tragedy.
But, this is the first man to write about this.
Here is a European writing about love across the racial divide.
Characters like Trejago are no longer the hopeful young men
arriving from England to make their fortune.
India has changed them,
just as it was changing Kipling.
He was starting to see the contradictions
and the tragedies of the Raj.
Then, in 1885,
just as Kipling was starting to find his subject in Lahore,
he was diverted and given an opportunity
to observe Anglo-Indian high society up close.
He was sent by the Gazette to be the special correspondent
for the summer season at the hill town of Shimla.
The posting would allow him to get under the skin of the ruling elite
and explore a world that was as strange as that of the Walled City.
It would offer a new direction for him as a writer of short stories.
Kipling would take the train from Lahore to Ambala,
and then a horse and cart up the steep mountain road to Shimla.
Sadly, these days, you can't take the train from Pakistan to India.
I've had to come across the land border crossing at Wagah.
I'm coming up on the lush foothills of the Himalayas now.
It must have been an incredibly welcome sight to Kipling
and the other Europeans escaping the dusty plains
and looking forward to getting up out of the heat.
In 1903, they finally built a railway up to Shimla.
I'm going to take the train
rather than take my chances with a horse and cart.
Perched 7,000 feet up in the Himalayas,
Shimla was the summer capital of the British Raj.
And every spring, hundreds of civil servants, clerks
and administrators made the 1,200-mile journey from Calcutta
to rule India in a more temperate climate.
One viceroy regarded this mountain retreat as a preposterous place.
"That the capital of the Indian Empire should be thus hanging
"on by its eyelids to the side of a hill is too absurd."
Shimla was an exclusive world of expensive guest houses and hotels.
Like all the hill stations,
it was designed to be an oasis of Englishness -
with Home County-style architecture,
rose gardens, picnics,
lawn tennis and croquet.
Shimla was probably the most English town in India.
All the houses were sort of...
I can best describe them as "Tudorbethan",
although they did have corrugated iron roofs.
The flowers in the garden were English flowers -
irises, sweet peas, roses.
There was afternoon tea, log fires when you first went there.
Everything was as English as it could be.
And the cathedral was English-looking.
People quite often got married there.
Unlike Lahore, with its small, stuffy world of 70 administrators,
this was a bustling playground
for the cream of Anglo-Indian society.
It was the court, wasn't it?
Where deals were done
and where there was an enormous amount of the kind of life
that you do have in a court.
Balls, for example.
Balls and parties, and...
people paying visits on each other
and it being important who comes and visits you and who doesn't.
And, really, the top of the tree is if you can be intimate
with the Viceroy, the Queen's representative, and her family,
which Kipling's parents were, of course.
MILITARY BAND PLAYS
'Raaja Bhasin is a writer and historian
'who is an expert on the British in Shimla during the Raj.'
What was this place like in Kipling's day?
For one, the number of people would have been perhaps
a 50th of what there are there now.
What would that have been in the 1880s?
Maybe about 20,000 people and, of that,
maybe 3,000 or 4,000 Europeans,
and the rest Indians.
And this would have been the main thoroughfare
for the British in Kipling's day. Yes.
This is where they rode up and down? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.
The Anglo-Indians who couldn't make it to Shimla in the season
were dying to know what was happening there
and Kipling sent regular reports
on the festivities to the Civil and Military Gazette.
"This week's list of amusements includes the usual Monday 'pop',
"a dance at Government House on Wednesday, two nights' theatricals,
"a variety entertainment at the Gaiety Theatre this afternoon,
"and the Trade Ball at Benmore tonight."
Amateur theatricals were a high point of the Shimla season.
And here at the Gaiety Theatre,
Kipling appeared in a French farce called A Scrap Of Paper.
Though, one observer described his performance as "horrid and vulgar".
I'm sure you do, as far as I'm concerned...
'Today, the theatre still performs every other play in English.'
Out of my way, you bedding-department gigolo!
Squirrel, squirrel! Look what you've done to my squirrel!
Get out before I call the manager!
Amateur dramatics played an important role
in British-Indian life beyond just giving vent to the frustrated and,
no doubt, misplaced theatrical ambitions of the bored wives.
Kipling enjoyed acting because it allowed him to get close to women.
Theatre, whether it was putting on a play in an officers' mess,
or in a purpose-built venue, like this one in Shimla,
was really one of the only chances within the confines
of the Victorian society that the British imposed here
where men and women could get close for flirting and romance.
After his first stay in Shimla, Kipling writes...
"The month was a round of picnics, dances and theatricals and so on.
"And I flirted with the bottled-up energy of a year on my lips."
While Shimla had the outward appearance
of English respectability,
in fact, it was a hotbed of intrigue and scandal.
The town was a celebrated destination
for the "fishing fleet" - girls who had travelled from Britain
on the lookout for husbands,
and for its "grass widows" - wives who could misbehave
while their husbands worked down on the plains.
Shimla was really full of grass widows.
Because, anybody who could afford it sent their wife and children,
they sent them up to the hills so they didn't have to suffer
the horrible hot weather on the plains.
And most people were between about 25 and 45
and when they went up to Shimla,
there were these attractive young women,
there were the officers who were coming up on leave,
they'd come up on three weeks' leave,
and there they were in this town
with loads of proximity and husbands not there. You can imagine!
Lady Reading once described as Shimla as a place
where "every Jack has someone else's Jill."
The young, unmarried, white, junior members of the administration
and the military could go and do what is called "poodle-faking" -
which was to make love to the married wives
now their husbands are in the plains.
He had this great phase,
"duty and red tape" - that's life down on the plains.
"Picnics and adultery" - that's life up in the hills.
And there's a huge contrast.
Standards start to slip when you're up in the hills.
You can get away with it.
And Kipling sees it as paradise.
He says, "This is like Elysium.
"This is where the gods live. Everything goes here."
# I am the very model of a modern Major-General
# I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral... #
Kipling was able to rub shoulders with the power elite
of British India at work and at play,
and the pretensions and the foibles of their world
would provide fertile material for his fiction.
At first, he was intoxicated by it,
describing it as a place of "glamour, wine and witchery".
The Mall was the place to be seen. And every afternoon,
Kipling would promenade here with the other Anglo-Indians,
picking up political and social gossip for the newspaper.
This is where
the world and its dog
came to "eat the air", "hawakhana".
Hawakhana, eating the air. Eating the air.
And that was their promenade. Clean, fresh air.
Throw in a few flirtations for good measure,
it would make a good promenade.
There was even a part of town known as Scandal Point.
So, this was the central hub of gossip for the whole of Shimla?
Absolutely. This is where all the townspeople gathered,
especially the women,
with a traffic jam of rickshaws all crowding this place,
exchanging scandal.
And all these elegantly dressed middle-aged ladies
trying to figure out who was going to run off with whom,
who would like to run off with whom.
And the way Kipling presents it,
it's not the conception of Victorian society that we have.
I mean, there was a lot of sexual intrigue.
It seems much more free than we would imagine these days.
It most certainly was.
If anything, Shimla was a steamy place.
But, after three months of what he called
"the gay season in the hills",
Kipling was beginning to see through it.
Always more comfortable as an outsider,
he was now turning what he saw into biting, satirical short stories.
Shimla is the place where people let their hair down,
but even Rudy Kipling realises
that, actually, it's a kind of false society.
It's not really genuine.
And he very quickly gets jaded by it.
And it's very fascinating - here's a youngster,
thought this was going to be paradise,
but he very quickly turns his pen.
His pen becomes very waspish,
and he starts to criticise this society more and more, to the extent
that the stories he writes about Shimla society are really...
They're letting the side down terribly.
"There was a Commissioner in Shimla, in those days.
"An ugly man. The ugliest man in Asia, with two exceptions.
"His name was Saggott. Barr-Saggott.
"Anthony Barr-Saggott and six letters to follow.
"Departmentally, he was one of the best men
"the Government of India owned.
"Socially, he was like unto a blandishing gorilla."
"Mrs Hauksbee was clever, witty, brilliant
"and sparkling beyond most of her kind,
"but possessed of many devils of malice and mischievousness.
"She could be nice, though, even to her own sex.
"But that is another story."
These are very thinly veiled portraits of quite important people.
He must've had balls to write as he did about them. Of steel.
All of Kipling's little stories are true.
And I think here it again comes to Kipling as a writer -
his ability to sort of take off from real-life situations.
Shimla is perhaps a perfect case in point where he was able to do that.
Kipling's disillusionment with Shimla comes through
in many of the satirical short stories of life there
during the summer season, and they're different in style
to the other stories he was writing at the time.
What I think I've understood more clearly since coming out here
is that Kipling's real genius was in getting close to his subject.
Perhaps that was because of his grounding as a journalist.
He writes the common soldier so well
because he's spent these long hours chatting, drinking beer
with the soldiers stationed in Lahore.
He writes the Walled City well
because he was one of the few Europeans who really explored it.
And he's able to portray - with a slightly acid tongue -
the British in Shimla because he was part of that society.
Many of Kipling's stories were published
alongside his journalism in the Civil and Military Gazette.
But it wasn't until 1887, when he was 21,
that he started grouping them
with new and more ambitious pieces into a single book.
Its title - Plain Tales From The Hills - was apposite.
These were deceptively simple stories that aimed to tell readers
about life in Anglo-India as it really was.
Kipling liked to head out of town on horseback,
visit the rural villages and see the real India.
One such trip gave him the idea for the short story Lispeth,
in which a young Englishman falls from his horse
and is rescued by a beautiful hill girl.
"When a hill girl grows lovely,
"she is worth travelling 50 miles over bad ground to look upon.
"Lispeth had a Greek face,
"one of those faces people paint so often and see so seldom."
The hill girl, a convert to Christianity,
falls passionately in love with the Englishman
and declares her intention to marry him -
much to the horror of the missionaries who raised her.
The betrayal of Lispeth is treated sympathetically by Kipling
and the English are portrayed as untrustworthy.
Contrary to the received idea of Kipling as the bigoted Victorian,
here it is the West that lets down the East.
Only eight pages long,
Lispeth is a story that retains its power to unsettle.
It was a provocative opening to his first book.
Grouped together, the stories that follow
of adultery, loneliness and betrayal
did not add up to a flattering portrait of the Raj.
I don't think people knew what they were getting.
In India, they were shocked by what he said.
There was a sense that he'd let the side down,
that he shouldn't have published the stories.
The Viceroy was telling Mrs Kipling,
"Oh, you really shouldn't have let your son do these stories."
And I think people were very startled when that book came out
because they WERE so subversive, they WERE so cynical.
In describing the realities of Anglo-Indian experience,
in writing Plain Tales From The Hills, nothing was taboo.
Kipling knew that some who came to find a new life in India
found despair instead.
Suicides were not uncommon, but always covered up.
In Thrown Away, a young soldier, new to India,
fails to cope because he doesn't seem to understand that India
is a country where you shouldn't take anything too seriously.
After he blows his brains out,
his senior officer has to bury the body,
covering up the evidence,
and pretending to his family back home that he had died of cholera.
Kipling knew all about what happened to people when they were young
and new to the country.
To survive, he seems to be saying you had to live by a new moral code.
The real India was unfamiliar and threatening -
not that the fools back home understood that.
They were fed made-up stories of honour and bravery.
Thrown Away is one of the few Plain Tales From The Hills
that was never published in the Civil and Military Gazette,
and it marks an important change.
This dark, brilliant story proving Kipling so different
from the reactionary he's made out to be, was written
not just for the Anglo-Indians,
but the armchair imperialists back in Britain.
Plain Tales didn't make Kipling popular with the British in India
and, as word about the new stories spread,
and he grew less respectful towards his hosts,
his Indian education was coming to an end.
His proprietor, George Allen, starts to get pretty worried,
to the extent that, eventually, Kipling is too hot to handle.
He's being so rude about people like the Viceroy,
the commander-in-chief,
British society in general,
that Allen basically says to him,
"Look, young Kipling, I think it's time you went to England.
"We can't handle you here."
Seven years after he had first arrived,
Kipling went back to Lahore
to say goodbye to his family
and to reflect on an extraordinary seven years.
"I've had a good time. I've tasted success and the beauty of money.
"I've mixed with fighters and statesman,
"administrators and women who control them.
"It was vivid and lively, and gloomy and savage.
"I tried to get to know folk from the barrack room and the brothel,
"to the ballroom and the Viceroy's council.
"And I have, in a little measure, succeeded.
"My training has been extensive and peculiar.
"And now, I'm going to come home to see how it will work."
Kipling left Lahore on 3rd March, 1889.
Destined for fame and fortune,
his reputation would wane with the Empire
and his politics would alienate later generations.
But it was the stories that grew out of his experiences here
in Lahore, and in the foot hills of the Himalayas in Shimla,
which remain his masterworks -
works which are far more modern and complex,
and far more sympathetic to the layers of Indian life,
than Kipling is usually given credit for.
Arriving back home in October,
he found that Britain had changed, too.
The Empire was more cherished and celebrated than ever.
And the reading public were fascinated to find out
what life was really like out in the colonies.
Kipling found that his Plain Tales were a popular,
as well as a critical, sensation.
The eternal outsider had discovered a welcoming audience.
People said, "Now we have somebody who will tell us about India."
And there is Oscar Wilde's famous review that,
when you're reading Plain Tales From The Hills,
"one feels as if one were sitting under a palm-tree
"reading by superb flashes of vulgarity."
SHE CHUCKLES
But Kipling was the "hottest thing".
And Kipling was really the first "hottest thing" ever,
because he arrived in London at a time when mass media
were really beginning to be developed,
and so he was the first writer to have a kind of global fame.
And, I think, anything he wrote, he could publish.
And publishers were just queueing up to publish his work.
It was the boldness of his stories which shocked and enthralled
his British readers and they couldn't get enough.
Think of Lord Byron saying, "I was the comet of the season!"
Rudyard Kipling is the comet of the season.
He astonishes everybody because this is a new kind of realism
that they haven't known in London
and he really has an astonishing impact.
No writer - not Shakespeare, not Dickens -
has ever enjoyed such fame in their own lifetime.
After a period in America,
he was to live out his life here in the Sussex countryside.
He became the literary lion of the Empire
as the Empire itself fell into decline.
And his fame has never waned.
Kim, his story of an orphaned boy growing up on the streets of Lahore,
would be his literary masterpiece and win him the Nobel Prize.
But everything he achieved was founded on his teenage adventures
as a cub reporter who broke all the rules,
writing short stories that would change, for ever,
the way India is imagined.