Rudyard Kipling
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Rudyard Kipling’
Two former soldiers in India find British bureaucracy cramps their style, so they set off to become kings of their own land.
It is the days of the British Raj, and the editor of a newspaper in Lahore has done a favour for fellow freemasons ‘Peachey’ Carnehan and his inseparable companion Daniel Dravot. Now the two ex-army men have crammed themselves into the paper’s tiny, stuffy office to share with him a resolution. “We have decided” said Carnehan “that India isn’t big enough for such as us.”
Rikki-tikki-tavi had never met a cobra before, but when the first thrill of fear had passed he knew what he must do.
Little mongoose Rikki-tikki-tavi has been swept by a flood into the garden of an English couple living in a bungalow in Sugauli (near the border with Nepal) during the Raj. He is immediately adopted as a pet by Teddy, the couple’s young boy, but Rikki-tikki soon finds that not all is well in the garden. Indeed, Darzee the tailorbird is desolate.
After the devastation of the Great War, calls rose for a new economic and social system, and to put the wisdom of our forebears behind us.
After the Great War of 1914-1918, a consensus grew that the world had changed and there must now be a new global economy, a new kind of society, even a new morality. Socio-economic experts — the gods of the market place — declared their laws, and the public worshipped at their shrines; but Rudyard Kipling believed that older gods, the wise maxims of our forebears, would have the last word.
If officials in the Raj ever forgot who their boss was, they would bring the whole government down about their ears.
In Kipling’s short story, Aurelian McGoggin, a British bureaucrat, has been boring everyone in Shimla with his conviction that there is neither God nor Hereafter, so we can only worry along somehow for the good of Humanity. In a tongue-in-cheek aside, Kipling gave a Raj-shaped twist to an argument that had been made by political thinkers from Moses to Alexis de Tocqueville.
Kitty Beighton enters an archery contest where the prize is one very beautiful bracelet and one very ugly Commissioner.
Kitty Beighton has entered an archery contest in Shimla. First prize, officially, is a diamond bracelet. Unofficially, it is Commissioner Barr-Saggott. Mrs Beighton wants Kitty to win; young Cubbon of the Dragoons definitely doesn’t. But Kitty’s first shot has hit in the gold and unwisely, Barr-Saggott (already no oil painting) allows himself a smirk...
A street urchin of Lahore takes it on himself to provide a naive Tibetan monk with a hot meal.
Young Kim O’Hara, who knows all the ways and wiles of the dusty streets of Lahore, has promised to help a Tibetan monk beg for his dinner. He has high hopes of a certain grocer’s wife, but she is not disposed to dole out charity to yet another holy man.