The Kipling File

Lahore in the 1880s is a lively centre of culture and colonial ambition, and Kay Robinson has just arrived to take charge of the Civil and Military Gazette. Among his staff is a young Rudyard Kipling, lonely, impulsive and impressionable, who dreams of being a writer. His former editor had waved away his literary ambitions as foolish. Robinson takes the opposite view, gives the young man, known to friends as Ruddy, far more room to write, and soon becomes his friend and confidant.

That friendship opens the door to the Kipling household, and there Robinson falls for Ruddy's sister, Trix. The novel is told in Robinson's own voice, and through it he recounts a friendship that was never going to last and a love that proved hard to hold on to. All of it plays out in Anglo-Indian society, in a Punjab where resentment of British rule is beginning to be felt.

Sudhir Kakar uses this fictional frame to look at the unsettled early years of the man who would go on to write The Jungle Book and Kim. His Kipling is a contradictory figure, a restless and brilliant young man whose great talent was constantly at odds with his inner demons. Written in graceful, luminous prose, the book is as much a portrait of a gifted mind in the making as it is a story of loyalty and longing.