Kipling In India

Grange Art Gallery, Rottingdean, Saturday, June 27

THIS year marks the 150th anniversary of Rudyard Kipling’s birth in Bombay.

And to mark the occasion the second annual Kipling Festival in his old home village of Rottingdean is exploring the influence India had both on the writer's life and work.

Over the next two weeks the village will host a variety of Kipling-themed events, including poetry readings, tours of the gardens on the site of his old home, and performances of new plays Rikki Tikki Tavi based on one of his Jungle Book stories, and The Fever Trees examining Kipling’s life growing up.

One of the festival highlights is a talk by former Cambridge University lecturer and chair of the Kipling Society Mary Hamer. Her Virginia Prize-winning novel Kipling And Trix was published in 2012, partly inspired by the writer’s experiences growing up in India.

“He spent much more time with the Indian servants than he did with his parents,” says Hamer. “He grew up speaking Hindustani – the servants would have to remind him to speak English to his parents.”

The lives of the then five-year-old Kipling and his three-year-old sister were to change for the worst when their parents sent them to live in Southsea with Captain Pryse Agar Holloway and his cruel wife Sarah.

“The experiences he had in Southsea nearly killed him,” says Hamer. “I have no reason to think there was actual sexual abuse, but there was certainly spiritual abuse. The boy was bullied, to the point he was absolutely mad by the time he escaped. The little girl was made into a pet.”

He finally left the house six years later when his mother Alice returned to Britain, and returned to India at the age of 16 to work on a Lahore newspaper.

“When he got back to India he found himself speaking a language he didn’t know, and couldn’t understand what he was saying,” says Hamer. “Gradually it clicked!”

She sees India as a recurring comfort in his life – it was where he ran away to when he initially got engaged to Carrie Balestier, and where he drew inspiration for his most popular tales for children: The Jungle Book and Just So Stories.

“It kept him alive as a child, and it saved him again when he needed to move on and become a grown man, a father of a family,” she says.

Hamer’s own relationship with Kipling began at the age of eight or nine when she read his children’s stories. Having been prevented from studying him for her PhD she decided to return to Kipling a decade ago.

“I felt I had got unfinished business with this man,” she says. “At the time I was at university they weren’t studying Kipling – he was never part of post-colonial studies.

“He shared the assumptions of his time [most famously in the colonial poem The White Man’s Burden] but he had a friendship and respect for Indian people. Gunga Din is a poem of respect.”

Rather than create a straight biography of Kipling and his sister Hamer decided to create a “bio-novel”.

“I didn’t mess around with the facts,” she says. “I used them to structure the novel.

“There are six volumes of Kipling’s letters, and many biographies, as well as his own memoirs, but there wasn’t so much information on Trix. I had to fill in the gaps, and take imaginative leaps.”

It was her writing group which encouraged her to look at the role Kipling’s little sister played in his life.

“She was very beautiful, and had three or four proposals in the same season,” she says. “But she chose to marry an unsuitable man who didn’t have her literary interests.

“She was an army wife in India, with nothing to support her writing habit.”

When Trix wrote her first novel, only a year after her wedding, it was a powerful account of an unhappy marriage.

“She must have been attacked for her honesty by her husband’s family,” says Hamer, adding her next novel was much more escapist, and led into an interest in the popular spiritualist method of automatic writing.

“If she didn’t write she got terrible headaches and her arm would start to twitch,” says Hamer. “It made her more confident there was an outside force, although I think it was more a shut-off feeling in herself.”

With historian and writer Kathryn Tidrick.

Starts 4.30pm, tickets £10. Visit www.kiplingfestivalrottingdean.co.uk