Kipling Sahib

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, spent an unhappy school-age exile in England and returned to India as a sixteen-year-old journalist. Charles Allen follows the years in Lahore and Allahabad in which Kipling worked for colonial newspapers, travelled widely and transformed the people, languages and institutions around him into poems and stories that quickly made his reputation.

The biography places Kipling's early writing within the social world of the British Raj while tracing the family connections and experiences that shaped his imagination. Allen also addresses the tensions in Kipling's relationship with India: affection and close observation existed alongside the assumptions of empire. The result is a portrait of how colonial India formed the writer before his fame became international.