313. Rudyard Kipling: Escaping India & Writing The Jungle Book (Part 2)

Hello and welcome. There is no Anita, I'm afraid, in this episode, as she is still in A and E, so all your prayers, her back is giving her terrible pain. But with me is my great friend Andrew Lyset, the brilliant biographer of Roger Kipling, who took us in the last episode so brilliantly through Kipling's childhood and his early writings. Now in this episode, we are going to follow Rudard Kipling through his brilliant Indian short stories, including classics such as The Man Who Would Be King that became that famous movie with Michael Cain and uh

Sean Connery, and then his move to America, where improbably in Vermont, he wrote The Jungle Book and Kim, two of the greatest volumes of British fiction about India. We last saw Kipling with Mrs. Hawkesby and Mrs. Reaver Andrew up. in similar dining in Pilates and involved in Himalayan flirtations.

By the end of the summer he's back on the plains and he's beginning to publish short stories in the Christmas annual of the Civil and Military Gazette. Now one of the first stories he writes is an extraordinary tale called The Strange Ride of Moroughby Dukes. And this tells the tale of an unimaginative engineer, a typical servant of empire, who is going out for an evening ride. He's got a slight fever, so he's he's trying to ride it off and wake himself up. And the horse careers off and he ends up falling into a pit where, says Kipling in this work of fiction,

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