'Kipling Sahib: India and the Making ofRudyard Kipling, 1865-1900' by Charles Allen

When the arch-satirist Nancy Mitford wanted to establish the ridiculousness of Lady Montdore, her megalomaniac character in "Love in a Cold Climate" who had recently returned from India with her husband the viceroy, Mitford had her declaim that they had put India on the map, no one really having heard of it before! Well, Rudyard Kipling might indeed have put the subcontinent into the literary consciousness of the world, so powerful was the impact of his indelible tales of the Indian Raj and its diverse people and cultures.

As Charles Allen puts it at the beginning of his brilliantly insightful biographical study, "Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1900," which focuses on the first half of the writer's life, from his birth in Bombay to his unhappy childhood in England to his much more joyous young adulthood back in Bombay, India made Kipling the great artist he was, just as his works created an India, in all its peoples and cultures (colonial and indigenous), that for so many millions of readers was their introduction to its many splendors.

"India was where Rudyard Kipling was happiest, where he learned his craft, where he rediscovered himself through writing and came of age as a writer. India made him, charged his imagination, and after he left India in March 1889 at the age of twenty-three he was most completely himself as an artist when reinhabiting the two Indian worlds he had left behind. He lived thereafter on borrowed time, a state of higher creativity he was unable to maintain once he had exhausted his Indian memories with the writing of his masterwork 'Kim.' " A century after Kipling received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907, the first English-language writer and at 42 still the youngest ever to win it (the Swedish academy paying "tribute of homage to the literature of England, so rich in manifold glories, and to the greatest genius in the realm of narrative that that country has produced in our times"), his fame has receded somewhat. At the time, he was not just one of the world's bestselling authors but also one of the most critically esteemed.