A Thematic Study

of
Rudyard Kipling's Short
Stories

BY

MS.MUKUL JOSHI

RESEARCH GUIDE
DR.SHtoSH CHINDHADE

PLACE OF RESEARCH
INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDIES IN ENGLISH
AUNDH, PUNE-411007
 A Thematic Study of Rudyard Kipling's Short Stories.
"A Thematic Study of Rudyard Kipling's Short Stories" is an extensive study of the
themes in Rudyard KipHng's stories. The researcher has clubbed together the short stories having
similar themes for the analysis. Each chapter covers a prominent part of Kipling's work. The
researcher has taken into consideration around one hundred and fifty short stories of Kipling for
the present study.
Chapter I: Introduction
In the introductory chapter of this work the researcher throws light on
the life and works of Rudyard Kipling and focuses on different stages of his life, the people and
places which shaped his development as a writer. A survey of Kipling's major works is done
which traces his progress as a short story writer, a poet and a novelist. A review of the criticism
of Kipling's works shows in this chapter shows that in spite of having a great literary output of
quality Kipling was often ignored by the critics. In the last section the plan of research of this
thesis is briefly discussed by the researcher. The themes of the short stories of Kipling are
broadly divided in five categories and are analysed in the subsequent chapters.
Chapter 11: Tales of India
CUfei'- Kipling's Indian Tales are most talked about Anglo-Indian short stories.
It^dia occupies a central position in Kipling's writings since the land had a very special place in
h|s heart. Kipling spent a considerable span of his life in India as a child and later as a journalist.
l^is tales of India are presented through his collections like Plain Tales from the Hills and are
divided into three sections. I) The Simla Tales II) Anglo-Indian Tales III) Native Indian Te^les.

Kipling's Simla Tales present a picture of the life of Anglo-India as it centered around
Simla, the government's summer capital. As the century advanced, methods of transport
improved.Simla became increasingly crowded with summer visitors and with ambitious women
wanting to be associated with influential men. Getting to Simla was therefore the be-all and end-
all of Anglo-Indian existence. The innumerable maneuveres, strategies, conflicts, and
disappointments that followed in the wake of this struggle for survival in Simla and marital
relationships provide the themes for a number of short stories in Plain Tales from the Hills
n'sisg) and elsewhere Kipling's Anglo-Indian women are all presented as devouring females.
social climbers, eternally plotting either to capture suitable young men or to cause their downfall.
The stories of Simla are also mainly the stories of socialite Mrs.Hauksbee.

In the Anglo-Indian Tales, Kipling turns his focus from the women of Anglo-India to its
men. The figures are more vivid, of amazing variety, his touch is more certain and his purpose
more determined. He presents his men at work-civilians, Army officers. Engineers, Doctors
Lawyers carrying out their tasks in a strange and uncongenial atmosphere. Sometimes Kipling
emphasizes and creates sensational incidents and characters to give an impressive background to
British achievement. There existed for Kipling two Indias.First, there was the personal India of
his liking, which provided him with material comforts and literary fame. Then there was
colonial India. This was the India that provided Kipling with tales. In such writing he had a
specific purpose-to impress upon the minds of Englishmen at home the almost divine necessity
of maintaining the British Empire. In his writings he interpreted with greater zeal the heroism
and self-sacrifice of Englishmen working in India for the empire. He wanted to show that theirs
was not an easy task, for they had to battle against superstition and violence and had to deal with
a race without the law. Duty, hard work and commitment to work are the major themes dealt
with in these tales.

Irhe Native Indian Tales revolve around Indian life. They are to be found mainly, in the
early volumes, and are considerable in number. Some of them rank amongst the best short stories
of Kipling. Kipling had tremendous interest in Indian life. His father's influence and his own '
inherent curiosity brought him much nearer to the real India. So his sketches of Indian life WCTe
remarkable, they did strike the imagination of the West in a unique manner. The Indians who
feature in his stories are the unorganized Rajas and the poor peasants, the Bengalis, the pathans,'
the Sikhs, the Bhils and the moneylenders indulging in nefarious dealings. The stories are woven
around themes of love, loyalty, intrigue, courage and fortitude. The middleclass and Western
Educated India was treated with derision and contempt as they had lost their primeval touch and
had ceased to be real Indians and they were a potential threat to the empire. To the people in
India these stories may have appeared familiar stuff brilliantly executed, but to the English at
home the stories had the strangeness, the colour, the variety and the perfume of the East.
Chapter III: Tales of Soldiers-Kipling's tales of soldiers revolve around three men in
Army as well as the around Naval Captain Emmanuel Pyeroft.Kipling's famous soldier stories
involve three soldiers—Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd.These stories revolve around the life of
the common soldier in the barracks. Kipling portrayed every phase of the soldier's life inside and
outside the barrack room in the peacetime stories. The peacetime life is set particularly against
the background of Indian climate and disease. It has its own comedy and tragedy, its own
humour and pathos. Kipling's sympathetic study leads to a better understanding of the soldier.
The contrasts are made between boredom and action, between barrack life overseas and
soldiering in Britain giving readers a completely new view of "Tommy Atkins."

Kipling wrote some interesting stories which relate to the Royal Navy and the Royal
Naval men. These naval stories were written around the characters Captain Emmanuel Pyecroft
and the famous Mrs. Bathurst. The Pyecroft stories show Kipling's longing to find a private
world to match his own privacy, his longing to find a secret society that would match his own
freemasonry, his longing to find a loneliness that would match his own creative isolation.

Chapter IV: Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural.

India has always appeared to the West as a land of mysteries, of secret cults, of dark
underworlds, and unfathomable riddles. Kipling's Supernatural stories deal with the eerie, the
mysterious and the supernatural in Indian life. In these stories, he noted some of the things that
bewitched and puzzled the white man. Kipling wrote these stories at various intervals which
deal with the themes of marvelous, of ghosts, the supernatural and the psychic experiences. "The
Phantom Rickshaw" and "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes" are among the few tales
dealing with the psychic experiences and the supernatural. The supernatural tales of Kipling
present a study of fear and present states of human mind under the impact of black magic and
other terrifying experiences.

Chapter V: Tales for Children

Kipling began to write children's tales when he was barely thirty and continued for some
fifteen years (1894-1910).The children's tales are classified as I) Animal Tales II) School tales
Ill) Historical Tales.

Animal tales are the tales in Jungle Books and in Just for stories which were primarily
written for the children. The Jungle Books could be considered as books in the line of Aesop's
Fables, Jataka and Panchatantra Tales. The concept of law appears in the form of fable in the
Jungle Books. The projection of law expresses some of Kipling's intimate convictions about life.
In the hierarchy of law, certain codes of action are expected and many of them are manifestations
of certain virtues. It consists of rules of conduct like keeping the promises, loyalty to friends,
bravery, generosity and respect for the elders. It exemplifies a code of honour based on hard
facts, with tooth and claw for its practical sanctions and necessity of courage, endurance,
observation, good faith, dexterity, physical and mental fitness.His Just so stories are fables about
how things came to be as we see them, the whale's throat and the armadillo's scales. The Just so
Stories are little myths or solving little riddles like how the camel got something so strange as a
hump and the elephant anything as strange as a trunk. These stories hover between a level of
fantasy and a level of simple conviction. In one aspect they are like make-believe games which
children love. In another, they are an introduction to one of the great literary kinds reflecting
something radical in the development of human imagination.

: : The school stories Stalky &Co. concern adolescence and make their greatest appeal to
adolescents. Kipling appears to have regarded them as addressed as much to educators as to
those suffering education. It's a story of Stalky and his friends M'Turk and Beetle studying at the
Coll(based on Kipling's United Services College) The constant theme of Stalky & Co. is that
ours is a world in which we are lucky if even the roughest justice comes our way.

Puck of the Pook 's Hill and Rewards and Fairies are historical tales set in different
periods of English History. Kipling's approach, as a writer, to the past, and especially to the
English past is presented in Puck ofPook's Hill and its sequel. Rewards and Fairies. He tried to
give children a taste for the past. The central chapters of Puck ofPook's Hill devoted to the tale
of Parnesius the centurion and three movements -the Norman conquest, fall of Rome and the
church of Tudor England. Kipling's treatment of history is brilliantly executed and characterized
by a disinterested love of the past for its own.

Chapter Vl-Science Fiction Tales.

 Kipling did not confine himself to India, beasts and children. He also experimented with
the modem science fiction successfully. The science fiction stories of Kipling talk about
futuristic aviation, introduction of advanced technology into a medieval society, also captures the
excitement of infant science of Radio, invention of microscope in The Eye of Allah.
The researcher has also dealt with the narrative techniques used by Rudyard Kipling in his
short stories, although it is not an approach central to this study. Methods such as the frame-
story, the "limited" narrator and the suppressed narrative have contributed towards the success of
some of Kipling's early short stories.

Chapter Vll-Conclusion

To conclude it can be said that the sweep of his imagination is so wide that it extends
over not only varieties of men but also lands as far apart as England ,Europe ,Asia ,and Africa,
which become the living organisms of his art. The sweep is not only wide but, it is also deep, and
balanced by exploration in detail. The stories reflect his insight into various layers of the
unconscious and the dimensions of the psyche which rise in the structures of his tales. He has a
genuine eye for exploring wide variety of life in the form of his short stories. It is of course true
that the creative genius of Kipling has t^ be considered a single, indivisible whole, and that his
roles as a poet, novelist and a short story writer are only facets of that one imaginative mind. Yet
it must be said that it is in the area of the short story that the best aspects of his creative talent are
vividly reflected.

The stories have an uncanny knack of representing human minds, hearts, behaviours,
weaknesses, strengths, understanding and sympathy on both sides of the divide between the east
and the west. It is an apparent divide and it can be meaningfully bridged. Kipling shows in
numerous ways how and under what circumstances this can be done. Though Kipling believed
that British were superior, many of his stories create a different picture. In these stories he looks
at Anglo-Indian characters with a combination of ruthless criticism and sympathy that is rare in
literature. He criticizes the foibles of the British and presents to us many types of involvement
and encounters between Anglo-Indians and India. If we read his stories without pre-judgement,
Kipling's Indian stories clearly reveal his love for India. Kipling belonged to the community that
colonized India. But he is not an "outsider" He appears to be an 'Insider-outsider' He is an
Indian in many senses. He never hesitates to reveal where Anglo-Indians go wrong, particularly
where they fail as human beings by being insensitive. The stories present an extra-ordinary
variety of character and circumstance.

The quality that strikes the reader is Kipling's wide and intimate knowledge of the
people, places, the flora and the fauna and culture of India Kipling simply gets out of India the
maximum of literary effect as a teller of tales. His idea is to escape into a region where life is
simple and intense. Kipling's Anglo-Indian tales are the tales talking of the encounters between
the Indians and the English. Two Indias seem to emerge out of Kipling's writings.

The man of action is omnipresent in his work. He is building bridges, fighting famines; a
subaltern or an employee of the forest department. He despises the men who only talk. His
interest in world's work and the men and women and machines who do it. Whether that work be
manual or intellectual, creative or administrative, the performance of his work is the most
important thing in a person's life. Kipling's writing embodies an attitude toward that work that
places its satisfactory completion above convenience, desire, and comfort in the scheme of
things.

Verisimilitude is one of the outstanding qualities of Kipling's short stories. He was the
first short story writer to create faithfully the scenes and atmosphere of barrack room and to '
make his soldiers seem real. His keen observation, his unflinching fidelity to the facts of life, and
his innate power to create living breathing, real people account for the deep impression of
verisimilitude that he produces on the sensibility of his reader. Kipling was the professional of
professionals, as is shown in his continuous search for finding the ways and methods of
professionals. Kipling was known to have talked at length with builders, masons, carpenters, and
craftsmen to know their skills, their lingo, their selective phraseology, their attitudes, and his
comprehensive grasp of the day-to day life of workmen are reflected.

Kipling is often drawn to certain favourite themes. Kipling is most concerned with the
human virtues like courage, duty, honour, decency, commitment and grit. He is quick to
recognize these virtues in men and women from all classes and races. The themes of revenge.