Footnotes

'I HAVE NEVER WRITTEN ANYTHING ABOUT THE MUTINY': this letter points to what might seem on the face of it to be a quite extraordinary and altogether unexpected omission from the oeuvre of the most famous of all Anglo-Indian writers, one who was born in Bombay only eight years after the Mutiny. A possible explanation is provided by Charles Allen in his recent analysis of Kipling's early career, where apropos the marriage of Kipling's parents he writes: 'Barely seven years had elapsed since the hideous eruption of violence known as the Sepoy or Indian Mutiny, when British men, women and children in scores of isolated communities scattered across the northern and central plains had been put to the tulwar and bayonet. In the words of the Mutiny's first historian, the British had experienced "the degradation of fearing those we had taught to fear us". The degradation had been followed by bloody retribution, with the avenging armies of the British often failing to make any distinction between rebels and innocent bystanders. The result was a legacy of bitter distrust and a drawing apart of the two races that was to last for decades... After the initial outpouring of memorials and personal reminiscences the Mutiny of '57 became a taboo subject among Anglo-Indians, something not to be spoken about but always there at the back of one's mind, along with the unspoken fear that what had happened once could happen again, and that Indians were to be neither trusted nor respected. These were attitudes that the Kiplings soon came to share' (Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling, 2007, pp. 19 and 21).

This letter was written from Vermont after Kipling's marriage to Caroline Balestier, and it was here that he wrote The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895): see also the following lot. It is not published in The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, edited by Thomas Pinney (1990-1999).