Just So Stories

Rudyard Kipling was an English writer born in British-controlled India in 1865. He is known for his prolific career that shaped English-language literature, but he is also a controversial figure criticized for his imperialist and racist views. 

Kipling grew up in India until the age of five when he was sent back to the United Kingdom to receive an education. He lived with his younger sister in an abusive foster home and later attended a boarding school. At 16, he returned to India and worked at various local newspapers. Kipling was primarily a journalist for Lahore’s Civil and Military Gazette, but the paper also published dozens of Kipling’s short stories over the years. During this time, Kipling wrote obsessively and prolifically, publishing six collections of short stories in 1888 alone. 

In 1889, Kipling decided to move back to London. First, however, he spent some months traveling across Asia and the United States, where he made his way from California up the west coast to Seattle, Washington, and eventually east to New York. Kipling had returned to England by the end of 1889 and was married in 1892. The newlyweds moved to the United States and rented a small cabin in Vermont, where their first daughter was born later that year. During his time in Vermont, Kipling began working on the stories that would become some of his most enduring works, The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895).

In 1896, the Kiplings had a second daughter. Due to various personal and political conflicts, the family moved back to the UK, where they had a son in 1897. The Kiplings’ first daughter, Josephine, died of pneumonia in 1899. Kipling was devastated by the loss and in 1902 published his now-classic Just So Stories, a collection of children’s stories addressed to his “Best Beloved,” who is understood to be Josephine. In 1907, Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was the first English-language recipient of the prize and, at 41 years old, remains the prize’s youngest laureate.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Rudyard Kipling was a famous writer and his short stories and novels were incredibly popular. However, his reputation began to suffer during the First World War, with Kipling’s strongly pro-war stance alienating some, especially as the war went on. Today, critics continue to point to controversial works like the poems “Gunga Din” (1890) and “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) as examples of Kipling’s racist and paternalistic pro-empire attitude. In “Gunga Din,” Kipling uses demeaning language and reductive stereotypes in his depiction of a Hindu water-bearer, while “The White Man’s Burden” depicts Western colonialism as a supposedly selfless mission to “civilize” non-European peoples, whom Kipling describes as, “Your new-caught sullen peoples / Half devil and half child” (7-8) that are incapable of culture or self-rule. Kipling’s imperialistic, Victorian worldview is sometimes reflected in Just So Stories, with his emphasis on hierarchy in the natural world, and the use of a racial slur in the original version of “How the Leopard Got His Spots.”

However, others have argued that his literary genius is undeniable and that his work shows a complex portrayal of colonial life consistent with the time and place in which Kipling lived. This tension between seeing Kipling as a voice of his time or as emblematic of imperialist oppression sparks ongoing debates about his legacy in modern literature.