Chapter One

Introduction

Since 1901, the Nobel Prize has been honouring men and women from all

corners of the globe for outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine,

literature, and for work in peace. The foundations for the prize were laid in 1895

when Alfred Nobel wrote his last will, leaving much of his wealth to the

establishment of the Nobel Prize. On November 27, 1895, Alfred Nobel signed his

last will in Paris. When it was opened and read after his death, the will caused a lot of

controversy both in Sweden and internationally, as Nobel had left much of his wealth

for the establishment of Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine,

Literature and Peace with the addition of Economic Sciences in 1968 via sponsorship

from The Riksbank (Sveriges Riksbank). The executors of his will were two young

engineers, Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist. They set about forming the Nobel

Foundation as an organization to take care of the financial assets left by Nobel for this

purpose and to coordinate the work of the Prize-Awarding Institutions. This was not

without its difficulties since the will was contested by relatives and questioned by

authorities in various countries.

Winners get a medal, a Nobel Laureate diploma, cash (about 1 million USD)

and a pat on the back from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden plus a gourmet feast

from Sweden’s finest chefs at the Nobel Banquet. The banquet is the famed televised

celebration dinner held in the Blue Hall (Blå Hallen) at The City Hall (Stadshuset)

with 1300 guests. The Peace Prize, however, is awarded in Oslo under the eye of King

Harald V of Norway.

Alfred Nobel had broad cultural interests. The interest that he developed in

literature during his early youth lasted throughout his life. His library holds a rich

spectrum of literature in different languages. Further evidence of Nobel’s literary

interest was that during the last years of his life, he began writing fiction again. As

described in Nobel’s will one part was dedicated to the person who shall have

produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction. The

Laureate should be determined by "the Academy in Stockholm", which was specified

by the statutes of the Nobel Foundation to mean the Swedish Academy. These statutes

defined literature as "not only belles-lettres, but also other writings which, by virtue of

their form and style, possess literary value". At the same time, the restriction to works

presented "during the preceding year" was softened: "older works" could be

considered "if their significance has not become apparent until recently". It was also

stated that candidates must be nominated in writing by those entitled to do so before 1

February each year. The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded 105 times to 109

Nobel Laureates between 1901 and 2012. The Swedish Academy is responsible for

choosing the Nobel Laureates in Literature. The Academy is composed of 18

members whose tenure is for life. Known as De Aderton (The Eighteen), current

members of the Academy include distinguished Swedish writers, linguists, literary

scholars, historians and a prominent jurist. Its working body is the Nobel Committee,

elected from among its members for a three-year term.

The word ‘laureate’ refers to being signified by the laurel wreath. In some

Greek mythology, the God Apollo is represented wearing a laurel wreath on his head.

A laurel wreath is a circular crown made of branches and leaves of the bay laurel. In

ancient Greece, laurel wreaths were awarded to victors as a sign of honour-both in

athletic competitions and in poetic meets.

The very first Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded in 1901 to the French

poet and philosopher Sully Prudhomme, who in his poetry showed the "rare

combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect". Over the years, the Nobel

Prize in Literature has distinguished the works of authors from many different

languages and cultural backgrounds. The Literature Prize has been awarded to

unknown masters as well as authors acclaimed worldwide.

For centuries past the literature of England has flourished and blossomed with

marvellous luxuriance. When Tennyson's immortal lyre was silenced forever, the cry

which is so customary at the passing of literary giants was raised. With him the

glorious reign of poetry is over; there is none to take up the mantle. But it is not so

with the fair goddess Poetry. She does not perish, she is not deposed from her high

estate; but she arrays herself in a fresh attire to suit the altered tastes of a new age.

In the works of Tennyson idealism is so pervasive that it meets the eye in a

very palpable and direct form. Traits of idealism, however, may be traced in the

conceptions and gifts of writers who differ widely from him, such writers who seem

primarily concerned with mere externals and who have won renown especially for

their vivid word-picturing of the various phases of the strenuous, pulsating life of our

own times, that life which is often chequered and fretted by the painful struggle for

survival and by all its concomitant worries and embarrassments. This description

applies to Rudyard Kipling, to whom the Swedish Academy has awarded the Nobel

Prize in Literature in the year 1907. He was the first Englishman to be honoured with

this award and to date remains its youngest recipient.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born on 30th December, 1865 in Bombay, where

his father, John Lockwood Kipling, himself an artist was the Principal of the

Jeejeebyhoy Art School. His mother was Alice Macdonald, two of whose sisters

married the highly successful 19th century painters Sir Edward Burne – Jones and Sir

Edward Poynter, while a third married Alfred Baldwin and became the mother of

Stanley Baldwin, later Prime Minister. These connections were of lifelong importance

to Kipling.

Kipling was taken to England at the age of six and was left for five years at a

foster home at Southsea, which came to be known as the ‘House of Desolation’. The

years from 1871 to 1877 became, for Kipling, years of misery. He suffered many

nervous breakdowns and an examination showed that he badly needed glasses. In

1877 Kipling’s mother returned to England and collected him from the ‘House of

Desolation’, so that he could attend the United Service College in Westward ho,

Devon, a new inexpensive and inferior boarding school.

Kipling returned to India in 1882 to live with his parents and worked for seven

years as a journalist. He became the assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette

and Pioneer, a Lahore news paper. His parents belonged to the Anglo-Indian society,

and Kipling thus had the opportunities for exploring the whole range of that life. All

the while, he had remained keenly observant of the spectacle of native India, which

had engaged his interest and affection earliest childhood. He was quickly filling the

journals he worked for with prose sketches and light verse. In march 1889 Kipling left

India to return to England , determined to pursue his future as a writer and in 1891 he

planned a round the world voyage, but travelled only to South Africa, Australia, New

Zealand and India.

In the year 1892, Kipling married Caroline balestier, an American. Their

honeymoon took them as far as Japan, but they returned to live at his wife’s home at

Vermont, but their manners and attitudes were considered objectionable by their

neighbours. Unable or unwilling to adjust to the life in America, the Kipling’s

returned to England in 1896. Even after Kipling remained very aware that Americans

were ‘foreigners’, and he extended to them, no more than semi exemption from his

proposition that only ‘lesser breeds’ are born beyond the English Channel. In 1902,

Kipling brought a house at Burwash, Sussex, which remained his home until his death

Kipling had thus far refused many awards and honours including that of

England’s Poet Laureate but in 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature,

the first English man to be so honoured, and to date remains its youngest recipient.

In 1915 during World War 1 Kipling visited the Western Front as a reporter

and he was actively involved in the Boer war in South Africa as a war correspondent.

In 1917, he was assigned the post of Honorary Literary Advisor to the Imperial War

Graves Commission and in 1922 he was named Lord Rector of the University of St.

Andrews in Scotland. In 1926 he was featured on the cover of Time Magazine and in

1935 he gave an address to the Royal Society of St. George, outlining the dangers

Nazi Germany posed to Britain. Rudyard Kipling died o haemorrhage on 18 January

1936 in London, and his ashes are interred in the poet’s corner of Westminster abbey,

London, England near to T. S. Eliot.

Kipling was a prolific, very versatile writer, and had from the outset all the

qualities necessary for popularity. His journalistic experience served him in good

stead throughout his career, and his prose works, which include stories of Indian life,

of children, and of animals, are told with great vitality. He has an inventive faculty, a

romantic taste for the adventurous and the supernatural, and an apparently colloquial

style, which ensured for his work a popular reception. His insistent proclamation of

the superiority of the white races, of Britain’s undoubted mission to extend through

her imperial policy the benefits of civilization to the rest of the world, his belief in

progress and the value of the machine, found an echo in the hearts of many of his

readers. Into the period of the decadent of writers he swept like a gale of invigorating

salt air, glorifying the values of action, manliness, loyalty, and self-sacrifice, and if his

work betrayed occasional lapses of taste or excursions into the melodramatic or

sentimental, they were not faults of such a kind as to effect the popularity he had

enjoyed from the moment of hi first English publications. But there was more in

Kipling than a mere popular writer. His achievement in revitalizing literature in

1890’s is not to be underestimated. His painting of Anglo-Indian and of native life is

extremely good: his portraits of soldiers, natives, and of children are also vividly

drawn: his background is clearly visualised and realistically presented, and he has

great ability to create an atmosphere of mystery. The apparent carelessness of style is

an effect deliberately and skilfully cultivated, and his stories are expertly constructed.

As a poet Kipling claims credit for re introducing realism and a racy vigour

into the verse of the nineties. At his best he achieves genuine poetry; at his worst he

can be mechanically and stridently crude. He lacks delicacy of touch. He is a

ceaseless experimenter in verse forms and rhythms, and his main themes are those of

his prose works. He was a singer of the glories of imperialism. It was his firm

conviction that English men were born to enlighten the world’s “....fluttered folk and

wild-/Your new caught, sullen peoples, /Half devil and half child” (kipling,6-8). He

was against granting freedom to slave nations. He called upon Englishmen to take

upon the ‘white man’s burden’ and “reap his own reward” (kipling,50). Kipling was a

realist who wrote about everyday matters and familiar objects. He had unique faculty

of seeing the romance of modern life. He has got more poetry out of the machinery

than any other poet. He understood Indian life from the view point of an Englishman.

In his earlier poems which are soldier and sailor rhymes he freely used cockney

dialect with its dropped consonants and distorted vowels, its sprinkling of foreign

words and its technical jargon.

Kipling was a short story writer of the traditional type and had no equal among

English short story writers of the traditional type. Hudson in An Outline History of

English Literature writes:

In that form he was the master of many moods, passing with

ease and assurance from brutality to fantasy, from folklore to farce –

performing brilliantly in each. He widened the range of fiction with his

stories of machinery and of animals, his gift of efficiency and

conviction going far toward persuading reader that machine as well as

animals must surely have minds souls, of which Kipling appeared to

know from A to Z the nature and intimate workings(Hudson,281).

The accusation has occasionally been made against Kipling that his

language is at times somewhat coarse and that his use of soldier's slang in some of the

broadest of his songs and ballads verges on the vulgar. Though there may be some

truth in such remarks, their importance is offset by the invigorating directness and

ethical stimulus of Kipling's style. He has won immense popularity, not only in the

Anglo-Indian world, which possesses in him a great literary master, but also far

beyond the limits of the vast British Empire. During his serious illness in America in

1899, the American newspapers issued daily bulletins regarding his condition, and the

German Emperor dispatched a telegram to his wife to express his earnest sympathy.

Kipling may not be eminent essentially for the profundity of his thought or for

the surpassing wisdom of his meditations. Yet even the most cursory observer sees

immediately his absolutely unique power of observation, capable of reproducing with

astounding accuracy the minutest detail from real life. However, the gift of

observation alone, be it ever so closely true to nature, would not suffice as a

qualification in this instance. There is something else by which his poetical gifts are

revealed. His marvellous power of imagination enables him to give us not only copies

from nature but also visions out of his own inner consciousness. His landscapes

appear to the inner vision as sudden apparitions do to the eye. In sketching a

personality he makes clear, almost in his first words, the peculiar traits of that person's

character and temper. Creativeness which does not rest content with merely

photographing the temporary phases of things but desires to penetrate to their inmost

kernel and soul, is the basis of his literary activity. Kipling draws the thing as he sees

it for the God of things as they are. In these weighty words lies a real appreciation of

the poet's responsibility in the exercise of his calling.

Rudyard Kipling's manly, at times brusque, energy does not preclude

tenderness and delicacy of touch, though these qualities never clamour affectedly for

recognition in his works. In the innermost being of this indefatigable observer of life

and human nature vibrate strings attuned to a lofty note.

If Kipling is an idealist from an aesthetic point of view by reason of

poetical intuition, he is so, too, from an ethical-religious standpoint by virtue of his

sense of duty, which has its inspiration in a faith firmly rooted in conviction. He is

acutely conscious of the truth that even the mightiest states would perish unless they

rested upon the sure foundation in the citizens' hearts of a loyal observance of the law

and a reasoned self-restraint. For Kipling, God is first and foremost Almighty

Providence, termed in Life's Handicap a Greet Overseer. The English as a nation can

well appreciate these conceptions, and Kipling has become the nation's poet.

Many and varied are the movements that have had their vogue in

English literature, a literature unparalleled for wealth of output and adorned to surpass

all others by the immortal figure of Shakespeare. In Kipling may be traced perhaps

more of Swift and Defoe than of Spenser, Keats, Shelley, or Tennyson. Clearly,

however, imagination is as strong in him as empirical observation. Though he does

not possess the refined and sensuously beautiful style of Swinburne, yet he escapes,

on the other hand, all tendency toward a pagan worship of pleasure for pleasure's

sake. He avoids all morbid sentimentality in matter and Alexandrian super florescence

in form.

Kipling favours concreteness and concentration; empty abstractions and

circumlocutionary descriptions are wholly absent from his works. He has a knack for

finding the telling phrase, the characteristic epithet, with swift accuracy and certainty.

He has been compared now to Dickens; he is, however, always original, and it would

seem that his powers of invention are inexhaustible. Nevertheless, the apostle of the

imagination is likewise, as stated above, the standard-bearer of law-abidingness and

discipline. The Laws of the Jungle are the Laws of the Universe; if we ask what their

chief purport is, we shall receive the brief answer: “Struggle, Duty, Obedience”.

(Literature: 1901-1967 - Page 63 ) Kipling thus advocates courage, self-sacrifice, and

loyalty; unmanliness and lack of self-discipline are abominations to him, and in the

world order he perceives a nemesis before which presumption is constrained to

surrender.

If Kipling is quite independent as a writer, it does not follow that he

has learned nothing from others; even the greatest masters have done so. With Bret

Harte, Kipling shares his appreciation of the picturesqueness of vagabond life, and

with Defoe his accuracy in depicting every detail and his sense of the values of

exactness in the use of terms and phrases. Like Dickens he feels a keen sympathy with

those of low degree in the community, and like him he can perceive the humour in

trifling traits and acts. But his style is distinctively original and personal. It

accomplishes its ends by suggestion rather than by description. It is not quite

uniformly brilliant but it is always eminently expressive and picturesque. The series

From Sea to Sea (1899) is a veritable model of graphic description, whether the scene

is laid in the Elephant City governed by the Grand Divinity of Laziness, in Palm

Island, or in Singapore, or whether the story deals with manners and customs of

Japan. Kipling has at his command a large fund of irony - sometimes highly pungent -

but he has abundant resources of sympathy, too, sympathy for the most part extended

to those soldiers and sailors who have upheld the honour of England in far-distant

lands.

He attained fame and success as a very young man, but he has continued to

develop ever since. One of his biographers has stated that there are three «notes» to be

traced in his authorship. The satirical note is found in Departmental Ditties, Plain

Tales from the Hills, The Story of the Gadsbys, with its amusing commendation of

single blessedness, and in the much-debated novel, The Light that Failed. The second,

the note of sympathy and human kindness, is most clearly marked in “The Story of

Muhammad Din” and in “Without Benefit of Clergy” (in Life’s Handicap), a gem of

heartfelt emotion. The third, the ethical note, is clearly traceable in Life’s Handicap.

Whether there be much value or not in this classification which, as is usually the case

in such matters, cannot be consistently applied to the whole of his production, one

thing is certain: Kipling has written and sung of faithful labour, fulfilment of duty,

and love of one's country. Love of one's country with Kipling does not mean solely

devotion to the island kingdom of England, but rather an enthusiastic affection for the

British Empire. The closer uniting of that Empire's separate members is a long and

fervently cherished aspiration of the poet's. That is surely clear from his exclamation

“What should they know of England who only England know?”(The English Flag,

kipling,6)

Kipling has given us descriptions in vivid colours of many different countries.

But the picturesque surface of things has not been the principal matter with him; he

has always, in all places, had a manly ideal before him: ever to be “ready, ay ready at

the call of duty” and then, when the appointed time comes, to “go to God like a

soldier”. (The Young British soldier, Kipling, 67)

Kipling’s poems and stories were extraordinarily popular in the late 19th and

early 20th century, but after World War I his reputation as a serious writer suffered

through his being widely viewed as a jingoistic imperialist. As a poet he scarcely

ranks high, although his rehabilitation was attempted by so distinguished a critic as

T.S. Eliot. His verse is indeed vigorous, and in dealing with the lives and colloquial

speech of common soldiers and sailors it broke new ground. But balladry, music-hall

song, and popular hymnology provide its unassuming basis; and even at its most

serious—as in “Recessional” (1897) and similar pieces in which Kipling addressed

himself to his fellow countrymen in times of crisis—the effect is rhetorical rather than

imaginative.

But it is otherwise with Kipling’s prose. In the whole sweep of his adult

storytelling, he displays a steadily developing art, from the early volumes of short

stories set in India through the collections Life’s Handicap (1891), Many Inventions

(1893), The Day’s Work (1898), Traffics and Discoveries (1904), Actions and

Reactions (1909), Debits and Credits (1926), and Limits and Renewals (1932). While

his later stories cannot exactly be called better than the earlier ones, they are as good

—and they bring a subtler if less dazzling technical proficiency to the exploration of

deeper though sometimes more perplexing themes. It is a far cry from the broadly

effective eruption of the supernatural in “The Phantom Rickshaw” (1888) to its subtle

exploitation in “The Wish House” or “A Madonna of the Trenches” (1924), or from

the innocent chauvinism of the bravura “The Man Who Was” (1890) to the depth of

implication beneath the seemingly insensate xenophobia of “Mary Postgate” (1915).

There is much in Kipling’s later art to curtail its popular appeal. It is compressed and

elliptical in manner and sombre in many of its themes. The author’s critical reputation

declined steadily during his lifetime—a decline that can scarcely be accounted for

except in terms of political prejudice. Paradoxically, postcolonial critics later

rekindled an intense interest in his work, viewing it as both symptomatic and critical

of imperialist attitudes.