His name was Charlie Mears; he was the only son of his mother who was a widow and he lived in the north of London coming into the City every day to work in a bank. He was twenty years old and suffered from aspirations.

This book explores and re-evaluates Kipling’s connection with India, its people, culture, languages, and locales through his experiences and his writings. Kipling’s works attracted interest among a large section of the British public, stimulating curiosity in their far-off Indian Empire, and made many canonize him as an emblem of the ‘Raj’. This volume highlights the astonishing social and thematic range of his Indian writings as represented in The Jungle Books; Kim; his early verse; his Simla-based tales of Anglo-Indian intrigues and love affairs; his stories of the common Indian people; and his journalism. It brings together different theoretical and contextual readings of Kipling to examine how his experience of India influenced his creative work and conversely how his imperial loyalties conditioned his creative engagement with India. The 18 chapters here engage with the complexities and contradictions in his writings and analyse the historical and political contexts in which he wrote them, and the contexts in which we read him now. With well-known contributors from different parts of the world – including India, the UK, the USA, Canada, France, Japan, and New Zealand – this book will be of great interest not only to those interested in Kipling’s life and works but also to researchers and scholars of nineteenth-century literature, comparative studies, postcolonial and subaltern studies, colonial history, and cultural studies.

An Irish orphan becomes the disciple of a Tibetan monk while learning espionage tactics from the British secret service in India. Kipling's final and most famous novel.

Peter Havholm blends knowledge of political battles in 1880s British India with close readings of well-known works like 'The Man Who Would Be King', 'Kim', and 'The Light That Failed' to connect Rudyard Kipling's continuing popularity with his youthful discovery that British India could be fictionalized as wondrous. Havholm's reading both acknowledges Kipling's artistic achievement and illuminates the continuing allure of the imperialist fantasy.

Annotation This volume surveys 200 years of Indian literature in English. Written by Indian scholars and critics, many of the 24 contributions examine the work of individual authors, such as Rabindranath Tagore, R.K. Narayan, and Salman Rushdie. Others consider a particular genre, such as post-independence poetry or drama. The volume is illustrated with b&w photographs of writers along with drawings and popular prints. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.