#000633
Tales of India
Rudyard Kipling
A gathered selection of Rudyard Kipling's short fiction set in British India — the terrain that made his name. Kipling wrote these stories out of his years as a young journalist in Lahore and Allahabad, and they range across the hill stations, cantonments, bazaars, and jungles of the Raj, peopled by soldiers, officials, servants, children, and animals. The prose is quick, vivid, and confident, alert to sensory detail and to the collisions of the many worlds crowded under colonial rule. This particular volume is a mid-1930s American reprint in Rand McNally's Windermere Series, illustrated by Paul Strayer and aimed partly at younger readers. It offers an inviting doorway into Kipling's Indian tales — and, for a modern reader, into the vexed politics of empire that his work both records and, at times, endorses.
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The author
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was born in Bombay, schooled in England, and returned to India as a newspaperman, mining that experience for the stories and verse that made him, by his thirties, the most popular writer in the English-speaking world. In 1907 he became the first English-language winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The book
Tales of India collects Kipling's Indian short fiction; this edition is a 1935 Rand McNally Windermere Series printing illustrated by Paul Strayer. The stories showcase his gift for compression, atmosphere, and voice across the social range of the Raj.
How it has aged
Kipling's craft is undiminished, but his politics are now central to how he is read. He was an ardent imperialist — author of "The White Man's Burden" — and his portrayals of Indians and empire have drawn sustained criticism from postcolonial critics, even as writers from Orwell to later admirers insisted on separating his artistry from his ideology. The best way to read him today is with both held in view: extraordinary storytelling and a worldview that helped rationalize colonial rule.
For more context
Read alongside Edward Said's account of Kipling in Culture and Imperialism and George Orwell's 1942 essay on Kipling.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Rudyard Kipling
- Publisher
- Rand McNally (Windermere Series)
- Place of publication
- Chicago
- Year
- 1935
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Fiction
- Location
- Colorado