His father was John Lockwood Kipling, an artist with Pre-Raphaelite connections who headed the Mayo School of Arts in Lahore (now Pakistan’s National College of Arts) and researched traditional Indian skills.
His uncle by marriage was the august painter-designer Edward Burne-Jones. This trumpeter of empire somehow emerged from the arts-and-crafts aestheticism of late-Victorian Britain. He combined text, drawings (see picture) and design into an enchanting package that young readers still enjoy. These 12 “alternative creation narratives” were originally meant for Kipling’s beloved daughter Josephine, who died, aged six, in 1899 they were published in 1902. How could the strident jingoist and the shape-shifting magician share the same brain? Like Kipling himself, Mr Batchelor lets the big picture emerge from small details.įluent, engaging and gently erudite, his account centres on the making of the “Just So Stories”. Nonetheless, his allegiance to British imperialism “pulled him into explicitly racist writing”. This ingenious, versatile and empathetic literary magpie, once a teenage journalist in colonial Lahore, became “a ravenous observer of the world”. Critics and readers fret over the paradoxes of an author who, in a poem, thanked “Allah Who gave me two/Separate sides to my head”. Today he is an avatar for debates over Britain’s past, and a case study in reconciling admiration with judgment.
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