Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling

"This is the story of the forgotten Kipling: 'Ruddy' the troubled youth eager to be accepted by Anglo-Indian society but too arrogant for his own good. A boy terrified of heat, darkness, and disease; a teenager who suffered a series of physical and mental breakdowns and turned to opiates for relief. A young man compelled to take dangerous 'night walks' into the native city of Lahore." "This is Ruddy the breaker of taboos: who visited prostitutes; who wrote about love across the racial divide and wives who committed adultery in the hill-stations; who wrote sympathetically about the drunks and vagabonds of the British underclass. But when Kipling used his pen to attack figures in the highest tiers of the establishment, he became too scandalous for British India's comfort. At twenty-three, Ruddy left India to make a name for himself in literary London." This account of the first part of Ruddy's life, between 1865 and 1900, reveals the true Rudyard Kipling in all his complexities.