Volume 51, Number 5 · March 25, 2004
'The First Citizen of India'
By Pankaj Mishra
In January 1900, Rudyard Kipling wrote to Charles Eliot Norton, 'I've done a long leisured Asiatic yarn in which there are hardly any Englishmen. It has been a labor of great love and I think it is a bit more temperate and wiser than much of my stuff.' This was Kim, Kipling's most successful novel, which he had begun in the early 1890s, intending it to be an adventure story set in India. When he returned to it in the fall of 1899, he was recovering from a series of personal setbacks. In 1898, his beloved sister, Trix, had been diagnosed with mental illness. Then, in early 1899, while visiting America, Kipling had caught pneumonia, and had lain too close to death to be informed of the death of his six-year-old daughter Josephine.
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