Published: 18 March 2010
by GERALD ISAAMAN

TODAY we see the world through the penetrating cameras of TV, films, DVDs and video, plus the unchecked chatter of internet blogs.

And the end result is a confused and distorted picture you can’t totally trust. Pictographs, the basis of writing, are now the fashion, the word is no longer sacrosanct as new generations of technocrat kids text and tweet.

But it was the word that counted in Rudyard Kipling’s heyday. Details such as the evocative description of beauty and smell, taste and explosive emotions could add to the sensation of seeing through a writer’s eyes the ugly or exotic actuality of a place, the sensation of the supreme moment, now dulled by endless repetition in TV clips.

He was undoubtedly a citizen of the world, much travelled over five continents, a man with a passion for becoming involved wherever he was, and, of course, declaring proud, sometimes arrogant views from an imperial age much decried now for their rampaging ­prejudices.

All that is worth bearing that in mind while enjoying this admirable collection of Kipling’s travel writing, the more so because it has been brought together by Andrew Lycett. He himself is a much-travelled journalist but, more importantly, the author, a decade ago, of a much-admired major biography of the author, poet and misunderstood man of political influence.

He takes us from the plains to the hills of India, where Kipling was born in 1865 in what is modern-day Mumbai, to the stinking cattle sheds of Chicago, where tourists watched the animals being slaughtered. And to the Paris Exhibition of 1878 to meet three fresh-faced pretty girls in a Nagasaki teahouse.

We go to South Africa, the Valley of the Kings, Brazil, Jerusalem, Venice, Sweden, and, of course, to England, and London, where Kipling lived initially in two unfurnished rooms in Villiers Street, off the Strand. That location provided the backdrop for a scene in his poignant 1891 tale, The Light That Failed, his travels forever invading his novels, children’s stories and overflowing journalism, as you can easily discover now that Kipling is out of copyright.

As one of PG Wodehouse’s characters said: “I can’t keep still. I’ve got the go-fever, like that man in Kipling’s book.”

“Bombay [Mumbai] was a city for which Kipling had a great affection,” Lycett told me at his home in Primrose Hill. “Bombay and the rest of India had a profound effect on him and his imagination. He used to attribute his unique way of looking at the world to having ‘two sides to his head’ – the result of being exposed to different cultures from an early age.”

Yet he had no sympathy for Indian nationalist aspirations, which is the reason why plans to turn the art school building in Mumbai where Kipling’s father once taught – and where he may have been born – into a Kipling museum have been rejected. And that’s despite so much of his literature now regarded as enduring classics.

“The authorities have put their put their foot down because Kipling was an imperialist,” says Lycett. “But I think this is a matter of local politics, one which can probably be overcome. It would be a significant gesture if the Indians did make some sort of monument to a man who was in fact one of their great writers, the first person born in India to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

“Kipling is greatly respected by modern Indian writers as someone who told about their country as it is. He turned his brilliant author’s eye to the subcontinent of his day. And although he was indeed politically an imperialist, he was scathingly satirical about the misdemeanours and foibles of the ruling classes of the Raj.”

Lycett, like Kipling, loves travel. “That’s how I discovered the India of Kipling,” he points out.

“In this new book I include fascinating comments by him on the new phenomenon of globetrotters, or tourists, coming to India. 

“He was wary of developments such as air travel, which might put too much power in the hands of an oligarchy.”

Nevertheless, Kipling did make it to Hampstead, his daughter being the owner for some years of immaculate Burgh House, where he visited her, which reminds me of the marvellous Kipling story when he was at the height of his fame.

Two cheeky graduates wrote him a letter, which said: “We hear you earn a shilling for every word you write these days. Enclosed is a shilling. Please send us a word.”

That hardly taxed Kipling’s brain. “Thanks,” he wrote, and pocketed the shilling.

• Kipling Abroad. By Andrew Lycett. IB Tauris Publishers £19.50