Just So Story

© 2003 David Minor / Eagles Byte

In the first chapter of "Kim" Rudyard Kipling wrote, `"A white-bearded Englishman was looking at the lama, who gravely turned and saluted him and after some fumbling drew forth a note-book and a scrap of paper. `Yes, that is my name,' smiling at the clumsy, childish print...Come to my office awhile.' The office was but a little wooden cubicle partitioned off from the sculpture-lined gallery. Kim laid himself down, his ear against a crack in the heat-split cedar door, and, following his instinct, stretched out to listen and watch." And so Kipling introduced his father, John Lockwood Kipling, curator of the Lahore Museum, to a wider world. As with Kim, listening and watching were skills both Kiplings were constantly stretching.

Curator in Lahore for nearly twenty years, Kipling, through his son's novel, became known as The Keeper of the Images. He presided over a 'Wonder House' containing Islamic manuscripts, Buddhist sculptures, a carved wood door frame, Kurdish rugs, Islamic calligraphy, Persian miniatures, glazed tiles, Tibetan furniture and devil-dance masks - the surviving remnants of dynasties cheek-to-jowl with the latest marvels of machine-made goods. And, most notably, out in front of the museum, the gun Zam-Zammah, perch of the fictional British orphan Kimball O'Hara, and best known today as Kim's gun.

While John Kimball cared for his inanimate charges and constantly added to the collection, his 17-year-old son Rudyard, new sub-editor of the local Civil and Military Gazette, combed Lahore for materials for his paper; at the same time building up his own collection - tales and images he would transform into fiction and poetry. In the Shah Alam Market, the taverns, under a tree along the Circular Road, in lantern-flickered back alleys, he would hear many stories. Stories of the Moghul Kamrab who was blinded by his brother after attempting to take Prince Akbar's life with a rigged cannon. Of Akbar's grandson Shah Jehan, who built a world-renowned tribute to his dead wife as well as the Octagonal Tower, where he was imprisoned by his rebellious son Aurangzeb and spent the last eight years of his life. Of Ranjit Singh and the diamond called Koh-I-noor, that would end up in the Tower of London. Or the 14-foot-long gun Zam-Zammah, or Lion's Roar, that the emperor dragged to the siege of Multan, the gun being put out of commission and losing its roar after firing two shots. Of British lieutenant Alexander Burnes who ascended and charted the Indus River with his "little elephants". The same Burnes who was honored for his services with knighthood, made a member of the Royal Geographical Society, returned to Lahore, headed west into Afghanistan under heavy disguise on a diplomatic mission to Dost Mohammed at Kabul, fought against him in Britain's First Afghan War, attempted to establish peace, and was slaughtered along with his entire household and retinue on November 2nd, 1841.

His mind overflowing, Kipling would leave India in 1889, return to visit his parents in 1891, then leave forever, dying 45 years later. The works he left behind, many illustrated by his father, would become controversial in our own time, but Kipling's India is the British India that lives in our minds today. Just so it was that the image keeper's son would create and bequeath images of his own.