Hello and welcome to this episode of Chronicles where today we're going to be talking all about Kim by Rudyard Kipling.

Now this is the first Kipling novel that we've going to be talking all about Kim by Rudyard Kipling. Now, this is the first Kipling novel that we've covered so far on Chronicles,

and I'm very excited about it.

It's a pleasure to talk about the most famous Indian author of all time.

So it should be a damn good show.

So let's talk a little bit, shall we, about Rudyard Kipling

before we get into the actual novel. So Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865. Now, Rudyard Kipling's father

was quite a remarkable man in his own right as well. In 1865, the year of Kipling's birth,

Kipling being born right at the end of the year on December the 30th.

So Kipling comes along shortly after his father's move to Bombay,

and there he becomes a professor at the local school of art and industry as a professor of architectural sculptures

and so was a very, a man very much bound in an intellectual understanding of the Orient,

of India, of its cultures and traditions and its forms of art. And obviously all of this

would be something that Kipling would absolutely inherit from his own father as well. And so

Kipling lived a, by all accounts, a very happy, somewhat spoiled, but very loving life in those

early years. But there was a spout of tragedy

in his life not long after, which is where, as was very customary for the time, it was decided

that Kipling would go back to England, or to England for the first time, in his case, to the

motherland of the empire.

And he would actually have some years, some of his important early formative years,

living in England. So he can actually see his roots, who he is as an Englishman.

And what that part of his identity is all about and what the heart of empire, what it's all

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