The Kipling File

Sudhir Kakar

The psychoanalyst and writer Sudhir Kakar reimagines the youth of Rudyard Kipling, as the future author discovers colonial India while working for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore in the 1880s. This is a tale of the turmoil—including doomed friendship and difficult love—that shaped the future Nobel-winning author of classics such as The Jungle Book and Kim. Narrated by Kipling’s editor at the Gazette, Kay Robinson, it depicts an extraordinary Anglo-Indian life in a Punjab that is beginning to stir with anti-colonial sentiment.

Penguin Random House, 256 pages, Rs 499