Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay and sent to England as a boy. He came back to India as a young man and wrote about it with a clear, detached eye — the eye of someone who loved the place and also served the empire that ruled it.

In Rikki-Tikki-Tavi he watches a mongoose the way a naturalist watches: the pink nose, the restless tail, the war-cry in the grass. He notices everything. He does not soften the animal. He shows it.

But look to the horizon of this world and it is an imperial one. An English family in a bungalow. An Indian garden, half-wild and arid in the heat, full of danger. A small loyal creature who keeps the danger out. Kipling saw India exactly — and he saw it from above.

He won the Nobel Prize in 1907, the first writer in English to do so.

Read the texts: If— · Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

He gave no Nobel Lecture. NobelPrize.org notes that as a child he spoke English, Hindi and Portuguese — worth knowing when you meet the word veranda. Read about his prize at NobelPrize.org.