I  WAS so foolish about Kipling that I told myself it was worth the trip to India to be able to read Kim on the spot — it was so much more real than when I had read it at home. In Bombay I visited the compound where stood the house in which Kipling was born when his father presided over the School of Fine Arts. The house itself has been replaced Fine Arts. The house itself has been replaced by a more modern structure, but Kipling's old nurse was still about the place. In the Club at Lahore, where Kipling had gone as a child with his father when he had become Director of the Museum, they showed me the billiard cue that Kipling used. In the newspaper office they told me many tales of Kipling. Especially, how he would leave the Club each night with bits of conversation and slang scribbled in pencil on his cuffs, and sometimes over the bosom of the boiled shirt all Englishmen wear to all clubs of India.

      I myself it was worth the trip to India to be But my chief interest in India at the time was Indian unrest, and the object of my visit to Lahore was to meet a famous old Indian journalist and leader in the fight against British rule. After we had exhausted politics it sud- denly occurred to me that the old man, being a journalist, might know Kipling. He did, he was "ashamed" to say.

      And then he started. I got a new, an unexpected, and an unexpurgated version of Kipling. It was the Indian's point of view — Kipling through smoked glasses!

      Here's the gist of it. Kipling grew up in Lahore as a guttersnipe. His boyhood companions and playmates were the children of cooks and sweepers, the lowest of the low castes. From them he learned all of India he knew, except the side of Society and of the ruling caste as found in the cities and at Simla. Kipling, quite unlike his father, never took any interest in or had any appreciation for the intellectual, artistic, and spiritual sides of Indian life. Hence it is that whatever of Indian life Kipling put into his word pictures is from the point of view of an outcast, or of a drunken sergeant, or of a shameless woman of the world of the British ruling caste.

      "And," concluded the Indian, "no writer on India has ever done so much to defame India, or to cause it to appear in so false and vicious a light, as Kipling. We hate Kipling! But we can forgive him; what can you expect from one of his upbringing, what good can come out of barracks and the mouths of sweepers?"