Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) remains the enfant terrible of English literature if not an outright villain, for he is routinely castigated for his blatant championing of British imperialism. He remains phenomenally popular as a writer, his sheer political incorrectness notwithstanding. His poem ‘If –’, which is stoical rather than jingoistic, regularly comes out tops in opinion polls conducted in Britain to decide the most popular poem in the language. His novel Kim is as sympathetic an overture towards Buddhism as to be found in perhaps any English novel. And countless children all over the Anglophone world still grow up inhabiting the magical world of the two Jungle Books.
So what do we do with Kipling? We could perhaps try and fill out the caricature that he is known as (and ‘caricature’ means to simplify by overloading or playing up one characteristic at the expense of all others), so as to be able to see him in the round, and as someone with a complex inner life. This would be to rub out the exaggeration without offering exoneration, and to understand all without forgiving all. This may seem to be the proper task of a biographer but perhaps a novelist could do it even better. For novels are, as Mikhail Bakhtin argued, by their very nature not one-sided but ‘dialogic,’ and not sternly judgemental but marked instead by what he called their ‘unfinalizability’.
Few persons may be thought better equipped to undertake such an imaginative exercise as Sudhir Kakar, foremost psychoanalyst who is also the author already of five fictionalized biographies. This is a new genre which he has made his own—and which could perhaps be named bio-fics (on the pattern of bio-pics, except that it sounds somehow comical) or perhaps psy-fi (but how to pronounce it differently from sci-fi?). The protagonists Kakar has chosen to explore so far have been Vatsyayana, the author of the Kamasutra (in The Ascetic of Desire), Ramakrishna Paramahansa (Ecstasy), Mira Behn in relation to Gandhi (Mira and the Mahatma), Dara Shukoh and Aurangzeb (The Crimson Throne), and most recently, the witty and profound Sanskrit poet of love and renunciation, Bhartrihari (The Devil Take Love).