FRONT PAGE | Sunday, January 17, 2010 | Email | Print |  | Back
A tale of two Pioneers
Jaskiran Chopra | Dehradun
January 18 is a sad day for the world of letters and poetry. It was on this date that two well-known poets, Harivansh Rai Bachchan and Rudyard Kipling, passed away, though in different eras.
Joseph Rudyard Kipling died on January 18, 1936 while Harivansh Rai passed away on the same date in the year 2003. It is quite amazing to observe that there were quite a few uncanny connections between the lives of these two poets.
Kipling passed away in 1936, the year after Madhushala, Harivansh Rai’s magnum opus, was published. This was also the year when Harivansh Rai’s first wife, the young Shyama, passed away (1936).
On the seventh death anniversary of the legendary Hindi poet, it would be appropriate to mention some other such connections. Rudyard Kipling was a correspondent for the The Pioneer at Allahabad. He was one of the two nobel laureates who worked for The Pioneer, the other being Winston Churchill. Harivansh Rai’s father Pratap Narayan worked at the Pioneer Press for more than thirty years and later, the young Harivansh Rai was a correspondent for The Pioneer and toured many districts of UP to write reports.
Kipling received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. It was in 1907 that Harivansh Rai Bachchan was born on November 27. Kipling was awarded the prize on December 10, 1907.
Another important similarity between the lives of the two poets was their summer visit to the popular hill station of Mussoorie in the Himalayas while they were in their twenties. Kipling visited Mussoorie much before the creator of the immortal Madhushala was born.
Renowned author Ruskin Bond, who has been living in Mussoorie for the past almost fifty years, says he was often haunted by the question ‘Did Rudyard Kipling ever visit Mussoorie?’
“I finally got my answer a few years ago”, he said while talking to The Pioneer.
Bond said that the old bridle path from Rajpur in the Doon valley upto Mussoorie had been popularly known as the Kipling Road. He said that in Kim, Kipling’s famous work, Kim and the lama are described as crossing over “the Siwaliks and the half-Tropical Doon”, leaving Mussoorie behind them. “However, this description did not prove that Kipling had come this way.”
Bond’s Swiss friend Anilees brought him proof that the great writer had indeed visited Mussoorie. Among Kipling’s unpublished papers and other effects in the Library of Congress there exists an album of photographs which includes two of the Charleville Hotel, Mussoorie, where he had spent the summer of 1888.
On a photograph of the office of the hotel, he had inscribed the words And there were men with a thousand wants, and women with babes galore, But the dear little angels in Heaven know that Wutzler never swore. Wutzler was the patient, long-suffering manager of this famous hotel which is now the premises of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration.
A second photograph, said Bond, was inscribed with the caption Quarters at the Charleville, April-July 88 and carries this verse A burning sun in cloudless skies and April dies, A dusty Mall - three sunsets splendid and May is ended, Grey mud beneath - grey cloud o’erhead and June is dead. A little bill in late July and then we fly.
“He came up the bridle path which was known as Kipling Road for many years, though it was never its official name”, said Bond.
Harivansh Rai visited Mussoorie in 1937, a year after Kipling’s death.
He was 29 years old and his first wife, Shyama, had succumbed to tuberculosis in the winter before the summer of 1937. He was at a complete loss as to how to go ahead in life with this burden of grief at the loss of his young wife. He had vowed to regenerate himself. One of the steps he wanted to take in this direction was to complete his MA degree which he had abandoned in 1930 after the first year.
Brij Mohan Gupta, who was from Dehra Dun and studying at Allahabad, was known to Harivansh Rai and invited him to spend the summer holidays with him in the valley. This summer break proved decisive for the poet.
Harivansh Rai went up to Mussoorie with Brij Mohan to pay a visit to the well-known Professor Amar Nath Jha who had bought Lynwood Cottage (near Charleville where Kipling had stayed) where he spent his summers. He had taught Harivansh Rai when he was an undergraduate and was annoyed with him for leaving the university after the first year of MA (English). “Now that I was thinking of enrolling at university again, I thought I should seek his blessing, especially as he was now head of the English department”, writes Harivansh Rai in his autobiography.
In The Ballad of East and West, Kipling wrote “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth.
The first two lines of this poem may be considered politically incorrect. But the next two lines can be seen as aptly describing the strange way in which the lives of these great two men of letters had some similar elements despite their diverse literary spheres.
.
Email | Print | Rate:
|