In his autobiography, Something of Myself, Rudyard Kipling tells how he returned to Bombay from public school in England. He had been away for 11 years, but once again walking the streets of Bombay, the town of his birth, the teenage Kipling found himself uttering whole sentences in the native tongue - presumably Marathi, a language he had entirely forgotten. He now found to his own mystification that he could communicate in it effectively, although with the curious drawback that he was unable to understand what he was saying. A language at once familiar and strange had possessed him, a possession that worked both ways, uncovering a substratum of India within the white colonialist. Kipling's mother tongue may have been English, but those other mothers, the native nurses and household servants, had left their mark on him.

LRB 23 February 2006 | PDF Download