Rudyard Kipling: was he a vampire of the Raj or an Indian born in another skin, who upheld the British empire but gave his heart to the East? Khushwant Singh, celebrated columnist, author and ardent Kipling fan, knits this anthology with a fascinating introduction on the life of this controversial writer.

This book explores and re-evaluates Kipling’s connection with India, its people, culture, languages, and locales through his experiences and his writings. Kipling’s works attracted interest among a large section of the British public, stimulating curiosity in their far-off Indian Empire, and made many canonize him as an emblem of the ‘Raj’. This volume highlights the astonishing social and thematic range of his Indian writings as represented in The Jungle Books; Kim; his early verse; his Simla-based tales of Anglo-Indian intrigues and love affairs; his stories of the common Indian people; and his journalism. It brings together different theoretical and contextual readings of Kipling to examine how his experience of India influenced his creative work and conversely how his imperial loyalties conditioned his creative engagement with India. The 18 chapters here engage with the complexities and contradictions in his writings and analyse the historical and political contexts in which he wrote them, and the contexts in which we read him now. With well-known contributors from different parts of the world – including India, the UK, the USA, Canada, France, Japan, and New Zealand – this book will be of great interest not only to those interested in Kipling’s life and works but also to researchers and scholars of nineteenth-century literature, comparative studies, postcolonial and subaltern studies, colonial history, and cultural studies.

David Sergeant grew up in west Cornwall and studied English at Oxford, where he is now a Junior Research Fellow. He is a published poet and has also written on Robert Burns and Ted Hughes.

Welcome to the Masters of Prose book series, a selection of the best works by noteworthy authors. Literary critic August Nemo selects the most important writings of each author. A selection based on the author's novels, short stories, letters, essays and biographical texts. Thus providing the reader with an overview of the author's life and work. This edition is dedicated to the English writer Rudyard Kipling, born in India, which inspired much of his work. He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story. His children's books are classics; with a versatile and luminous narrative gift. Kipling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was among the United Kingdom's most popular writers. Henry James said, "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known." In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and at 41, its youngest recipient to date. This book contains the following writings: Novels: The Light That Failed; Kim; Captains Courageous; The City of Dreadful Night. Short Stories and Collections: The Jungle Book; The Second Jungle Book; Indian Tales; Just So Stories; Debits and Credits; Limits and Renewals; Thy Servant a Dog. Biographical: Rudyard Kipling by John Palmer. If you appreciate good literature, be sure to check out the other Tacet Books titles!

Featuring an internationally distinguished list of contributors, Kipling and Beyond reassesses Kipling's texts and their reception in order to explore new approaches in postcolonial studies. The collection asks why Kipling continues to be a significant cultural icon and what this legacy means in the context of today's Anglo-American globalization.

The most popular author of his day and a paradox who was both an assertive British imperialist and a man of sensitivity and wide reading, Rudyard Kipling is best remembered now as the author of The Jungle Book, the Just-So Stories, and Kim. Fully annotated, volumes 5 and 6 conclude the publication of Kipling's letters, a heroic effort that began with the publication of volume 1 in 1990.

Following an experimental railway track at Chintadripet, in 1835, the battle for India's first railroad was fought bitterly between John Chapman's Great Indian Peninsular Railway and Rowland MacDonald Stephenson's East India Railway Company, which was merged with Dwarkanauth Tagore's Great Western of Bengal Railway. Even at the height of the Mutiny of 1857, Bahadur Shah Zafar promised Indian owned railway tracks for native merchants if Badshahi rule was restored in Delhi. From Jules Verne to Rudyard Kipling to Mark Twain to Rabindranath Tagore to Nirad C. Chaudhuri to R.K. Narayan and Ruskin Bond-the aura of Indian trains and railway stations have enchanted many writers and poets. With iconic cinematography from The Apu Trilogy, Aradhana, Sonar Kella, Sholay, Gandhi, Dil Se, Parineeta, Barfi, Gangs of Wasseypur, and numerous others, Indian cinema has paved the way for mythical railroads in the national psyche. The Great Indian Railways takes us on a historic adventure through many junctions of India's hidden railway legends, for the first time in a book replete with anecdotes from imperial politics, European and Indian accounts, the battlefronts of the Indian nationalist movement, Indian cinema, songs, advertisements, and much more, in an ever-expanding cultural biography of the Great Indian Railways. Dubbed as 'one of a kind' this awe-inspiring saga is 'compulsive reading.' 'In this fascinating cultural history, Arup K Chatterjee charts the extraordinary journey of the Indian Railways, from the laying of the very first sleeper to the first post-Independence bogey. It evokes our collective accumulation of those innumerable memories of platform chai and rail-gaadi stories, bringing alive through myriad voices and tales the biography of one of India's defining public institutions.' – Shashi Tharoor, Author, M.P., Lok Sabha 'The Great Indian Railways is a fascinating and well-researched cultural biography of the Indian Railways-those intricate arteries of the soul of India, as have been experienced, written, filmed, and dreamed. We cannot all travel by rail to know India, as Gandhiji did, but we can and should read this book!' – Tabish Khair, Author, Professor