Plain Tales from the Hills Book

A young subaltern, ribbed by his regiment for his sweet and gentle demeanour—especially cruelly ribbed by the Senior Subaltern—makes a public promise to repay the debt. A little boy, whose best friends happen to be the Indians he fraternises with, becomes the reason for an amendment in an important ryotwari act. A frustrated young man commits suicide and two of his colleagues come to the rescue of his parents, far away in England…

The characters who people Kipling’s Plain Tales From The Hills are a very varied lot, ranging all the way from (and these are in the majority) the ‘Anglo-Indians’, the Englishmen and women who came out to India, to the natives, to the others to be found then in India: Chinese immigrants, part-Portuguese, part-Indian ‘half-breeds’, and more. The problems they face and the situations they find themselves in are equally varied, with romantic entanglements being the most common: unwanted loves, unattainable loves, misplaced loves, loves to be drawn back from their straying. The treatment of the stories is very different, too, all the way from the hilarity of yarns like The Rout Of The White Hussars to the poignancy of something like Thrown Away. There is the cuteness of Tod’s Amendment and the somewhat spooky mumbo-jumbo-cloaked crookery of The House of Suddhoo.

What I liked most about Plain Tales From The Hills was the immense readability of these stories, and, of course, Kipling’s versatility: he is as adept at humour as he is with drama or tragedy or even something approaching the supernatural. His insight into human character is good, and his characters themselves are often memorable. And the biggest plus: he brings to us the India—especially the Simla—of the British Raj vividly to life.