Plain Tales from the Hills: 40+ Short Stories Collection (The Tales of Life in British India) E-Book
Rudyard Kipling
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Plain Tales from the Hills," Rudyard Kipling presents a masterfully crafted collection of over forty short stories that vividly encapsulate the complex tapestry of life in British India during the late 19th century. Employing a rich narrative style that interweaves humor, wit, and profound social commentary, Kipling captures the nuances of colonial life, with its confluences of cultures, class disparities, and the unique everyday challenges faced by his characters. The stories, varying in tone from light-hearted anecdotes to sobering reflections, encapsulate the colonial experience with both affection and critique, illustrating Kipling's skill in portraying the human condition against a backdrop of societal change. Rudyard Kipling, the son of English parents residing in India, immersed himself in the diverse cultures and peoples of the subcontinent, experiences that deeply influenced his literary voice. Born in 1865 and raised in a colonial environment, Kipling's childhood experiences significantly shaped his understanding of British and Indian relations. His works, often reflecting the complexities of imperialism, serve as both celebration and critique of colonial life, underpinned by empathy and insight into the Indian milieu. "Plain Tales from the Hills" is highly recommended for readers seeking an authentic exploration of colonial India through Kipling's discerning lens. The collection not only serves as a testament to Kipling's literary prowess but also as an essential commentary on the cultural intersections of colonialism. Those intrigued by historical narratives, rich characters, and the intricacies of human relationships will find this collection a compelling addition to their literary repertoire. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Plain Tales from the Hills: 40+ Short Stories Collection (The Tales of Life in British India)
Table of Contents
Introduction
Plain Tales from the Hills: 40+ Short Stories Collection gathers Rudyard Kipling’s early short fiction about British India into a single, coherent volume. Many of these tales first appeared in newspapers, notably the Civil and Military Gazette and the Pioneer, before being issued in book form in 1888 in Calcutta. The collection presents a panoramic cross section of Anglo-Indian life in the late nineteenth century, from cantonments and civil offices to club verandahs and bazaar lanes. Its purpose is not to offer a single narrative arc but to build, story by story, a composite portrait of a society under pressure, improvising daily routines within an imperial order.
The scope of this single-author collection is both concentrated and comprehensive. Concentrated, because it focuses on a specific time, place, and milieu: the British administrative and military presence in India as experienced by officials, soldiers, families, and those around them. Comprehensive, because the stories observe that world from many angles, tracing how public duty intersects with private desire, and how a colonial system shapes the smallest choices of those within it. Read together, the tales form a mosaic of character types, situations, and social rituals, revealing how reputation, rumor, and circumstance govern lives at every station.
The volume consists of short stories and sketches. There are no poems, essays, diaries, letters, or novels here; instead, brief, self-contained narratives carry the weight of a larger social history. Within the field of the short story, Kipling ranges across modes: social comedy and satire, military anecdote, moral fable, romance under constraint, and, at times, a brush of the uncanny. Some pieces operate as tightly wound incidents with a sharp final turn; others unfold as reflective vignettes. This focus on compact forms allows the book to move swiftly through a wide array of voices, settings, and ethical situations.
A unifying element is the recurring social frame: the station, the club, the office, the bungalow, and the parade ground. The stories often begin from everyday talk and observation, then track how minor accidents, misunderstood gestures, or bureaucratic edicts ripple outward. The persistent themes include the fragility of reputation, the weight of hierarchy, the persistence of gossip, and the negotiated boundaries between communities. Duty collides with personal feeling; prosperity sits beside loneliness; and the line between order and embarrassment proves perilously thin. The book’s range of outcomes underscores how a tightly woven society magnifies both kindness and error.
Stylistically, the tales are marked by economy, clarity, and a reporter’s eye for telling detail. Kipling’s sentences move briskly, with an ironic restraint that allows events and voices to reveal themselves without overt commentary. He relies on precise observation of dress, weather, and work to anchor moral stakes. The frame narrator, often an insider to the milieu, speaks with familiarity but avoids self-display, giving the impression of a ledger of lives rather than a memoir. This formal compactness, inherited from journalism, supports swift shifts of tone from light social comedy to sudden gravity, while keeping the focus on consequence.
Language is another hallmark. The stories make use of Anglo-Indian idioms, place names, and occasional words drawn from the linguistic traffic of the time. This vocabulary is not decorative; it situates the reader within a hybrid social space where English rubs against administrative jargon, soldiers’ slang, and the realities of the bazaar. Such words can carry power dynamics and assumptions typical of the period. For contemporary readers, they are part of the historical record, both illuminating daily life and revealing attitudes embedded in speech. The prose relies on this texture to create immediacy and to hint at unspoken rules.
Settings range from plains cantonments to hill stations, with their seasonal migrations and shifting social temperature. Heat, monsoon, and altitude are not mere backdrops but forces that organize behavior, schedules, and expectations. The book attends to the rhythms of transfers, leave, and the annual move to cooler elevations, tracing how environment shapes temperament and decision-making. Offices, courts, and mess halls carry distinct codes, while verandahs and gardens become stages for courtship and negotiation. By moving among these places, the collection maps a geography of obligation and escape, showing how people construct small refuges within the apparatus of empire.
Characters recur across clusters of tales, knitting the book into an informal cycle. Soldiers in the ranks, junior civil servants, memsahibs navigating social calendars, and Indian servants and intermediaries appear with enough continuity to form a recognizable society. A trio of enlisted men often reappears with brisk, humorous energy, their camaraderie contrasting with the stiffness of officialdom. Elsewhere, young officers and clerks encounter the pitfalls of haste, pride, or inexperience. This ensemble method invites comparison and memory from one story to the next, turning isolated episodes into a living social ledger rather than a sequence of unrelated anecdotes.
Military pieces balance bravado with vulnerability. They record the resourcefulness and esprit de corps of the ranks alongside the fatigue and risk that attend frontier duty and routine drills. The humor in these tales is rarely careless; it buffers hardship while exposing cracks in discipline or judgment. Tactical exploits sit beside small acts of loyalty, and narrative pace mirrors the quick decisions demanded by service life. Without disclosing outcomes, it is clear that the stakes are often immediate and physical, yet the stories also consider how honor, rumor, and the chain of command shape what men dare and endure.
Civil and domestic tales focus on careers, marriages, and the abrupt judgments of a small world. Courtship unfolds within a web of expectations; promotions and postings carry social value as well as salary; and the wrong word at the wrong time can create lasting consequences. Several narratives turn on legal or financial missteps, or on the misreading of custom and rank. Others explore the tension between benevolence and control in charitable schemes or household arrangements. Across these strands, the collection is attentive to how formal structures meet personal needs, and how each can either support or distort the other.
A central reason these works endure is their double vision: they are products of the imperial milieu and also lucid about its pressures and contradictions. The stories humanize participants without dissolving the power imbalances that frame their choices. They capture the improvisational ethics of colonial administration, the costs of isolation, and the moral ambiguity of acting inside a vast system. As early work, they established Kipling’s authority in the short form and offered readers in and beyond India a recognizable world, sharply drawn. Today they serve as literature and as historical witness to a society that has since vanished.
Approaching this collection now means embracing both its artistry and its context. Some terms and attitudes reflect the late nineteenth century and can be troubling; they are part of the historical record the book preserves. Readers may find it useful to move freely among the tales, allowing contrasts of tone and setting to accumulate into a broader picture. Each story stands alone, yet together they constitute a sustained inquiry into character under pressure. The result is a compact but far-reaching portrait of British India, built from short forms that carry the weight of a vanished world with striking immediacy.
Author Biography
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was a British writer whose fiction and verse became defining expressions of the late Victorian and Edwardian era. Born in British India and active across Asia, Europe, and North America, he wrote short stories, children’s classics, novels, and poems that reached a vast audience. He was the first English-language author to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1907, recognized for narrative power, imagination, and stylistic innovation. His work fused journalistic sharpness with ballad rhythms and folktale patterns, and it remains both celebrated for craft and storytelling vigor and debated for its entanglement with imperial ideology.
Raised initially in Bombay, he was sent to England for schooling, notably at the United Services College in Devon, whose rough camaraderie later informed Stalky & Co. Exposure to Indian languages, street life, and oral storytelling during childhood, combined with intensive reading of English classics, gave him a dual perspective he mined for decades. Early ambitions centered on journalism; practical training, speed, and compression would shape his fictional technique. He admired balladry and popular song, and he absorbed the brisk, observational prose of newspaper writing, influences visible in his clipped dialogue, vivid scene-setting, and interest in technical detail and craft.
Returning to the subcontinent in the early 1880s, Kipling worked for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and later The Pioneer in Allahabad. The newsroom became his apprenticeship: he produced sketches, tales, and verse about Anglo-Indian life, soldiers, and administrators. Collections such as Departmental Ditties and Plain Tales from the Hills established his reputation for economy, irony, and keen observation. He wrote with unusual sympathy for rank-and-file soldiers while satirizing officialdom, and he captured the textures of frontier stations, barracks, and bazaars. By the late 1880s his stories were circulating widely in Britain, signaling an unusually rapid rise to fame.
During the 1890s he broadened his horizons, traveling and publishing across Britain and North America. Barrack-Room Ballads popularized his soldier verse, including “Gunga Din,” while The Light That Failed explored the costs of artistic ambition and loss. His children’s fiction reached international readers with The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book, tales that combined animal fable with adventure and moral inquiry. He also wrote the sea story Captains Courageous. Time spent in the United States coincided with intense creativity, and his command of the short story matured as he experimented with frame narratives, dialect voices, and tightly plotted, high-velocity prose.
In the opening years of the twentieth century, Kipling produced Kim, an expansive novel of espionage, pilgrimage, and apprenticeship set across northern India, and the playful Just So Stories, whose origin myths for children displayed his rhythmic prose and neologistic wit. During the South African War he reported from the field and helped edit a soldiers’ newspaper, experiences that reinforced his belief in duty and imperial service even as he wrote cautionary verses such as “Recessional.” “The White Man’s Burden” provoked controversy for its rhetoric of empire, while “If—” offered a stoic ethic that became one of the most quoted poems in English.
Settling in England for much of his later life, he published story cycles that interwove local history and myth, notably Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, alongside essays and tales about technology and work. The First World War marked him deeply; he supported recruitment and wrote memorial poems and epitaphs that wrestled with sacrifice and grief. Collections such as Debits and Credits and Limits and Renewals show a tightened, often somber art, attentive to ritual, memory, and the costs of modernity. While his public standing remained high, shifting political currents led to sharper criticism of his imperial attitudes and assumptions.
Kipling died in England in the mid-1930s after a long, productive career. His legacy is complex: a master of the English short story, a poet with a distinctive ballad voice, and a children’s author whose imaginative reach has rarely been equaled. His work has been adapted often and remains globally read, though it is scrutinized for its entanglement with British imperialism. Postcolonial critics and historians have reframed his corpus, yet many readers still value his narrative economy, sense of place, and ear for speech. The Nobel recognition, widespread popularity, and enduring influence attest to a writer both canonical and contested.
Historical Context
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) wrote most of the stories later gathered as Plain Tales from the Hills while on staff at the Civil & Military Gazette in Lahore (1882–1887) and The Pioneer in Allahabad (1887–1889). First printed in newspapers between 1886 and 1888, they were collected by Thacker, Spink & Co. in Calcutta in 1888. Simla, Lahore, Allahabad, and Calcutta anchor the geography of these pieces, which move between cantonment, club, bazaar, and hill station. The tales’ clerks, subalterns, memsahibs, missionaries, and sepoys speak to a late-Victorian Anglo-Indian world governed by routine and rumor, where files, railways, and regimental orders shape private fates as surely as grand policy.
The political framework is the British Raj under Crown rule after the Government of India Act (1858), itself a response to the 1857 uprising. Administration consolidated through the Indian Civil Service (ICS), the Indian Penal Code (1860), the Indian Evidence Act (1872), the Code of Criminal Procedure (1882), and the Police Act (1861). The army was reorganized, European and Indian regiments redistributed, and cantonments formalized. High Courts were created at Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras (1862), and the Chief Court of the Punjab (1866) sat at Lahore. These institutions underpin tales of arrest, divorce, promotion, and scandal, giving narrative heft to office corridors, parade grounds, and magistrates’ benches.
Simla, gazetted as the Government of India’s summer capital, is critical context. Under Viceroys Lytton (1876–1880), Ripon (1880–1884), Dufferin (1884–1888), and Lansdowne (1888–1894), departments decamped to the hills each hot season. The Viceregal Lodge, whose foundation stone was laid in 1888, symbolized imperial permanence amid deodar forests. Simla’s Mall, bandstand, amateur theatricals, gymkhanas, and dances formed a seasonal marriage market where reputations were minted or ruined. Files and flirtations moved together: appointments and divorces could begin on the Promenade. The oscillation between plains and hills—bureaucracy by day, gossip by night—structures many stories’ social stakes and explains their recurring concern with secrecy, surveillance, and sudden reversals.
Lahore in the Punjab, where Kipling learned journalism, offered a different tempo: Civil Lines abutting the walled city, cantonments near bazaars, and the telegraph humming down The Mall. The Chief Court administered a legal order while Punjabi commercial vigor drove print, photography, and opium retailing under government monopoly. The Lahore Museum, overseen by Lockwood Kipling until 1893, exemplified the intersection of craft, ethnography, and empire. In such a city, tales of telegraphy mistaken for magic, opium dens, bank frauds, and newsroom scoops could plausibly share a page. Lahore’s layered spaces—dak-bungalow, mosque, club, and newsroom—furnished both the cosmopolitanism and collision that animate the collection.
The British soldier of the late 1870s and 1880s stood at the core of frontier garrisons from Rawalpindi to Peshawar and Rangoon. Armed with the Martini-Henry rifle, drilled by the Army Act reforms of 1881, and clad increasingly in khaki drill, he inhabited barracks, canteens, and curry-shops as much as battlefields. Pay-books, stoppages, and the regimental mess generated comic and tragic turns alike. Enlistment brought Irish, English, and Scottish voices into contact with Punjabi, Pathan, and Burmese worlds, making dialect a tool of both comedy and critique. Kipling’s enlisted characters move through parade-ground ritual, fatigues, guard-duty insomnia, and sudden violence, all under the eye of the adjutant.
Campaigns and expeditions provided a martial horizon. The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880) shaped regimental memory; frontier disturbances in the Hazara region (notably 1888) sustained a climate of readiness; and the Third Anglo-Burmese War (1885) annexed Upper Burma, initiating riverine operations and jungle patrols. Soldiers and subalterns crossing rivers, storming stockades, or posting in fly-blown outposts embody this wider history. Logistics—elephant trains, pontoon bridges, and commissariat missteps—matter as much as heroism. The imperial map here is not abstract: cantonments, messes, and courtyards convert strategy into everyday routine, while campaign medals and sick-lists testify to the costs of small wars.
Racial hierarchy structured work, law, and intimacy. European privilege in courts and clubs, countered by reformers, framed frictions that surface across the tales. The Ilbert Bill controversy (1883), permitting qualified Indian magistrates to try Europeans, stirred Anglo-Indian anxieties about status, marriage, and vulnerability; Ripon’s eventual compromise revealed the limits of equality within empire. Mixed households of bearers, ayahs, sais, and khitmatgars reveal dependence through command. As clerks, policemen, translators, and grooms mediate between languages and laws, opportunities and humiliations multiply. Romantic ties across racial and religious lines collide with communal norms, caste strictures, and office penalties, yielding narratives of secrecy, exposure, and reprisal.
Victorian gender expectations traveled up to the hills with the mail. The Indian Divorce Act (1869) made civil dissolution possible for Christians, yet scandal remained career poison. Simla’s season compressed courtship into a few months of dances and rides, producing fierce competition and elaborate etiquette. The Rukhmabai case (1884–1888) and Age of Consent Act (1891) debates exposed tensions about female agency within Indian and British legal frameworks. In this world, matrimony intersects with medical leave, promotion lists, and club ballots. Domestic interiors—verandahs, drawing rooms, and tents—become theaters of ambition and fear, where letters mislaid or overheard whispers can unmake reputations as surely as formal decrees.
Disease and death haunted cantonments and civil lines. Cholera, typhoid, malaria, and smallpox ebbed and surged with monsoon rhythms; sanitation reforms attempted to impose order on drains, wells, and bazaar slaughterhouses. Pasteur’s and Koch’s advances, circulating by the 1880s, contested miasmatic theories; colonial public health tried disinfection regimes, quarantine, and vaccination campaigns, not always convincingly. The military hospital, the civil surgeon’s bungalow, and the sanitary conference became familiar settings. Belief in microbes coexisted with spiritualism and ghost-lore, especially after sudden deaths in heat and fever. Stories that juggle medical earnestness with comic blunder or occult intrusion mirror a culture both modernizing and superstitious.
Technology transformed tempo. The Indian railways linked Calcutta, Bombay, and Delhi by the 1870s, and by the 1880s the Punjab and Sind systems created fast corridors for troops, officials, and gossip. The electric telegraph, built from the 1850s, made up-country posts feel near to Calcutta’s secretariats. Photography studios such as Bourne & Shepherd (established 1863) popularized the carte-de-visite, enabling likenesses to circulate and mislead. The press, hemmed by the Vernacular Press Act (1878) and its repeal (1881), cultivated an Anglo-Indian news ecosystem of reports, retractions, and rumor. Misdelivered telegrams, misread photographs, and misprinted items become engines of plot, reflecting infrastructures both empowering and fallible.
Files governed empire. The General Department, Foreign and Political Department, and provincial secretariats produced minute-writing cultures where promotions hinged on precis, not panache. The ICS examination in London prized classical languages while service required Hindustani, Persian, or regional tongues. Orientalist scholarship, from the Asiatic Society founded in Calcutta in 1784 to university chairs, fed careers; philology, epigraphy, and translation offered prestige. Within this paper universe, the clerk or scholar could shape treaties, revenue settlements, or catalogues, yet social status lagged behind intellectual achievement. Tales of brilliant but thwarted experts, or of memoranda filed and forgotten, dramatize how a misphrased minute could redirect a human life.
Money worries thread the colonial middle class. Salaries in rupees collided with sterling liabilities and the long decline of silver’s value in the 1870s–1890s. Council Bills, exchange telegraphs, and remittances complicated household arithmetic. Presidency Banks in Calcutta (1806), Bombay (1840), and Madras (1843) coexisted with private agency houses; forgery and embezzlement invited new policing under the Forgery Act and the IPC. Young officers borrowed on the chit system to outfit horses and uniforms; racing, mess subscriptions, and hill-station seasons deepened debt. Bank collapses were rare but rumors potent. Against this backdrop, frauds, speculative bubbles, and unpayable IOUs become plausible catalysts for disgrace, flight, or reluctant reform.
Religious plurality shaped everyday negotiation. Anglican chaplains, Roman Catholic priests, and Nonconformist missionaries worked beside Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and Parsi institutions. The Church Missionary Society and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel ran schools and hospitals; zenana missions targeted sequestered women. Conversions—earnest, strategic, or contested—provoked familial and communal crises. Pilgrimage centers such as Puri, with the Jagannath temple, signified both devotion and colonial fascination with ritual economies. Meanwhile, Theosophy (founded 1875; Indian headquarters at Adyar from 1882) popularized occult syncretism among some Europeans. The friction between creed, caste, skepticism, and wonder powers stories of faith healed, faith tested, and faith exploited.
Leisure was duty’s twin. Pig-sticking in the North-West Provinces, tent-pegging on regimental fields, steeplechases at racecourses from Allahabad to Meerut, and gymkhanas at Simla rehearsed imperial ideals of nerve and dash. Polo spread from Manipur across the hills; cavalry identity fused with horseflesh, saddlery, and regimental music. Amateur theatricals, charades, and tableaux vivants in club theaters complicated rank with role-playing; the bandstand concert blurred flirtation with protocol. Sport produced casualties and camaraderie, wagers and debts. The hazards of the hunt, the magnificence of the mess, and the fatigue of barrack-room Sundays provide a social grammar for courtship, rivalry, and moments of grace.
Domestic service knit the colonial household to the city. The bearer controlled linens and confidences; the khitmatgar attended table; the ayah managed children; the sais tended horses; the dhobi ruled reputations with laundry. Contracts were informal, loyalties personal, and information flowed along servant networks linking bungalow and bazaar. Children moved easily between zenanas, compounds, and public spaces, forming attachments that cut across race and class. Urban dualities—Civil Lines versus the walled city—framed misrecognition, charity, and cruelty. The bungalow verandah, with its cane chairs and tattis, is the stage for children’s play, whispered intrigue, and sudden summonses that alter destinies with the quietest knock.
Crime and policing reflected a codified but improvisational order. The Indian Police, created by the 1861 Act, answered to district magistrates; European and Indian officers juggled limited manpower, vast jurisdictions, and a labyrinth of languages and customs. The Indian Evidence Act (1872) aimed to rationalize testimony, yet forgery rings, confidence tricksters, and illicit gambling houses exploited bureaucratic gaps. Opium, legal yet regulated, sustained licensed shops and clandestine dens; the government monopoly sat uneasily with moral reformers. Cases of mistaken identity, wrongful arrest, and bureaucratic comedy were plausible in cities where uniforms, laundry marks, and paperwork bore authority. Law’s letter met bazaar cunning, with mixed results.
Kipling’s plain style, ear for dialect, and newsroom pacing turned this milieu into literature. Serialized publication taught economy and punch-lines; later collection in Calcutta in 1888 fixed a portrait of Anglo-India at a historical moment. The soldier tales pioneered the voices of Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd; the Simla sketches anatomized hill-station mores; the Lahore pieces married newsroom irony to bazaar wonder. After leaving India in 1889, Kipling wrote from London and Vermont, yet the Raj remained his imaginative province; in 1907 he became the first English-language Nobel laureate. Today the tales register their era’s prejudices and brilliances, invaluable for reading empire’s texture beyond proclamation.
Synopsis (Selection)
Lispeth
A Pahari girl raised by missionaries falls for an English convalescent, and the elders’ well-meant deceit leaves her disillusioned with both love and faith.
Three And—an Extra
After a bereavement, a Simla husband drifts toward a brilliant flirt while his wife finds a way to win him back during the Season’s social theater.
Thrown Away
A naive subaltern buckles under the unspoken pressures of station life, and his superiors quietly manage the fallout to preserve reputations.
Miss Youghal's Sais
A police officer courts Miss Youghal in disguise as her groom, leading to comic exposure and an unexpected official solution to their romance.
Yoked With an Unbeliever
An Anglo-Indian marriage founders when one partner rejects the values and demands of the Service, showing how domestic discord can wreck a career in India.
False Dawn
In a dust-storm at a ball, a young man’s misdirected proposal triggers misunderstandings that ripple through Simla’s small, watchful world.
The Rescue of Pluffles
Mrs. Hauksbee extricates an inexperienced officer from a predatory liaison and steers him back toward safer affections and duty.
Cupid's Arrows
A gifted archer must choose between a wealthy suitor and the man she loves, using a public tournament to signal her private decision.
His Chance in Life
A low-ranking, mixed-heritage clerk seizes command during a crisis and proves his mettle in a system that rarely credits his kind.
Watches of the Night
A misplaced ring linked to a dangerous flirtation forces two friends into a nocturnal, clandestine recovery to avert scandal.
The Other Man
A society wife’s fixation on an absent lover corrodes her marriage, as illness and duty expose the gap between her ideals and reality.
Consequences
A seemingly trivial indiscretion in the Hills sets off outsized social and professional repercussions for the offender.
The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin
A brilliant young skeptic is brought up short by India’s climate and strain, emerging chastened from a crisis of body and creed.
A Germ Destroyer
An overzealous sanitation scheme and a case of mistaken identity turn a new disinfectant into the catalyst for farcical high-level chaos.
Kidnapped
Station leaders conspire to spirit away a groom on his wedding day to prevent a socially disapproved match, neatly rewriting his future.
The Arrest of Lieutenant Golightly
Stripped of his kit and status by a string of mishaps, an officer is mistaken for a deserter before the system begrudgingly sets him right.
The House of Suddhoo
A desperate father, a supposed magician, and a telegraph create a tangle of fraud and fear that tests the line between belief and exploitation.
His Wedded Wife
After a subaltern’s star turn in female costume, the invented ‘wife’ seems to outlive the performance, unsettling his real married life.
The Broken Link Handicapped
A regimental race, ill-judged handicapping, and bravado turn sport into a cautionary episode about risk, luck, and face.
Beyond the Pale
An Englishman’s secret affair with a young Indian woman collides with custom and danger, showing the costs of crossing rigid boundaries.
In Error
A newcomer’s well-meant mistake—social or official—meets India’s unforgiving memory, schooling him in the unwritten code.
A Bank Fraud
A clever forgery scheme exposes the fragility of procedures and the personal stakes of honor in a small colonial bank.
Tods' Amendment
A precocious child’s eavesdropping and plain talk influence a legislative debate, lampooning how policy gets made in the Hills.
In the Pride of His Youth
Buoyed by early promise and romance, a young official overreaches and discovers how quickly pride meets discipline in the Service.
Pig
Insult, taboo, and private grudges entwine in a dark little episode where religious sensitivities turn a quarrel into something far harsher.
The Rout of the White Hussars
A regiment’s prank with its band and a night of uncanny unrest end in a panicked retreat, half farce and half ghost story.
The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case
A sensational suit of alleged adultery is unpicked to reveal blackmail and perjury, with official cunning restoring a rough sort of justice.
Venus Annodomini
A middle-aged civil servant confronts age and vanity during a flirtation season, measuring memory against the present Simla mood.
The Bisara of Pooree
A talisman reputed to compel love passes from hand to hand, breeding theft, obsession, and uneasy luck.
The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows
In a stark monologue from an opium den, an addict charts the quiet descent of lives consumed by the pipe.
The Story of Muhammad Din
A brief, tender friendship between an Englishman and a local child is sketched in small incidents and sudden loss.
On the Strength of a Likeness
A man builds an infatuation on a resemblance and learns how illusions—and portraits—can warp judgment and heart.
Wressley of the Foreign Office
To impress a woman, a pedant undertakes a monumental study, finding respect he did not seek and failing at the aim he did.
By Word of Mouth
A bereaved husband receives an inexplicable warning that alters his plans, unsettling the line between coincidence and the uncanny.
To Be Held for Reference
A brief, satirical compendium of Hill-station types and rules-of-thumb, offered as a newcomer’s guide to surviving Simla.
The Three Musketeers
Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd—soldiers three—introduce their rough camaraderie and resourcefulness in barracks and beyond.
The Taking of Lungtungpen
With reckless bravado and improvisation, the trio stages a daring, comic capture of a riverside village.
The Daughter of the Regiment
The soldiers rally to protect a girl they regard as their own, pitting loyalty and esprit de corps against rules and custom.
A Friend’s Friend
A well-connected hostess quietly engineers a favor for an acquaintance, showing how influence and obligation move the Hills.
The Madness of Private Ortheris
Crushed by heat and homesickness, Ortheris breaks down, and his mates steer him back from the brink with hard-won empathy.
Haunted Subalterns
Young officers confront a haunting that seems to echo past misdeeds, blurring guilt, chance, and superstition.
Bitters Neat
A tart vignette in which a veteran’s plain talk cures a younger man’s illusions about love, ambition, and the Service.
Plain Tales from the Hills: 40+ Short Stories Collection (The Tales of Life in British India)
Lispeth
She was the daughter of Sonoo, a Hill-man, and Jadeh his wife. One year their maize failed, and two bears spent the night in their only poppy-field just above the Sutlej Valley on the Kotgarh side; so, next season, they turned Christian, and brought their baby to the Mission to be baptized. The Kotgarh Chaplain christened her Elizabeth, and "Lispeth" is the Hill or pahari pronunciation.
Later, cholera came into the Kotgarh Valley and carried off Sonoo and Jadeh, and Lispeth became half-servant, half-companion to the wife of the then Chaplain of Kotgarh. This was after the reign of the Moravian missionaries, but before Kotgarh had quite forgotten her title of "Mistress of the Northern Hills."
Whether Christianity improved Lispeth, or whether the gods of her own people would have done as much for her under any circumstances, I do not know; but she grew very lovely. When a Hill girl grows lovely, she is worth traveling fifty miles over bad ground to look upon. Lispeth had a Greek face—one of those faces people paint so often, and see so seldom. She was of a pale, ivory color and, for her race, extremely tall. Also, she possessed eyes that were wonderful; and, had she not been dressed in the abominable print-cloths affected by Missions, you would, meeting her on the hill-side unexpectedly, have thought her the original Diana of the Romans going out to slay.
Lispeth took to Christianity readily, and did not abandon it when she reached womanhood, as do some Hill girls. Her own people hated her because she had, they said, become a memsahib and washed herself daily; and the Chaplain's wife did not know what to do with her. Somehow, one cannot ask a stately goddess, five foot ten in her shoes, to clean plates and dishes. So she played with the Chaplain's children and took classes in the Sunday School, and read all the books in the house, and grew more and more beautiful, like the Princesses in fairy tales. The Chaplain's wife said that the girl ought to take service in Simla as a nurse or something "genteel." But Lispeth did not want to take service. She was very happy where she was.
When travellers—there were not many in those years—came to Kotgarh, Lispeth used to lock herself into her own room for fear they might take her away to Simla, or somewhere out into the unknown world.
One day, a few months after she was seventeen years old, Lispeth went out for a walk. She did not walk in the manner of English ladies—a mile and a half out, and a ride back again. She covered between twenty and thirty miles in her little constitutionals, all about and about, between Kotgarh and Narkunda. This time she came back at full dusk, stepping down the breakneck descent into Kotgarh with something heavy in her arms. The Chaplain's wife was dozing in the drawing-room when Lispeth came in breathing hard and very exhausted with her burden. Lispeth put it down on the sofa, and said simply:
"This is my husband. I found him on the Bagi Road. He has hurt himself. We will nurse him, and when he is well, your husband shall marry him to me."
