Rudyard Kipling’s Multiple Personality: One personality spoke English, the other Hindustani, and the one who spoke English didn’t understand Hindustani.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), who won the 1907 Nobel Prize in Literature, appears to have had a more traumatic childhood than Charles Dickens: Kipling was separated from his parents and mistreated, at a younger age and for a longer period of time.

“First of all, he was born in India, the son of an English artist and scholar…It appears that up to the age of six Kipling talked, thought and dreamed, as he says, in Hindustani, and could hardly speak English correctly…

“When Rudyard Kipling was six and his sister three and a half, they were farmed out for six years in England with a relative of Kipling’s father. John Lockwood Kipling was the son of a Methodist minister, and this woman was a religious domestic tyrant in the worst English tradition of Dickens and Samuel Butler. The boy, who had been petted and deferred to by the native servants in India, was now beaten, bullied with the Bible, pursued with constant suspicions and broken down by cross-examinations. If one of the children spilled a drop of gravy or wept over a letter from their parents in Bombay, they were forbidden to speak to one another for twenty-four hours. Their guardian had a violent temper and enjoyed making terrible scenes, and they had to learn to propitiate her by fawning on her when they saw that an outburst was imminent.

“ ‘Looking back,’ says Mrs. Fleming, Kipling’s sister, ‘I think the real tragedy of our early days, apart from Aunty’s bad temper and unkindness to my brother, sprang from our inability to understand why our parents had deserted us…We were just like workhouse brats, and none of our toys really belonged to us.’

“Rudyard had bad eyes, which began to give out altogether, so that he was unable to do his work at school…and for punishment was made to walk to school with a placard between his shoulders reading ‘Liar.’ He had finally a severe nervous breakdown, accompanied by partial blindness, and was punished by isolation from his sister. This breakdown, it is important to note, was made more horrible by hallucinations…

“He was next sent to a public school in England…

“…in July, 1882, not yet quite seventeen…He went back to his family in India, and there he remained for seven years. The Hindu child, who had lain dormant in England, came to life when he reached Bombay, and he found himself reacting to the old stimuli by beginning to talk Hindustani without understanding what he was saying…That Hindu other self of his childhood…” (1, pp. 345-351).

Most bilingual people feel and think somewhat differently when they speak one of their languages or the other; however, the difference is a difference in roles, not personalities: both languages are known by their one and only personality.

But when Kipling spoke Hindustani and did not know what he was saying, it meant that he had two personalities, and that his English-speaking personality, who did not speak Hindustani, was listening from behind-the-scenes, while his Hindustani personality spoke. That is multiple personality.

Kipling’s Sister

Since Alice MacDonald (Kipling) Fleming was even younger than her brother when their childhoods became traumatic, it would be expected that her outcome would not be as good.

“The sister of author Rudyard Kipling, Alice Fleming adopted the pseudonym “Mrs. Holland” because members of her family were opposed to her involvement in occult matters. She was one of the seven principal mediums involved in the famous cross-correspondences cases…

“In 1893, while living in India, she began automatic writing, often receiving poetry but occasionally letters for friends purportedly coming from their deceased loved ones…

“Fleming continued to do automatic writing until 1910, when she suffered a nervous breakdown” (2).

Kipling became a medium for his characters, while his sister became a medium for the “dead,” the former a healthier and more productive version of multiple personality.

1. Edmund Wilson. “The Kipling That Nobody Read” [1941], pages 344-395 in Edmund Wilson’s Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s: The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow [1941], Classics and Commercials, Uncollected Reviews. New York, The Library of America, 2007.

2. Fleming, Alice MacDonald (Kipling): “Mrs. Holland” (1868-1948). http://www.spiritualistresources.com/cgi-bin/great/index.pl?read=72