A comic based on the poem of the same name by Rudyard Kipling.
Kipling (1865-1936) was born in Bombay (Mumbai), India, and schooled in England. He worked as a journalist in Lahore, India (now in Pakistan), from 1882 to 1889. He married an American in 1892 and lived in Brattleboro, Vermont, after which he returned to England with his wife, settling in Sussex. He died in London.
Much of his best-known work is based on his experience and observations as an Englishman in British India. His volumes of verse included Departmental Ditties (1886) and Barrack-Room Ballads (1892). He is well-known in the United States for the children's books The Jungle Book (1895) and Just So Stories (1902). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, the first English-language writer to receive it. His writings have provided the source for numerous motion pictures, including Captains Courageous (1937), Gunga Din (1939), Kim (1950), The Jungle Book (1942, 1967, 1994, et al.), and The Man Who Would Be King (1975).
In the later 20th century, his reputation as the 'poet of British Imperialism' caused him to be widely reviled as an apologist. However, his work as a whole shows that he understood the price of Empire, to conqueror and conquered alike, with a subtlety often missed by both its boosters and detractors. His poems about the Great War (World War I) are particulary ambivalent, as his only son died in a war that seemed to drag on forever to no discernable point. It is Louis Killen's recording of Peter Bellamy's arrangement of "We Have Fed Our Sea" (from the poem The Song of the Dead) that caused me to seek out those of Kipling's poems that might shed light on our own, more recent entaglements in Central Asia.
Please click here for more information on the history of the Northwest Frontier Province, the Khyber Pass, and the Pathans (Pushtuns/Pukhtuns).
Poetry by Rudyard Kipling. Art © 2004 by E. J. Barnes. Pictured sample: Page 2, panel 3.
Minis of Arithmetic on the Frontier are currently out of print. Download the PDF (580Kb).