In November 1882, Rudyard Kipling, about a month short of his seventeenth birthday and newly returned to India, the land of his birth, from England, where, following Anglo-Indian practice, his parents had placed him at age five for his education, became sub-editor of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, capital of the Punjab province of British-ruled India. The CMG was the one daily newspaper in the Punjab. Kipling and the paper’s editor constituted the entire editorial staff. Over time, Kipling, in addition to his editorial tasks, began reporting on local news and official events. The editor also permitted him to place a few of his own poems and stories in the paper; a new editor welcomed many more.

The CMGoffices where Kipling worked attracted a wide cross-section of visitors. Kipling also spent at least one month of the year at Simla, a village in the foothills of the Himalayas, to which the British Viceroy and the government moved for about half the year in order to escape the heat of Calcutta. In and around Lahore (where he lived with his parents and sister and belonged to the Punjab Club) and at Simla, Kipling, as a journalist, got to know members of the different branches of the British civil administration (“Civilians”) and their wives; British Army soldiers and officers; government officials, including the Viceroy and the occupants of other high offices; and native Indians belonging to the different religious and tribal groups and castes of India. These