Biography | Rudyard Kipling — Born on This Campus, in a House That Is No Longer Standing

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 on the campus of the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay.

The second given name came from Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, where his parents had courted.

John Lockwood Kipling and Alice Macdonald had married at St Mary Abbots, Kensington, on 18 March 1865.

Lockwood then took the post of professor of architectural sculpture at the art school endowed a decade earlier by Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy.

In 1866 he opened ateliers for decorative painting, modelling and wrought iron, and became the school's first dean.

The house in which the child was born stood on this campus and later served as the dean's residence.

That building was pulled down.

The bungalow that carries the plaque today was built in 1882, after the boy had already been sent to England.

Kipling, visiting in the 1930s, told the dean the marked house was not the original.

The plaque still prefers the simpler story.

The school now occupies the neo-Gothic block of 1878 at 78 Dr Dadabhai Naoroji Road, designed by George Twigge Molecey.

The campus, including the later dean's bungalow, is listed Grade II by the Government of Maharashtra.

Rudyard and his sister Alice, called Trix, spent their first years here among ayahs and the noise of a working port.

In 1871 they were taken to England and left with a foster family in Southsea.

He was five.

The Bombay years remained the measure he used on later rooms.

He later called the city the mother of cities, and said he had been born at her gate, between the palms and the sea.

Photo: DesiBoy101, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons