Divided Destinies

"Divided
Destinies"

(Notes edited
by John McGivering.

[August 11 2009]

Publication

ORG Volume 8 (Verse) page 5080, records the first appearance of this poem (Verse No. 140) in the Pioneer of 19 August 1885, as “Divided Destinies” or “The Divided Destinies” and the Pioneer Mail of 30 August the same year.

It is collected in:

Early Verse
Departmental Ditties and Other Verses
Inclusive Verse
Definitive Verse
The Sussex Edition, Volume 32, page 81
The Burwash Edition, Volume 25.
The Works of Rudyard Kipling (Wordsworth Poetry Library)
A Choice of Kipling’s Verse by T. S. Eliot.

Four lines from verse 8 of this poem are used as the heading to Chapter 3 of Lockwood Kipling's Beast and Man in India:

His hide was very mangy and his face was very red,
And ever and anon he scratched with energy his head.
His manners were not always nice, but how my spirit cried
To be an artless Bandar loose upon the mountain side!

See also "Collar-Wallah and the Poison Stick".

Notes on the text

[Verse 1]

Bandar translated in a footnote as 'Monkey'. The Bandar-log (Monkey-people) appear in The Jumgle Book, notably in "Kaa's Hunting".

[Verse 2]

Ranken tailors with shops in Simla and Lahore mentioned in many of the Indian stories. [Edward J Buck, Simla Past and Present, Thacker, Spink, Calcutta, 1904.] Buck has an illustration of Eanken's Simla premises at page 154.

[Verse 3]

bunnia merchant, trader, shopkeeper

Peliti’s Hotel in Simla. See Buck p.55.

[Verse 4]

Hamilton’s jewellers in Simla (see Buck, page 153) Jack Pansay bought a ring there for Kitty Mannering “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” (Wee Willie Winkie).

[J McG.]

©John McGivering 2009 All rights reserved