Introduction

Abstract

Should you be travelling in the far north of Vermont, USA, in the vicinity of the town of Brattleboro, you might chance upon a road called Kipling Road. If you were of an inquisitive disposition you might even follow it, and if you did, you’d come upon a grey, shingled house set into the hill, called Naulakha. Although, this being Vermont, you might well assume that this was a name derived from native American language, you would be wrong, because it is derived from a different Indian tongue entirely: it is the Hindi word for ‘priceless jewel’. This, in fact, is the house that the newly married Rudyard Kipling designed, built and inhabited from 1893 until 1896, and where he wrote both of the Jungle Books, parts of the Just So Stories, and parts of Kim. It houses a miscellany of Kipling furniture and possessions — his golf clubs, an Indian teakwood sideboard, a couple of plaster statuettes of Bagheera and Grey Brother, and the desk at which he wrote the Jungle Books. The nomination which aimed to put Naulakha on the USA’s National Register of Historic Places, strikingly, argued not for its literary but for its architectural significance, describing this house — part American vernacular architecture, part allegedly inspired by the Kashmiri boathouse and the Indian bungalow — as ‘a dramatic cross-cultural expression, spanning two continents stylistically.’¹