The Culture Shocks of Rudyard Kipling

The dynamics of culture shock explain why a person who moves from a familiar environment into a strange one often experiences grief, anxiety, confusion and hostility - the very aspects of Kipling's art which have long puzzled his critics. Since Kipling moved from one culture to another (India to England, Vermont to South Africa) roughly every five years for the first forty years of his life, it is not difficult to see why these problems were so important to him personally, or why they furnished the major themes of his most important work.