An Irishman’s Diary

In an entertaining if racist short story from 1891, Rudyard Kipling has his narrator visit a tiny Himalayan kingdom, between India and Tibet, where the monarch is troubled by a wild family who refuse to pay taxes or obey the law.

The king’s dilemma is that the patriarch, Namgay Doola (who name supplies the story’s title) is also a pillar of the community: the man everyone looks to in a crisis, or when hard work needs to be done.

But when a vengeful Doola cuts the tail off a cow – an animal sacred in those parts – owned by a neighbour who has informed on him, something has to give. So the narrator volunteers to visit the turbulent family and see if he can resolve the king’s problem.

As he has been warned, the Doolas look nothing like other Tibetans. Specifically, they have red hair. When the father sings a song in the local patois, “Dir hane mard-i-yemen dir to weeree ala gee”, the narrator is haunted by the thought that he knows the tune.

Red hair

Questioning the man about his origins, he learns that Namgay Doola is the son of Thimlay Doola, long dead, who was also red-haired but about whom little else is now known.

So, following a hunch, the narrator asks whether his father left any religious customs: whereupon Doola produces a box of mementos, including a crucifix. And at around twilight (Angelus time, near enough), the narrator watches as the family intones their hymn before the cross  – “Dir hane mard-i-yemen dir to weeree ala gee” again.

Then he recognises the lyric: “They’re hanging men and women too, for the wearing of the green.” From which comic epiphany, Kipling’s narrator is able to present the king with two alternative solutions to his problem.

One is to hang the entire family. The other is to put the son of Thimlay Doola – aka Tim Doolan – in charge of the army, exempt from laws and taxes, but also (this is crucial, the narrator insists) from ownership of land.

The king takes the latter course. Happiness ensues.  And, as well as amusing his readers, Kipling makes an early contribution to the home rule debate, reminding everyone that while the Catholic (and cattle-mutilating) Irish make excellent soldiers, they should never be allowed self-government, even over a plot of Himalayan forestry.

That aside, the story is interesting for other reasons.  One is that it was inspired by a real-life Tim Doolan, an army sergeant who deserted near Darjeeling circa 1857, crossed into Tibet, married a local beauty, and went native.

He was unheard of in India again until 1889, when newspapers reported the strange case of a young Tibetan, badly wounded in a battle with the British, who had suspiciously European features.

Questioned (through an interpreter), the wounded soldier turned out to be a son of Tim Doolan, and to have a box of mementos like the one described in Namgay Doola, although the rest of the story’s plot was invention.

Irishwoman in La

hore The plight of lndia’s lower-caste whites

– "the poorest of the poor" – fascinated Kipling. A few years before Namgay Doola, he had started writing a novel called Mother Maturin, in which the title character was an Irishwoman, reduced to running an opium den in Lahore.

She nevertheless manages to send her daughter to England for an education. And after the young woman returns, married to a British official, it is noticed that government secrets are soon being sold in the Lahore markets.

The novel was never published, nor indeed finished, probably because it would have embarrassed Kipling’s parents, then based in Lahore. In a letter to his aunt, the writer said his mother found the story “nasty but powerful”. He added: “I know it be in large measure true.”

But as Peter Hopkirk noted in a book called Quest for Kim (1997), Kipling was able to reuse parts of the abandoned work in his masterpiece.  Published in 1901, that too, like Namgay Doola, concerned a half-caste son of the Hibernian diaspora, who, while helping a Tibetan lama towards enlightenment, and doubling as a spy, presents a child's-eye portrait of India at the height of the Raj.

The hero's name, inherited from a forgotten father, was Kimball O'Hara. And the book's working title referred explicitly to his racial origins: Kim of the 'Rishti'.

In the event, the novel became famous under the simple three-letter name. Which, among other things, was probably a sideways nod at Tim.