It is neither myth nor legend, but a fact tinged with the oddity of history: Rudyard Kipling, bard of Empire and balladeer of British India, had once dabbled in Calcutta’s stock market. Kipling, who gave us The Jungle Book and Kim, was not just a chronicler of colonial life but also a customer of Place, Siddons & Gough, Calcutta’s most prestigious brokerage firm, nestled in the buzzing financial alley of Lyons Range. A photograph of a stock certificate, 1905, bearing Kipling’s name and 20 shares in Standard Jute Co. Ltd. confirms it: even the great spinner of tales could not resist the charms of jute and dividend.
In Kipling’s time, there was no formal Calcutta Stock Exchange. Trading took place under the shade of a venerable neem tree, less a symbol of financial stability than colonial improvisation. Beneath its branches, fortunes were made in coal, jute, tea, and paper.
The stockbrokers then were primarily European and Bengali, with Marwaris entering in larger numbers during the wartime booms. Kipling’s firm, Place, Siddons & Gough, stood at the centre of this world. Its clientele included literary legends, viceroys, generals, and European magnates.
Kipling came back to India in 1882 as a young journalist and left in 1889 but his connection to the country and its fledgling financial world endured. He continued to correspond with his Calcutta brokers from London. His 1905 purchase of Standard Jute shares came just two years before he received the Nobel Prize.
Standard Jute, run by Bird & Co., was a sound investment. It consistently paid dividends, a rare stability in a market where coal shares once soared dizzyingly and jute companies multiplied like rabbits. Kipling was likely advised by F.L.B. Siddons, his broker and a director in the same jute company.
However, Kipling was only a minor participant in a larger drama. The Calcutta market was a theatre of dreams and delusions where wealth could appear overnight and vanish by noon. The Great Boom during the First World War sent prices sky-high: shares of Titaghur Papers rose from Rs 50 to Rs 530, Bowreah Cotton from Rs 91 to Rs 1,640, and jute from Rs 7 to over Rs 160. With soaring prices came speculators, amateurs, and opportunists. Some won. Others — many others — were crushed by the same tide. There was the tragic case of Bhadermull, who went from owning 17 racehorses and courting royalty to dying penniless in a dingy corner of Darmahatta Street. And the Nathanis, a pair of brothers who famously speculated against each other in a classic bull-bear duel, transferring Rs 95 lakh from one pocket to the other in a single day.
As the decades turned, the characters of the exchange changed. The sharp, frugal, and enterprising Marwaris replaced the departing Europeans who sold their seats and went home after independence. The Bangurs, once penniless at Nimtala Ghat, became industrial titans after a broker gave one of them 500 Bengal Coal shares as dowry. The Bengalis, who had once flourished in the market, gradually faded. Names like Pyne, Laha, and Nanda Lal Roy are now memories. Yet Kipling’s firm endured, its name a thread connecting past to present.
What, then, does it mean that Kipling traded stocks in Calcutta? It offers a window into the rhythms of Empire, the confluence of literature and trade, and the beating commercial heart of colonial India. The man who wrote of jungle law and imperial duty also played the market under a neem tree, trusting his fortune to the invisible hand of commerce and his broker’s human hand.