linguistic:paraphrasing, quality:correction
Childhood (1865–1882)

Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, to Alice Kipling (born MacDonald) and John Lockwood Kipling. Alice (one of the four noted MacDonald sisters) was a vivacious woman, of whom Lord Dufferin would say, "Dullness and Mrs Kipling cannot exist in the same room." John Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and pottery designer, was the Principal and Professor of Architectural Sculpture at the newly founded Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Bombay.

John Lockwood and Alice met in 1863 and courted at Rudyard Lake in Rudyard, Staffordshire, England. They married and moved to India in 1865 after John Lockwood had accepted the position as Professor at the School of Art. They had been so moved by the beauty of the Rudyard Lake area that they named their first child after it, Joseph Rudyard. Two of Alice's sisters were married to artists: Georgiana to the painter Edward Burne-Jones, and her sister Agnes to Edward Poynter. A third sister, Louisa, was the mother of Kipling's most prominent relative, his first cousin Stanley Baldwin, who was Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times in the 1920s and 1930s.

Kipling's birth home on the campus of the J. J. School of Art in Bombay was for many years used as the dean's residence. Although a cottage bears a plaque noting it as his birth site, the original one may have been torn down and replaced decades ago. Some historians and conservationists take the view that the bungalow marks a site merely close to the home of Kipling's birth, as it was built in 1882 – about 15 years after Kipling was born. Kipling seems to have said as much to the dean when visiting J. J. School in the 1930s.

Kipling wrote of Bombay:

Mother of Cities to me, For I was born in her gate, Between the palms and the sea, Where the world-end steamers wait.

According to Bernice M. Murphy, "Kipling's parents considered themselves ' Anglo-Indians ' and so too would their son, though he spent the bulk of his life elsewhere. Complex issues of identity and national allegiance would become prominent in his fiction."

Kipling referred to such conflicts. For example: "In the afternoon heats before we took our sleep, she (the Portuguese ayah, or nanny) or Meeta (the Hindu bearer, or male attendant) would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution 'Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.' So one spoke 'English', haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in."