Do you like Kipling?
Writer returning to favour, biographer says
For decades, he was treated as a “persona non grata” in literary circles, left off from school syllabuses due to his “politically incorrect” views of the British Empire.
But now Rudyard Kipling is enjoying a revival among a new generation of researchers who have a “wider perspective of the world,” says his biographer Andrew Lycett.
Kipling (1865-1936), the youngest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1907 at age 42), was one of the most popular writers in the English-speaking world in the late19th and early-20th centuries. His books — including the Just So Stories and The Jungle Book — are regarded as classics of children’s literature, and he was a pioneer of the short story.
He fell out of favour during the 20th century, when he was seen as an apologist for colonialism. George Orwell accused Kipling of being “morally insensitive” and a “prophet of British imperialism.”
Kipling, who was born in Bombay, has been attacked for writing from a British colonialist perspective, while some of his works have been accused of having racist overtones. His poem The White Man’s Burden has been criticized for suggesting it was incumbent on the U.S. to civilize “savages” in the Philippines.
Speaking recently at the Chalke Valley History Festival, Lycett argued people have now “moved beyond that knee-jerk reaction” to Kipling.
“There is a younger generation of researchers, PhD students, who are going back to Kipling,” he said. “He is taught at universities more, there is more of a sort of willingness to look at him afresh, and to look again at his works and to see what was good about him.
“People now have a wider perspective and they see that Kipling was a sort of global writer, really, he wrote about the world.”
Lycett said there is “no doubt” Kipling was a reactionary, “but he was also a great observer. So if you want to know about Kipling’s world, about India in the late 19th century, Kipling is a great place to start.”