He had nothing but respect for India

ONCE revered as the Bard of Empire, Rudyard Kipling has often been viewed as something of an embarrassment in the postcolonial world.

Critics have pointed to his poem Gunga Din (1890), which is written from the point of view of an English soldier in India about an Indian water-bearer, and lines from his novel Kim (1901) such as ‘My experience is that one can never fathom the Oriental mind’ as examples of how he was a racist. But academics also say that he had a deep affinity with India and was often affectionate towards the Indian subjects of his work.

Last night Rana Mitter, professor of the history and politics of modern China at Oxford University, who has a Bengali family background, described Kipling as ‘very respectful of India as a culture and society’.

He said: ‘Kipling understood India better than his British contemporaries. If you read a poem like Gunga Din you’ll see that it isn’t contemptuous of India at all, but is respectful.

‘However, Kipling was a product of lateVictorian Britain and had prejudices that were commonplace at that time.’

Professor Mitter said Kipling’s The Ballad Of East And West, which contains the famous line ‘East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet’, is more problematic.

Born in Bombay in 1865, Kipling was sent away to school in England when he was five.

In 1882 he returned to India, where he worked for newspapers. Aside from his poetry, among his best known work is The Jungle Book from 1894, which became a children’s classic and inspired a film produced by Walt Disney in 1967. He died in 1936.