There’s a dilapidated bangla (bungalow) in the grounds of the Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai that commemorates the nearby birthplace of Rudyard Kipling. But it’s not the actual spot where one of India’s greatest English language writers (arguably the greatest) was born to the school’s principal, John Lockwood Kipling and his wife Alice, 150 years ago this month, on 30 December 1865 – that has long since disappeared. And, apart from a plaque that seems to have a shifting presence, there’s really not much to show for Rudyard himself. Efforts by the Indian and state governments, as well as private foundations, to turn the place into a museum, or something appropriate to Kipling, have foundered, largely because Indians can never quite decide what they think about him.  They are not alone. Kipling, the “bard of empire”, has always been difficult to place in the cultural pantheon. Britain, too, has done remarkably little to officially mark the sesquicentenary of its first winner (in 1907) of the Nobel prize for literature (and still the youngest ever from anywhere).  Indian-born, yet British? We are already entering the muddy field of contradictions that sometimes bog down the reputation of this mild-mannered man. Yet it is these that make him uniquely appealing and that, belying top-level institutional indifference, are sparking an unexpected revival of interest in him, and in particular in his role as a commentator on the origins of an integrated global culture.  A few more of those apparent incongruities spring easily to mind: the propagandist for Britain’s colonial ventures, as well as for the Boer and first world wars, who could sympathise with the plight of the women left behind in “Harp Song of the Dane Women”: “What is a woman that you forsake her, / And the hearth-fire and the home-acre, / To go with the old grey Widow-maker?”; the opponent of Indian self-determination who wrote sensitively of individual Indians in stories such as “Lisbet” and “Beyond the Pale”; the conservative supporter of the established order who poked fun at the hypocrisies of the Raj establishment in his Plain Tales from the Hills.  One clue to these anomalies is found in his troubled childhood, when he was plucked from the warmth of his native Bombay and transported halfway across the world to live with foster parents on the dank south coast of England. He recalled in his memoir, appropriately titled Something of Myself, about his love of being wheeled round Bombay in his pram by his ayah, taking in the colours of the marketplace and listening to the gentle sounds of the wind whistling through the palm trees overlooking the Indian Ocean. But then he was whisked off to Southsea, where, along with the miserable weather, he discovered the severities of monotheistic English religious fundamentalism and was subjected to physical and psychological tortures by his Evangelical foster mother, Mrs Holloway, in the excruciating manner later brought to life in his story “Baa Baa Black Sheep”. He noted that his experiences there gave him “the habit of observation, and the attendance on moods and tempers”. More generally, his early years nurtured the ecumenism of his 1912 poem “The Two-Sided Man”: “Much I owe to the Lands that grew – /More to the Lives that fed – / But most to Allah Who gave me two / Separate sides to my head.”  During the 20th century, attitudes to Kipling were shaped in a negative fashion by George Orwell, who commented in a famous essay in 1942 that, over the previous 50 years or so, “every enlightened person has despised him”, though he had the good grace to add “and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there”.  Orwell, who was born in India and worked in Burma, was part of a generation that had grown up with the empire, and that either supported its practices and values in knee-jerk fashion (and so regarded Kipling as its literary mouthpiece) or took a determined stand against it, based largely on the need to confront fascism in Europe (in which case, he was a demon).  This coolness towards Kipling was first engendered by GK Chesterton, who attacked him in 1905 from a conservative Roman Catholic perspective, not just for being a vulgar rabble-rouser (Kipling had recently been stoking up support for the Boer war), but, more lastingly, for being a rootless cosmopolitan with a penchant for innovation and no real love for England. Later, the literary critic Edward Said suggested in his book Orientalism (1978), in an argument developed in his 1987 Penguin introduction to Kim, that Kipling was part of a western movement that sought to subordinate the cultures of India and the east to its own.  Each generation seems to get the Kipling criticism it deserves. But while the issues raised by Said continue to inform present-day conversations on multiculturalism and Islam, the underlying reality is that the people who felt most strongly for and against Kipling have passed on. It is now possible to look at Kipling without historical prejudice, and the result is a growth of objective interest in his work.  Chesterton’s objections are being turned on their head. Yes, Kipling was a cosmopolitan, but that is a virtue. He introduced Britain to the wider world. Far from being the typical reactionary, Kipling espoused technology and modernity. He wrote approvingly about machines; he referred to the cinema; he trumpeted the deep-sea cables and aeroplanes that linked different parts of the empire. Chesterton the conservative didn’t like that; such innovations threatened the settled England he loved. So he argued that Kipling’s love of engineers and soldiers betrayed an unseemly enthusiasm for order, which tipped too easily into militarism.  The new Kipling is regarded positively as a decorous bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries (someone born in 1865, who died in 1936, couldn’t have better straddled the two).  It used to be argued that the boy wonder who knocked off the Barrack-Room Ballads, shortly after returning to London from India in 1889, had written himself out by 1900. But Daniel Karlin, a professor at Bristol University, has shown how cleverly stories such as “An Habitation Enforced” and “The House Surgeon” in Kipling’s 1909 collection Actions and Reactions convey the changes beneath the surface of English Edwardian society. Philip Hensher recently included “The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat” from 1913 in The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, describing this satire on incipient mass media as “the howling artificial pinnacle of Kipling’s genius” and applauding its “consideration of hysteria and wildness in the public mind”.  Kipling’s fiction also bears witness to the unease of the years following the first world war. After losing his son, John, at the battle of Loos in 1915, he channelled his grief into stories such as “The Gardener”. He was also one of the first writers to deal with post-traumatic stress syndrome in “A Madonna of the Trenches” and “A Woman in His Life”.  That conflict is also at the centre of a reassessment of Kipling’s poetry. You can’t ignore his doggerel and propaganda. But he was also a sensitive war poet, whose “Mesopotamia” (1917) laments the consequences of a notable British defeat at Kut el-Amara in 1915 – “They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young” – while indicting those responsible: “When the storm is ended shall we find / How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power / By the favour and contrivance of their kind?” This anger is taken up in his “Epitaphs of the War” (1914-18). The critic Harry Ricketts has charted the debt owed to Kipling by war poets such as Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas, and has sought, more widely, to present him as an unacknowledged modernist.  Kipling’s capacity for sober scutiny has also helped revive his reputation among Indian critics. As the exploitative nature of Britain’s colonial rule has come more into the historical frame, his often condescending attitude to their political aspirations is not condoned. But they can commend him as a commentator on their own past, when the subcontinent was making its first tentative steps from colonial dependency to self-rule.  There are, currently, two new big-screen animated versions of his timeless classic The Jungle Book in the works  Meanwhile, Kipling’s Englishness, or “albinism”, is being rediscovered. It is ironic that in 1906, the year after Chesterton criticised him for not being English enough, he published Puck of Pook’s Hill, his sublime meditation on the interplay between England’s history, countryside and identity. In his ongoing search for a new England, the singer Billy Bragg often includes a growling version of “A Pict Song” from the book in his sets.  Puck of Pook’s Hill was followed four years later by Rewards and Fairies, with its evocative poem “The Way Through the Woods” (with the more populist “The Glory of the Garden” appearing in 1911). Kipling said of this latter collection that he “worked on the material in three or four overlaid tints and textures, which might or might not reveal themselves according to the shifting light of sex, youth, and experience”. One young musician who has been inspired by the different layers of meaning is Olivia Chaney, who, drawing on the folk tradition of the long-established Kipling enthusiast Peter Bellamy, performs “Brookland Road” from it.  On a wider stage, an indicator of Kipling’s popularity is Hollywood, where, currently, there are not one but two new big-screen animated versions of his timeless classic The Jungle Book in the works – one due in the spring from Disney using the voices of Bill Murray (Baloo) and Scarlett Johansson (Kaa), and the other the following year from Warner Brothers, with Benedict Cumberbatch (Shere Khan) and Cate Blanchett (Kaa).  Next December the Victoria and Albert Museum will stage an exhibition centred on Kipling’s father, Lockwood, whose decorative sculpture is still visible on the railway station and in Crawford Market in Mumbai. Lockwood’s meticulous drawings of Indian craftsmen are well represented in the museum, while his illustrations adorn the first (1901) edition of Kim.  Kipling’s own gifts of inventiveness and observation provide challenges and paradoxes for our troubled times. It is worth recalling how often they are underscored by the humour and humanity found in “We and They”, a late poem that deserves to be better known:  • Andrew Lycett’s biography Rudyard Kipling has been reissued by Weidenfeld & Nicolson with a new introduction. His collection Kipling and War was recently published by IB Tauris.
‘Vulgar rabble-rouser’, ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, ‘mouthpiece of the empire’ … Kipling has had his share of detractors. But, 150 years after his birth, interest in India’s greatest English-language writer is growing