Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling [Public Domain] via Wikimedia Commons Rudyard Kipling was born in India, 'the jewel in the Crown of the British Empire', in 1865. His life straddles the turn of the twentieth-century almost exactly (he died in 1936), a period that also saw the British Empire reach its height and begin its decline -- Indian independence came little more than a decade after Kipling's death in 1947. The contrasting locations of his birth (the first six years of his life were spent in the multicultural and vibrantly bustling city of Bombay) and death (the rolling green, and quintessentially 'British', countryside of Sussex) epitomize the paradoxical nature of Kipling, the literary man. Where so many of his writings set in India exhibit a zest and enthusiasm for Eastern culture, landscape, and peoples, an equally large number of his poems are filled with racism, pro-imperial jingoism, and an undying belief in the white man's right to global rule. Just as his life-span straddled the century, Kipling straddled geographical boundaries and ideological positions, and these inconsistencies come through most prominently, and productively, in his literature. Kipling…