Did you know Rudyard Kipling once lived in Vermont? When I learned that this Anglo-Indian author - once the world's most popular writer - wrote “The Jungle Book” and the first draft of “Kim” on a Vermont hillside in the 1890s, I jumped at the chance to visit his house near Brattleboro. It’s now a rental property, which means you can sleep in a house that’s filled with Kipling memorabilia and his original furniture, and you’ll see the golf clubs that Arthur Conan Doyle brought during a visit. (There was snow when he came, so they painted the balls red before they played.)
It’s a charming story - until you realize that Kipling was an unabashed imperialist. He believed it was the moral duty of an empire to “civilize” its colonial subjects; his notorious poem “The White Man’s Burden” called for the U.S. to seize control of the Philippines. And this is why Kipling today, for all his fame a hundred years ago, has been practically written out of the literary canon.
So, should we still read Kipling? It’s a complicated question that I tried to unpack for this week’s radio show on the politics of writing. Literary scholar Chris Benfey was my guide as we walked through Kipling’s house - and his life. I also talked with Salman Rushdie, the great post-colonial writer who, like Kipling, was born and raised in Bombay before moving to England. He says no Western reader has ever known India so deeply as Kipling.
What does Rushdie think about Kipling today? “If you want to learn through literature about the world then, read him. You can’t erase imperialism just because you disapprove of it.”
-Steve