THE LONG RECESSIONAL: THE IMPERIAL LIFE OF RUDYARD KIPLING By David Gilmour, John Murray, £ 22.50 Of the 42 years from his birth in 1865 till he won the Nobel Prize in 1907, Rudyard Kipling spent less than 19 years in England. Yet, he came to be regarded as the greatest spokesman of British imperialism, the favourite child of the Empire. Kipling never saw a battle in India. Yet he is credited with making the modern soldier. For some like George Orwell, however, he epitomized the 'jingo imperialist...morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting'. David Gilmour's one-point agenda is to rescue Kipling from the Orwellian formulation. But in trying to do so, he reveals a man with two sides to his head, one 'mocking Indians for their political pretensions and their 'orientally unclean...habits'...and the other intensely receptive to sights, smells and sounds...absorbing the experience without feeling the need to censure'. The best part about Gilmour is that he does not feel the need to censure either, stating matter-of-factly that Kipling, 'like his father...preferred 'Mussalmans' to Hindus' or that he was 'no more concerned about the political rights of native Africans than he had been about Indian constitutional rights in the Subcontinent'. Gilmour also admits that it was perhaps the idea of England, and a sense of its capability and potential, that attracted Kipling much more than the reality. India was perhaps the only country that Kipling tried to understand. The rest - including America, South Africa, Canada, Egypt and Brazil - he decided to despise. Long after he had left India, never to return, in 1889, his works continued to revolve around India and Indians. Kim, the last and arguably the most important of his Indian writings, was published as late as 1901. In contrast, his wanderings in other continents produced mostly polemical works, with the exception of Captains Courageous, inspired by America. Kipling experienced India first as a child, much like Kimball O'Hara, with an inquisitive mind, untainted by racial or moral prejudices, and then as a young journalist, needing to absorb the country through all his senses, in addition to his exceptionally agile mind. His stint with the Civil and Military Gazette and the Pioneer inspired some of his finest Indian works, including Departmental Ditties (1886), Soldier Tales, Indian Tales (1887), The Story of the Gadsbys, Plain Tales from the Hills, In Black and White and Wee Willie Winkie (1888). Gilmour is correct in observing that the sharp edge in Kipling's journalistic writing is difficult to detect in his later works. His years as a scribe also stood him in good stead when questions of authenticity were raised, a tricky hurdle where even Forster faltered. The boy who had left India at the age of five was 'Ruddy baba'. The man who came back as the assistant editor of the Gazette was 'Kipling sahib' (or Kuppeeleen sahib), although only 16. The 11 years in between, and the able guidance of Cormell Price, his British headmaster, had taught him 'to make and keep empires'. The 'Ruddy baba' and the 'Kipling sahib' selves were most often at odds with each other, but managed to work in tandem beautifully in Kim. Kim and the lama were informed by his close encounters with native India as a child, while the babudom of Huree Chunder Mookerjee and Grish Chunder Dé were sketched with a journalist's eye for detail. The Gazette-Pioneer experience brought Kipling closer to the Anglo-Indian civil servant community and the upper echelons of Indian society. Quite evidently, the former proved a more rewarding study than the latter, since Kipling ended up reflecting: 'You'll never plumb the Oriental Mind/ And if you did, it isn't worth the toil' ('One Viceroy Resigns'). Interestingly, the poem is a dramatic monologue written as Lord Dufferin's reflections on his rule and advice to his successor. Gilmour, with some degree of reluctance, admits that 'the views expressed belonged more to Kipling than to Dufferin'. While India would not fit into any neat theorizations, Kipling was a little surprised to find that America did. A society, whose 'barbarism plus telephone, electric light, rail and suffrage' and 'moral dry rot' he found difficult to accept, was soon being exhorted to take up 'The White Man's Burden'. For Kipling, Americans in 1899 were on 'the threshold of... the White Man's work, the business of introducing a sane and orderly administration into the dark places of the earth' (in this case, the Philippines). But unable to sustain himself on the New World, he moved on to South Africa, where he took up the imperial cause against the Boers. Kipling, the prophet, emerged from the ruins of the Boer War, unable to rejoice in the imperial success because he could see the sun gradually setting on the Empire. He prophesied the Nazi threat, but during his time it was regarded as yet another expression of his undisguised hatred of the Germans. As Kipling's political activism increased, from the American years, his literature declined just as fast. There is an unknown Kipling too. One who was exceptionally sensitive to the plight of Indian women and more liberal than the most liberal Victorian on sexual matters; one who never tried to impose epic qualities on his fictional soldiers, only human ones; one who was shattered by the death of his favourite daughter, Josephine, and son, John, but would never speak about it, just as he retrieved and destroyed most of the letters he had written. Above all, one who refused to hit back at the numerous, often vicious, parodies of his poems. Gilmour's greatest achievement is in discreetly unveiling the 'other' Kipling without upsetting his impeccable scholarship. Few poets other than Shakespeare have been as widely read and quoted as Kipling. But few have been as misunderstood. And quoted out of context, as Gilmour points out, citing the famous lines from 'The Ballad of East and West': 'Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet/ Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment seat'. 'The apparent message of these lines', Gilmour observes, 'is contradicted by the rest of the verse, which asserts that two men of similar courage and ability can be equals despite multitudinous differences of class, race, nation and continent.' 'But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,/ When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth.' These are postcolonial times, and Kipling, the white man, has an enormous burden. Gilmour's is a commendable effort to lighten it.