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A phantom rickshaw appears every ten years or so in the English-reading world. It haunts various literary journals and magazines for a few months and then disappears, only to materialise again after a decade or two, pulled by a different literary coolie this time. The man sitting in this spectral rickshaw is always Rudyard Kipling, though you would hardly think so at times because this is a ghost that appears, often alternately, in two very different forms.
After the last round of haunting — the highpoint of which was a dense and brilliant literary essay by Sara Suleri in the Rhetoric of English India — Kipling is back among us. And, as is common, his reappearance has coincided with another biography — Harry Ricketts' The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling.
In the usual course of events, Kipling is dragged out on his spectral rickshaw — pedalled furiously by a writer or critic (increasingly a native) and dressed up either as the White Man's Burden or as the Great Universal Writer. As the White Man's Burden, he is everything that we should never be: not only a patriarchal colonialist but also a racist. As the Great Universal Writer, he is everything we can never be: not only a genius able to understand and narrate all men, women and animals but also pure as, well, driven snow. Usually, if Kipling is raised from the dead as the former this decade, he is liable to stalk the land as the latter in the next.
This time, however, thanks to the London Review of Books, we have snapshots of Kipling's ghost in both its guises. Perhaps this has something to do with the death of the subject, but we shall not go into that matter. Suffice to say that if Amit Chaudhuri's review of Harry Ricketts' biography ('A feather! A very feather upon the face!?, LRB, 6 January 2000) contained elements of Kipling as the White Man's Burden, David Gilmour's rejoinder (Letters, LRB, 20 January 2000) presented a vision of Kipling, the Great Universal Writer.
Kipling's ghost is up and about again and the controversy rages: is it a beast or is it superman?
Gilmour takes exception to Chaudhuri's statement that Kipling was...