Rudyard Kipling without ‘White Man’s Burden’: A Sesquicentenary Appreciation
by Laksiri Fernando
( December 22, 2015, Sydney, Sri Lanka Guardian) Born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay, this year is Rudyard Kipling’s sesquicentenary birth anniversary. Kipling is famous for his many literary works – verse, prose or plain writing – but for a Sri Lankan audience, he is rather loathed because of his controversial poem, ‘The White Man’s Burden.’ He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, among many other international awards. Throughout a greater part of these hundred-and-fifty years, the critiques have been debating on how to evaluate his contributions, for ‘humanity’ I would say, and the controversies are still abundant and inconclusive as they were at the beginning of the 20thcentury.
