Rudyard Kipling is widely-read in much of the English-speaking world, 72 years after his death. Rabindranath Tagore is highly reguarded in Bengal (now Bangladesh and the state of West Bengal in India) and was influencial in early 20th century Spanish literature. Both won the Nobel Prize for Literature (Kipling in 1907 and Tagore in 1913) and both are still revered for their storytelling abilities and poetic sensetivity.
Yet, in real life, Tagore hated Kipling's work, and protested Kipling's imperialistic attitude to the point of writing Gora, widely seen as a rebuke of Kipling's views.
Paint the Map Red
Kipling, of course, viewed British Imperialism as a force of good, lifting up the "new-caught sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child" from anarchy to civilization. Of course, Kipling does not want Indians lifted to do well, but rather to be lifted to serve the Empire and it's natives.
Kipling was a political conservative, who disliked the Earl of Ripon (the Viceroy of India from 1880-84) who pushed for more legal rights for Indians. The Enlightenment of Pagett, M. P., one of Kipling's unpublished stories, makes the liberal M. P. Pagett look like a fool as he sympathzes with natives.
In his story The Head of the District, Kipling expressed his dislike of Lord Ripon by having the head of a regional government in north-east India be replaced by a well-educated Bengali named Grish Chunder De (who Kipling tells had "gone to England and entertained many drawing rooms). Kipling expresses his dislike of De who has the audacity of accepting the post in place of an Englishman, and criticizes the fictional Viceroy for making the appointment as a way to win a reputation by "appointing a child of the country to the rule of the country."
Not suprisingly, while Kipling is viewed mostly negatively in India, he is particularily unpopular in Bengal.
Amritsar
Kipling did not hate all Indians. He admired Sikhs for their military braveness (much like he admired British army officers for this reason, idolizing them in many of his stories). It is also convenient for him, since his career as a writer began in Lahore, where he lived for three years. Lahore is 30 miles away from Amritsar and its golden temple, the holiest shrine in Sikhism.
There are no direct mentions of him in his writing, but Rabindranath Tagore was the kind of Indian that Kipling would have attacked. Tagore was well-educated (briefly attending University College London) and an influential Bengali writer. He praised the Indian independence movement, even returning his knighthood after the Amritsar massacre (where British soldiers killed 379 civilians). Kipling set up a fund for General Dyer, who ordered the massacre.
(The massacre is dramatically depicted in the Oscar winning film Ghandi with Dyer being played by Edward Fox).
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