India is to have its first museum celebrating the writer Rudyard Kipling, after decades in which the country he loved consigned him to obscurity as a prophet of British imperialism.

A dilapidated bungalow in the grounds of an art school in Bombay, where Kipling was born and lived until he was nearly six, is being restored to house a hoped-for collection of associated memorabilia. The move may be the first sign of his rehabilitation by a people who inspired some his most memorable poetry and prose. Long after they gained independence from Britain in 1947, Indians found it difficult to discuss Kipling - a proponent of the Empire, whose poems included The White Man's Burden - without rancour.