"The lyrics were written in the 1890s, and they were put to music ... in the 1970s" skips over a good deal. I once spent a while browsing in old issues of the journal of the Kipling Society, and discovered that many -- perhaps most -- of Kipling's songs had been set to music more than once during his lifetime. Some of them made it into the music halls. Unfortunately, the old tunes seem to have disappeared almost completely; I have never seen any recent mention of the copious sheet music & anthologies that must once have existed.

Kipling was of course imperialist, and he was sexist by recent standards, but he does seem to have been remarkably free of racial & religious bigotry. He wrote an interesting poem ("The Mother-Lodge") about a Masonic lodge he seems to have belonged to in India. He was proud of what a mixture it was.