Kim
June 2, 1987
A review of "Kim" by Rudyard Kipling.
Copyright © 1998 Property of Deborah K. Fletcher. All rights reserved.
Rudyard Kipling wrote Kim in 1901, paralleling his own childhood as an Indian-born Briton, left alone by his parents at age five, and raised in an English school from age twelve. He returned to India at age sixteen, and his experiences there strongly influenced his novels. He went back to England at age twenty-four and became a literary celebrity. He married Caroline Wolcott in 1891, and they settled in Brattleboro, Vermont, for eight years, after which they moved to Sussex, England. Kipling's Kim, Just So Stories (1902), and Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), were written in Sussex, earning him the Nobel prize for literature in 1907.
Kimball O'Hara is an Irish boy who has been raised by an East Indian woman after the death of his parents, who lived in Lahore City in India. Kim has learned to survive on the streets of Lahore, and is cunning, and wise for his age.
Early in the novel, a Tibetan lama enters Kim's life. He is on a holy quest to find a river of healing. Kim becomes his disciple, hoping to find his destiny, which was revealed to him in a prophecy about two men who would prepare the way for a red bull upon a green field. The bull is later shown to be the flag of a regiment of Irish Mavericks in which Kim's father served.
Kim and the lama meet before the Wonder House of Lahore in Victorian India. Their travels take them through the cities, villages, mountains, and plains of India. They experience native magic, superstition, war, and intrigue.
Kim's destiny is the Great Game, which he finds when he is taken in by the Maverick regiment, and is educated in an Indo-European school. The Great Game takes Kim into the service of the Indian government as a political spy. He travels across India with the lama, learning and growing, until he completes his first mission by bringing about the fall of a group of errant kings.
About the time when Kim succeeds in his mission, the lama wanders into a river, where he is almost drowned. One of Kim's colleagues pulls him out of the water and revives him. The lama is certain that he has found his river, and that he has been cleansed of all his sins.
The end of the book is the beginning of Kim's adult life as a player of the Great Game, and of the lama's peace. The only end is the end of Kim's association with the lama. Kim's destiny, which he found in two men who prepared the way for a red bull on a green field, goes on.
Kim is written ostensibly for and about children, but examines on a deeper level the opposition of East and West. Kim is a white boy, born of white parents, raised by an Indian nurse, schooled in a white school, apprenticed to a Tibetan Lama, and employed by the Indian government. In Kim, the vast chasm between the East and the West is bridged in the person of the young Kimball O'Hara, who reconciles his two cultures by living one at a time.
Morton N. Cohen writes, in his introduction to Kim:
It is, however, Kipling's theme of East-and-West, the Indian stories and verse, the landscape of Empire, that he is best known for and in which, in fact, he did his best and most original work. Among these works, Kim stands out above the rest, like the tallest peak of the Himalayas.
The peaks of the Himalayas are an appropriate simile, since the character who helps Kim the most is Terhoo Lama, the Holy Man from Tibet. He represents the Far East, bringing a second, lesser opposition of East and West to the novel, and emphasizing the conflict within the boy, Kim. He helps Kim to discover and achieve his destiny as a Sahib, a European boy in India. He also takes Kim to many parts of India, allowing him to use the knowledge which he has gained at the madrissah, or Indo-European school.
Kim's mixed heritage allows him to be both an Indian and a young Sahib. He changes from one to the other, and also to other identities, by simple changes of clothing and manner. Since he has grown up as a spy for various members for the community of Lahore, he is very good at becoming other people. When he is taken in by the Irish Maverick unit, he uses this ability to survive. He puts on the bright red of the unit, speaks English, and lives the identity of his birth. When he leaves the school, he becomes a Hindu boy again, dressing, speaking, and behaving like a Hindu, even using some of the more colorful expletives (but he also incorporates his new knowledge of medicine and mapping, shielding them as holy magic). In this way, he begins to blend his two cultures into a unique, personal culture. He merges his cultures so well, in fact, that when he returns to the school after vacation, the servants in the bazaar, who are of a naturally observant race, do not realize that he has grown up as a Hindu rather than a European. Kipling writes:
He slouched to the tree at the corner of a bare road leading towards the bazar, and eyed the natives passing. Most of them were barrack-servants of the lowest caste. Kim hailed a sweeper, who promptly retorted with a piece of unnecessary insolence, in the natural belief that the European boy could not follow. The low, quick answer undeceived him. Kim put his fettered soul into it, thankful for the late chance to abuse somebody in the tongue he knew best.
Even before his schooling, though, he is able to become anyone, and to deceive even those people who have seen him in a different guise only a few hours before.
The East and West theme, which is embodied in Kim, is not only a contrast of clothing, language, and manners; it is a contrast of texture, flavour, inflection, and character. The East has an auro of mystery and excitement for those of us from the Western reaches, while the West, as represented by the English and the Irish, has a stolid, humdrum quality. This difference within the spirit of the title character is commented upon by Cohen:
... When Kim is Indian, when he is in the bazaars or on the Grand Trunk Road, when he's living and sharing adventures with the lama, when he's free of Western and British restraint, he lives intensively: it is then that Kipling's imagination soars and ranges heavenward. When Kim ceases to be an Indian vagrant, when he dresses up in white man's clothes and goes to school, he becomes far less interesting, he ceases to be mysterious. But even after that, Kim is able to escape the sahib's life on holidays, and again the story picks up and we get more of the mystery that enthralls us.
This difference of East and West, the flavours, the colours, and the textures, are presented throughout the novel. The Western elements are barely described, since Western readers recognize them almost by instinct, but the Indian scenes are brought into vivid relief. George Moore comments in a 1904 edition of Pall Mall magazine upon a passage from the novel which describes an Indian evening in great detail:
It would be difficult to find a passage in literature of the same length so profusely touched with local color.
The texture of Kipling's India is made up of plains, hills, and mountains; brillian sunshine, choking dust, and fierce and endless rain; a multiplicity of races, religions, castes, and dialects; and all that which was woven together to form the complex society of Victorian India. The texture of his Irish camp, however, is simply tents, pots, pans, bundles, and regimental flags - the British military camp with which we are all familiar.
Although born with a Western heritage, Kim has learned to think and feel as an Asian. He trusts almost no one, and knows the value of lies. He also has an Asian's sense of himself.
"Now am I alone - all alone," he thought. "In all India is no one so alone as I! If I die to-day, who shall bring the news - and to whom? If I live and God is good, there will be a price upon my head, for I am a Son of the Charm - I, Kim." A very few white people, but many Asiatics, can throw themselves into a mazement as it were by repeating their own names over and over again to themselves, letting the mind go free upon speculation as to what is called personal identity. When one grows older, the power, usually, departs, but while it lasts it may descend upon a man at any moment. "Who is Kim - Kim - Kim?"
Kim is also sensible of the value of showing affection when it is felt, something no Western-bred person of the time could do. The lama, as a symbol of the farther East, is even more capable of showing affection, and his affection for Kim helps Kim to follow his destiny. These phenomena of emotion are noted by Cohen:
When the lama speaks of "the red mist of affection" that he feels for Kim, he admits publicly to something no Englishman of the time could possibly have uttered. In Victorian times, the English did not feel publicly, and yet Kim is a book in which emotion is visible everywhere. It is a book where people not only feel openly, but where they even go further and act upon their emotional convictions.
As the novel progresses, and Kim matures, the blend and contrast of East and West also matures until, at the end of the novel, Kim uses his training from both cultures to achieve his mission for the Indian government. He changes the identities of himself and his co-workers, he weaves stories of intrigue and magic, and he employs tools of mapping and documents stolen from errant kings. His unscrupulousness and his English education, allow him to be successful as an employee of the government.
Nirad C. Chaudheri writes that Kipling has written, in Kim,
... not only the finest novel in the English language with an Indian theme, but also one of the greatest English novels.
Furthermore, as written in a 1901 edition og Longman's Magazine,
His theme is India, where he is always at his best; and we learn more of the populace, the sects, the races, the lamas, the air, the sounds, scents and smells from a few pages than from libraries of learned authors.
This spect of Kim is Kipling's greatest contribution to literature. His personal experiences in India have allowed him to write vivid, exciting poetry and fiction, filled with details which can only come of an intimate knowledge of his subject.
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