Kipling, like Kim, spoke Hindi as a child, had an English education, and then embraced India. Kipling felt orphaned in the House of Desolation; Kim was actually orphaned. Kim’s character developed as Kipling’s would have if he’d stayed in India instead of going to school in England. Though Kim seems Eurasian and has a Eurasian foster mother, he’s actually all white and finally returns to his own people. Kipling, going back to England after working on the Pioneer, discovered and reclaimed his own lost inheritance in Sussex. Like Kipling, Kim has a quick mind and intense powers of observation. Kipling compared both himself and Kim (in chapter 1) to the caliph of Baghdad and legendary hero of The Arabian Nights. As he wrote to his newspaper editor in 1886: “I am deeply interested in the queer ways and works of the people of the land. I hunt and rummage among ‘em; knowing Lahore City—that wonderful, dirty, mysterious ant-hill—blind fold and wandering through it like Haroun Al-Raschid in search of strange things.”15
Kim usually thinks and dreams in Hindi; prefers native food and eats like an Indian; sleeps curled up, native fashion; has an Oriental vagueness about time, an Eastern resignation to fate and indifference to noise; and generally borrows from all the customs of the country. But he also has a white man’s fear of snakes, a white cockiness and aggressiveness, and a white respect for order and orders. His racial amalgamation is symbolized by the kit he carries away from school: an English revolver, medicine box, and compass; an Indian robe, amulet, and begging gourd. His frequent shift from the vernacular to English and back again suggests confusion about his racial identity. In the course of the novel Kim, adept at disguises and pigmentation, dresses alternately as a Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, and Eurasian, as well as British civilian, soldier, and schoolboy, and plays three main roles: disciple, student, and spy.
Though Kim is called the “Little Friend of all the World,” he’s more hostile than friendly. He’s in constant conflict not only with the Russian and French enemies, but also with the Lahore police, the native boys fighting for position on the cannon Zam-Zammah, the railway clerk who tries to cheat him, the cheeky sweeper, the two chaplains of the regiment, the sergeant who restrains him, the drummer boy who guards him, the Eurasian boys at school, the villains plotting to murder Mahbub, the Hindu boy in Lurgan’s shop, and the Woman of Shamlegh.
Kim easily slips in and out of various disguises and roles and adapts to each of his teachers. But, cut off from his assumed race and mother tongue, he’s troubled and confused about his personal identity. Whiteness never disturbed his Indian identity during his first thirteen years in Lahore, but after he leaves his native city he twice asks himself the overwhelming question: “ ‘Who is Kim?”’ (p. 116) “ ‘And what is Kim?”’ (p. 272). He experiences a corresponding loneliness when he lives among white men, when he reaches Benares, and when, cut off from Hurree, he nurses the sick lama.
A mixture of Aladdin and Huck Finn, skilled in strategies of survival and expert in obscene curses (especially about the questionable parentage of his adversaries), Kim searches for, yet hides, his true self. Despite his cockiness, he is orphaned, alone, outcast and personally insecure during the malleable years between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. Like the vulnerable Kipling, he is amenable to education, change, and exploitation. His lack of fixed identity allows him to be shaped for many different roles—for the Indian caste system and the British army each has a rigid hierarchy—and his mentors prey on his weaknesses to bring out his strengths. His English education blends with his Irish father’s influence and Indian culture to produce, as Colonel Creighton foresees, an ethnological hybrid who’s perfect for the Secret Service. Everything that Kim has done and learned and is leads to this foreordained end. In The Jungle Books even the much wilder Mowgli finally joins the Forest Service. The doubles or second selves who haunt the troubled heroes in the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Robert Louis Stevenson split them apart and drive them mad. But Kim, despite his manic-depressive oscillations, his hysteria and despair, has the extraordinary ability to harmonize and integrate the “separate sides to [his] head” (p. 129).
There are two parallel but conflicting quests in the novel: Kim’s search for his father’s regiment, which leads to the Great Game, and the lama’s search for the sacred River of the Arrow, which leads to enlightenment. Kim must choose between them. The father-son relationship of the celibate monk and orphaned boy provides a moving contrast as well as a close bond. Kim is intelligent, resourceful, and adventurous; the lama is hopelessly impractical, dependent, and unworldly. The protean Kim constantly changes; the lama remains the same.
Kipling frequently states that the lama is deep in meditation, considering vast matters and illuminating knowledge with brilliant insight. The lama’s ascetic holiness inspires the respect of the native characters. But Kipling never reveals the insights of the intellectually limited lama, who (like many holy men) merely repeats the same old formulaic phrases. Instead of profound perceptions, he offers vague abstractions like Desire, Wheel, Way, Enlightenment, Search, and Cause of Things that emphasize his detachment from the world. One authority on Buddhism, skeptical of this superstitious tradition, defines “Primitive Lamaism... as a priestly mixture of Sivaite mysticism, magic and Indo-Tibetan demonolatry, overlaid by a thin varnish of Mahayana [search for salvation] Buddhism.”16
The lama seeks the River to free himself from the Wheel, and these two symbols also structure the book. He follows the endless flow of the Ganges as it runs parallel to the Grand Trunk Road from Lahore to Benares, and repeats the circular motion of the Wheel as he travels from the Himalayas to the flatland, returns to the mountains of Kashmir, and then circles down to the Indo-Gangetic Plain. When he finally finds the River he goes into a trance, nearly drowns himself in it, and has to be rescued by Hurree, who pulls him back into the real world. If the River of the Arrow really existed, it certainly would have been discovered during previous millennia and become a holy place for pilgrims. It’s worth noting that Colonel Creighton helps control India by surveying and cartography, while the lama finds the River by spiritual intuition and without the aid of a map.
The lama actually pays for Kim’s Western education at St. Xavier‘s, which separates them for most of three years and propels Kim into the Great Game. Despite his extensive discipleship, Kim learns nothing from the lama. What the lama calls Illusion is for Kim the only Reality. He even takes the unwitting lama away from his search for the River, which they know is on the plains, and into the mountains for counterespionage. When the Russian spy strikes the lama and tears his sacred chart, the lama—in a poignant scene—experiences the anguish of repentance for succumbing to the rage he thought he had transcended and the desire for retribution that defiles his entire existence: “ ‘I have come near to great evil, chela.... I was tempted to loose the bullet; and truly, in Tibet there would have been a heavy and a slow death for them’ ”(p.237)
At the end of the novel the lama finds salvation—“ ‘the wise Soul loosed itself from the silly Body and went free’ ” (p. 277)—for both himself and for Kim. But as a nonpolitical foreigner the lama has no strong claim on Kim’s traditional fidelity to the Muslims of Lahore, and the chela can leave the guru without feeling he has also abandoned India. As the lama finally frees himself from the Wheel, Kim—expressing the theme of the book—willingly becomes a cog in the wheel of British life: “Things . . . slid into proper proportion. Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to.” They were not, as the lama believed, Illusion, but “all real and true” (p. 272).
The lama’s unworldliness and Kim’s commitment to the world unfold in the historical context that inspired the Great Game: the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the endless campaigns against the hostile tribes on the Northwest Frontier, the two disastrous British-Afghan Wars (1838-1842 and 1878-1880), as well as the hostility of the French and the increasingly dangerous political and military threats
of Russia. The presence of the French with the Russian spy in the novel was provoked by the Russo-French entente in 1894, which defined those two countries as Britain’s main enemies, and the Fashoda crisis in 1898, which brought Britain and France to the brink of war over competing colonial claims in the southern Sudan.
In the nineteenth century Afghanistan became the focus of a hundred-year rivalry between the two great powers of czarist Russia and Victorian England, which struggled for control of the forbidding country that divided their two empires. Inexorably extending its hegemony thousands of miles to the south and east, Russia threatened to occupy the legendary cities along the Silk Road of Turkistan. Britain wanted to control Afghanistan’s foreign relations in order to arrest Russia’s influence in Central Asia. The two imperial rivals began to play out the Great Game (a term invented by a British lieutenant in the Bengal cavalry), the secret quest for information and power over a vast uncharted territory.
The victory of the British, French, and Turkish allies over Russia in the Crimean War of 1854-1856 failed to stop the Russian advance toward the border of Afghanistan. Russia took Tashkent in 1865, Bukhara and Samarkand in 1868, Khiva in 1873, and Merv in 1884. In 1846 some 2,000 miles had separated the Indian and Russian frontiers. Thirty years later, they were 500 miles apart, with only the unstable power of the emir of Kabul between them.
In Kipling’s time Anglo-Russian rivalry was intense, Russia was a very real enemy, and the borders were not finally settled until 1895. Kipling expressed this fear of and hostility toward the Russians in two stories: the powerfully anti-Russian “The Man Who Was” (1890), about an English soldier in the Crimean War who escapes the terrors of a Siberian prison camp and returns on foot to tell the tale; and “The Man Who Would Be King,” in which Dan, an outlaw British adventurer, aims to provide an army ready to attack Russia when it tries to invade India.
In his work as a spy the well-trained Kim uses many disguises, various languages, knowledge of the Koran and of medicine, codes and theft, surveying and mapmaking, weaponry and technical expertise, as well as physical violence against the enemy. But his specialty is an intuitive and highly profitable eavesdropping. In a characteristic posture at the beginning of the novel, he “laid himself down, his ear against a crack in the heat-split cedar door, and, following his instinct, stretched out to listen and watch” (p. 10) the lama’s conversation with the curator of the museum. (The “heat-split cedar” makes the scene absolutely convincing, and it’s significant that though the curator gives the lama a pair of spectacles, he never learns to see the world through Western eyes.) After delivering Mahbub’s cryptic message to the English officer, Kim “lay close in the grass and wormed nearer to the house” (p. 39), where security is extremely poor, and gets his first taste of real power by learning that his message has activated the British plan for war against the rebellious kings on the Northern Frontier. He also overhears the lama talking to the widow of Kulu, Mr. Bennett speaking to the soldiers, and, most significantly, the villains plotting to murder Mahbub.
The Russian and French spies, operating in hostile territory, employ in a cruder form the same methods as the British. But they fail because of their insensitivity to local custom, unconvincing disguise as hunters (they buy their trophies instead of killing them), and blundering violence against the lama, enabling Kim to capture their secret documents. Kim, like the British, thinks of the Russians as Asiatics, though their supposed racial alliance affords no greater understanding of subject peoples. It’s worth noting that when Kim struggles against Mr. Bennett, he kicks him in the stomach; when he fights the Russian, the rules of combat are waived and he kicks him in the groin. But all tactics are justified. Kipling, like almost all his contemporaries, believed in the philanthropic justification of imperialism. As Maugham wrote of the British in India: “They kept the peace. They administered justice. They built the roads, the bridges, the railways. They fought famine, flood and pestilence. They treated the sick.”17 Kipling’s portrayal of the romantic, simplistic struggle of good against evil belongs to the adventurous, even boyish tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle and John Buchan, in contrast to the disenchanted realism and moral ambiguity of modern spy novels: Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Maugham’s Ashen-den, Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, and John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.
Loyalty—to the British cause—is a dominant theme in the novel. Kim is loyal to his race rather than to his culture and, though Ireland was then under British domination, chooses a British rather than Irish identity. In doing so he absorbs the finest qualities of his three English mentors—Strickland’s knowledge of the natives, Lurgan’s linguistic talents, and Creighton’s ability to plumb the Oriental mind—and becomes an expert player of the Game. The Afghan Mahbub remains loyal to the British after the Afghan Wars, just as the Indian Rissaldar-major remained loyal during the Indian Mutiny. “‘A madness ate into all the Army,’ ” the major recalls, “ ‘and they turned against their officers” ’; he saw “ ‘the land from Delhi south awash with blood”’ (p. 53). Even the Woman of Shamlegh, educated by the English and then betrayed by an Englishman, helps Kim—though she also tries to seduce him.
Kim asks: “ ‘How can a man follow the Way or the Great Game when he is so-always pestered by women?”’ (p. 248). But Kipling also reveals, in the subtlest and most elusive part of the novel, that the pedophile Lurgan (the male complement to the Woman of Shamlegh) also tries to seduce Kim. When Kim first enters Lurgan’s enticing curiosity shop, he notices the strikingly sensuous “soft-eyed Hindu child,” self-satisfied and in a privileged place, “sitting cross-legged under the table of pearls with a little smile on his scarlet lips” (p. 147). Lurgan, inciting a sexual rivalry between the two boys, tells Kim that the Hindu is fiercely jealous and has threatened to kill Kim with poison or a knife. The Hindu boy’s jealousy is so intense that he actually tries to poison Lurgan with arsenic. When Lurgan and the boy are finally reconciled, “the child, heavy-eyed with much weeping, crept out from behind the bale and flung himself passionately at Lurgan Sahib’s feet, with an extravagance of remorse that impressed even Kim” (p. 152). The boy’s sexual jealousy and homicidal rage are clearly caused by his fears that Kim will replace him as Lurgan’s favorite.
Kipling (punning on “vice”) reveals Lurgan’s true feelings and demonstrates the danger to Kim when Lurgan tests him with hypnosis: “Lurgan Sahib laid one hand gently on the nape of his neck, stroked it twice or thrice.... The light touch held him as in a vice, and his blood tingled pleasantly through him.... Another wave of prickling fire raced down his neck, as Lurgan Sahib moved his hand” (p. 150). Unlike the Hindu boy, Kim resists Lurgan’s hypnotic attempt to seduce him and (since the adventurous hero must remain asexual) proves himself worthy of the Secret Service. But the insidiously vicious character of Lurgan hints at the treachery and evil at the heart of the Great Game.18
Kipling was admired by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and had a strong influence on authors as varied as the Russian Isaak Babel, the German Bertolt Brecht, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, and the American Ernest Hemingway.19 Kim has been universally praised by many great writers for its sympathetic understanding of Indians and for its translation of their idiom into measured and dignified English. Edmund Wilson called it “an enchanting, almost a first-rate book.”20 T. S. Eliot thought it was Kipling’s “maturest work on India, and his greatest book.”21 Somerset Maugham believed it was “his masterpiece.”22 Just after the novel was published, Kipling’s older contemporary Henry James admired the richness of the characters and liveliness of their journey, and explained why the novel was such a joy to read:
The beauty, the quantity, the prodigality, the Ganges-flood, leave me simply gaping as your procession passes.... I find the boy himself a dazzling conception, but I find the Lama more yet—a thing damnably and splendidly done.... The whole idea, the great many-coloured poem of their relation and their wild Odyssey—[is] void of a false note and swarming with
felicities that you can count much better than I. You make the general picture live and sound and shine, all by a myriad touches.23
Jeffrey Meyers, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has published biographies of Katherine Mansfield, Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lowell and his circle, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Robert Frost, Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, George Orwell, Errol and Sean Flynn, and Somerset Maugham.
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
1. Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1937), pp. 3-4.
2. Rudyard Kipling, “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.” In The Writings in Prose and Verse (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907), vol. 6, p. 368.
3. Kipling, Something of Myself, p. 17.