Kim

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Kim

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set In India in the late 1880s; first published in London in 1901.

SYNOPSIS

Kim, a young white orphan who has been raised as an Indian street urchin, becomes both a spy for the British Secret Service and the disciple of a Tibetan lama holy man).

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Novel in Focus

For More Information

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in Bombay, India, where his father, John Lockwood Kipling, was a professor of Indian art and architecture. After being educated in England, Kipling returned to India in 1882, where he worked for the next seven years as a reporter. During this time his short stories about life in British-ruled India (published in 1888 as Plain Tales from the Hills) won him a literary reputation there, and when Kipling came back to Britain in 1889 he was rapidly accepted on the London literary scene as something of a young genius. By the following year he had published a novel, The Light That Failed (1890), along with further collections of short stories and several books of poetry that focused on the British colonial experience in India. Forever linking Kipling’s name with the British Empire, his poems (e.g., “Gunga Din,” 1882) and stories (e.g., “The Man Who Would Be King,” 1888) are highly original in their often sympathetic portrayals of both Indians and the common British soldiers serving in India. During the 1890s, Kipling’s series of children’s stories featuring Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves, was published as the two Jungle Books (1894 and 1895). Along with the Just So Stones (1902), also for children, they remain among his most widely read works today. Begun in the early 1890s, Kim was completed in 1900. At once a young reader’s adventure story and a serious adult novel, it not only describes the meeting of cultures under British rule in India, but also dramatizes India’s strategic importance within the larger British Empire.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The British in India

Britain’s presence in India began in the seventeenth century, when the English East India Company established a handful of coastal trading forts (called “factories”) at sites from Surat in the west (1619) to Calcutta in the east (1690). Only in the middle of the eighteenth century, however, with the breakup of India’s Mughal Empire into warring states, did British influence begin to extend inland from the coast. In 1757 East India Company forces under Robert Clive won a major victory north of Calcutta at Plassey; they defeated the Bengali ruler Siraj-ud-Daula, who had temporarily captured the factory in Calcutta. Another military victory followed in 1764, over the deteriorating Mughal armies further inland at Buxar. The British victories at Plassey and Buxar—after which the Company controlled the rich province of Bengal directly— marked a turning point for British power in India, in that the company’s military strength began to transform Britain’s economic influence into political control. Over the next half century, the Company extended its dominance into southern India by defeating Tipu Sultan of Mysore in 1799, and into central India by defeating the Maratha Confederacy in 1818. Finally, in 1849 the Company annexed the region of northwestern India known as the Punjab. Ruling either directly or through client kings, the British East India Company now controlled all of India from its headquarters in Bengal.

In 1857, however, the situation changed dramatically when a violent revolt broke out in northern India against the Raj, as British rule had come to be known (from “rajah,” the Sanskrit word for “king”). The unrest originated among Indian soldiers, called “sepoys,” who served under British officers in the British Indian Army. Reflecting India’s religious makeup, many of the soldiers were either Hindus or Muslims, and the army had offended both by ordering them to handle cartridges greased with cows’ fat (unclean to Hindus) and pork fat (unclean to Muslims). The soldiers’ insurrection triggered widespread unrest among the civilian population of northern and central India, where decades of British political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural Westernization had created deep resentment among many Indians. Both the revolt and the British suppression of it in the following year were violent and bloody, with each side committing brutal atrocities against soldiers and against civilian men, women, and children.

In the novel, which is set approximately three decades after the unrest, Kim meets an old Indian soldier who participated in the conflict on the side of the British. For remaining loyal to the “sahibs,” as Indians referred to the whites (the word was originally Arabic and means “master”), the old soldier was given good land in his village and is “still a person of consequence” often visited by British officials who pass near the village (Kipling, Kim, p. 94). As scholar and critic Edward Said points out in his introduction to a recent edition of the novel, Kipling’s novel offers only one side of the story, through the old soldier, for his loyalty hardly represents general Indian opinion. Indeed, the old soldier would have been viewed as a traitor by at least a substantial proportion of the Indian population.

Significant changes in British policy followed the unrest of 1857-58. The British East India Company was shut down, and the colonial administration and army, formerly under the Company’s private control, were turned over to the British government, which appointed a governor general to command both. Massive public works programs begun under the Company were continued and new ones undertaken: irrigation systems, telegraphs, roads, railroads, and British-run schools and universities created a modern infrastructure that in large part survives today. Railroads and the famous highway called the Grand Trunk Road, which was built under the Company’s rule, figure prominently in the novel. Founding a number of universities in major cities, the government deliberately fostered Western education for Indians in the interest of breaking down India’s traditional caste system and encouraging greater participation by Indians in colonial administration. As a result, by the time of the novel a middle class of Indian civil servants and other professionals had begun to emerge. In the novel this newly Westernized segment of Indian society is represented by the character Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, known as the Babu, a Westernized Hindu Bengali with an M.A. degree from the first such institution, British-run Calcutta University, which was founded in 1857.

INDIA’S RELIGIOUS VARIETY

Followers of India’s oldest major religion, Hindus today make up about 85 percent of India’s population. Hindus worship a complex array of gods and goddesses and have traditionally been segregated into castes social classes originally defined by occupation. Much of the resentment against British rule was inspired by British attempts to reform or abolish the caste system, which the British viewed as backward, Hindus are represented in the novel by Such characters as the old soldier and the widow of Saharunpore (who befriends Kim and the lama).
Islam arrived in India from the north with the Mughal conquerors of the sixteenth century and remained strongest in India’s north, especially in the Punjab and Bengal (the two regions that split from India after independence from Britain in 1947 to form lim dominated Pakistan).in general the British tended to favor Muslims, whom they viewed as warlike and aristocratic, over Hindus Muslim characters in the novel include the colorful Afghan horse trader and spy Mahbum Ali, who drafts Kim into the British Secret Service.
While Buddhism originated in India around the sixth century &.C.E. (when its founder, the Buddha or Enlightened One, is thought to have lived)and shares many of its precepts with Hinduism, it failed to displace Hinduism in India Instead east ward and became predominant in many parts of East and Southeast Asia. Buddhism is lrepresented in the novel by the wise Tibetan lama (or holy man)who befriends Kim, and who some critics have suggested is the novel true hero.
Christianity arrived in India with European explorers in the fifteenth century, and Christian missionaries comprised an important element of British colonialism The novel features two Christian priests, one Anglican and one Catholic, whose worldly behavior contrasts sharply with the lama’s simple spirituality.
Other religions mentioned in the novel include Sikhism and Jainism. Although both derived from a blend of Hindu with Muslim or Buddhist beliefs, they are separate faiths.

The Great Game

Since 1876 Queen Victoria had been styled “Empress of India” in addition to her other royal titles; thereafter she appointed a Viceroy of India (her personal representative) who replaced the governor general as commander of the colonial administration and the Indian Army. The Queen’s imperial title reflected India’s preeminent role among the vast territories Britain now controlled. In 1897, when it held an extended and extravagant public celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (she had come to the throne in 1837), Britain ruled vast chunks of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the islands of the Pacific—about a quarter of the world’s land mass and population. Because of its lucrative trade opportunities and strategic value as a gateway to the rest of Asia, India was considered “the jewel in the crown” of this worldwide empire.

Protecting this “jewel” had worried the British as far back as the Napoleonic Wars that England and her allies fought, and finally won, against France from 1803 to 1815. At that time it was feared that Napoleon might invade Egypt, another British-controlled territory, and defeat British forces there, thus opening the way for a move against British India. This threat came to nothing, but after the defeat of Napoleon’s France, a further menace to India was perceived in the expansionist Russia of Czar Alexander I and his successors, who in fact began a campaign of conquest and diplomacy that brought Russian armies steadily closer to the Indian border. By the middle of the century, agents and officers of each government were at work trying to advance their nation’s cause by winning over the khans and emirs of Central Asia, north of India, where the contest was being played out. It was one such officer, a British captain named Arthur Conolly, who first called this struggle the “Great Game”—several years before a fatal miscalculation on his part led to his execution by a hostile emir in the Central Asian town of Bokhara in 1842.

That same year a British military expedition was driven out of Afghanistan in southern Central Asia, a defeat that concluded the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-42). A Second Anglo-Afghan War followed from 1878 to 1880, in which the British were again frustrated in their attempts to control the remote, mountainous, and landlocked region. In both wars Russia and Britain supported rival claimants to power in Afghanistan, which the British hoped to establish as a buffer zone to protect India from Russian encroachment.

“TE-RAIN” AND THE GRAND TRUNK ROAD

In the first half of the novel Kim and the lama travel together across northern India, from the Punjabi city of lahore (now in Pakistan) to Lucknow and Benares near Bengal, a journey of about 1,000 miles. They travel by train and by foot on the Grand Trunk Road A 1,500-mile-long highway, the road is India’s major thoroughfare.it was constructed by the (East India Company to facilitate military and commercial transportation (parts had been built by sixteenth-century rulers for the same purposes). Spanning northern India, the Grand Trunk Road rum northwest from Calcutta through Benares, Delhi, and Lahore to the Punjab-Afghan border.

While Arthur Conolly originated the phrase the “Great Game,” it came into common use only decades later with the publication and success of Kim. Kipling uses it repeatedly in the novel, for it is as a player in the Great Game that Kim is trained and deployed by the novel’s spymasters. These include the Afghan horse trader Mahbub Ali and the Babu, both loyal to the British, and both of whom ultimately work for the enigmatic Colonel Creighton. Creighton, a British officer, poses as an ethnological researcher, his academic inquiries into Indian folkways serving as a perfect cover for his true job as head of the British Secret Service in India. In the real world, the British did engage in espionage and counterespionage throughout the century, but there was no single “Secret Service” as such in India: the actual British spy system in India and Central Asia was less centralized than that depicted in the novel.

By the 1880s three separate organizations were working to further British strategic interests in India. In 1879 the Indian Army had established an Intelligence Department under Major General Sir Charles MacGregor, which at first consisted of only five officers plus native clerks. MacGregor himself put together a confidential 1883 handbook, The Defense of India, providing a detailed analysis of India’s vulnerability to Russian attack from the north. In addition, the colonial government’s Political Department employed its officers in intelligence gathering along the mountainous frontiers, where they did their best to monitor Russian troop movements. Finally, topographical intelligence was the province of a government organization called the Survey of India, whose Colonel T. G. Montgomerie, journalist and author Peter Hopkirk suggests, was the model for the novel’s Colonel Creighton.

In the 1860s the Viceroy of India had forbidden British officers to travel north of India’s borders because of the high probability that they would be captured and executed (as Arthur Conolly and others had been). Therefore, Mont-gomerie, then a young captain working for the Survey of India, came up with the idea of sending specially trained native inhabitants, who would be better able to escape detection, north of the border to conduct undercover surveying of the vital mountain passes and other strategic points. Known as “pundits” (a Hindi word meaning “learned man”), Montgomerie’s operatives obtained a wealth of valuable information this way from the 1860s into the 1880s. Hopkirk concludes that Kipling, with a reporter’s deep knowledge of British India, modeled the novel’s Mahbub Ali and the Babu on Montgomerie’s pundits, right down to similar code names (Mahbub Ali and the Babu are designated C25 and R23, respectively).

In one particularly effective technique, Mont-gomerie had the pundits disguise themselves as Buddhist pilgrims and carry specially modified versions of pilgrims’ gear. For example, Mont-gomerie trained them to measure the distances they covered by taking uniform steps, counting the steps, then noting every hundredth step by moving a bead on a rosary, the string of 108 beads that devout Buddhists carried. By removing eight beads, Montgomerie made it easy to calculate that one rosary’s worth of walking equaled 10,000 steps. The “pilgrim” recorded each day’s distance on a paper cylinder concealed in the Buddhist prayer wheel that he spun as he walked. In the novel Kim is trained to collect topographical intelligence in precisely this way.

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

The novel opens in the Punjabi city of Lahore, as 13-year-old Kim plays with other boys outside the Lahore Museum, known to Indians (and to Kim) as the Wonder House. Kim is the orphaned son of a British nursemaid and an Irish sergeant in the Indian Army. His real name is Kimball O’Hara, but Indians who know him call him Little Friend of all the World. Kim’s father, who left the army and “fell to drink and loafing,” lived with an opium-smoking “half-caste woman” (a woman of mixed European and Asian descent) before his death several years earlier, and she now looks after the boy (Kim, p. 49). But Kim has grown up largely on his own, acquiring an intimate knowledge of the streets of Lahore, playing with young Indian boys and evading the charitable workers, missionaries, and other representatives of the British establishment who might seek to curtail his cherished freedom. His only connection to the past is the leather pouch that hangs around his neck, into which the woman has sewn the few official papers that constitute Kim’s inheritance from his father.

Suddenly Kim and some other boys are approached by “such a man as Kim, who thought he knew all castes, had never seen,” a tall strangely dressed man with wrinkled yellow skin and a holy man’s rosary (Kim, p. 52). The stranger, a Buddhist lama, or holy man, says he is from Tibet and asks about the museum. He has come to India on a pilgrimage to the Buddhist holy places there, and to Lahore because he has heard about the sacred objects in its museum. Kim, his curiosity aroused, escorts the lama to the museum’s curator, a kindly white-bearded Englishman who possesses a wide knowledge of Buddhism and other Eastern religions. Listening at the door while the two men talk in the curator’s office, Kim overhears the lama tell the curator that the real reason for his pilgrimage is to seek the legendary River of Healing, which formed at the place where an arrow shot by the Buddha fell to the ground. As the lama leaves the museum to continue the search for the mythical river—which, he says, “washes away all taint and speckle of sin”—he tells Kim that his quest has been jeopardized by the death from fever of his chela, or disciple (Kim, p. 58). The chela was a boy who traveled with the lama and begged for him, and since his chela’s death, the lama has been lonely and hungry. Always eager for fresh sights and sounds, Kim decides that he will be the lama’s new chela. In making this decision, Kim also conceives a quest of his own, based on some dimly remembered words of his father, who had once said that Kim’s destiny would lie with a group of men whose god was a red bull in a green field (the emblems on his father’s regimental flag).

The lama and Kim set out for Benares, a city of many temples, in which the lama will consult another holy man. But before beginning the journey, the lama and Kim spend the night with Kim’s friend Mahbub Ali. Mahbub Ali is a large man with a red beard, an Afghan horse trader who divides his time between Lahore and his homeland, “that mysterious land beyond the [mountain] Passes of the North,” (Kim, p. 66). He often employs Kim to watch certain men and report on their movements, although Kim does not yet know Mahbub Ali’s status as a spy for the British. Mahbub Ali has just returned with valuable intelligence: five kings north of India’s borders have allied with Russia. He needs to communicate this information to the British garrison in Umballa, a city that is on the way to Benares. Since he is being watched by agents of the five kings, he asks the boy to deliver a small package to a bungalow there. He tells Kim that the matter concerns a horse, and that Kim is to find a certain British officer at the bungalow, give him the package, and say that “the pedigree of the white stallion is fully established” (Kim, p. 68). Kim agrees “with a giggle, his eyes aflame” (Kim, p. 68). Not for a moment does he believe the story about the horse, instead imagining his mission to involve romantic intrigue of some sort.

After journeying by train with the lama from Lahore to Umballa, Kim finds the bungalow and delivers both the package and the message. He then conceals himself near the bungalow and eavesdrops on Colonel Creighton, the British officer to whom he has delivered the message. As Creighton discusses the situation with another officer—whom Kim discovers to be the British Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army—Kim learns that his message has triggered the movement north of some 8,000 British troops to punish the five kings. For Kim, this is much more exciting than romantic intrigue. “It is big news,” he tells himself excitedly (Kim, p. 86). The next day, when Kim and the lama continue their journey, they spend the night in a village where they meet a Hindu priest and an old soldier who served with the British in the Great Mutiny of 1857.

The following morning, the old soldier accompanies them to the Grand Trunk Road, the highway that will take them to Benares. Along the way they befriend the widow of a wealthy rajah (princeling) from Sarunhapore in the Himalayan foothills. The widow is on a religious pilgrimage and, charmed by Kim’s lively wit and the lama’s modesty and wisdom, she invites them to travel with her. That evening Kim sees several British soldiers marching with flags that depict a red bull on a green field—the sign that he remembers his father describing, and that he believes will be associated with his destiny. A long column of British troops marches into sight behind the flags and begins pitching tents nearby. Later that evening Kim sneaks away from the widow’s camp and creeps into the soldiers’ encampment, but he is apprehended by the regiment’s Anglican chaplain, Reverend Bennett. Believing the boy to be a thief, Bennett summons his Roman Catholic colleague, Father Victor, and the two search Kim and find the papers that the “half-caste” woman had sewn into the leather pouch Kim carries around his neck. The two priests are amazed to discover that the boy they take for a little Indian beggar speaks English, even if haltingly, and is in reality the son of a former sergeant in their own regiment.

Meeting with Kim and the two priests, the lama is heartbroken to learn that Kim has deceived him, and that his chela is in fact “a Sahib and the son of a Sahib” who can no longer accompany the lama on his quest for the River of Healing (Kim, p. 139). He blames himself, how ever, explaining that his attachment to Kim goes against the precepts of Buddhism, which hold that all passions (including affection) are obstacles to spiritual enlightenment. When it appears that Kim will have to go to a military orphanage and become a soldier, and that the only alternative is an expensive British school in Lucknow, the lama suggests that he himself pay Kim’s tuition fees at the school. The priests doubt that the lama can do so, however. The lama departs and Kim—desperate to escape from the sahibs and rejoin the lama on the road—sends a letter to Mahbub Ali pleading for the horse trader to come to his rescue. Responding quickly, Mahbub Ali arrives a few days later and takes Kim to meet with Colonel Creighton. Identifying Kim as the boy who delivered the earlier message, Mahbub Ali explains the situation, stressing (in the language of horse trading) that Kim is a “colt” who “has no equal” (Kim, p. 156). Fluent in many of India’s various languages, resourceful, adept at disguise, Kirn is perfect for the Great Game and should not be wasted as a soldier, the Afghan tells Creighton. Creighton agrees, and when the lama in fact sends the tuition money (presumably from his monastery’s treasury, though the novel does not say so), Creighton escorts Kim by train to Lucknow. Creighton tells Kim that at the school he will learn surveying skills, hinting that Kim will eventually be called on to assist him in the Survey of India, perhaps in disguise.

Creighton and Mahbub Ali carefully monitor Kim’s progress at the school, which is called St. Xavier’s. Although Kim likes the school and learns how to behave like a young sahib, when he hears that he is expected to spend the long summer holiday at an army barrack-school in a remote hill station, he rebels. Darkening his skin with dye, he disguises himself as a low-caste Hindu boy and goes “back to the Road again,” promising Mahbub Ali by letter that he would be back at school for the start of term and asking Mahbub Ali to defend him to Creighton (Kim, p. 177).

Later in the holiday, however, Kim meets up with Mahbub Ali and, on Creighton’s instructions, travels to Simla in the Himalayan foothills, summer capital of the colonial government. There, in some of the novel’s most colorful scenes, Kim is trained in the arts of espionage by an eccentric and mysterious Briton named Lurgan, with whom he lives until it is time to return to school in Lucknow. There, too, he meets Lurgan’s friend Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, a British-educated Bengali known as the Babu, a master of disguise who also works for Creighton and who further instructs Kim in spy techniques. Kim returns to Lurgan’s house in Simla for subsequent Christmas and summer holidays and eventually tries out his skills in the field. He helps Mahbub Ali thwart a Briton who is illegally smuggling arms north of the border and accompanies the horse trader to the remote city of Bikanir, which Kim maps using the secret surveying techniques he has learned.

After the operation in Bikanir, Mahbub Ali finally persuades Creighton to take the boy out of school and bring him into the Great Game before his abilities are blunted. No longer the dirty 13-year-old ragamuffin who arrived at St. Xavier’s, Kim is now a tall, confident, and handsome young sahib of 16. He has kept in touch with the lama, who visited Kim regularly at school while continuing his quest for the River of Healing. Now Creighton gives Kim six months to travel with the lama before beginning his work in the Great Game, but before the six months are up, Kim stumbles into the novel’s last two Great Game adventures.

First, during a train journey, Kim rescues another agent who is being stalked by assassins. Then, in his last adventure, Kim and the lama go north to Sarunhapore, where they stay with their friend, the widow whom they had met on the road years earlier. There they happen upon the Babu, also a guest of the widow, but now in disguise as a doctor. He tells Kim that two men, one French and one Russian, have crossed through the mountain passes from the north pretending to be on a hunting expedition while actually surveying the valleys and passes that are close to the Indian border. After journeying into the mountains to help the Babu stop this hostile intelligence operation, Kim, the lama, and the Babu return to Sarunhapore. It is here, as the novel closes, that the lama finally finds enlightenment, locating his River of Healing in a modest irrigation ditch. In accordance with Buddhist doctrine, he now believes he is ready to leave the cycle of birth, death, and reincarnation that is the human lot. Instead, however, he decides to stay in the world and help others reach enlightenment as well—specifically, to help his beloved disciple, Kim.

“Little Friend of all the World”: Kim and imperialism

When first meeting Mahbub Ali, the reader leams that he is a spy for Britain and that “five confederated Kings, who had no business to confederate, had been informed by a kindly Northern Power [i.e. Russia] that there was a leakage of news from their territories into British India” (Kim, p. 69). Mahbub Ali—whose spying is the source of the leakage—thwarts the kings’ surveillance by having Kim deliver to the British the news of their alliance with Russia, after which Kim overhears Creighton conferring with the British Commander-in-Chief about how they should respond. They plan to send troops north to attack the five kings, but when Creighton asks, “Then it means war?” the Commander-in-Chief replies, “No. Punishment” (Kim, p. 85).

These two passages reflect the essentially paternal quality of Britain’s attitude toward India, the British Empire, and indeed much of the world as a whole in the late Victorian era. It was an attitude that rested on one simple, pervasive, and largely unquestioned assumption: that the British had an absolute right to rule other peoples. From such a premise comes the conclusion that the five kings—whose kingdoms lie outside of “British India”—have “no business” forming their own foreign policies, despite their positions as the heads of sovereign states. The British often used the threat of military force to impose treaty obligations on Central Asian rulers (for example, at the end of the Second Anglo-Afghan War in 1880). Similarly, the distinction made by the Commander-in-Chief in his subtle correction of Creighton—not war, but punishment—implies that, as he sees it, the five kings owe obedience to Britain: punishment is for disobedient children, while war is for equal opponents.

In his introduction to the novel, Edward Said points out that the novel provides no hint of Indian dissatisfaction with British rule, dissatisfaction that certainly existed and that found a voice in such organizations as the Indian National Congress, which was founded in 1885 and became the focal point of India’s growing independence movement. In the world of Kim, however, British imperial rule is a benevolent gift that no one would ever wish to refuse. As one historian of the empire notes, it was at the time of the novel’s composition in the 1890s that Kipling, “more than anyone, gave voice to the national emotions” of imperial Britain (Morris, p. 348). Like Kim, many Britons thought of their small island nation as a Little Friend of all the World.

Sources and literary context

Colonel Creighton and his espionage network are not the only part of the novel inspired by real life. In its rich and detailed descriptions of Indian sights and sounds, Kim explores Kipling’s memories of his own boyhood in India. According to Peter Hopkirk, whose research is presented

QUESTIONS OF RACE, CULTURE, AND EMPIRE

In modern studies of Kim and Kipling, controversy has arisen over the question of whether—and If so, how—Kipling’s writings are racist Certainly the novel abounds with broad generalizations regarding “Oriental” disorganization, ineptitude, or duplicity In describing the chaos of Lahore’s train station at night, for example, Kipling writes that all hours of the twenty four are alike to Orientals, and their passenger traffic is regulated accordingly” (Kim, p 74), Similarly, we are told that “Kim could lie like an Oriental (Kim, p. 71) Some critics have argued that such stereotypes reveal racial prejudice on Kipling’s part. Others, arguing that the novel’s nonwhite characters often compare favorably to the whites, suggest that cultural stereo typing does not necessarily stem from racially based prejudgments. It has furthermore been suggested that the “brilliance of Kim Iies in its ability to represent cultural multifariousness” while at the same time illustrating the power of a “monolith,” the colonial system (Suleri, p, 119)

in his recent book Quest for Kim, many (though not all) of the novel’s other characters and settings are based on actual people and places Kipling knew. Most significantly perhaps, the white-bearded curator of the Wonder House is widely recognized to be an accurate and affectionate portrait of Kipling’s father, John Lock-wood Kipling, who held that same position at the real Lahore Museum when Kipling himself was a boy. Both of Kipling’s parents helped him as he wrote the novel, offering critical advice and suggestions; his father, an accomplished artist, produced illustrations for the novel’s first American edition.

Kipling also knew a colorful Afghan horse trader named Mahbub Ali, whose father had sided with the British during the First Anglo-Afghan War (1829-32). While the real Mahbub Ali kept his friend “Kuppeleen Sahib” up to date about events in Afghanistan when Kipling was a reporter, he does not seem to have spied for the British (Hopkirk, Quest, p. 60). Other characters such as the lama may also originally have had real-life models, though it seems certain that Kipling added his own creative touches to their fictional counterparts.

Kim is a highly original work and does not stand squarely within any single literary tradition, but it has been compared with Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which also describes a young boy’s coming of age within the context of a colorful journey. The wise yet often naive lama, critics have suggested, has much in common with Huck’s companion Jim, the escaped slave with whom Huck journeys on the Mississippi.

Reception

Kim was serialized in McClure’s Magazine in the United States from December 1900 to October 1901 and in Cassell’s Magazine in Britain from January to November 1901. It appeared in book form in Britain and America in 1901. Early reviews were muted, considering Kipling’s status as a leading British author, partly because public attention at the time was preoccupied with the South African War (1899-1902). This bitter and often brutal colonial struggle pitted the British against the Afrikaners (white descendents of Dutch colonials in South Africa, formerly called Boers). Kipling himself traveled to Africa to report on the South African War for British newspapers. The conflict had sharply reduced popular enthusiasm for imperial ventures, and Kipling’s name was firmly linked with such ventures in the public mind. Popular enthusiasm also flagged with the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901; along with the war, her death seemed to mark the passing of the imperial era.

Yet critics soon recognized Kim as an artistic masterpiece and the best of Kipling’s novels. Edward Shanks, for example, praised it as celebrating “the infinite and joyous variety of India for him who has the eyes to see it and the heart to rejoice in it” (Shanks in Page, p. 152). Even more laudatory were the words of novelist Kingsley Amis, who called Kim “not only the finest story about India” but “one of the greatest novels in the language” (Amis, p. 83).

—Colin Wells