Kim

by Rudyard Kipling

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in British India around 1900; published in 1901.

SYNOPSIS

A spy thriller as well as a story of a spiritual quest and a coming-of-age tale, Kim captures the variety and color of Indian social and political life at the height of the British Empire.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Novel in Focus

For More Information

Born in Bombay, India, of British parents, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) spent the first five years of his life with his parents in India before going to England for a proper British education. At seventeen, he returned to India and from 1882 to 1889 pursued a journalistic career in the northern reaches of the country. While working for a British newspaper, Kipling also began to write short works of fiction that were well received. Eventually he departed India for the West, married an American woman, and lived out most of the rest of his life in celebrity in England. The nostalgic novel Kim was written while Kipling was recovering from a terrible bout of influenza that nearly killed him and did in fact kill his beloved seven-year-old daughter. Despite its sometimes dark ruminations upon race relations and the charge that it conveys an image of righteous British colonialism, Kim is widely considered a masterpiece of children’s literature. The novel appeared serially in McClure’s Magazine (Dec. 1900-Oct. 1901) and in Cassell’s Magazine (Jan.-Nov. 1901); it was also released in book form in 1901.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

British India

According to one prominent researcher, there were at one time 225 distinct languages, not including their attendant dialects, in India. Modern counts still put the number at some 212. An ancient crossroads of culture, the Indian subcontinent is home to many different peoples with very different ways of life. These include the Sikhs, the Rajputs, the Bengalis, the Gujaratis, the Marathas, the Brahmins, the Tamils, the Andhras, the Kannadigas, the Malayalis and the Parsis, among the most prominent groups.

There had been a strong British presence on the Indian subcontinent since the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the East India Company, a British trading conglomerate, set up its first post on India’s northwest coast. The Company was to virtually rule India, controlling trade, law and order, and education until 1859, when Queen Victoria proclaimed that India would be governed directly by the British sovereign.

What changed the Company’s fortunes in India was the series of events known today as the “Indian Mutiny” or the “First Indian War of In-dependence.” (India would not, in fact, become an independent nation until 1947.) Although the events leading up to the bloodshed were extremely complicated, one of the reasons for the uprising was the suspicion that the British were determined to do away with the most basic Indian social and religious customs and replace them with British ones.

The single event that precipitated the fighting was the arrival from Britain of a new kind of cartridge for the rifles carried by Indian soldiers in the ranks of the East India Company’s army. This cartridge demanded a different kind of greasing than the previous model, and the British discovered that a mixture of animal fats worked best. They failed, however, to take into proper account the Hindu taboo against touching any product made from cattle, and the Muslim taboo against pork. While Company officials were careful to specify to British manufacturers of the cartridgelubricants that only goat or sheep fat was to be used, once subcontractors in India itself began to produce the lubricants, the directions got less precise. A rumor spread that the British purposely used animal fats that would contaminate the Indian soldiers, and the fear of this grew rapidly. A group of eighty-five Indian soldiers at Delhi balked at greasing their rifle cartridges, and were promptly sentenced to ten years in jail for disobedience. Other Indian regiments decried what they saw as an injustice and took up arms against the British. Within days, beginning on May 10, 1857, the British colony at Delhi was butchered in its entirety, including women and children. Soon the violence spread to other parts of the country. The northern city of Lucknow, where the novel’s hero, Kim, is sent to a British school, was the scene of a particularly long-drawn-out seige.

THE BENIGHTED OF THE EARTH?

[A]lways in the later nineteenth century an underlying assumption was that the British were a superior nation whose duty was to spread the benefits—material and moral —of trade with them and to propagate their own styles of education, law, and manners to the benighted of the earth, simultaneously making a profit for the imperial metropolis.

(Brown, pp. 103-04)

The Indian uprising was put down within a year, but it was a savage fight, with the British response matching the Indian in terms of atrocities. Sobered by the experience, Britain’s Queen Victoria quickly realized how close her empire had come to jeopardizing its significant interests in India and decided she would no longer trust the future of such important trade as spice, tea, cotton, and other natural resources to the management of the East India Company. The Company had significant ties to the British government throughout most of its tenure—for example, the Bank of England had bailed it out of financial troubles, and the Company took pains to institute British law wherever possible in India. But in the aftermath of the mutiny it was relieved of its powers and duties in India, and the government stepped in as the sole official ruler of the subcontinent.

On November 1, 1859, Queen Victoria established the office of the “Viceroy of India,” a political appointment subordinate in rank only to the monarch; the creation of this office was intended to demonstrate to the Indian people the high regard and affection of the British Crown for its Indian subjects.

Along with this legislative change came also a certain change in attitude. The events of 1857-1858 had served to increase tension—and racist inclinations—in British-Indian relations. Once, the British had mixed with the Indians around them, often taking Indian wives or mistresses and socializing with the people that they were teaching or commanding. Also the British had filled the ranks of the Company’s standing army with Indian men. The new India under the British Crown, in contrast, became much more rigidly segregationist.

The sheer rapidity and scale of the “mutiny” violence had shocked both sides into recognizing that the British presence in India, which had come to dominate the country and people over the past two centuries, resulted in an unnatural, uneasy state of affairs. It was determined by some of the British people living in India that the Indians were a treacherous, untrustworthy, and violent people, a stereotype that gained widespread acceptance in the second half of the nineteenth century. British authorities barred Indians from any real level of power in the administration of India, forbade them to operate artillery in the army until World War I, and strictly regulated their numbers in the army so that there would always be a strong majority of non-Indian soldiers in any area. The British furthermore cloistered themselves in their own communities, staffed by Indian servants who were “kept in their place” by a rigid social code. In Kim, for example, an elegant party at a high-ranking British officer’s home upon which Kim eavesdrops is attended by only British guests but staffed by Indian cooks, gardeners, and house-attendants.

The Hindu caste system

Indian society in Kipling’s day was—and still is to a certain degree—organized by the ancient “caste” system of

hierarchical, hereditary social classes. People from one caste have little to do with members of other castes; for example, it is forbidden that a person eat food prepared by or touched by a member of a lower caste. Yet caste is actually a component of Hindu society, not Indian society as such. Hinduism itself is a nebulous concept—it denotes neither a church, nor a religion, but “a body of customs and a body of ideas” (Spear, p. 41) based largely on a sense of shared community; the caste system is one of its distinguishing features. Although the date of Hinduism’s origin is unknown, scholars do know that the caste system existed in rudimentary form by 500 b.c.

At the time that Kipling was writing Kim, Indian society was still dominated by four classes, or varnas—the priests (Brahmins), warriors (Kshatriyas), merchants (Vaishyas), and the servants or cultivators (Sudras, pronounced “shoo’-druhs”). These four groups were then subdivided into an intricate system of caste differentiation. The entire social structure, which endured more or less in its original form until as recently as 150 years ago, can be baffling in its complexity. At various times there have been nearly three thousand different levels of social importance and responsibility that both determined and were determined by one’s lineage, occupation, and home. Caste was, of course, passed down through the generations, but there were castes for doctors, writers, leatherworkers, milkmen, and streetcleaners, to name just a few professions. Castes were also formed around geographical location; the Rajput people of the north were traditionally thought of as warriors, for example. A fifth group, known as the “outcasts” or “untouchables,” appeared when those outside of the four classes of society, usually members of outlying tribes or conquered peoples, decided to order themselves in the same way as the members of the original four classes. Deprived of any rights, these outcasts were universally despised and abused. The lower one’s caste, the fewer one’s rights and dignities; even Kim, whose nickname throughout the novel is “Little Friend to all the World,” shuns a group of lowercaste travelers that he notices on his journeys in northern India:

They met a troop of long-haired, strong-scented Sansis with baskets of lizards and other unclean food on their backs, their lean dogs sniffing at their heels. These people kept their own side of the road, moving at a quick, furtive jog-trot, and all other castes gave them ample room; for the Sansi is deep pollution.

(Kipling, Kim, p. 86)

The infrastructure

After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the Indian subcontinent was brought into full and rapid contact with the Western world. Meanwhile, within India, the British system of railways and roads was opening the country up to itself. The Grand Trunk Road, for example, along which much of the action of Kim takes place, was begun in 1839 and would grow to 1,400 miles in length, linking the northwest frontier to the major cities of Calcutta and Delhi. Before the British arrived, India did not have many roads at all, and those that did exist had been poorly maintained. The British immediately saw that if they were to make full use of India’s riches, they were going to have to construct a road system that ensured expedient transportation of raw and manufactured materials from one area to another.

The railway system introduced by the British was even more impressive than the roads and remains a wonder to this day. By 1900, it was carrying 200 million passengers and 46 million tons of freight a year. At the turn of the twentieth century, a combined 25,000 miles of government and private-enterprise tracks crisscrossed the country and employed by far the largest number of laborers in India. These tracks linked the seaports with important inland areas of agricultural production and also forged a link with the outlying, politically significant areas of the country. Neglected by the builders of railroads were southern and central India, while the builders concentrated on the northern reaches of the country. Thanks partly to the perceived threat of Russia’s advancing upon India’s borders with Afghanistan, the British took greater interest in the northern region. The sheer ingenuity of the engineers who built the tracks that were to crisscross India defies imagination:

The relatively short run from Bombay to Surat required bridges to be built across eighteen rivers, and some foundations had to be driven 140 feet deep to withstand the torrents of floodwater. When the railway was finally pushed up to Simla, the last 60 miles of track were laid along 103 tunnels blasted through the mountainsides.

(Moorhouse, p. 164)

At the time of their initial development, the railroads were decried as a danger to Indian culture. Critics warned that the railroads would disrupt traditional ways of life and bring different cultures into conflict. As it turned out, the native Indian people took eagerly to the trains, even though the kind of socializing that rail travel necessitated did bring together different castes of people who would never have considered sharing space with one another. “It brought thousands of all castes cheek by jowl in third-class carriages. It did not of course affect the main marriage and other social restrictions, but it encouraged social contact and exchange of ideas” (Spear, pp. 283-84). The train compartment in which Kim and his traveling companion, a Tibetan holy man, ride is filled with people of varying castes, people who would have had no contact with each other outside the railway system.

The Punjab: the final frontier

At the turn of the century, India’s northern border with Afghanistan was the most interesting and lucrative part of the country, as far as the British were concerned. This rugged and mountainous region is the geographical area in which Kim is set. The educated Indians of the more southern regions, specifically the Hindus from Bengal, were, thanks in part to their excellent Western education, becoming vocal and eloquent opponents of British rule, and were as a result ignored or openly denounced by the British as ungrateful, insurrectionary, or “un-Indian.” Because of their education and fluency in English, they were shunned by other Indians who regarded them as quasi-British imperialists. Hurree, the Bengali who in the novel is a British agent, is just such a figure.

In contrast to the southern Bengalis, soldiers from the Punjab, the northwest frontier, had aided the British during the “mutiny,” and it was to them that the British now looked with approval—and apprehension. The Russians, whom Kim and his friends encounter at one point in the novel, were also very interested in the province, and were a worrisome threat to the British on two counts. Firstly, the British Crown did not like the idea of another country interfering in its richest and most strategic colony; second, any political success enjoyed by the Russians anywhere in the world at this time was bound to tilt the scales of European power. In the late nineteenth century, the British extended roads, railway lines, and irrigation canals deep into the Punjab, in the hopes of stabilizing their power there. The “Great Game” of spying and counterspying that underlies Kim thus had a very real and very high-stakes purpose: British authorities believed that the Russians were plotting an invasion of northern India.

The Indian Civil Service

The Indian Civil Service, or ICS, as it was known, drew the best middle-class British men to it through the promise of adventure, good pay, and perhaps also the idea that it was a British duty to bring British culture to the Indians. Originally an offshoot of the East India Company, under the British Crown the ICS extended British rule to every corner of India. The Company had established its own British school, Haileybury College in Hertfordshire, England, to train prospective employees in the demanding jobs that the Company required in India. Boys studied a smattering of Oriental languages, as well as more rigorous programs in literature, mathematics, law, history, and politics.

As Britain annexed more and more territory in and around India, the British needed more and more employees to administer the regions, and the numbers soon outdistanced Haileybury’s capacity to produce them. The ICS was then thrown open to students at other British universities. Between 1855 and 1859, men from Oxford and Cambridge in England provided the majority of new candidates to the service.

There were three divisions to the ICS: the Executive, the Judicial, and the most desirable and flamboyant of the three, the Indian Political Service, which dealt with external and diplomatic affairs. Attached to this division are many of the characters in Kim who ostensibly work for the department of the Indian Survey while actually collecting covert information on people opposed to British rule. For all the excitement and danger of his career as a spy, then, Kim is still a civil servant.

The Novel in Focus

The plot

Young Kimball O’Hara, or Kim, as he is known throughout the novel, is the orphaned son of an Irish sergeant. Kim lives like an Indian street urchin on the streets of Lahore (a city on the northwest frontier of India, just south of Cashmere [Kashmir]). His British blood, however, gives him privilege and self-assurance, and he moves through the city as “Little Friend to all the World,” doing exactly as he pleases. His life is forever changed, however, when he meets a strange Tibetan holy man, a Buddhist lama or teacher, named Teshoo, with whom he becomes instantly fascinated. Kim vows to accompany the old man in his wanderings throughout India, and the two set out on a great quest for a mystical Indian river in which the old man hopes to rinse away his sins.

Kim’s ability to blend with the Indian natives has made him useful to the British Secret Service, for whom he has been an unknowing courier; while the boy intuits that he is transferring secret information to the British from his friend, an Arab horse-trader, he does not realize the extent to which this information is essential to British interests in the area. The “disguise” of being the follower of a holy man allows the boy to slip undetected past enemies of Britain with an incriminating piece of paper that launches a punitive military strike against a potential uprising in the northern part of the country.

Kim envisions a carefree life, traveling with his lama and dabbling occasionally in the lowlevel espionage that fills him with a sense of self-importance. But a chance encounter with his father’s former regiment causes Kim to be handed over to military chaplains in the interests of getting him a British education. Over Kim’s horrified protests, the lama concludes that the boy ought to possess the best education that can be found for him and arranges for money to be sent from his Tibetan monastery to achieve this end. News of his “capture” comes to the ears of the high-level British officials who have previously found the boy so useful, and they decide to turn him into one of their operatives. When this is made clear to the lad, Kim grudgingly enters the halls of learning.

Upon his release three years later, Kim resumes his journey with the lama, but also engages in secret spying missions involving political unrest along the northwest frontier. His own quest for self-discovery becomes entangled with the lama’s search for enlightenment and with the trade in military secrets that scuttles throughout life in the Punjab. Spiritual enlightenment and political success merge in the novel’s famously ambiguous conclusion, in which the lama, who has finally reached his spiritual goal—to leave behind his body and merge with the “Great Soul”—returns to life to help Kim live up to his own spiritual potential.

The Middle Way

Kipling’s India was a land of many different belief systems, prominently Hinduism and Islam, but—thanks primarily to the British—Christianity as well. By far the most thoroughly discussed religion in the novel, however, is Buddhism, a belief system that emerged out of Hinduism in the sixth century a.d. The “Middle Way” that Teshoo follows is the spiritual practice of Buddhism. It avoids extremism, aiming to provide a way of life for everyone, not only for priests. The Middle Way counsels moderation in views, resolves, speech, action, living, effort, recollectedness, and meditation. Buddhism declined seriously in India between the first and sixth centuries a.d., although it later gained great popularity abroad in China, Japan, southeast Asia, and Tibet. Although the reason for the Indian decline is uncertain, it may have been related to the preferences of the Indian nobles for Hinduism, which was based on the idea of social hierarchy—a concept Buddhism totally disregarded. Hinduism also did not condemn violence, which Buddhism utterly rejected.

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha (which means “enlightened one”), taught that the worldly things that people desired were not real, but an illusion. Attachment to riches, to people, to food or drink, and to all other earthly things, caused human beings to be reborn over and over again into different bodies because they could not give up the world. This chain of reincarnation was expressed in the image of the “Wheel of Life.” The drawing that the lama keeps with him and works on throughout the novel is of the Wheel of Life, which plots the six states of man (ranging from gods to demons), the twelve modes of existence (for example, ignorance, sensation, birth, and death) and the three vices of ignorance, anger, and lust. Freedom from the wheel and an end to rebirth comes only with detachment from desires—at this point, one’s soul is absorbed into the Great Soul of the universe and one achieves enlightenment or nirvana. Exactly what nirvana is has always been a matter of debate. Scholars dispute whether it means simply final oblivion to the sorrows of life or whether it promises a conscious sense of eternal happiness. Teshoo’s transcendent experience, in which, after sitting in contemplation for two days and eating or drinking nothing, he crosses the threshold between life and death, between time and timelessness, suggests the latter:

[M]y soul went free, and, wheeling like an eagle, saw indeed that there was no Teshoo Lama nor any other soul. As a drop draws to water, so my Soul drew near to the Great Soul which is beyond all things. I saw all Hind [India], from Ceylon in the sea to the Hills.... I saw them at one time and in one place; for they were within the Soul. By this I knew the Soul had passed beyond the illusion of Time and Space and of Things. By this I knew that I was free.

(Kim, p. 411)

Because Buddhism taught detachment from the world, it led naturally to monasticism; Teshoo, for example, comes from a monastery in Tibet. Buddhist monasteries, however, are much different from Christian monasteries, in that people can come and go from them as seems proper to them. Teshoo can thus be a Buddhist holy person

without being confined to the space of his monastery, and Buddhist holy people were even expected to wander as he does.

Red bull on a green field

Kim’s father was a member of an Irish regiment, the Mavericks, who were on a tour of duty in India as part of the British military exercises there. The standard of this regiment is a red bull on a green background, and the image becomes confusedly entangled with a prophecy about Kim’s future. The Indian woman who became Kim’s father’s mistress after the death of his wife, and who took charge of the boy for a little while, tells him: “[S]ome day...there will come for you a great Red Bull on a green field, and the Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes, and… nine hundred devils” (Kim, p. 3). More than merely a regimental standard, the red bull on the green field also signifies the military presence of the British, whose colonies were always colored red in the green fields of India on maps of the time. But the image is also reminiscent of the Irishness of Kim and his father, of which much is made throughout the novel. Ireland, traditionally associated with the color green, was having its own nationalistic political strife with England at the time Kipling was writing Kim; there is almost certainly a pro-English significance to the military image that represents Kim’s birthright in the novel. In his introduction to Kim, Angus Wilson notes, “It is these two aspects—the wild Irish lad and his taming by working as a British spy that were emphasized by critics and readers in the first forty years after the publication of the novel” (Wilson in Kipling, pp. xiv-xv).

Sources

The idea of a novel that featured the secret machinations of the British intelligence network in India first appeared in an unpublished work of Kipling’s entitled “Mother Maturin,” which concerned the marriage of a poor Irish girl living in Lahore to an upper-class British civil servant and the successful spy ring that they create together. But the most important source for the novel is surely Kipling’s own cherished memories of India. Kim has been seen by critics as in many ways reflecting Kipling’s own child-hood, a time that he idealized throughout his life. As a child, the novelist was attended to by an Indian ayah, or nanny, and probably spoke an Indian tongue better than English. The story of a little British boy who lives as an Indian native may reflect in certain ways Kipling’s own early memories of his first years. The novel opens outside the “Wonder House”—the Lahore Museum, where the holy man goes to meet an English curator who treats him with respect and shows him the impressive collection of Indian artifacts in the museum. The two men recognize each other for lovers of art and knowledge, and through his courteous exchange with the lama, the curator emerges as one of the most honorable characters in the book. The brief sketch of the museum director was modeled after Kipling’s father, for a time the curator of the Lahore Museum. He also provided the original illustrations for Kim’s appearance in book form.

Reviews

When Kim first came out, reviewers focused intently on the Irishness of Kim and his father, probably because the turn of the century marked a particularly turbulent time in Irish-English political relations. But, more lastingly, the novel has been studied in terms of its representation of Indian colonialism—the relationships and balance of power between the British ruling class and the Indians in the novel. Perhaps not surprisingly, the reviews have often condemned Kipling’s essentially pro-British attitudes. Edmund Wilson, for example, called Kipling a “jingo imperialist” (Wilson in Moorhouse, p. 175). But many critics praise Kipling’s sense of adventure, romance and humor, and see in Kim both “high literature and… perpetual entertainment.” (Bloom, p. 1). Kipling’s own opinion of the novel appears in a letter to a friend and editor that announces its completion. “I’ve done a long leisured asiatic yarn in which there are hardly any Englishmen. It has been a labour of great love and I think it is a bit more temperate and wiser than much of my stuff (Kipling in Wurgaft, p. 104).

For More Information

Bloom, Harold, ed. Rudyard Kipling: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

Brown, Judith M. Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy. The Short Oxford History of the Modern World. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. London: Macmillan, 1981.

Moorhouse, Geoffrey. India Britannica. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.

Spear, Percival. India: A Modern History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961.

Wurgaft, Lewis D. The Imperial Imagination: Magic and Myth in Kipling’s India. Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983.