Title: Kim Author: Rudyard Kipling Creation Date: 1901 Location: British India / England Collection: Empire and Its Shadows
Brief
Kim by Rudyard Kipling was serialised in McClure's Magazine and Cassell's Magazine through 1901 and published by Macmillan & Co. that October. It draws on Kipling's formative years: born in Bombay in 1865, he returned to India in 1882 to work as a journalist in Lahore, the city whose streets and museum furnish the novel's opening scene.
The protagonist is Kimball O'Hara, "Kim," the thirteen-year-old orphan of an Irish colour-sergeant and nursemaid, both dead in Lahore. Kim has grown up in the bazaars, fluent in Urdu, Punjabi and Hindi, able to pass for Hindu or Muslim, and entirely Indian in every register except his European blood, which will eventually claim him. The plot braids two strands: Kim's accompaniment of Teshoo Lama, an elderly Tibetan Buddhist on a spiritual quest for the River of the Arrow, and Kim's recruitment as a British secret-service agent in the "Great Game" — the contest between British and Russian empires for Central Asia. Kim serves the lama as his chela and Colonel Creighton of the Ethnographical Survey as an intelligence asset. The novel never asks him to choose because its deepest fantasy is that he should not have to.
The book is simultaneously an adventure novel, a spiritual quest, and an imperial administration manual — a catalogue of human types, roads, disguises and ethnographic categories through which the Raj governed. The gap between the love it generates and the politics it encodes is the gap the reader is left to walk across alone.
The Imperial Machine
The India into which Kim was published in 1901 contained roughly 294 million subjects administered by around 1,000 members of the Indian Civil Service — the "thousand men" who ran a subcontinent through a land-revenue system extracting some £30 million a year from the peasantry. The machine worked because it had organised itself into an apparatus of knowledge as much as force, and Kim is the novel of that apparatus at its most self-confident.
The "Great Game" was a real institution. The Survey of India employed pundits — Indian surveyors trained at Dehradun and despatched disguised as Buddhist pilgrims — who had mapped Tibet and the Karakoram passes since the 1860s. The Ethnographical Survey, which Creighton explicitly serves, classified castes, languages and tribes into the taxonomies the Raj used to govern. Creighton draws on officers like Sir Richard Burton and Sir George Grierson, whose Linguistic Survey of India was running as Kipling was writing.
The Grand Trunk Road is not neutral ground: it is the road along which grain taxes moved from the Punjab to the railheads. The Lahore Museum — the "Wonder House" — was also an instrument of the project; the preservation of Indian art under British custodianship was a claim to own it.
Kipling was correcting proofs in the year Queen Victoria died. The Indian National Congress had been founded in 1885; the Swadeshi movement was building. Within twenty years the apparatus Kim describes would be contested by Gandhi's non-cooperation campaign; within fifty it would be gone.
The Subjected People
Kipling's defenders cite his Indian characters as evidence of uncommon affection. Teshoo Lama is drawn with tenderness unusual in Edwardian fiction; Mahbub Ali, the Afghan horse trader turned British agent, is rendered in the round; Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, the Bengali Babu, is loquacious, physically timid, and genuinely competent. Nirad Chaudhuri called Kim the finest book about India written by an Englishman, and he had these characters in mind.
But every affectionate portrait is subordinated to the imperial project. The lama's spiritual quest is indulged but never politically serious; his otherworldliness makes him useful cover for Kim's espionage. Hurree Babu is comic relief whose Bengali-accented English is mocked even as his courage is acknowledged. Mahbub Ali is loyal to the British. Every affection flows toward a figure already working for the empire.
The one identity no one in Kim is permitted to hold is that of an Indian nationalist. The novel is set precisely when the Indian National Congress was founded (1885), when Dadabhai Naoroji was formulating the "drain of wealth" argument, and when Bal Gangadhar Tilak was arguing that swaraj was an Indian birthright. Kim contains no trace of any of this. Its Indians serve the Raj, seek enlightenment, or populate the Grand Trunk Road as picturesque background. Kipling sees them with clarity and renders them with love, but they are visible only as people the novel has already decided are content to be subjected. The erasure is not a failure of observation. It is a choice of frame.
The Reckoning
Kim was the book by which Kipling was judged when the Swedish Academy awarded him the 1907 Nobel Prize — the first English-language Nobel. For a generation it was read as adventure fiction; for another its politics were bracketed by admirers who loved the prose.
The reputation then collapsed. Edmund Wilson's 1941 essay "The Kipling That Nobody Read" argued that Kim was a great novel undermined by Kipling's inability to face the contradiction at its centre — Kim's double loyalty to the lama and to the Great Game. George Orwell's 1942 essay called Kipling "the prophet of British imperialism in its expansionist phase" and argued that his worst enemies were admirers who pretended the politics did not matter.
Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (1993) delivered the definitive postcolonial reading: the novel's aesthetic pleasures — the density of its India, the warmth of its characters, the grandeur of the Grand Trunk Road — are inseparable from its political work. To read Kim honestly is to recognise its exceptional vividness and its systematic erasure of Indian political agency simultaneously.
The pairing with Rabindranath Tagore's Gora (1909) — which takes an Irish orphan raised as a high-caste Bengali Hindu and gives him precisely the nationalism Kim is denied — has become the canonical counter-text. Kim is now read as both one of the most beautiful novels about India and one of the most politically dangerous. The two readings are not in competition. They are the condition of reading the book at all.
The Reading
The novel opens on a boy sitting astride a great bronze gun. The gun is Zam-Zammah, the "fire-breathing dragon" of the Punjabi wars, mounted on a brick platform outside the Lahore Museum — the "Wonder House" — and the boy is Kimball O'Hara, called Kim, thirteen years old, burnt black by the sun, dressed in the rags of a bazaar child and indistinguishable from any other street boy in the city. His father, Kimball O'Hara senior, was an Irish colour-sergeant in the Mavericks regiment who fell into opium and drink after his wife Annie Shott, an Irish nursemaid, died of cholera; the father followed her not long after, leaving the boy with three papers wrapped in oilskin — his birth certificate, his father's discharge, and a Masonic certificate — which Kim wears around his neck on a leather cord. The Mavericks' regimental badge is a red bull on a green field, and the dying sergeant told the boy that one day the red bull on the green field would come for him and make him great. Kim has kept the papers and half-believed the prophecy.
On the day the novel opens, an elderly Tibetan lama in a russet robe arrives at the Lahore Museum asking to see the curator — a kindly, bearded Englishman modelled on Kipling's own father. The lama has come down from the high country of Tibet on a twofold quest: to find the place where the Buddha shot an arrow that, falling, caused a stream to spring from the ground whose waters wash away all sin and release the bather from the Wheel of Things; and to visit, along the way, the four great Buddhist sites of northern India. The curator shows him the museum's collection of Gandharan sculptures, gives him a pair of spectacles, and they part with mutual respect. Kim, watching from outside, recognises something holy in the old man and attaches himself on the spot. The lama accepts him as his chela, his disciple, and the two set out together.
Before leaving Lahore, Kim makes one other arrangement. Mahbub Ali, a Pathan horse-trader from the Kabul country who does secret work for the British Intelligence Department, gives Kim a folded piece of paper and tells him to deliver it, on the Grand Trunk Road, to an Englishman at Umballa — a message that, unknown to Kim, concerns the loyalty of certain northern rulers and will trigger a small frontier war. Kim carries the paper beneath his clothes, feeling the pleasure of a boy entrusted with a man's secret, and walks south with the lama.
The Grand Trunk Road sequences are the novel's warmest achievement. Kipling renders the road as a river of human traffic flowing in both directions between Calcutta and Peshawar — Sikh veterans with their medals, Bengali clerks, Marwari moneylenders, Pathan horsemen with long curved knives, Hindu pilgrims with shaved heads, Muslim grain-merchants with their bullock-carts piled high, Jain banias on foot, sadhus naked and ash-smeared, fakirs with matted hair, women travelling under canopies, wedding processions with their drums and their crying flutes, all of it dust and heat and the smell of cooking fires at the serais where travellers rest at night. Kim moves through this plurality with the delight of a boy who has no fixed identity to defend. He arranges food for the lama, bargains with innkeepers in four different tongues, tells tall tales to anyone who will listen, begs small coins for the old man's bowl, and ministers to the lama's physical needs while the lama himself walks in an inner landscape the boy can see only the edges of. On the road they meet the Kulu woman, travelling with her grandchildren under a curtained cart, who takes an immediate affection to Kim and feeds them both whenever their paths cross. They meet an old Sikh soldier of the 1857 mutiny, loyal to the British in the telling, who lectures Kim on the military virtues and is given one of Kipling's warmest portraits of an Indian man serving the Raj of his own conviction.
At Umballa, Kim delivers Mahbub Ali's paper by climbing the garden wall of the English officer's bungalow and listening from the bushes while the officer reads it aloud to another Englishman; the two men speak of eight thousand men going north and of the frontier war the paper has set in motion. Kim, delighted to have been the secret cause of so large an event, rejoins the lama on the road and tells him nothing.
The red bull on the green field comes for Kim by accident. The Mavericks regiment — his father's old regiment — is marching up country, and its advance party has pitched camp in a mango grove beside the road. Kim creeps in to examine the regimental flag, is caught by the chaplains Father Victor and Mr Bennett, and the papers round his neck reveal him as the white orphan son of a dead soldier. The regiment claims him. The lama, who has walked into the camp behind his chela, grasps what has happened with more sorrow than surprise, and insists on paying — from his own savings, slowly gathered for his quest — to send Kim to St Xavier's in Partibus, the best Catholic school for European boys in Lucknow. It is a staggering act of love from an old man with nothing.
The school chapters are compressed. Kim learns mathematics, surveying, English history, Latin, and the elements of the manners by which a sahib is distinguished from a native. He hates the fixed identity and the enclosed walls, and he escapes whenever the terms release him. His holidays are spent in training for the Great Game, not in European amusement. Under Mahbub Ali's rough tutelage and the supervision of Colonel Creighton of the Ethnographical Survey, and above all under the remarkable Lurgan Sahib — a dealer in curiosities in Simla whose shop is also a school for spies — Kim learns the observational disciplines of his future trade. Lurgan plays with him the so-called Jewel Game: a tray of stones is shown for thirty seconds, then covered, and the boy must recite every stone and its place. Kim proves nearly perfect at it. He learns disguise, accent, the silent reading of other men's faces, the memorisation of maps, the art of being no one in particular. He also meets Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, the Bengali Babu, who is both a figure of comedy and a genuinely formidable agent, and who will be Kim's field partner in the work to come.
Graduation from the school and from the training comes together. Kim is released into the field in the disguise of a young man of mixed parentage walking the roads as a holy man's chela — his cover is the literal truth of his attachment to the lama, and the cover is the strongest because it is real. Mahbub Ali sends him north. Hurree Babu is already in the hills. The mission is this: two agents, one Russian and one French, have crossed the passes from the north and are mapping the Himalayan approaches to British India, preparing reports that could be used to guide an incursion. They must be intercepted, their papers taken, and their mission neutralised without a formal diplomatic incident.
The lama, who knows nothing of this and who believes he is finally ascending toward the River of the Arrow, goes with Kim and Hurree Babu into the foothills of the Himalayas. The climbing is hard on the old man; he is used to high country but no longer young. In a high valley they meet the two foreign agents, who have with them a collection of surveying instruments and sealed papers and the usual coolie porters carrying their loads. Hurree Babu presents himself to the Europeans as a fawning, bibulous, useless native guide, loaded with comically accurate English literary quotations, and is engaged by them as a hanger-on. Kim walks in the lama's shadow. On a narrow mountain path the foreign agents, angered by what they take to be the lama's insolence, strike him — a blow to an old holy man — and in the ensuing confusion the porters, outraged by the sacrilege, desert the Europeans. Kim seizes the bag of papers and the survey instruments. The mission has been won by a single blow of European impatience against an old man's dignity.
But the lama is injured. The descent back through the foothills is long and slow, and the old man fasts, and meditates, and grows weaker, and his spiritual attention — which had been diffused across the failure of his long quest — begins to gather itself to a single point. Kim carries him, bargains for food, protects the stolen papers in a sealed packet strapped to his body, and finally collapses himself from exhaustion and the accumulated strain of holding two lives together.
The Kulu woman — the same stout, voluble old lady who had fed and mothered Kim earlier on the road — takes them in at her house in the lower country. A Jain temple healer and a herbalist tend the lama. Kim sleeps for what feels like days, and when he wakes the packet of stolen papers is delivered by Hurree Babu to the correct hands, and the Great Game is won for that season.
The lama's vision comes at a small stream on the edge of the Kulu woman's property. He has fasted and meditated and at last, lying on the bank of a stream that no map had ever marked, he experiences the release he has been walking toward for years: the Wheel of Things stops, the Soul is free of its attachments, the River of the Arrow is found — not as a geographical location but as a condition of consciousness, which is what he had always been looking for under the form of a place. He is on the edge of complete liberation. One step further and he will be gone.
He does not take the step. In the last extraordinary scene of the novel, the lama describes the vision to Kim and then tells him that at the very moment of his liberation he had felt the boy — his chela, his beloved — falling from him into danger, and he had drawn back from the Soul's release to gather Kim in and keep him safe. He has chosen, knowingly and deliberately, to defer his own enlightenment so that the merit he has acquired may benefit the boy he loves. It is an act within the strict logic of Mahayana Buddhism — the bodhisattva who refuses the final release to stay for the sake of sentient beings — and it is, simultaneously, the most human act in the book. The lama has found his river. He has stepped back from it for love. He sits beside Kim on the grass and tells him, quietly, that the Search is accomplished.
The novel closes on this note, and the last image is not of Kim riding off into the service of the Raj, not of Colonel Creighton pinning a medal on him, not of any neat resolution of the two loyalties the book has held open. It is of the lama, his voice clear, his face turned toward Kim, saying that the quest is done. Kim's own future — whether he will become a British officer in Indian dress, whether he will be an Indian who has been trained by the British and will one day turn his training against them, whether the two halves of his identity can in fact be held together in a single life — is left, deliberately and with a kind of honesty Kipling rarely permitted himself, unresolved. The ambiguity is the book's one acknowledgement that the life it has imagined for its boy was a fiction the empire could not actually sustain. The Great Game will use Kim. The lama has blessed him. India has raised him. Somewhere between those three claims, the novel stops, and the reader is left to walk the rest of the road alone.
This post is part of Empire and Its Shadows, a series on colonialism, power, and the books that answer empire back. See the full collection →
Two Penguin editions suit this collection's purposes. Harish Trivedi's Penguin Classics edition (2011) is the most useful scholarly paperback — Trivedi, a Delhi-based Kipling specialist, gives the novel a detailed introduction and annotation that refuses to look away from its colonial politics. The Penguin Modern Classics edition (2000) carries Edward Said's introduction, the essay that did more than any other to reframe Kim as a text whose beauties and its imperial work are inseparable.
Edited by Harish Trivedi. The scholarly Penguin Classics paperback, with an introduction that engages directly with the novel's imperial politics.
Introduction by Edward Said. The Penguin Modern Classics edition — Said's essay is the landmark postcolonial reading of the novel.
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