Summary
Rudyard Kipling’s novel of India (1901), published twelve years after Kipling left India, his only successfully sustained and mature piece of long fiction, read by Edward Said as a novel in which pleasure in the Great Game serves, and does not contradict, the political purpose of British control (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.159-165 / printed p.132-138).
Details
-
Kimball O’Hara, the orphaned son of a sergeant in the Indian army and a white mother, grows up in the Lahore bazaars, becomes the Tibetan lama’s chela, is discovered to be white (albeit Irish), is schooled at St. Xavier’s, steals the Russian-inspired conspiracy’s papers, is healed with the lama through renewed contact with the earth, and as the novel ends returns to the Great Game, entering the British colonial service full-time (PDF p.163 / printed p.136).
-
It is an overwhelmingly male, celibate novel of travel, trade, adventure and intrigue; the women are few and debased or unsuitable, and to be “eternally pestered by women”, says Kim, is to be hindered in playing the Great Game (PDF p.163-164 / printed p.136-137).
-
Kim’s healing is a ceremony of reappropriation: his soul’s wheels “lock up anew on the world without”, and his movement from liminality to domination is a function of being a Sahib in colonial India — Britain, through a loyal Irish subject, taking hold once again of India; the lama’s vision of freedom strikingly resembles Colonel Creighton’s Indian Survey, become redemptive (PDF p.168-171 / printed p.141-144).
-
For Kipling there was no conflict between Kim’s colonial service and his loyalty to his Indian companions; one purpose of the novel is to show the absence of conflict once Kim is cured of his doubts, the lama of his longing for the River, and India of a few upstarts and foreign agents (PDF p.173 / printed p.146).
-
The loyalist veteran’s account of the Mutiny of 1857 — “A madness ate into all the Army” — puts the extreme British view in an Indian mouth, and the Widow of Kulu’s praise of the police superintendent — these be the sort to oversee justice, in her words as checked against the original — makes natives assent to the right kind of colonial rule; no one in the novel challenges British rule (PDF p.174-176 / printed p.147-149; the Mutiny quotation as Said quotes it).
-
Creighton, the ethnographer-scholar-soldier who heads the Great Game, embodies the union of power and knowledge; the Babu, the native anthropologist, is caricatural not because he is incompetent but because he is not white, and can never be a Creighton (PDF p.179-180 / printed p.152-153).
-
Unlike the late-nineteenth-century novel of disillusion, Kim has no awakening from a fancy dream: Jude Fawley in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1894) is ensnared and ends neglected, while Kim graduates from one brilliant success to another (PDF p.183 / printed p.156).
-
Chapter Two, V concludes: Kim gets beyond the paralyzing impasse of the novel of disillusion, because his geography is Britain’s to move about in freely — time is on his side, his gift for disguise and languages lets him pass through India’s Babel unscarred, and the confluence of Creighton’s Great Game with his disguise fantasy could not have occurred without British imperialism; Kim is not a political tract, but a great document of its historical moment and an aesthetic milestone along the way to midnight August 14-15, 1947 (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.184-189 / printed p.157-162).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, Rudyard Kipling, Imperialism, Orientalism