Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [11]
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