Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [9]
Kipling, like Kim, spoke Hindi as a child, had an English education, and then embraced India. Kipling felt orphaned in the House of Desolation; Kim was actually orphaned. Kim’s character developed as Kipling’s would have if he’d stayed in India instead of going to school in England. Though Kim seems Eurasian and has a Eurasian foster mother, he’s actually all white and finally returns to his own people. Kipling, going back to England after working on the Pioneer, discovered and reclaimed his own lost inheritance in Sussex. Like Kipling, Kim has a quick mind and intense powers of observation. Kipling compared both himself and Kim (in chapter 1) to the caliph of Baghdad and legendary hero of The Arabian Nights. As he wrote to his newspaper editor in 1886: “I am deeply interested in the queer ways and works of the people of the land. I hunt and rummage among ‘em; knowing Lahore City—that wonderful, dirty, mysterious ant-hill—blind fold and wandering through it like Haroun Al-Raschid in search of strange things.”15
Kim usually thinks and dreams in Hindi; prefers native food and eats like an Indian; sleeps curled up, native fashion; has an Oriental vagueness about time, an Eastern resignation to fate and indifference to noise; and generally borrows from all the customs of the country. But he also has a white man’s fear of snakes, a white cockiness and aggressiveness, and a white respect for order and orders. His racial amalgamation is symbolized by the kit he carries away from school: an English revolver, medicine box, and compass; an Indian robe, amulet, and begging gourd. His frequent shift from the vernacular to English and back again suggests confusion about his racial identity. In the course of the novel Kim, adept at disguises and pigmentation, dresses alternately as a Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, and Eurasian, as well as British civilian, soldier, and schoolboy, and plays three main roles: disciple, student, and spy.
Though Kim is called the “Little Friend of all the World,” he’s more hostile than friendly. He’s in constant conflict not only with the Russian and French enemies, but also with the Lahore police, the native boys fighting for position on the cannon Zam-Zammah, the railway clerk who tries to cheat him, the cheeky sweeper, the two chaplains of the regiment, the sergeant who restrains him, the drummer boy who guards him, the Eurasian boys at school, the villains plotting to murder Mahbub, the Hindu boy in Lurgan’s shop, and the Woman of Shamlegh.
Kim easily slips in and out of various disguises and roles and adapts to each of his teachers. But, cut off from his assumed race and mother tongue, he’s troubled and confused about his personal identity. Whiteness never disturbed his Indian identity during his first thirteen years in Lahore, but after he leaves his native city he twice asks himself the overwhelming question: “ ‘Who is Kim?”’ (p. 116) “ ‘And what is Kim?”’ (p. 272). He experiences a corresponding loneliness when he lives among white men, when he reaches Benares, and when, cut off from Hurree, he nurses the sick lama.
A mixture of Aladdin and Huck Finn, skilled in strategies of survival and expert in obscene curses (especially about the questionable parentage of his adversaries), Kim searches for, yet hides, his true self. Despite his cockiness, he is orphaned, alone, outcast and personally insecure during the malleable years between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. Like the vulnerable Kipling, he is amenable to education, change, and exploitation. His lack of fixed identity allows him to be shaped for many different roles—for the Indian caste system and the British army each has a rigid hierarchy—and his mentors prey on his weaknesses to bring out his strengths. His English education blends with his Irish father’s influence and Indian culture to produce, as