Kim by Rudyard Kipling

I have a book of knowledge that I have kept from my childhood.  It has a chapter on literature.  Five of its pages are devoted to illustrations of scenes from famous literary works: one for classical mythology, one for Dickens, two for everything from Shakespeare to Victorian times, and one for what it says are 'Books of Recent Times'.  

Among the illustrations on this page is one which shows a young boy walking through an Indian bazaar with a Tibetan lama.  The caption reads: 'Kim by Rudyard Kipling'.  By the time my book of knowledge was published, Kim had been in print for sixty years, which makes the usage of the word 'recent' very odd.  It is now over a hundred years since Kim hit the book stores, and I have been meaning to read it for a large slice of that time.

Kim is a picaresque novel in so much as its eponymous hero, a young orphan boy, is a lovable rogue.  We meet Kim when he is about thirteen and has been fending for himself on the streets of Lahore in the years since his father died.  Although he dresses as a native and has been tanned by the sun, Kim is actually of Irish descent.  Two things happen to him almost simultaneously: he enters the service of an itinerant Tibetan lama and becomes his chela (acolyte), and he is conscripted into the British Secret Service by a Pathan horse-trader and spy.  Kim's story, then, becomes divided by his desire to be with his beloved lama who is searching for the mythical River of the Arrow, and the part he plays in the political machinations of the empires of Britain and Russia, the so-called Great Game, as they vied for control of what is now Afghanistan.  Kim is also divided by his upbringing as a cat-witted urchin in Lahore, the imposed weight of his duty as the son of a white man, and his spiritual sojourn with the lama Teshoo.

On face value, Kim is a likeable story.  Its two central characters, Kim and the lama, are quite endearing, and they are surrounded by an ensemble of secondary characters who are exotic and intriguing.  The action takes place in a world that is also exotic and intriguing, and Kipling brings it all to life with a precise but vivid prose style.  All the senses are engaged as we explore Kim's slice of the sub-continent as it was in the 1880s.  

Or, better still, how Kipling would have us believe it to be.  One needs to be wary of the surreptitious (and not so surreptitious) anglophile sentiments expressed by the native Indian characters and the absence of countervailing voices.  And we could make note of the sweeping  statements (some positive, many jaundiced) made about the racial characteristics of the Easterners and the gender characteristics of women.  

I was greatly assisted in my reading of this text by the two extended and very informative introductions by Edward W. Said and Jan Montefiore that appear in the Penguin Classics eBook of Kim, which I both commend and recommend.  We are all prisoners of our times and of our personal and political temperaments, and Kipling is no exception.   Knowing this, and being forewarned, perhaps we can still enjoy Kim for what it is was essentially meant to be: an adventure story of a resourceful boy in a strange land in a strange time.  I know I did.