Some Reflections of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim The numerous references to ‘the game’ that the young Kim plays - that is, a natural expression of his spirited freedom as a not-by-any-means ‘ordinary’ and implicitly privileged member of the Anglo-Indian world, though placed by the destiny of an orphan on its margins - give way the ‘Great Game’ in the latter half of the novel when his multi-lingual resourcefulness and special gifts of mind and temperament are turned to the purpose of defending British India from foreign enemies (French and Russian). Henceforth he operates under the control of Col. Creighton, the British spymaster, who himself works through the intermediaries Mahbub Ali and Hurree Babu, the chief secondary characters of the novel - and what characters they are! - who represent the worlds of Hindi and Moslem India in its complex accomodation with the British Raj. For Kimball O’Hara - to give the boy his full name, received from his father, a former colour sergeant in “the Mavericks”, an Irish regiment in India - the shift from boyish ‘games’ to the ‘Great Game’ of patriotic defence is tantamount to the discovery of his ‘destiny’ or ‘fate’ - a development which affirms his identity not merely in the sense of a historical role but in the sense of an intermediary between cultures, Indian and British, which he knows equally well within the ‘two sides of his mind’, as the poem prefixed to Chapter Eight of the novel has it. The historical events concerned, though fictional in extreme, are not out of keepign with the actual circumstances of colonial life in the age of imperial competition between the European nations). At one level, the novel is propaganda for British rule and government in India: in it Kipling takes pains to identify the type of Englishman who knows the country best and who, by virtue of that knowledge, is acknowledged by the wisest of the natives to be the proper lords of India. Such a man appears on the road during the journey that Kim makes in company with the Maharinee (a widow of an India prince). There, when she encounters an English colonial officer who turns out, in retrospect, to be none other that Col. Creighton, the head of the Secret Service in India, she has this to say:
It is in contradistinction to that kind of man are the French and Russians diplomats whose engagement with the treasonable kings of the North West (Pathan country) is the objection of the spy activities of Mabhub, Hurree and ultimately Kim. These are men who do not know the natives, and whose undoing comes when one of them intemperately strikes the lama out of irritation at being denied the opportunity to buy for silver what is unbuyable: his diagram of the Wheel of Life. Englishmen do not strike natives, we are told. In the resultant fracas, Kim lands a blow to the Frenchman’s groin—his genitals, it is implied—which seriously maims him, and the diplomatic papers are effectively purloined in the ensuing mêlée. Those foreigners - the French and Russian agents - have just been congratulating themselves on being the natural masters of Orientals such as Babu Hurree, whom they have branded a ‘monstrous hybrid’ produced by the meeting of West and East. (Those intrusive agents are very conscious that, compared with the English in the wider world, they “have not yet left their mark”.) Yet Kim himself is just such a hybrid - though strictly speaking pure Irishman in genetic terms (and therefore an honorary Englishman in the colonial context); and though the narrative reveals that Babu Hurree and, indeed, all Babus - the class of anglicised Hindhus who played so large a part as clerks in the actual administration - are a dismal conglomerate of native talent and hollow education backed by worthless university degrees and a preposterous affection for the English classics. Babu quotes - and misquotes - Shakespeare often and comes up with such malapropisms as ‘a creaming joke’ (where the Englishman day says ‘screaming joke’.) At the same time, Babu proves himself a brilliant shape-changer even to the extent of transforming from an obese and gluttonous fool to an athletic mountain climber, via the interim disguise of a travelling hakim [or physician], purportedly from Dacca. Such a character cannot be dismissed simply as the victim of colonial exploitation or the underling of a hegemonising imperial power—though, to modern eyes he very predominantly retains just that character. Indeed, the very term ‘Babu’ entered the twentieth-century dictionary to describe the ‘vile English’ made up of pretensious phraseology of linguistic ineptitude of which he is the chief exemplary in English literature. (Today the type is more likely to be called a colonial subaltern, using the postcolonial coinage.) Without any apparent trace of irony and much delight in his subject, Kipling tells us in an aside that India is the ‘most democratic of countries’; and this within minutes of telling us that he who sit atop the Zam-zamah (that is, the great bronze gun captured by the British in their Asian wars) will be the ruler of the region. The kind of democracy envisaged here is not, in fact, politico-practical, but rather a capacity on the part of all the constituent castes and classes of British-India to intercommunicate and share in the global reality of the Indian experience not withstanding differences of wealth and honour, religion, ethnicity and - finally - their respective positions in the colonial system. At the same time (the gun says it) the position of the top dog is reserved for the English colonial officers from the Viceroy down whose determination to protect ‘British India’ from colonial competitors makes for the central strand of the adventure-story plot of Kim. (In parenthesis, it should be said that there is one restriction upon the freedom of the Englishman in India, and Kipling shares with Noel Coward the famous conviction that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun.) A great deal of page-by-page text of the novel is taken up with measuring the differences between Western and Oriental people, chiefly with emphasis on ambiguous special aptitudes of the Orientials such as their ability to wait patiently for uncertain or indefinitely delayed outcomes as if time did not exist at all, their ability to sleep without total disregard to ambient sounds, and even to ‘squat’ on the floor or lie on the naked earth (as Englishman apparently cannot do), &c., &c. One such ability which the novel underscores is a profoundly inventive capacity for expressive cursing and defamation, chiefly having to do with the enumeration of parental generations in connections that reflect ill upon their antagonists in a conversation of that kind. Indeed, the utter paucity of the English serving-man’s unimaginative equivalent is explicitly pointed out on one occasion when Kim professes himself to be utterly bored by the f****ing and blinding of the army cadets with whom he is placed during his brief sojourn with the Irish regiment. Such a distinction is flattering in a sense to the Oriental, though in that case there antagonism is the lowest class of Englishman. There nevertheless exists a distinction which privileges all Englishmen over all Indians and that is the colour-code of the colonial system. The aforementioned cadets are wrong, of course, to call all Indians “niggers” as they do (and wrong again to call anyone by such a name) if only because ) very few of those on the Oriental side of the colour bar are actually black in any ethnologically accurate sense. Moreover, the transition from whiteness to blackness is at the heart of Kim’s method of transacting his hybrid identity in British India and the scenes were he is dyed to suit his role as a native boy are among the most powerful in the novel, invoking as they do various ideas of polymorphous transgressiveness whether by means of sexuality or black magic. If Kim is about one topic it is about colonial hybridity. The chief focus of the novel, Kim O’Hara, is in fact an orphaned Irish boy whose parents are an Irish colour Sargeant and the nanny of an army officer’s children. Having been brought up by natives after his widower father’s decline into dissoluteness and death, he has drawn deeply of the local culture and perhaps even drawn it in with the milk of the native woman who took care of him after the death of his natural mother. All of these circumstances signify that he stands in an interim position - a kind of crossroads - between British and India society (bearing in mind that Ireland was more or less securely lodged within the British Union at the time of writing). At the same time, Kim’s Irishness is a factor of a very special kind in the novel and there is no doubt that Rudyard Kipling privileged the Irish in his conception of the colonial regime. They were, quite naturally (he thought) intermediaries between the British and their colonial subjects: they had active passions where the English had reserve; they were themselves a subject nation while being, in strictly political terms, members of the Imperial Parliament also. They could therefore mediate between the ruler and the ruled and even, in many instances, teach the rulers how to rule or, at least, protect them against follies arising froom their own insulated superiority in the colonial world. (This is a role explicitly played by such Irishmen in Kipling as Sargeant Mulvaney in Soldiers Three, whom Henry James described as the best type of human it is possible to be without an education.) Kim also derives from his Irish background qualities which serve to bestow on him a moral superiority and a freedom of spirit that makes him a fit companion for the superior kind of English (e.g., Col. Creighton) and the superior kind of Indian (e.g., Tesho Lama, the Buddhist monk whom he accompanies as a chela, or disciple, throughout so much of the novel). One such quality is his interest in the ‘game’ for its own sake and not for any monetary profit; another is his hot temper and a third his sense of humour. When, for instance, the foreigner agents inadvisedly strike the lama, we learn that ‘[t]he blow had waked every unknown Irish devil in the boy’s blood’, while their fate after their chattels and effects have been stolen by the men of Shamlegh ‘tickled the Irish and the Oriental in his soul’. In the first part of the novel, Kim sets out on a quest to establish his real identity, lead on by a package of papers left him by his father (a birth certificate, a ne varietur - being a Masonic rescript - and a prophecy which clearly refers to his heritage in the traditions of the Irish regiment in which his father served involving a lion on a green field. All this acts to confirm his “Englishness” - though at the point of contact, when the identification is actually made by an Irish priest in company with an English padre, it is clear once again that Kipling regards the Catholic as the better equipped to understand the real nature of Kim’s hyrbidity. Yet identifying Kim as British in spite of his years of separation from his own kind is not the aim of the novel nor the end of his itinerary. In fact, the questions of destiny and identity repeatedly posed by Kim has a deeper and more subtle - perhaps ultimately elusive significance than that. Kim’s search’, in fact, is parallel to that of Teshoo Lama who is questing the river of purification into which the Buddha shot an arrow in the ancient myth he has learned in his monastery in Tibet. Nor is Kim slow to insist that he too has a “search” or that he, like some other characters in the novel quest, is by nature a “searcher” after truth. Kim’s recurrent question - “Who is Kim - Kim - Kim” - elicits some of the most pyschologically interesting writing in the novel, notwithstanding the banality of the question-form itself. It is a question, we are told, that all men but particularly the young must ask; but also one which can rarely be answered; or, rather, the answer is so elusive that, as we seem approach it in its high lodging place, it suddenly falls away like a ‘wounded bird’ and escapes our capture. Three times Kim asks himself this very question and though he seems to grasp the elements of the answer early on, it is only at the end of the novel that it strikes him with the force of an epiphany at the moment when (influenced by the sleeping potions administered by the Maharanee to restore him after his long physical trial) he suddenly apprehends his own place in the Indian scheme of things. Twice before this moment he has asked it, and twice the answer has eluded him. It is only when he resigns the question for a positive answer that the real answer appears to him - and to us:
The contents of this revelation are, of course, quotidian: Kim simply realises that the pragmatic world around him, the world of British-India in all its vitality and diversity, is his proper environment, his ambience and his stage. This may be compared with a much earlier, if less climactic, sense of thrill that he experienced on waking up one morning during the boyhoood sections of the novel to see ‘the world in real truth’ amid the bustle of bullocks, carts, cooking fires, and all such parphernalia of the migratory world that surrounds him. Yet that earlier perception was not marked in his mind as a revelation of identity: simply a recognition that the world is, and is as it is, and no other way. The colonial mindset tends, by contract, to characterise India as exotic and therefore remote from the commonsense “reality” of the imperial homeland. In this way, the novel ends by affirming as truth what it presents as experience throughout its episodes: British India is not a deviation from normality, it is an entire world of its own and a world of consequence beyond the local and the purely temporal moment of the narrative. For Kipling, indeed, the everyday reality of India has an ultimately sacral quality, which accounts in large measure for the vibrancy of the novel. Kim’s closing epiphany clearly coincides with the adventures of the now-ageing lama who has finally found his purifying river; and this parallel is at the heart of the philosophical conception of the novel. It is intensely pertinent that the lama should discovers not the particular river cited in the myth but the purifying quality in any river that he meets when he is ready for purification - in fact, a stream in which he nigh-drowns himself in his fainting fit of transcendental ecstasy, only to be rescued by Babu Hurree who is less-than-accidentally ‘just passing’. In Buddhist terms, the lama comes to understand the convergence of his own identity is with the atman or higher soul of Buddhist philosophy: a dogma intellectually understood but only valid when actually experienced. By comparison, Kim’s relatively pragmatic acknowledgement of the ‘thereness’ of the world around him (what he elsewhere calls the ‘whirl of India’) and his own place in it is less a philosophical discovery than a personal settlement: a coming-to-terms with the givens of identity in the world that he actually inhabits. Although the matter is not spoken of, it is fairly clear that he has graduated through his adventures, and especially through his brilliant part in the overturning of the imperialist plans of the Russian and French intruders in the North-West region, to become a star agent in the English Secret Service. He attains this rank because his heart and mind are fully open to the native Indian world while his spirit is fundamentally and implacably aligned with the British world order. Yet, for all that this is a political determination of character and destiny, it contains within itself a definite form of enlightenment: Kim finds out who is in a manner exactly equivalent to the lama’s transcendental wisdom - that is, by letting the vexatious question of identity slip by and simply living it in the world that is given him to inhabit. At yet another point in the fabric of the novel the British world and the Indian world are sutured together in a kind of philosophical brotherhood like that which subsists between the young Sahib Kim and Tesho Lama. In this case the match is between Teshoo Lama and Col. Creighton, a learned man in the European manner who serves as director of the Ethnolographical Commission but also covertly directs the British Secret Service and hence plays the part of a grand-master in relation to the ‘Great Game’ played out on the checkers board of the imperial world. Early in the novel, Creighton presents the lama a pair of glasses which have the iconic significance of European science but nevertheless bear overtones of vision and enlightenment. Late in the novel, the lama, himself a former abbot of a Tibetan monastery (lhassery), pronounces the verdict that Creighton is worthy to be an abbot also. Creighton himself aspires to membership of a rather different order, the Royal Society in London, a scientific organisation to which he sends his enthnological papers based on his profound experience and understanding India culture. Ironically, the ambition to become FRS [Fellow of the Royal Society] is shared by Babu Hurree, a less systematic ethnologist and a spinner of ludicrous descriptions in Babu English which the London society members are unlikely to take seriously. Nevertheless, the role of the Society as a kind of philosophical elite in England, and hence equivalent to the Buddhist monks in India, is systematically enscribed on the novel. In this way a convergence between Western science and Indian philosophy is, notionally at least, brought about. In the most important instance, however,that convergence is effected in the person of young Kim, whose full embodiment of both Indian and ‘English’ traits renders him an ideal composite: a truly Anglo-Indian specimen. Kipling’s novel thus argues for the emergence of a form of civility and, indeed, of civilisation in British India which will incorporate the best of both ‘traditions’. There is some novelty in this, and though Victorian literature has British boys going native (such as Martin Rattler in the Caribbean) and American literature has its Huckleberry Finn (dallying with a black slave qua American native), Kipling’s story maps onto the tale of modern philology which traces a shared heritage between European languages and those of India and categorises the whole ensemble as Indo-European languages. The nineteenth-century textual sources of these discoveries were the Sanskrit manuscript of Hindu tradition and the collective term given by nineteenth-century ethnographers to the racial lineage involved was ‘Aryan’ (deriving from the name of the divine hero Arja in the Buddhist tradition). Unhappily, the term Aryan fell into the clutches of Nazi racists in the European 1930s and was implicated in the racial genocide perpetrated against the Jews (a semitic people) on the basis of such distinctions. At the date when Kim was written, however, Aryan was more commonly associated with theosophical religions than with ideas of European superiority. Nonetheless the uses of racist labels was an undoubted ingredient of the colonial mentality in India as elsewhere - if only in the form of the hateful term “wog” which was indiscriminately used by the British in that period for anyone born east of Suez and purportedly deriving from the tag ‘wily Oriental gentleman’ - a thin excuse for an ugly term. Measured against such prejudices, Kipling’s novel is something of an exception. It provides not only the most detailed and authentic portrait of British India in existence (‘not only the best but almost the only literary portrait we have’, as George Orwell wrote) but also the unique instance in which the prejudice against orientals and the belief in the supposed superiority of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant to all of those they met with in eastern and western regions of the world is convincingly challenged. In place of that inherently oppressive belief, Kipling substituted a benign fascination with a world of vivid difference that subsisted beneath and and beneath and even, in some sense, above the British Raj in India, and gave us a vision - possibly erroneous and possibly misleading - of a kind of higher civiilsation made up of a form of hybridity that was (in his conception) anything but ‘monstrous’. In this sense Kim contests that idea of colonial domination and presents instead a vision of colonial ‘enlightenment’ - though without the least significant alteration in the political structure of actually-existing British imperialism in India. (As Edward Said has pointed out [see infra], Kim was written at a time when Indian Independence was already a highly developed political demand on the part of the National Congress and - more broadly - national élite, lead by Mahatma Ghandi.) Kim is Kipling’s utopian dream and fullest embodiment of that ideal ever written. At the same time, and to an astonishing degree, it affords a visionary synopsis of the critical discourse known as postcolonialism, replete with terminologies of which ’hybridity’ is the most obvious example. For all its literary and human virtues, however, the taint of the colonial mentality absolutely pervades the novel; but Rudyard Kipling could no more abolish this in contemporary fact than he could abolish India as he knew it. Bruce Stewart
ENG312C2 - University of Ulster - 2006 |
||||||||