Kipling and Kim

Rasoul Sorkhabi

The Creation of a Himalayan Novel

Thou must learn how to make pictures of roads and mountains and rivers - to carry these pictures in thine eyes till a suitable time comes to set them down upon paper.

Colonel Creighton to Kim

There are several reasons to share this article with the readers of Himalayan Journal. First, Rudyard Kipling, a pioneer of the short story in English and dubbed by some critics as the British Empire’s poet, was born (and lived the first six years of his life) in Bombay (Mumbai - the headquarters of the Himalayan Club). Second, some of Kipling’s best-known literary works are related to the Indian subcontinent, thus depicting this important part of our planet during an important period of world history. Third, Kipling won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 (now one hundred years ago), the first English writer (and also the youngest one ever) to win this award, partly because of his masterpiece, Kim (the subject matter of this article) which is intimately linked with Himalayan mountains, foothills, rivers, towns, plains and peoples.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling
Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 to Alice Kipling (MacDonald) and John Lockwood Kipling, then a professor of architectural sculpture at the newly founded Jejeebhoy School of Art and Industry in Bombay. The couple had moved to India earlier that year, and had met each other two years before at Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, England - so overwhelmed by the beauty of the lake that they named their first and only son, Rudyard. (The building Kipling was born in is now the Dean’s residence on the campus of the Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art in Mumbai.)

Rudyard and his three-years younger sister, Alice (“Trix”), had a happy life in Bombay until 1871 when they were sent (as was the tradition for the British families living in India) to England to be raised with a foster family. The following six years Rudyard stayed with the Holloways at the Lorne Lodge in Southsea; his horrible experiences during this period were later reflected in some of his stories (notably “Baa Baa Black Sheep”). Eventually, Mrs. Kipling removed her children from what Rudyard called “the House of Desolation” in 1877, and the following year, Rudyard was admitted to the United Service College at Westward Ho!, North Devon - a training school for the armed forces. However, Kipling could make neither to the Royal army nor to a British university. Thus, in 1882, he went back to India - this time to live in Lahore where his father was principal of the Mayo College of Art and curator of the Lahore Museum. Aged 16, Rudyard began his literary career as an assistant editor for the Civil & Military Gazette, published in Lahore. Most of his writings there were collected in his first books, Departmental Ditties (verse, 1886) and Plain Tales from the Hills (short stories, 1888). In 1887, Kipling was transferred to Allahabad to work for the much bigger newspaper, the Pioneer. There also, he produced several volumes of short stories dealing with his impressions of India and Anglo-Indians. In 1889, Kipling sold all his publications for £250 and left India for England crossing East Asia, the Pacific, North America, and the Atlantic. In London, he continued his literary career and collaborated on a novel (The Naulakha - a Hindi word meaning “nine lakhs”) with an American literary agent, Charles Wolcott Balestier. Shortly after Wolcott’s death in 1891, Kipling (aged 26) married Wolcott’s younger sister Caroline (Carrie) Balestier (aged 29) in London (Henry James gave away the bride). The couple decided to move to the USA and settle in the Balestier family’s rural estate in Vermont. It was here (in a house they called “the Naulakha”) that their two daughters (Josephine and Elsie) were born, and Kipling published his famous two-volume stories of Jungle Books (1894-95) (depicting Indian landscape and people). In 1896, because of a dispute with Carrie’s alcoholic brother, the Kiplings decided to return to England. They lived in Rottingdean, Sussex, from 1897 to 1901. During this period, they had their first and only son (John) and Kipling worked on Kim (1901) and the Just So Stories (1902). In 1902, the Kiplings purchased a lovely seventeenth century house - Bateman’s - near Burwash, Sussex, and spent the rest of their lives there. During World War I (which killed his young son John in a battle) Kipling made pro-British propaganda. Kipling continued to travel in the UK and overseas (not to India, alas); he also continued to produce a large amount of poetry, stories and prose, and received many awards including honorary doctorate degrees from Durham, Oxford and Cambridge as well as the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literature in 1926 (curiously, he refused - twice - to be knighted and also declined the offer of the Order of the Merit from the King!). Kipling died on 18 January 1936 at the age of 71. On that day, his wife Carrie entered in her diary: “Rud died at 12 a.m. Our wedding day!” (They had been married for exactly forty five years.) The death of King George V two days later somewhat eclipsed Kipling’s funeral. Nonetheless, Kipling’s ashes were buried in the Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey (where many British luminaries rest). His autobiography, Something of Myself, was published the following year. In 1939, after Carrie died, their house - Bateman’s - was transformed to a museum dedicated to the author.

The Novel
Kipling’s most famous work is Kim. In his autobiography, Kipling remarks that in 1897 he “had a vague notion of an Irish boy, born in India and mixed up with native life. I went as far as to make him the son of a private in an Irish Battalion, and christened him ‘Kim of the Rishti’ - short, that is, for Irish.” However, many Kipling scholars believe that the idea goes farther back in time - to an unpublished novel, “Mother Maturin,” which Kipling started to write in 1885 about a an Irish woman who kept an opium den in Lahore and had married a Civilian; through her, Government secrets found their way to the Bazaar and vice versa. Apparently, Kipling’s father (whose literary sense Kipling respected) disapproved the publication of such a story, but some parts of the story were eventually incorporated in Kim, and Mother Maturin herself appeared as a slightly different character in the 1922 film-script (Kipling’s first “photo-dramatization” story) of “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows.”

Kipling began to write Kim during a very painful period in his life. In 1898, Sir Edward Brune Jones, his dear “Uncle Ned,” died, and Kipling’s only sibling, Trix lost her mind (she was to spend the following years in nursing-homes.) A year later, on a voyage to the US (his last trip to that country) Kipling, Carrie and their daughters all fell seriously ill; their beloved Josephine - only aged seven - died of pneumonia. All these were emotional blows to Kipling, and yet, he went on to write perhaps because only this labor of love could console him.

The original draft of Kim O’the ‘Rishti is kept as manuscript #44840 in the British Library in London (donated by Kipling himself in 1925), and Margaret Feeley has compared its differences with the printed revised version (“The Kim That Nobody Reads,” in Studies of the Novel, Fall 1981). Kim first appeared as a serial column in the monthly McClure’s Magazine in the USA (December 1900 to October 1901) and in Cassell’s Magazine in the UK (January through November 1901), and finally published in a book by Macmillan in London, and Doubleday & Page in New York in 1901 (with Lockwood Kipling’s relief illustrations).

Kim was published at the turn of the twentieth century - the year Queen Victoria died and Edward VII became Britain’s king; President William McKinley was assassinated and Kipling’s friend Teddy Roosevelt became US President. People live and die; works of art survive. Kim has been printed numerous times, more recently by Bantam Classics (1983), Penguin Classics (1987), Oxford University Press World’s Classics (1987), Reader’s Digest (1990), Everyman’s Library (1994), Norton Critical Edition (2002), Barnes & Noble Classics (2003), and Modern Library Classics (2004). I have also seen two motion pictures of Kim - the first released in 1951 (directed by Victor Saville, and starring Dean Stockwell as Kim, Errol Flynn as Mahbub Ali and Paul Lukas as Lama), and the second in 1984 (directed by John Davies and starring Peter O’Tool as Lama, Bryon Brown as Mahbub Ali, and Ravi Sheth as Kim). The novel has been published as an audio-book. (I have listened to the twelve-hour cassettes produced by the Books on Tape, 1998, and narrated by Stuart Langton in his British accent. There is also an abridged version narrated by Madhav Sharma and published by Naxos Audiobooks, 1999.) Kim has been translated into many languages.

My interest in Kim is partly because I want to know how Kipling came to write this fascinating story and how he composed its various scenes and characters. In the remaining of this article, we will focus on this aspect guided by Peter Hopkirk’s valuable research work, Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling’s Great Game (1996) in addition to numerous other sources which I have consulted (Kipling’s India by Arley Munson, 1915; Kipling and India by Syed Sajjad Husain, 1964; Kipling in India by Louis Cornell, 1966; Rudyard Kipling’s India by K. Bhaskara Rao, 1967; Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches 1884-88 edited by Thomas Pinney, 1986; Rudyard Kipling’s Kim edited by Harold Bloom, 1987; Kipling’s Indian Fiction by Mark Paffard, 1989; Empires of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland by Kaori Nagai, 2006), and various editions of Kim with introductions and scholastic commentaries.

The Great Game
The story of Kim takes place in the 1880s and 1890s against the backdrop of the Great Game - a political-military rivalry between Britain and Russia over the mastery of Asia and particularly the Himalaya and India. Indeed, the term Great Game was popularized by Kim and the culmination of the novel occurs along a road from the Chini Valley (renamed the Sangla Valley or Baspa Valley) toward Simla where Kim fights with a Russian and a Frenchman who were smuggling guns through the northwestern corner of the Himalaya to carry out sabotage against the British Raj. This combination of a Russian and a Frenchman in the story is rather strange because the Russians were traditionally considered to compete with the British in central-south Asia. However, Hopkirk argues that the Frenchman in the novel was probably inspired by the French explorer Gabriel Bonvalot, who had crossed the Pamirs, entering India in 1887. Bonvalot was actually pro-British; however, in Kipling’s political thought, the French also posed a threat to the British India. Although several Russian explorers and military officers had come to the Pamirs and northwest Himalaya in the nineteenth century, Hopkirk singles out Captain Gromchevsky as a closest model for the Russian man in Kim because Gromchevsky with a small band of Cossacks had entered Hunza in 1888. Interestingly, in his book, Central Asia (1891), Bonvalot writes of his meeting with Gromchevsky who had given him information about routes in the Pamirs.

Kim’s History and Geography
“He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah, on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher - the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum.”

This is how Kipling charmingly opens his novel, and we are introduced to Kim, an orphan boy of 13 living with a half-caste woman who smoked opium and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop in Lahore. Kim’s mother was a nursemaid in a colonel’s family, and Kim’s father, Kimbal O’Hara, a sergeant of the Irish regiment, had become an alcoholic after his wife died of cholera, and had finally drawn to the Lahore woman’s house where he smoked opium and finally died leaving Kim in her care. Kim grew up among Indian children (both Hindu and Muslim boys) and knew the languages and customs of Indians. Moreover, Kim was a curious boy with an open mind for people and cultures; indeed he was known as the “Little Friend of All the World.” In some ways, these overlap with Kipling’s own childhood when he had a “Hindu bearer” (by the name of Meeta) in Bombay who “would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs” in Hindustani (as Kipling writes in Something of Myself “and we were sent into the dinning-room after we had been dressed, with the caution ‘Speak English now to Papa and Mamma’). Kim relates that he was born on “first night of May” the year a strong earthquake shook Kashmir; this would place his birth in 1865 and exactly on Kipling’s own birthday!

But where did Kipling get the idea of Kim’s adventure? Hopkirk suggests two factual stories. In 1812, Durie, the son of a British soldier and an Indian woman, suddenly showed up at the bungalow of a British officer, Mountstuart Elphinstone, and told him of his adventures in Afghanistan. (This is documented in Elphinstone’s book, An Account of the Kingdom of Caboul.) The second and a more probable candidate for Kim is Nagmay Doola, the son of an Irish sergeant and a Tibetan woman, who was wounded and captured by British soldiers during a battle with the Tibetans in 1889. Nagmay Doola could not speak English although he had a fair complexion. Subsequently, it was found out that his father Tim Doolan (note how Tim rhymes with Kim) deserted from his regiment and went first Sikkim and then to Tibet. After Namgay Doola’s wounds were healed, he went back to Tibet - never to be heard of him again. This story appeared in The Globe in 1889, and Kipling definitely knew of it for he also wrote a short story entitled “Namgay Doola” having a similar plot and included it in his book Life’s Handicap, published two year later.

The gun Zam-Zammah mentioned in the opening of Kim (“who hold Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-breathing dragon,’ hold the Punjab”) still exists in Lahore (placed opposite to the Lahore Museum). It was built in Lahore in 1762 on the orders of Ahmad Shah Durrani, the Afhan ruler of the Punjab, and its last battle was in 1818 when it was damaged. The Lahore Museum also has an interesting story. We know that Kipling’s father, a knowledgeable man of arts and culture, was a curator there from 1875 through 1893. Indeed, he appears as the curator of the Wonder House in Kim, talking with the Tibetan Lama (whom Kim had taken there) about Buddhist images and places. Hopkirk comments that the present Lahore Museum, which many tourists and Kipling scholars mistake for the museum described in Kim, is a new museum opened in 1894, a year after Lockwood Kipling had left Lahore. The old museum, Hopkirk has found out, “stood next to the Central Post Office, only a stone’s throw from the present museum, and was housed in a building originally constructed for the great Punjab Exhibition of 1864 ... No longer a museum filled with Buddhist art treasures, it has been turned into a covered market, selling a host of everyday goods. It is to be found several hundred yards to the left of the Lahore museum, on the same side of the Mall, but across another, secondary road.”

The geography of Kim almost overlaps with areas Kipling himself had seen or lived - Lahore, Ferozpore, Karachi, Leh, Simla (Shimla), Umballa (Ambala), Delhi, Saharunpore, Lucknow, Benaras (Varanasi), Calcutta (Kolkata), Bombay (Mumbai), the Doon Valley, the Grand Trunk Road (dating back to the Indian Mogul period and today called National Highway 1), the Punjab, the Great Desert of Rajputana (Rajasthan), the Ganges (“Gunga”), and of course, the western Himalaya including the Khyber Pass (which Kipling visited in 1885 to report on talks between Abdur Rahman the Emir of Afghanistan and the Viceroy Lord Dufferin). The Khyber Pass was always regarded as strategic place by the British because they believed that any military invasion by Russians into India would be through the Khyber Pass (on the border with Afghanistan) - as the Moguls and other invaders had done so in the past.

Tibetan Lama
An important character introduced early in the novel is the Tibetan Lama who came from to Lahore “by Kulu - from beyond the Kailas ... where the air and water are fresh and cool.” The Lama makes sure that Kim and its readers understand his identity and objectives at once. He is not a pahari (a hillman) nor Khitai (Chinese) but from Bhotiyal (Tibet) who is on a pilgrimage to holy places of the Buddha’s life in India (“before I die”), including the Fountain of Wisdom or the River of Arrow, where Lord Buddha’s arrow had fallen when as a young boy he threw the arrow to demonstrate his strength. Kim becomes Lama’s chela (disciple) and they travel together along the Grand Trunk Road and in the Himalayas- the Lama in search of the River of Arrow, and Kim in search of adventures and his destiny (specifically looking for “a red bull on a green field” which his father had prophesied to bring welfare to Kim.)

Kipling knew about the Buddha’s life, probably through Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia (1879). But how did he get the idea of including a Tibetan Lama - especially “a Red Lama” (belonging to the Red Hat Order of Tibetan Buddhism even though the Yellow Hat Order was much better known) in his novel? Hopkirk’s research has led to a letter dated 16 May 1902 which Luckwood Kipling wrote to the famed explorer Sir Aurel Stein: “I wonder whether you have seen my son’s Kim, and recognized an old lama whom you saw at the old Museum and at the School.”

At the end of the story, the Lama finds the River of the Arrow on a farmland close to Saharunpore; but this was not a mighty river as readers would have expected but an irrigation canal! In this way, Kipling tells us that what the Lama was searching for was enlightenment and inner realization.

Mahbub Ali
“The big burly Afghan, his beard dyed with lime” - Mahbub Ali - enters the story as “one of the best horse dealers in the Punjab, a wealthy and enterprising dealer, whose caravans penetrated far and far into the Back of Beyond.” But he was actually a British spy registered with “the Indian Survey Department as C.2.1B.” This name-code reminds us of the nineteenth century “Pundits” - a group of native Indians who were employed, trained and sent by the Survey of India to explore, map and report on the activities of foreigners in places beyond the Himalaya. Some of these “Pundits” included Nain Singh Rawat (“No. 1”), his cousin Mani Singh (“GM”), second cousin Kalian Singh (“GK”), and yet another younger cousin Kishen Singh (“AL”).
Hopkirk’s research shows that there actually lived an Afghan (Pathan) horse-dealer named Mahbub Ali in Lahore and Kipling knew him. According to Ray Robinson, the editor of the Civil and Military Gazette (for which Kipling worked in Lahore), Mahbub Ali would sometimes call on “Kuppeleen Sahbi” and would tell him stories of his travels to lands beyond the Khyber Pass. This real Mahbub Ali stayed at Sultan Serai (which exists today) renamed as the Kashmir Serai in Kim. General Sir George McMunn (who lived in Lahore in the 1890s) in his book Rudyard Kipling: Craftsman (1938) refers to the real Mahbub Ali and writes that his father, a Kabuli horse dealer, took part in the 1839 ill-fated British war in Afghanistan and finally settled in Lahore. Mahbub Ali had three sons (Wazir, Afzul, and Aslam, whom McMunn knew personally); they inherited their father’s business but did not do well.

Colonel Creighton
Kim’s first assignment in the novel is to carry a written message from Mahbub Ali to Colonel William Creighton, the chief of the British secret service stationed in Umballa (his bungalow which Kim visited was secretly coded as “Laurel Bank” in telegrams). Creighton had close contacts with the Jang-i-Lat Sahib (the Commander-in-Chief) based in Simla. In Kipling’s days, Hopkirk informs us, “Umballa had a population of 50,000 people, of whom just over half were connected in one way or another with the military establishment.” Colonel Creighton was probably modeled on Captain Thomas George Montgomerie (1830-1878) of the Survey of India who started the Pundits program. Montgomerie was awarded a Gold Medal from the Royal Geographic Society in 1865 and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1872. Interestingly, Creighton also officially works for the Survey of India and is ambitious to become an FRS. Although we do not hear the name of the Commander-in-Chief in Kim, Field Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar was the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army during 1885-1893; Kipling (as he informs us in his autobiography) had met him once in Simla The British military in Simla had indeed setup a small Intelligence Branch in 1879, but if Kipling derives so much inspiration from actual events and personalities, it is interesting to note that in 1904, three years after Kim was published, the British rejuvenated their intelligence service much like Colonel Creighton’s system of spies.

Lurgan Sahib and His Shop
Lurgan Sahib, an Englishman who owned a shop in Simla and trained Kim (during Kim’s holidays from St. Xavier’s school) in matters of sharp memory, hypnotism and spying for the Great Game, is a mysterious character in the novel, but what is more interesting is that Lurgan Sahib is modeled on a more mysterious but real personality - A. M . Jacob. He was a gem-seller in Simla and also a British agent. Jacob died on 17 January 1921, and most of what we know about him comes from an obituary published in The Times, London. He was a Turkish boy sold as a slave to a rich Pasha who educated him. Jacob spoke several Asian and European languages, and after his master’s death, he traveled in the Middle East widely, finally arriving in Bombay. He sold the valuable Victoria diamond to the Nizam of Hyderabad (now called the Jacob Diamond, it is in the possession of the Government of India). Jacob was well known as a man of occult powers in Simla (even Madam Blavatasky, a founder of the Theosophy Society, who once lived in Simla “had to admit his superiority in providing at will supernatural phenomena,” The Times article claimed). Jacob was living in Simla when Kim was published, but ultimately he went bankrupt and died in poverty in Bombay at the age of 71. Although Jacob’s house still exists in Simla (a place called Belvedere), Simla historians and Kipling scholars have not been able to locate Jacob’s Shop which is believed to be the inspiration for Lurgan Sahib’s shop of magic and mysteries.

Bengali Babu
After Kim enters the Great Game, a Bengali Babu, “gentleman” or Hurree Chunder Mookrejee (“R.17”) appears in the novel. He introduces himself as having an M.A. from Calcutta University. Blair King (in the Norton Critical Edition of Kim, 2002) writes that “Mookrejee personifies the 645 Indians who had earned an M.A. from Calcutta University by 1888 ...Like Mookrejee, many Bengalis had left their native city, Calcutta, to seek their fortunes in other parts of India. Bengalis were spread over north India as teachers, lawyers, doctors, and government officials, teaching techniques of political organization to their less cosmopolitan brethren in the Punjab and Ganges plain.”

Although Kipling and Kim appreciate the Bengali Babu’s services to the British Great Game, they cannot hide their contemptuous feelings towards Bengalis: “I am a fearful man and I do not like responsibility,” Kipling quotes Mookrejee. “He robbed them, thought Kim ... “He tricked them. He lied to them like a Bengali.” The Kipling scholar from Bangladesh Dr. Sajjad Husain (in Kipling and India) remarks that Kipling treats the Bengali Hindu characters in his first Indian works (Departmental Ditties and Plain Tales from the Hills) in much more negative ways. Husain then argues that “Kipling’s contempt and hostility explains itself only in the light of the fact that he associated the Babus with the Indian Congress movement which he recognized as a challenge to British rule. The Babus were contemptible because they were hybrids who demanded rights and created difficulties.”

Hopkirk suggest that Hurree Chunder Mookrejee is modeled on the “Pundit” agent Babu Surat Chandra Das who was also a Calcutta graduate and had published a book (Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet, Calcutta, 1885) about his clandestine journeys into Tibet, disguised as a Buddhist scholar. Chandra Das was alive while Kipling was working on Kim.

St. Xavier’s School
Kim was an illiterate boy when he met the Lama. But after his true identity - being the son of an Irish sergeant in the Regiment of the Mavericks - was discovered by British officers (Kim always carried an amulet hung on his neck and which contained his birth certificate), the British decided to educate him. The school he was sent to - St. Xavier’s - does not exist in Lucknow, but undoubtedly it was modeled on a similar school in the British India of those days. The Dehra Dun school, where several “Pundits” were trained, comes closest to St. Xavier’s, but Hopkirk assures us that a particular school in Lucknow - La Martiniere College - was in Kipling’s mind. This school was built in 1800 by the will of a French adventurer, Claude Martin, who had left huge capital for such a school. La Martinere College (housing Calude Martin’s tomb) is still active in Lucknow.
Kipling and Freemasonry
When Kim was sixteen, he left St. Xavier’s, and employed by Colonel Creighton, he hit the Road of the Great Game. (Interestingly, Kipling also came to India when he was sixteen having graduated from the United Service College.) An unofficial ceremony for the initiation of Kim was performed by the Bengali Babu in presence of Mahbub Ali. In this meeting, the Babu tells Kim that from now on he would have the protection of a native secret society called the Sat Bhai or Seven Brothers, but he has to remember and utter the secret phrase (“I am Son of the Charm”) and carry around his neck the secret amulet to identify him when he is in danger. All these rituals and secret codes remind one of the Freemasonry Order, to which Kipling admitted in Lahore. (Hopkirk reports that the old Masonic temple in Lahore, to which Kipling went, still exists but is used as a Government office.) Kipling’s biographer Charles Carrington (in Rudyard Kipling, 1955) explains Kipling’s interest in Freemasonry as “a system which gratified both his craving for a world-religion and his devotion to the secret bond that unites ... the men who bear the burden of the world’s work.”

Kim: Afterword
Kipling leaves Kim alive but with an unknown destiny. One wonders how he would have continued his novel to the end (if he ever desired to do so). An Indian novelist, T. N. Murari has exactly done this but in his own preferred way. In two less-known novels, The Imperial Agent: The Sequel to Kipling’s Kim (1987) and The Last Victory (1988), Murari takes Kim to unravel a plot by Indian revolutionaries to assassinate Lord Curzon. Kim is, however, mistakenly arrested and imprisoned. Colonel Creighton instead of saving Kim asks him to stay in the prison and spy on Indian revolutionaries from within. Gradually, Kim becomes sympathetic to the cause of India’s liberation from British colonialism. In the second book, Kim marries an Indian revolutionary and has a daughter from her. Finally, Kim is killed by the British troops at the April 1919 massacre in Amritsar, and in revenge Kim’s wife shots Colonel Creighton (knighted and retired by then).

Kipling: Afterword
Over the past century, many scholars have commented on Kipling and Kim from various perspectives. Many believe that Kim is a masterpiece in English literature, while some consider Kim merely a boy’s tale of adventures (not a real novel). Some scholars have criticized Kipling to be a staunch supporter of the British colonial rule in India and elsewhere - which he definitely was, but in the sense that he idealized the Empire to be good for everyone, and in this idealization he, of course, ignored some ugly facts on the side of British rulers and some painful realities on the side of native Indians. Nonetheless, Kipling was not a warmonger or a preacher of bloodshed (even in Kim, the Russian and Frenchman are not killed in the end but left on the Simla Mall). Some scholars have criticized Kim as an “Orientalist” novel which tries to create an image of an exotic, changeless, obedient, fascinating India for the pleasure of the West.

All these views, of course, contain some truth and valid points, but there are also several important features of Kim that make it so readable and lovable even today. For one thing, as this article shows, Kim was not entirely a fantasy but woven together from historical elements and realities on the ground. Second, Kim presents a panorama of colorful landscape and diverse personalities; indeed, this is the first major piece of English literature (because of Kipling’s own upbringing) in which ordinary people from India and the Himalaya are portrayed with their words and expressions, from familiar words such as babu, chela, guru, fakir, yogi to more local words like but-parast (idol-worshipper), jadoo-gher (magician), choor (thief), hakim (physician), yagi (bad-tempered), etc. Third, the tolerance and understanding that Kipling and Kim show to diverse religions in India and the Himalayan region is to be admired (especially in our time). Fourth, there is also a spiritual dimension to Kim - an old man and a young boy both are searching for something beyond, for a true identity. Whether or how they find it is irrelevant; the process of searching is meaningful.

The political dimension, which Kipling tried to create in Kim (where Indians do not even question the British rule and take it for granted), is no more a burning issue; India is now independent and strong. But for all those reasons cited above, I think, Kim will remain a classic in the Himalayan literature.

Bibliographic Note: There are numerous biographies of Rudyard Kipling from two official ones - Charles Carrington’s Rudyard Kipling (1955) and Lord Birkenhead’s Rudyard Kipling (1978) - through my favorite books, Philip Mason’s Kipling: The Glass, the Shadow and the Fire (1975), Angus Wilson’s The Strange Side of Rudyard Kipling (1977) to more recent biographies: Rudyard Kipling by Martin Seymour-Smith (1989), Rudyard Kipling by Andrew Lycett (1999), Rudyard Kipling: A Life by Harry Ricketts (2000), The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling by David Gilmour (2202), Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life by Phillip Mallett (2003). If you love words and pictures together (as I do), you may refer to Rudyard Kipling: An Illustrated Biography by Martin Fido (1974, 1986), Rudyard Kipling and His World by Kingsley Amis (1975) or From Palm to Pine: Rudyard Kipling Abroad and At Home by Marghanita Laski (1987).


Summary
An analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) from historical and geographic perspectives to understand how this great Himalayan novel was composed and why it has become a classic.

Figures
Figure 1. A portrait of Rudyard Kipling on the title page of the Illustrated London News the day he passed away. (The drawing is done by Sir William Rothernstein.)

Figure 2. A map of NW British India with reference to places in Kim. (Map by Rasoul Sorkhabi modified from the map in the Oxford University Press’ edition of Kim, 1987.)