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This was life as he would have it – bustling and shouting, the buckling of belts, and beating of bullocks and creaking of wheels, lighting of fires and cooking of food, and new sights at every turn of the approving eye. The morning mist swept off in a whorl of silver, the parrots shot away to some distant river in shrieking green hosts: all the well-wheels within earshot went to work. India was awake, and Kim was in the middle of it, more awake and excited than anyone.
(K, 103–4)Kim is the Kipling book that people like who don't like Kipling.
A COLONIAL FICTION
Kim (1901), the most enchanting of Kipling's fictions and the only one ever to be compared with the great traditional names Dickens, Shakespeare, or Chaucer, is that rare thing, a colonial fiction that takes ethnic and cultural otherness as a source of pleasure, not anxiety. As Angus Wilson wrote,
Kipling's passionate interest in people and their vocabularies and their crafts is, of course, the essence of the magic of all his work. But in all the other books it tends to be marred by aspects of his social ethic – by caution, reserve, distrust, mastered emotion, stiff upper lips, direct puritanism or the occasional puritan's leer, retributive consequences, cruelty masquerading as justifiable restraint or bullying as the assertion of superiority. None of these is present in Kim.
Not all readers and critics will agree with this account. The postcolonial critics Zohreh Sullivan and Joseph Bristow find Kipling's inner contradictions and his imperialist politics lurking beneath his loving portrayal of India's rich diversity, while Thomas Richards reads Kim as an imperialist fantasy of comprehensive knowledge. Given that the boy hero's growth to the verge of manhood culminates in becoming a successful spy for the British Government as well as a devoted disciple to the Buddhist priest, lovers of this novel clearly do have serious critiques to answer. But before discussing these, it is useful to begin with a summary of the novel.
The boy Kim is a hybrid, born Irish and bred Indian. ‘Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song’ (K, 1), he is a white boy whose real name is Kimball O'Hara.
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