In all its complexity, this really is a simple book: it is simply an exuberant vision of India.

I wanted a book that would give me an English Colonialist view of India. It is a rather hard thing to find: few English Victorian writers of any consequence wrote about India. It wasn't until later, ie, Orwell and Forster, that it became a popular topic, and they wrote with a vastly different attitude. I just wanted to know what an Englishman thought of the "jewel in the English colonial crown".

What I found is exactly what I wanted: so exactly that it caught me off guard. Kipling offers no politics, neither "problems of England in India" or "The White Man's Burden". Kim is, quite simply, a vision of India. Exuberant, complex, vibrant, full of energy and life and change. This is Kipling's India. It is a beautiful, mysterious, dangerous, amazing place.

There is a hint of mass market fiction here -- the basic structure being a young boy, a prodigy, uniquely equipped to help the adults in important "adult" matters -- reminds me of Ender's Game or Dune (both books I loved, but not exactly "literature". But perhaps this isn't either. Such was the claim of critic after critic. But anyway.) Yet in reality it is only a device -- an excuse for Kipling to take his boy on adventures and to immerse us more fully in the pugnant waters of Indian culture -- or cultures.

As far as the English/Colonialism question goes, perhaps the real reason Kipling drew so much flak is because he deals his English critics the most cruel insult -- worse than calling them evil, or stupid, or wrong, he implies that they just don't matter that much. Kipling's India is a diverse place, with a plethora of people groups in it, divided by caste, religion, ethnicity, whatever. And the English, the "Sahibs"? Another people group. That's all. They don't dominate or corrupt or really change anything in any profound way; they just sort of become part of the broiling swirl of cultures and peoples that is India.
--
williekrischke@hotmail.com

This is a very entertaining novel, though not as good as the best of Kipling's short stories. As an adventure-oriented bildungsroman, Kim is well constructed with its gradual exposure of the ethnic and religous diversity of India, its engaging characters, and good quality of writing. While written as an adventure novel, Kim is also Kipling's prediction of the British Raj would become. The hero, Kim O'Hara, is in many ways an idealization of what saw as the logical conclusion of British India; a hybrid composed of both Indian and British elements. In an ironic way, this is how things turned out in British India. But where Kim is ethnically British with a largely Indian cultural background, the real inheritors of the British Raj were ethnic Indians (of a variety of ethnicities, castes, and faiths) whose outlook is colored strongly by Western influences.

How this book is read in a 'post-colonial' era is an interesting question. It would be easy, and wrong, to dismiss this book merely as an Imperialist tract, though Kipling clearly supported British Imperial control. It is even wronger to attack Kipling's racism, though there are unquestionably stereotyped elements present. In many ways, Kim is a celebration of India's ethnic and religous diversity. Probably the most unsympathetic characters in the book are not Indian, but Britishers with provincial outlooks. Kipling's support of the Empire is rather more subtle. It is clear that he viewed the existence of the huge and relatively tolerant polyglot society that was the Raj as the result of relatively benign British rule and protection. This is probably true. Without British overlordship, India is likely to have been a congeries of competing states riven by ethnic and religous divisions. Where Kipling is profoundly misleading is what he leaves out, particularly the economic exploitation India and crucial role India played in the Imperial economy.

To be honest, I disdained Kipling as a writer ever since turning away from the Jungle Book movie. When pressed to read his more representative novel "Kim", however, I was much more impressed. Kipling picks up on the bildungsroman theme in his book about a young white boy growing up in British India. True, the reader feels the heavy intrusion of Kipling in the narrative, such as the caricatured descriptions of ethnic peoples, but one also feels a genuine fondness for India, however patronizingly misplaced.

I thought some passages were quite remarkable for a writer at the height of the British Raj, such as the occasional sympathetic treatment of Indians and the allowance of deep relationships between the conquerors and the conquered (e.g., Kim and Mahbub Ali). The feeling of youth is well-given and Kipling succeeds at making the horror of imperialism both remote and romantic.