Said wrong on Kipling's Kim

To understand Kipling's position in Anglo Indian literature- at least as far as his one great novel is concerned- one must compare him with his precursor, Phillip Meadows Taylor, who served for a number of years in India and who married an 'Eurasian'. His books were romantic, highlighted the heroic role of Indian women, and were often told from an Indian perspective. Even where the protagonist is English- e.g. 'Ralph Darnell'- we read of an Indian female warrior rescuing and nursing the fellow back to health. However, Meadows Taylor's most famous work was based on the painstaking work done by Sleeman in suppressing Thuggee. Interestingly, Kipling drew on Sleeman's tome about feral children for his 'Jungle Book'.

Kipling, writing for a cynical, not sentimental, age, knew much less about India than Taylor- which is why Rudyard plays up the notion that kids in India can somehow gain a sort of limited omniscience just by prattling away to the bhisthi and the khidmatgar and the tonga wallah. His 'knowingness' is irritating but he and he alone can take a dinner table anecdote and turn it into something which, at first blush, is rooted in Memsahib bigotry but which suddenly unspools in the reverse direction. Perhaps, the lad wanted to be Maupassant but his denouements invariably lead us back to the Sermon on the Mount. 

Another way to situate a writer is to look at those inspired by him. In the case of Kipling, this would be Salman Rushdie surely a great enough writer to 'create his precursors'- i.e. alter our reception of them? 

Edward Said's introduction to Kipling's Kim came out 35 years ago. Since Said knew nothing of India and little of England, and didn't want to say anything about Rushdie, it was understandably shit. Still, each line in it is worth examining because it reveals a particular bias or blind-spot in the American academic mind.  

Kim is as unique in Rudyard Kipling's life and career as it is in English literature.

No. It is like Taylor's 'Confessions of a Thug' which is still very readable. It has a superficial similarity to Tagore's 'Gora'- which features a British kid who is ignorant of his biological origin and thus believes himself to be Indian. Kipling would also write about a human kid brought up with animals. In both cases 'oikeiosis'- belonging and 'appropriation'- occurs through 'suhrit praapti'- the gaining of 'like-hearted' colleagues and the Yoga-which-is-work-to- some-eusocial-end. Kipling is the 'poet of work'. Tagore, too, was a worker, not a drone. The difference was that Tagore collected rents from a big chunk of the countryside as a zamindar. The Empire existed for his benefit. Kipling was a poorly paid journalist with little independence to criticize 'Authority'. But, as a creative writer, he had great license which, on the whole, he used responsibly enough.  

It appeared in 1901, twelve years after Kipling had left India, the place of his birth in 1865 and the country with which his name will always be associated.

Kipling was a worker, not an artist, when he lived in India. It was a 'karmabhoomi' not a 'bhogabhumi'- a field for work, not tranquil reflection or the Parnassian cultivation of the arts.  This was because Indians- even Anglo-Indians- used and use English only for utilitarian purposes. By contrast, Kipling's dad was an artist. He did the illustrations and supplied his son with plots and characters for Kim which was first serialised in an American magazine, McClure's, which paid 25,000 dollars for it. The equivalent would be about 5 million now. 

It should be mentioned that before Kipling left India, he (following the line laid down by the proprietors of the paper he worked for) had attacked the new Indian National Congress in vigorous, not to say libelous, terms. This wasn't racial. The paper was sympathetic to Sir Syed Ahmed's Muslim association which had been formed at that time. 

It is true, however, that Kipling's political views on India throughout his life remained the same as they had been in 1888 when he was under the influence of his father and the lower class of British officials, or semi-officials, in India.

This didn't greatly matter because nobody thought Kipling understood politics save such as might arise if a conclave of wolves chose to solicit the counsel of a sagacious bear or a python with a reputation for incisive wit and an acknowledged mastery of the arcana of Quantitative Easing. 

More interestingly than that, however, is that Kim was Kipling's only successfully sustained and mature piece of long fiction;

Because McClure paid a good enough price for the effort to be worthwhile. Also, sonny boy got to showcase his father's art. This was a time when, as Robert Browning complained, painters had become far richer, indeed, more respectable, than poets or novelists. Still, it must be said, John Lockwood had met the Queen. Two of his wife's sisters had both married famous painters. His own family became quite close to the Viceroy in Simla. But they hadn't made a lot of money. 

I should mention that Kipling's people, and more importantly the guys who paid his salary, hated Lord Ripon and A.O Hume- whom they believed was secretly controlling the 'Brown Babus'.  Kipling also believed Randolph Churchill's claim that Ripon had neglected the defense of the frontier. Thus, just as the child Todd- in Todd's Amendment- saves a province from famine, so too must the boy Kim go off to the Frontier to repair what Ripon had ripped up. 

although it can be read with enjoyment by adolescents it can also be read with respect and interest years afterwards, both by the general reader and the critic alike.

It can only be read with increasing profit by someone who knows something of Indian religion and literary culture. The very name 'Kim' is related to the Rg Vedic 'Ka' and the Kena Upanishad. The boy, Kim, is related to the Sage Vishvamitra (friend of all the world) who has a Moses like power over rivers or bodies of water.  

Kipling's other fiction consists either of short stories (or collections thereof, such as The Jungle Books), or of deeply flawed longer works (like Captains Courageous, The Light That Failed and Stalky and Co., works whose otherwise interesting qualities are often overshadowed by failures of coherence, of vision, or of judgement).

'Stalky' is fine.  'Captains' was commissioned by McClure's and was pretty good given that Kipling had little knowledge of the subject matter. A young poet is permitted to write a highly personal novel after a romantic disappointment. 'Light' accepts that Art is hard-work not airy-fairy aestheticism. 

Only Joseph Conrad, another master stylist,

Kipling wasn't a master of prose. He was something better- viz. a ballad poet whose genius was natural if not 'naturaliter Christiana'. But, as a Freemason, Kipling's daemon was subordinated to- not Solomon whose 'inheritance can never befall another'- but a King of Kings from whom every child can inherit everything. Certainly, for the child I was in Nairobi and Delhi- Kipling's Jungle Books (but also Norah Burke's 'Jungle Pictures' and other such works)- served, so to speak, as my Hitopadesha. Sadly, it's horizon, in my case, wasn't Yoga but, rather, Viyogini Whiskey. Whitey is welcome to English's daemon. Myself, liking only Bollywood's Devdas.

can be considered along with Kipling, his slightly younger peer, to have rendered the experience of empire with such force,

But the Congo Free State wasn't part of an Empire- which is why it was so shitty. In any case, there was no univocal 'experience of empire'. The thing was highly ideographic.

Conrad was a sailor who was also a fine novelist. Kipling, kept out of the Army by his poor eyesight, was a poet of genius who, thanks to his journalistic training, wrote some great stories. Because he worked hard, he 'shows more than he knows'. Said and his ilk pretend to know about literature but what they write shows they fucking hate what they are incapable of producing. 

and even though the two artists are remarkably different in tone and style, they brought to a basically insular and provincial British audience

Kim was written for the American market. On the other hand, The Jungle Book stories were well received in England before being taken up by McClure's.  Still, Kipling had taken an early liking for American literature which, let's face it, was fucking marvelous. 

A quite separate point is that Kipling wrote more naturally about India when living in America because, had he been in England, many of his readers would have known much more about his subject matter than he did himself. Indeed, even into the Seventies, budding Indian novelists in London hesitated to paint with a broad brush on an Indian canvass because they knew they'd be deluged with letters from retired Colonels or ICS officers very politely correcting their ignorance. This is one reason, Indglish novels are largely about Aunties and Uncles and Grannies and so forth. 

the colour, the glamour and the romance of the British overseas enterprise.

was communicated by Southey and Tom Moore and so forth. But that was when 'Nabobs' returned from India- if they hadn't died of dysentery- with ample fortunes. Indeed, even wealthy natives, like 'Prince' Dwarkanath were lionized in London and Paris. Peak 'Orientalism' for England was the publication of 'Confessions of a Thug' in 1839. Queen Victoria ordered the proofs to be brought to her hot off the press- so gripping was that narrative. Its author- Meadows Taylor- worked for the Nizam.  But, during the 1840's a lot of Anglo-Indian Business Houses crashed while Britain's own Railway Companies boomed. An investor- like the Aunty in 'Way of all Flesh'- who sold Consols and bought Railway stock became very wealthy. 

Of the two, it is Kipling - less ironic,

Fuck, the fucking fuck, off! Journalism in India back then was meta-meta-meta fucking amphibolous and ironic because of a little thing called Section 499 of the  Indian Penal Code. Also, it was badly paid and the proprietors were only looking to create a threat point so as to get some juicy contract or engage in a yet more arcane type of jobbery. 

Conrad was a sailor- a profession held in high repute at that time precisely because its members were decent and down to earth. True, being Polish- i.e. having a huge fucking IQ and natural talent for mathematical logic, basically the bloke was a Tarski avant la lettre- his English may appear mannered. It isn't. Poles are just way smarter than us. They are conscientious craftsmen. But there is nothing ambiguous about their Faith or their Patriotism or their burning desire to be free.

technically self-conscious, and equivocal than Conrad - who acquired a large audience relatively early in life.

Kipling had genius. Conrad was a craftsman, albeit a very good and conscientious one.

But both writers have remained something of a puzzle for readers of English literature,

not Kipling for Indians. As for Conrad- how is he puzzling? The guy was a Polish sailor who didn't like the Tzar and did like England. Poles may be profound, they are not puzzling.  

whose scholars have found the two men eccentric, often troubling, figures, better treated with circumspection or even avoidance than absorbed and domesticated.

Said uses the word 'scholar' in a spirit of pure farce.  

But whereas Conrad's major visions of imperialism concern Africa in Heart of Darkness (1902),

where there was no Imperialism- only a 'Free State'- i.e. a private corporation whose atrocious conduct was reviled by genuine Imperial Civil Servants.  

the South Seas in Lord Jim (1900),

'Patusan' is independent.  

South America in Nostromo (1904),

South America had long been independent 

Kipling's greatest work concentrates on India,

a portion of the Grand Trunk Road and the Afghan frontier 

a territory never visited or treated by Conrad.

because it was far from the sea. Conrad simply wasn't a novelist of Imperialism. 

For indeed, India was the greatest, the most durable, and profitable of all British colonial possessions.

No. Most provinces barely broke even. The rate of profit on the whole enterprise was low- at best, three or four percent though the secular trend would have been lower. Still, the thing looked pretty much gilt edged- till the Kaiser's war.  

From the time the first British expedition

a purely commercial enterprise 

arrived there in 1608, until the last British Viceroy departed in 1947,

Mountbatten stayed on as Governor General till 1948. He was a great pal of Nehru. 

India acquired an increasingly massive and influential role in British life,

Nonsense! Neither Nabob nor West Indian magnate changed anything vital. Even the 'great Commoner' was coopted. What changed Britain- just as what changed France after the Bourbon restoration- was the manner in which the deficit was financed.  A class of 'riskless asset' was created. This meant there could be 'canonical' or 'Muth Rational' portfolio choice. Marx rated Balzac but didn't get his message- Consols create Capitalism. But the thing aint as innocent and Convent educated as might appear. Consols are Madam Bovary, are Flaubert, are a self deluding Chrematistics both literary and literal. 

Said, being a Professor of Stupid Shit, may not have known that the political wings of John Company had been increasingly clipped about a decade before the 1833 Act. The Mutiny did cause a sharp reaction but once direct rule was established India became boring and safe. There was a brief flurry of concern over young Indian Revolutionaries and what would become the 'Indo-German conspiracy' but nothing came of it. Still, there were a couple of stories- one by Ernst Bramah, the other by Somerset Maugham- which dealt with a problem Mahatma Gandhi and Charles Tegart, between them albeit in different ways, disposed off once and for all. Incidentally, Tagore wrote a novel violently attacking 'nihilistic' Hindu terrorists.

The Brits could have given India, in 1924, what they gave Ireland but the Indians weren't keen. Knowing the door was open meant that all conflict was reduced to the question of who would go through it first. Ultimately, it was American refusal to refinance the Empire that forced the Indians to accept the departure of the British- with predictably catastrophic results for millions of Indians. 

in commerce and trade, in industry, politics, ideology, war and, by the middle of the eighteenth century,

Nope. China was way cooler back then. India became fashionable with the rise of the Romantics.  

in culture and the life of the imagination. In English literature and thought the list of great names who dealt with and wrote about India is astonishingly impressive, since it includes William Jones,

who was in India 

Edmund Burke,

who was hired by Indians to attack Warren Hastings 

William Makepeace Thackeray,

who was born in India and was Victorian. He did write for an Indian paper owned by a relative but he set no fiction of his own in that country. But then neither did Lawrence Durrell. To write about the place you need to find either its animals or its women, or bum-boys, in the case of EM Forster, enchanting. 

Jeremy Bentham,

who was against Empire though Benthamites like Mill and Bentnick were for it- probably for the excellent reason that they were paid to be so.  

James and John Stuart Mill, Lord Macaulay,

all paid, at one time or another, by John Company 

Wilfred Scawen Blunt,

a slow witted horse-breeder used by the Brits to establish their veiled protectorate over Egypt.  

Harriet Martineau,

who, because she lacked a penis, had zero influence 

E. M. Forster

who tutored Ross Massood and, later, was private secretary to a rather peculiar Maharajah. But then Forster was thoroughly queer himself.  

and, of course, Rudyard Kipling, whose role in the definition, the imagination, the formulation of what India was to the British Empire in its mature phase, just before the whole edifice began to split and crack, is extraordinarily important.

It had zero importance. Kipling was out of date. India was no longer a place where work counted. It had become the land of blathershites. Theosophists triumphed. Viceroy Lytton's daughter was one. The future lay with shitheads like Said who can produce only Grievance Studies or babble about how God wants us all to fuck ourselves in the ass so as to defeat nastiness.  

Kipling not only wrote about India, he was of it.

Only as much as Thackeray or Saki or Lawrence Durrell. There were other Brits who spent a few years in journalism or the Army or whatever in India and who made money writing about it. John Masters is an example. I suppose Rumer Godden gets a higher place because she spent more time in India.  

His father, John Lockwood, a refined scholar,

No. He devoted himself to the decorative arts after leaving school. His father, a Methodist minister, was able to get him an apprenticeship in a pottery while he attended the Stoke Art School. There was nothing refined about this. 

teacher, and artist who is the model for the kindly curator of the Lahore Museum in Chapter 1 of Kim, was a teacher in British India.

He trained craftsmen and artisans as he himself had been trained. He was hired by a Parsi foundation on a salary of Rs. 400 a year- scarcely a princely sum- which he supplemented by private tutoring. Moreover, having adopted Ruskin's theory that Indians were bestial (because of the 1857 atrocities against Whites) he held firmly to the view that Indians were incapable of intellectual maturity. That was fine because he was basically an artisan. His best student, a Ramgarhia (carpenter caste) Sikh, did well for himself. The fact is, nobody is capable of intellectual maturity. Hard work is another matter. 

Rudyard was born there in 1865 and during the first years of his life spoke Hindustani,

actually he returned to England at the age of two and thus first began to speak in English- that too with a thick Worcestershire accent.

and was very much like Kim, a sahib in native clothes.

Nonsense! He was middle class and urban. Kim's father was a working class soldier gone to the bad.  

At the age of six, he and his sister were transported to England to begin their schooling; although the experience of his first years in England (in the care of a Mrs Holloway at Southsea)

Young Rudyard had behaved so badly as a three year old that his relatives didn't want him. Thus he was farmed out to strangers.  

was appalling and deeply traumatic, it furnished him with an enduring subject matter, the interaction between youth and unpleasant authority, which Kipling rendered with great complexity and ambivalence throughout his life.

Nonsense! Kipling's point- like Saki's- is that if you are looking after kids, you have to set boundaries and RESPECT THOSE BOUNDARIES YOURSELF. It is arbitrary procedures which are objectionable. Korczak tells a story against himself of how he once put a little girl he was playing with up onto the branch of a tree. The man meant well- he was only playing- but the kid was terrified. Then the other kids on his 'Kinderplanet' orphanage came to him in a body and asked him to apologise and seek forgiveness. 

Poles- even wee ones- are civilized. Saki's Anglo-Indian kids, angry at the destruction of their pet on erroneous grounds, imperil a White suburban baby till the child's father does a proper 'prayaschitham' penance. 

Then Kipling went to one of the lesser public schools designed for children of the colonial service, the United Services College at Westward Ho! (the greatest of the schools was Haileybury, but that was reserved for upper echelons of the colonial elite).

Said is wrong. Kipling went to a School which prepared boys for the Army rather than the 'Indian Civil'. Its first principle had been a housemaster at Haileybury.  It ultimately merged with Haileybury.  

Kipling returned to India in 1882.

Because his eyesight was too poor for the Army.  

His family was still there, and so for seven years, as he tells of those events in his posthumously published autobiography Something of Myself,  he worked as a journalist in the Punjab, first on the Civil and Military Gazette, later on the Pioneer. His first stories came out of that experience, and were published locally; at that time he also began writing his poetry (or rather what T. S. Eliot has called 'verse') which was first collected in Departmental Ditties (1886). Kipling left India in 1889, never again to live there for any length of time although, like Proust, for the rest of his life he lived in his art on the memories of his early Indian years.

What he wrote depended on the market. America chose to take Kipling as representing British India. England didn't because it knew so much more about India, not to mention British peeps.  

Subsequently, Kipling lived for a while in America (and married an American woman) and South Africa, but settled in England after 1900: Kim was completed in Rottingdean, Sussex,

because he'd had to leave America after falling out with his crazy brother-in-law. He settled in England in 1896 though wintering in South Africa.  

where Kipling lived till his death in 1936. He quickly won great fame, and a large readership; in 1907 he won the Nobel Prize. His friends were rich and powerful; they included King George V, his cousin Stanley Baldwin, Thomas Hardy, and it is worthwhile mentioning that many prominent writers (among them Henry James and Joseph Conrad) spoke respectfully of him.

But it was Mark Twain that Kipling had worshipped. Mowgli is Tom Sawyer- i.e. a boy who, no matter how many adventures he has, will grow up and get married and end up as a fucking Senator or big wheel in the Meat Cartel. 

Kim is Huckleberry Finn- a Mississippi which never need reach the Sea because its depth- e'en at two fathoms, or 'mark twain'- was already fathomless. 

After the First World War (during which his son John was killed) his vision darkened considerably.

As did that of Anglophile Americans like Santayana and old Possum. 

Jack's 'dulce et decorum' death was equivocal. The fact is, for a Punjabi, or a Tamil, or a Gurkha- not to mention the patriotic people of the Isles I pollute by my flatulence- such death for a son is preferable to Saidian paideia or even Socioptroctological instruction. This was the Arithmetic that applied to England's own Frontiers. 

Although he remained a Tory imperialist, his bleak visionary stories of England and the future, coupled with eccentric animal and quasi-theological tales, forecast also a change in his reputation.

In common with other writers of his generation. 

At his death, he was accorded the honours reserved by Britain for its greatest writers. Buried in Westminster Abbey, he has remained an institution in English letters, albeit one always slightly apart from the great central strand, acknowledged but slighted, appreciated but never fully canonized.

The poor fellow hadn't been to Collidge. He was considered vulgar and a bit of a cad. Then people remembered he was related, on his mother's side, to great artists who were pals of Ruskin and William Morris. Still he was a bit 'West Ken'- but so was Yeats. 

Kipling's admirers and acolytes have often spoken of his representations of India as if the India he wrote about was a timeless, unchanging, and 'essential' locale, a place almost as much poetic as it is actual in geographic concreteness.

No. They thought India had those qualities because Indians kept saying so. But Kipling- e.g. in the 'Bridge Builders' showed the Hindu Gods were prepared to accept technological change. After all, the railways would bring more pilgrims to their most celebrated shrines.  

This, I think, is a radical misreading of works like Kim, The Jungle Books, and the first volumes of his short stories. If Kipling's India has qualities of the essential and unchanging it was because, for various reasons, he deliberately saw India that way.

No he didn't. East and West could meet. The Pathan and the Bengali Babu could team up to throw out the Russians. 

After all we do not assume that Kipling's late stories about England or his Boer War tales are about an essential England or South Africa; rather, we surmise correctly that Kipling was responding to, and in a sense imaginatively re-formulating, his sense of places at particular moments in their histories.

I think, like other authors of the period, Kipling was pointing to something atavistic, unnamable and imperishable in the English countryside. There really were fairies at the bottom of the garden. They just mightn't be very sweet and kindly, was the problem.  

The same is true of Kipling's India, which must be interpreted - as we shall interpret it presently - as a territory dominated by Britain for 300 years,

British paramountcy lasted for 150 years. In 1647, England scarcely had a presence. Even in 1747, its prospects looked bleak. By 1847, it was apparent that India would be less commercially viable than had been hoped. With the Great War, the age of Empires ended. Indians could not agree to form a Federal Government and thus kept on the British Umpire.  

now beginning to present the problems of increased unrest which would culminate in decolonization and independence.

Disraeli pointed out that India had never been conquered. The Brits merely administered it, for a fee, according to its own hoary laws and traditions. 

Two things, therefore, must be kept in mind as we read Kim. One is that, whether we like the fact or not, we should regard its author as writing not just from the dominating viewpoint of a white man describing a colonial possession,

Fuck off! Kipling should be read as a votary of the Punjab Civil Service. In Burma, he'd jump off the train and go hug any Sikh he had glimpsed so as to have the pleasure of conversing in Punjabi. 'William the Conqueror' is about Punjab Civilians sent to help out during the Madras Famine. As with the 'story of the Gadsbys'- the English woman born in India is more capable, but also more frightening, than the male. Kipling's India is not ruled by Mrs. Hawksbee but the suggestion is that maybe the country would be better off if it were. Then Annie Beasant became the head of the Home Rule League. Suddenly Congress was pushing against an open door. But since everybody wanted to go through it first, the Brits had to dictate the pace and scope of the transition to representative government. 

but also from the perspective of a massive colonial system whose economy, functioning and history had acquired the status almost of a fact of nature.

Kipling was against taking Famine to be a 'fact of nature'. 

This meant that on one side of the colonial divide there was white Christian Europe; its various countries, principally Britain and France, but also Holland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Russia, America, Portugal and Spain, controlled approximately 85 per cent of the earth's surface by the First World War.

Then there was a War of Imperial cousins which put an end to the age of Empires- including the Ottoman Empire which had controlled a big chunk of 'White, Christian, Europe' for centuries. Still, Turks are White and Islam, in England, was less hated than the Pope.  

On the other side of the divide, there were an immense variety of territories and races, all of them considered lesser, or inferior, or dependent, or subject. The division between white and non-white, in India and elsewhere, was absolute, and is alluded to through Kim: a sahib is a sahib, and no amount of friendship or camaraderie can change the rudiments of racial difference.

Nonsense! Race doesn't matter. Work does. Forster arrives at the opposite conclusion from Kipling.  

Kipling could no more have questioned that difference, and the right of the white European to rule, than he would have argued with the Himalayas.

Kipling describes a sept of Irish descent in some Himalayan Principality. Being Irish, they are thieves and drunkards and law-breakers. So the Prince decides to make them policemen. Poachers make the best Game keepers. 

There was plenty of anti-Irish- and, because of Lloyd George- anti-Welsh- prejudice in Kipling's England. T.H White's originality was to show hatred for the Scots.  

The second thing is that no less than India itself of course, Kipling was a historical being, albeit a major artist.

India is geographical. Kipling celebrated its cartographers. 

Kim was written at a specific moment in his career, at a particular time in the changing relationship between the British and the Indian people.

This could be said of any writer who lived or had lived in the British Raj.  

And even though Kipling resisted the notion, India was already well into the dynamic of outright opposition to British rule (the Congress Party had been established in 1880, for example),

It was established by a White ICS man who became a vegetarian Vedantist and promoted cow protection- albeit for agronomic reasons. 

just as among the dominant British caste of colonial officials, military as well as civilian, important changes in attitude had occurred as a result of the 1857 Mutiny.

A.O Hume came to India before the Mutiny. 

The British and the Indians had thus evolved together. They had a common interdependent history, even though opposition, animosity and sympathy either kept them apart or sometimes brought them together.

The sad fact is that people like Hume knew more about a bigger stretch of India than Dadhabhai Naoroji.  

The complexity of a remarkable novel like Kim is that it is a very illuminating part of that history, as full of emphases, inflections, deliberate inclusions and exclusions as any great work of art, made the more interesting because Kipling was not a neutral figure in the Anglo-Indian situation, but a prominent actor in it.

Not really. Joseph Chamberlain had converted from Radicalism to Unionism and Imperialism before Kipling's works gained currency. 

Nor should we forget that even though India gained its independence (and was partitioned) in 1947, the whole question of how to interpret Indian and British history in the period after decolonization is still a matter of strenuous, if not always edifying, debate.

But that debate is confined to stupid academics with an axe to grind. 

Some Indians feel, for example, that imperialism permanently scarred and distorted Indian life, so that even after several decades of independence, and probably for many more years than that, the Indian economy, which had been bled by British needs and practices, would suffer.

Fuck that! Viceroy Sahib was personally entering the jhuggis of every landless labourer and inflicting fellatio and cunnilingus upon the natives! England drained us of gazillion gallons of jizz! Rishi Sunak must make restitution! 

Conversely, there are British intellectuals, political figures and historians who believe that giving up the Empire - whose symbols were Suez, Aden and India - was bad for Britain and bad for 'the natives' who have declined in all sorts of ways since their abandonment by the white man.

Enoch Powell, maybe. But R.A Butler dismissed him as a nutcase. It was the Tories who passed the 1935 Act. Had the Indians been able to agree to form a Federal Government, the Viceroy would have been answerable to an Indian Federal Cabinet.  

One milestone in the ongoing debate about the imperial past was the lively controversy joined in 1984 between Conor Cruise O'Brien

an Irishman- i.e. an inveterate enemy of British Imperialism. India could have got independence at the same time Ireland did.  

writing in the Observer and Salman Rushdie, who in a brilliantly argued essay in Granta 11 suggested that the vogue of what he called 'Raj revivalism' occurring in film and television concurrently with the Falklands War was an attempt to restore the prestige, if not the actual reality, of the long-gone Empire.

This was nonsense. The fact is, the BBC had some subcontinent origin producers and plenty of RADA trained darker skinned actors. Anyway, Richard Attenborough and David Lean had already decided to do 'epic' movies set in India. Ben Kingsley's father was Gujarati. He was astonishingly good.  

This was the period of television serialization of M. M. Kaye's The Far Pavilions and Paul Scott's great 'Raj Quartet', while films like Gandhi and A Passage to India were also reaching an enormous audience. O'Brien retorted by saying that this was little more than the whining of formerly colonized peoples, trying to get an unwarranted sympathy for their failures to manage in the present.

O'Brien, like most Irishmen, was very sympathetic to India. He just didn't like Public School toffs who pretended they were descended from starving coolies. Also, O'Brien hated the fad for stupid Continental philosophy which, quite obviously, was just spoiled Catholicism pretending to be Lefty. Said himself is a posh Prep Skool kid who had read his Sartre and Foucault.  

When we read it today, Kipling's Kim engages much the same set of issues. Does Kipling portray the Indians as inferior or as somehow equal but different? Clearly, an Indian reader will give an answer that focuses on some things more than others (for example, Kipling's stereotypical views - some would call them racialist views - on the Oriental character),

a Hindu- if sufficiently stupid and declasse like yours truly- will say Kim represents the essence of the Kena Upanishad and illuminates the link between Vishvamitra and Vamadeva who could be considered a precursor of the Buddha. 

Also, Kipling says 'kids in India have no caste'. That would be joyous if it were true. Modi may be making it so. Good luck to him.  

whereas English and many American readers would stress Kipling's affectionate descriptions of Indian life on the Grand Trunk Road.

They'd notice Kipling's sympathy for the Irish Priest who gets on well with the Tibetan monk.  

How then do we read Kim,

with extreme stupidity and prejudice if you are a fucking Academic 

if we are to remember always that the book is, after all, a novel, that there is more than one history in it to be remembered, that the imperial experience, while often regarded as exclusively political, was also an experience that entered into cultural and aesthetic life as well? Some things about Kim will strike every reader, regardless of politics and history. It is an overwhelmingly male novel,

There is a nice pahadi Rani in it. Still, the fact is, boys want to enter the world of men. True, for fooding they come to Mummy or Granny and sometimes they fall asleep with their heads in feminine laps. But we don't talk about it. BTW, I was actually in the SAS and am well hard. 

with two wonderfully attractive men - a boy who grows into early manhood, and an old ascetic priest - at its centre. Grouped around them are a set of other men, some of them companions, others colleagues and friends, who make up the novel's major, defining reality. Mahbub Ali, Lurgan Sahib, the great Babu, as well as the old Indian soldier and his dashing horse-riding son, plus Colonel Creighton, Mr Bennett and Father Victor, to name only a few of the numerous characters in this teeming book: all of them speak the language that men speak among themselves.

Because they happen to be men. No doubt, American men speak like women when among themselves.  

The women in the novel are remarkably few in number by comparison, and all are somehow debased or unsuitable for male attention: prostitutes, elderly widows, or importunate and lusty women like the Woman of Shamlegh;

This is foolish. The women are powerful but they are playing a greater game. 

to be always pestered by women, Kim believes, is to be hindered in playing the Great Game, which is best played by men alone.

Because if Kim & Co. can't slam shut the Afghan gate to keep out the Rooskis, lots of men would have to go and fight and die there. On the other hand, it must be said, the third Afghan War was a walkover for the Brits. Still, they gave that country independence because their attempt to overthrow the Bolsheviks had failed as had their attempt to seize Smyrna and make the Caliph their puppet. On the other hand, they did take Palestine and the Christian Palestinians flourished briefly. 

So not only are we in a masculine world dominated by travel, trade, adventure and intrigue,

it is not essentially masculine.  

we are in a celibate world, in which the common romance of fiction and the enduring institution of marriage have been circumvented, avoided, all but ignored.

as have pederastic relationships

At best, women help things along: they buy you a ticket, they cook, they tend the ill, and . . . they molest men.

Not this man, sadly. 

Moreover Kim himself, although he ages in the novel from thirteen until he is sixteen or seventeen, remains a boy, with a boy's passion for tricks, pranks, clever word-play, resourcefulness. Kipling seemed to have retained a life-long sympathy with himself as a boy, beset by the adult world of domineering schoolmasters and priests (Mr Bennett is an exceptionally unattractive specimen of it) whose authority must always be reckoned with - until another figure of authority, like Colonel Creighton, comes along and treats the young person with an understanding, but no less authoritarian, compassion.

At least nobody was fucking the boy in the ass.  

The difference between St Xavier's School, which Kim attends for some time, and service in the Great Game (British intelligence in India) does not lie in the greater freedom of the latter; quite the contrary, the demands of the Great Game are more exacting. The difference lies in the fact that the former imposes a useless authority, whereas the exigencies of the Secret Service demand from Kim an exciting and precise discipline, which paradoxically he willingly gives in to.

Which 13 year old boy would rather go to Skool than be a secret agent?  

From Creighton's point of view the Great Game is a sort of political economy of control, in which, as he once tells Kim, the greatest sin is ignorance, not to know.

People in Counter-Intelligence need to know stuff. How strange! 

But for Kim the Great Game cannot be perceived in all its complex patterns, although it can be fully enjoyed as a sort of extended prank.

The same could be said of James Bond. An agent is not a principal. He doesn't decide Strategy though he has some tactical freedom.  

The scenes where Kim banters, bargains, repartees with his elders, friendly and hostile alike, are indications of Kipling's seemingly inexhaustible fund of boyish enjoyment in the sheer momentary pleasure of playing a game, any sort of game.

No. There are some games he wants nothing to do with. The fellow isn't a rent-boy or a drug pusher.  

But we should not be mistaken about these boyish pleasures. They do not at all contradict the overall political purpose of British control over India, and Britain's other overseas dominions. A perfect example of this (to us, perhaps) odd mixture of fun and single-minded political seriousness is to be found in Lord Baden-Powell's conception of the Boy Scouts, which were founded and launched in 1907-8.

Indians might point to the Anushilan Samitis which predate the Boy Scout movement. The RSS, like Nehru's Congress Seva Dal, is a lineal descendant of the Samitis.  

An almost exact contemporary of Kipling, B.P., as he was called, was greatly influenced by Kipling's boys generally and Mowgli in particular. As we have come to understand his ideas about 'boyology', B.P. fed those images directly into a grand scheme of imperial authority culminating in the great Boy Scout structure 'fortifying the wall of empire'.

There was a demand, all over the world, for a youth movement which would complement the increasingly arid and demanding academic curriculum. Don't forget, there was also a Girl Guide movement. Sadly, Mummy wouldn't let me join.  

The recent research of Michael Rosenthal,3 in his excellent book The Character Factory: Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts and the Imperatives of Empire, manifestly confirms this remarkable conjunction of fun and service designed to produce row after row of bright-eyed, eager and resourceful little middle-class servants of empire. Kim, after all, is both Irish and of an inferior social caste; this enhances his candidacy for service in Kipling's eyes.

It is true that the Brits wanted Ireland to supply soldiers and poets and comic dramatists. They didn't want Ireland to be independent. The plain fact is, the Irish have more right to complain about the English than any Indian. 

B.P. and Kipling concur on two other important points: that boys ultimately should conceive of life and empire as governed by unbreakable Laws, and that service is more enjoyable when thought of as similar less to a story - linear, continuous, temporal - than to a playing field - many dimensional, discontinuous, and spatial.

Life is game-theoretic- that's true enough. It is also true that Kipling and B.P and other late Victorians were troubled by the new 'grand narratives'- Feminist, Socialist, anti-Imperialistic- that were gaining currency. However, the central Edwardian insight- viz. 'we are all Socialists now'- was that Society changes for the better if everybody plays by the rules. 

A recent book by the historian J. A. Mangan sums it up nicely in its title: The Games Ethic and Imperialism.

Since the time of Alexander, Imperialism has been associated with 'homonoia'- a common ethos rather than ethnos- but it was always strategic and game theoretic. Empires may contain lots of Princes and Dukes and Chieftains. Loyalty is always a matter of calculation. 

Yet so large in perspective and strangely sensitive is Kipling to the range of human possibilities that he gives another of his emotional predilections relatively full rein. He offsets the regimen of the service ethic in Kim by the lama and what he and Kim represent to each other.

Kipling knew that Buddhism is as rule-bound as Catholicism or Anglicanism. He felt- as many of his contemporaries did- that Anglicanism had become joyless and pedantic. Kipling's own predilection was for Freemasonry. That is the key to his thinking. Kim should be read in parallel with 'the Man who would be King'. 

For even though Kim is to be drafted into intelligence work at the very outset of the novel, the gifted boy has already been charmed into becoming the lama's chela (disciple) even earlier in Chapter 1.

No. Kim spots a good opportunity to rise. Chelas gain social mobility.  

But this almost idyllic relationship between two male companions has an interesting genealogy. Like a number of American novels (Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick and The Deerslayer come quickly to mind) Kim celebrates the friendship of two men in a difficult, and sometimes hostile, environment.

No. Kim is 'friend of all the world'- both Rishi Visvamitra in the Veda as well as the propensity to 'metta' in Buddhism (itself derived from 'Mithra' who was also an Iranian God. Incidentally, London once had a temple to Mithra back when the place was Roman.)

Even though the American frontier and colonial India are quite different, both places bestow a higher priority on what has been called male bonding than on a domestic or amorous connection between the sexes. Some critics have speculated on the hidden homosexual motif of these relationships, but there is also the cultural motif long associated with picaresque tales in which a male adventurer (with wife or mother, if either exists, safely at home) and his male companions are engaged, like Jason or Odysseus , or even more compellingly Don Quixote with Sancho Panza, in the pursuit of a special dream.

Nothing wrong with that. Men would go abroad to make a little money while Mummy or Wifey kept the home fires burning.  

In the field or on the open road two men can travel together more easily, and they can come to each other's rescue more credibly than if a woman were with them.

Because women tend to beat up robbers or ugly folk like me who try to smile at them.  

Or so the long tradition of adventure stories, from Odysseus and his crew, to the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Holmes and Watson, Batman and Robin, seems to have held.

Said thinks Batman should discuss the inequity of neo-liberalism with the Boy Wonder. When the Joker threatens to blow up Gotham, they should engage him a wide-ranging colloquy on regimes of Bio-Politics in Late Capitalism.  

For his part Kim's saintly guru belongs, additionally, to the overtly religious mode of the pilgrimage or quest common to all cultures.

No. He is searching for something which had been lost long ago- viz a sacred river. Vishvamitra has power over rivers. Kim is that Friend of all the World.  

Kipling we know was an admirer of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, though Kim is a good deal more like Chaucer's than Bunyan's work.

No shit, Sherlock! 

Kipling shares the early English poet's eye for wayward detail, the odd character, the slice of life, the amused sense of human foibles and joys. Unlike both Chaucer and Bunyan, however, Kipling is less interested in religion for its own sake (although we never doubt the lama's piety) than he is in local colour, scrupulous attention to exotic detail, and the all-enclosing realities of the Great Game. It is the greatness of Kipling's achievement that quite without selling the old man short, or in any way diminishing the quaint sincerity of his Search, Kipling, nevertheless, firmly places him within the protective orbit of British rule in India.

This is not an 'essential' feature of the novel. The same story could be told without there being a British Raj. As a matter of fact, some dozen years after Independence, some British mountaineers helped the Indian Army Chief by spying out the land on the Chinese side of the border. 

This is symbolized in Chapter 1, when the elderly British museum curator gives the lama his spectacles. In doing so he both adds to the man's spiritual prestige and authority, and he consolidates the justness and legitimacy of Britain's benevolent sway.

The lama gives the curator a valuable gift in exchange. Does that consolidate the justness and legitimacy of Tibet's benevolent sway?  

This view, in my opinion, has been misunderstood and even denied by many of Kipling's readers. But we must not forget that the lama depends on Kim for support and guidance,

Nonsense! The Lama depends on Lord Buddha and the Sangha he created. Kim gains greatly by being associated with the Lama. Read the Vimalakriti.  

and that Kim's achievement is to have neither betrayed the lama's values nor to let up in his work as a junior spy.

We all betray values all the time. We pray for forgiveness.  

Throughout the novel Kipling is clear about showing us that the lama, while a wise and good man, needs Kim's youth, his guidance, his wits; there is even an explicit acknowledgement by the lama of his absolute, religious need for him when, in Benares, towards the end of Chapter 9, he tells the Jataka, the parable of the young elephant ('the Lord Himself) freeing the old elephant (Ananda) who has been imprisoned in a leg-iron that will not come off. Clearly, the lama regards Kim as his own saviour.

No. He is saying all beings have Buddha nature.  

Later in the novel, after the fateful confrontation with the Russian agents who stir up insurrection against Britain, Kim helps (and is helped by) the lama who, in one of the most moving scenes of all Kipling's fiction, says, 'Child, I have lived on thy strength as an old tree lives on the lime of a new wall.'

The old do live on the strength of the young but nothing is permanent save Nirvana.  

Kim is reciprocally moved by love for his guru. Yet he never abandons his duty in the Great Game, although he confesses to the old man that he needs him 'for some other things'.

Occasionalism is one method of reconciling different ontologies- e.g. Buddhist, Jain, Vedantic, Christian etc. 

Doubtless those 'other things' are faith and unbending purpose. For in one of its main narrative strands Kim keeps returning to the idea of a quest, the lama's search for redemption from the Wheel of Life, a complex diagram of which he carries around in his pocket, and Kim's search for a secure place in colonial service.

This is unworthy of Said. Readers don't think Kim's ambition is to become a Joint Secretary in a Government Department.  

Kipling, I think, does not condescend to the old man's search. He follows him wherever he goes in his wish to be freed from 'the delusions of the Body', and it is surely a part of our engagement in the novel's Eastern dimension, which Kipling renders with little false exoticism, that we are able to believe in the novelist's respect for this particular pilgrim.

Kim is an adventure story. But so is our search for salvation. The thing doesn't need to be miserabilist and involve virtue signaling.  

Moreover the lama commands attention and esteem from nearly everyone. He is no charlatan, no beggarly impostor, no confidence man. He honours his word to get the money for Kim's education; he meets Kim at the appointed times and places; he is listened to with veneration and devotion. In an especially nice touch in Chapter 14, Kipling has him tell 'a fantastic piled narrative of bewitchment and miracles' about marvellous events in his native Tibetan mountains, events which the novelist courteously forbears from repeating, as if to say that this old saint has a life of his own that cannot be reproduced in sequential English prose.

At about this time, the Theosophists were publishing plenty of such stories.  

And yet, the lama's search and Kim's illness at the end of the novel are resolved together. Readers of many of Kipling's other tales will be familiar with what the critic J. M. S. Tompkins has rightly called 'the theme of healing'

as opposed to what? The theme of dying of dysentery?  

and, like those, the narrative of Kim progresses inexorably towards a great crisis. In an unforgettable scene Kim attacks the lama's foreign and defiling assailants, the old man's talisman-like chart is rent, and the two consequently wander through the hills bereft of their calm and health. Kim, of course, waits to be relieved of his charge, the packet of papers he has stolen from the foreign spy. For his part the lama is unbearably aware of how much longer he must now wait before he can achieve his spiritual goals. Into this heart-rending situation, Kipling introduces one of the novel's two great fallen women, the Woman of Shamlegh (the other being the old widow of Kulu

a Princess. How is she 'fallen'? 

), abandoned long ago by her 'Kerlistian' sahib, but strong, vital and passionate nonetheless.

the woman is the chief of her people and has many husbands (polyandry being common in that part of the world). She wants Kim to stay with her because he is of good character and highly capable. Kim stands up for his own religion in a way which she would respect. Said thinks that Dowager Princesses and wives with many husbands are 'fallen'.  Why?

(There is a recollection incorporated here of one of Kipling's most affecting earlier short stories, 'Without Benefit of Clergy', which treats the predicament of the native woman loved, but never married, by a departed white man.) The merest hint of a sexual charge between Kim and the lusty Shamlegh Woman appears, but it is quickly dissipated, as Kim and the lama head off once again.

I suppose there is a genetic angle to this. Kim would be contributing genes from a distant lineage thus reducing risks associated with inbreeding amongst isolated populations. Also he is a smart dude and useful to have around. 

What then is the healing process through which Kim, and the old lama, must pass before they can rest?

It is a metanoiac process. The details are unimportant.  

This is an extremely complex and interesting question and, I believe, it can only be answered slowly and deliberately, so carefully does Kipling not herd the plot into the confines of a jingoistic imperial solution. We cannot overlook the fact that because he has spent so much time with them, Kipling will not abandon Kim and the old monk with impunity to the specious satisfactions of getting credit for a simple job well done.

Kipling was writing at a time when the Theosophists had made Tibetan 'mahatmas' living in the astral plane, popular across the globe. The question was whether Kipling could do justice to the theme he had set for himself. I think he muddled through well enough. Turning the 'River of the Arrow' into an irrigation ditch in Saharanpur is a good touch. The Canal Colonies were a source of pride to the Punjab Civilian.  

This caution, of course, is good novelistic practice. But there are other imperatives - emotional, cultural, aesthetic. Kim must be given a station in life commensurate with his stubbornly fought-for identity.

Nonsense! The sequel could feature Kim battling bandits in Brazil. The guy could be Tintin- a journalist by profession just like Kipling himself.  

He has resisted Lurgan Sahib's illusionistic temptations and asserted the fact that he is Kim; he has maintained a sahib's status even while remaining a graceful child of the bazaars and the rooftops; he has played the game well, fought for Britain at some risk to his life, and occasionally with brilliance; he has fended off the Woman of Shamlegh. Where to place him, so to speak? And where to place the lovable old cleric?

We know in advance that he will achieve Nirvana.  

To approach these issues Kipling engineers Kim's illness and of course the lama's desolation. There is also the small practical device of having the irrepressible Babu, Herbert Spencer's improbable devotee

Spencer was so well known in India as to have an Indian name- Harbhat Pendse.  

and Kim's native and secular mentor in the Great Game, turn up to guarantee the success of Kim's exploits. Thus the packet of incriminating papers that will prove RussoFrench machinations and the rascally wiles of an Indian prince, are safely taken from Kim. Then Kim begins to feel, in Othello's words, the loss of his occupation: All that while he felt, though he could not put it into words, that his soul was out of gear with its surroundings - a cog-wheel unconnected with any machinery, just like the idle cog-wheel of a cheap Beheea sugar-crusher laid by in a corner. The breezes fanned over him, the parrots shrieked at him, the noises of the populated houses behind - squabbles, orders, and reproofs - hit on dead ears.

Kipling was the poet of work. What work will Kim take up next? I think he'd be a journalist like Tintin.  

In effect Kim has died to this world, has, like the epic hero, descended to a sort of underworld from which, if he is to emerge, he will arise stronger than before. In short, the breach between Kim and 'this world' must be healed. Now we may not consider the page that ensues as the summit of Kipling's art, but its role in the novel's intentional design by Kipling is crucial. The passage is structured around a gradually dawning answer to the question asked by Kim: 'I am Kim. And what is Kim?'

The word 'Kim' in Sanskrit means 'why?' or 'what?'.  But Ka is both the question and the God which is that question. 

Here is what happens: He did not want to cry - had ne\er felt less like crying in his life - but of a sudden easy, stupid tears trickled down his nose, and with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up anew on the world without. Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper proportion. Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and true - solidly planted upon the feet - perfectly comprehensible - clay of his clay, neither more nor less .. .

Sansara is Nirvana. But there is also the higher 'Oikeiosis' of the Stoic Sage. In the sequel, Kim battles bandits in Brazil.

Slowly Kim begins to feel at one with himself and with the world. Kipling elaborates further: There stood an empty bullock-cart on a little knoll half a mile away, with a young banyan tree behind - a look-out, as it were, above some new-ploughed levels; and his eyelids, bathed in soft air, grew heavy as he neared it. The ground was good clean dust - no new herbage that, living, is half-way to death already, but the hopeful dust that holds the seed of all life. He felt it between his toes, patted it with his palms, and joint by joint, sighing luxuriously, laid him down full length along in the shadow of the wooden-pinned cart. And Mother Earth was as faithful as the Sahiba [the widow of Kulu, who has been tending Kim]. She breathed through him to restore the poise he had lost lying so long on a cot cut off from her good currents. His head lay powerless upon her breast, and his opened hands surrendered to her strength. The many-rooted tree above him, and even the dead manhandled wood beside, knew what he sought, as he himself did not know. Hour upon hour he lay deeper than sleep.

This is the 'Sushupti' of the Vedantin.  

As Kim sleeps, the lama and Mahbub discuss the boy's fate; both men know that he has been healed, and so what remains is the disposition of his life. Mahbub wants him back in service; with that stupefying innocence of his, the lama suggests to Mahbub that he should join both chela and guru as pilgrims on the way of righteousness. The novel concludes with the lama revealing to Kim that all is now well, for, he says: I saw all Hind, from Ceylon in the sea to the Hills, and my own Painted Rocks at Such-zen; I saw every camp and village, to the least, where we have ever rested. I saw them at one time and in one place; for they were within the Soul. By this I knew the Soul has passed beyond the illusion of Time and Space and of Things. By this I knew that I was free.

He has attained kevalya gyaan. Borges's Aleph owes something to this passage. But then 'Search for Al-Mutasim' is cobbled together from Kipling. That is the mark of a great writer. He 'shows more than he knows' and equally talented writers can populate the topos he has created to, it may be, an even better purpose. 

There is some mumbo-jumbo in this of course, but it shouldn't all be dismissed.

Said may think Hindus are all jaahil kaffirs. But Kipling had no such prejudice. 

The lama's encyclopedic vision of freedom strikingly resembles Colonel Creighton's Indian Survey, in which every camp and village is duly noted. The difference is that what might have been a positivistic inventory of places and peoples within the scope of British dominion has become, in the lama's generous inclusiveness, a redemptive and, for Kim's sake, a therapeutic vision.

A good cadastral survey is a very useful thing.  

Everything is now held together. At its centre resides Kim, the boy whose errant spirit has regrasped things 'with an almost audible click'. The mechanical metaphor of the soul being re-tracked, so to speak, on rails somewhat violates the elevated and edifying situation that Kipling is trying to describe, but for an English writer situating a young white male coming back to earth in a vast country like India, the figure is apt.

As it would equally be for any writer of the period.  

After all, the Indian railways were British built, and they did assure some greater hold than before over the place.

The reverse is equally true. Railways enabled the Indian National Congress to make great strides. 

But we should also remark, however, that other writers before Kipling have used this type of 'regrasping of life' scene, most notably George Eliot in Middlemarch and Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady, the former greatly influencing the latter. In each case the heroine (Dorothea Brooke and Isabel Archer) is surprised, not to say shocked, by the sudden revelation of a betrayal by her lover: Dorothea sees Will Ladislaw apparently flirting with Rosamund Vincy, Lydgate's wife, and Isabel intuits the dalliance between her husband, Gilbert Osmond, and Madame Merle.

That is just Aristotelian anagnorisis. What Kipling is describing is in conformity with Indic esoteric soteriology.  

Both epiphanies are followed by a long night of anguish, not unlike Kim's illness. Then the women awake to a new awareness of themselves and the world. Since the scenes in both novels are remarkably similar, Dorothea Brooke's experience can serve here to describe both. She looks out on to the world past 'the narrow cell of her calamity' and sees the . . . fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying a baby . . . she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining. (Middlemarch, Chapter 80)

Eliot had translated Fuerebach's 'Essence of Christianity'. She stopped short of Marx.

Both Eliot and James intend such scenes as these not only as moral reawakenings, but as moments through which the heroine gets past, indeed forgives, her tormentor by seeing herself in the larger scheme of things.

James, like his brother, was part and parcel of a type of natural theology which would come to see some varieties of experience as essentially religious or spiritual. But Religion and Spirituality are multiply realizable. Some may never have 'epiphanies' or know 'dark nights of the soul' and yet remain firmly planted on the path of Faith. 

Part of Eliot's strategy here is to have Dorothea's earlier plans to help her friends receive vindication; the reawakening scene is thus a confirmation of the impulse to be in, to engage with, the world. Much the same movement occurs in Kim, except that the world is defined as liable to a soul's locking up on it.

No. Bodies die. Worlds pass away. Kipling wasn't stupid.  

The whole of the passage from Kim that I quoted above has in it a kind of moral triumphalism

spiritual- maybe. Moral? No. 

which is carried by the accentuated inflections in it of purpose, will, voluntarism: things slide into proper proportion, roads are meant to be walked on, things are perfectly comprehensible, solidly planted upon the feet, and so on. Standing above the whole passage are 'the wheels of Kim's being1 as they 'lock up anew on the world without'.

A higher oikeiosis has been established. What vocational 'economia' will it involve? I say, Kim becomes a journalist and has adventures in distant corners of the globe. 

And the series of motions is subsequently reinforced and consolidated by Mother Earth's blessing upon Kim as he reclines next to the cart: 'she breathed through him to restore the poise he had lost'.

This is Bhudevi. I suppose, as a journalist, Kipling must have seen invocations of her at the commencement of various PWD projects.  

Kipling here renders a powerful, almost instinctive desire to restore the child to its mother in a pre-conscious, undefiled, asexual relationship.

Don't hump holes in the ground. Just go to sleep already.  

But whereas Dorothea and Isabel are described as inevitably being part of an 'involuntary, palpitating life',

because it wasn't cool to be just a garden variety Christian back then 

Kim is portrayed as actually retaking voluntary hold of the life he has been leading.

We don't know what path in life he will choose.  

The difference, I think, is capital. What there is in Kim's newly sharpened apprehension of mastery, of 'locking up', of solidity is to a very great extent a function of being a sahib in colonial India.

Nonsense! Nobody would have been surprised if the sequel saw Kim battling bandits in Brazil.  

Nature and the involuntary rhythms of restored health come to Kim after the first, largely political historical gesture is signalled by Kipling on his behalf.

This is a signal Said put into the book so as to discover it. Why not just say 'Inglis peeps be Debil' ?

For the European or American women in Europe, the world is there to be discovered anew; it requires no one in particular to direct it, or to exert sovereignty over it.

Kipling's 'Naulakha' showed he didn't think American women could do much good in India. 

This is not the case in India, which would pass into chaos or insurrection unless roads were walked upon properly, houses lived in the right way, men and women talked to in the correct tones.

In America, by contrast, things would improve if people walked on roads in a highly improper manner. Also, instead of entering a house and sleeping there, house should enter you and then fall asleep.  

In one of the finest critical accounts of Kim, Mark KinkeadWeekes suggests that Kim is unique in Kipling's aeuvre in that what was clearly meant as a resolution for the novel does not really work.

It works well enough. People will read Kipling when Said is forgotten.  

Instead, Kinkead-Weekes says, there is an artistic triumph that transcends even the intentions of Kipling the author: [The novel] is the product of a peculiar tension between different ways of seeing: the affectionate fascination with the kaleidoscope of external reality for its own sake; the negative capability getting under the skin of attitudes different from one another and one's own;

That's not a negative capability at all. It is a great asset for a salesman or diplomat or journalist.  

and finally, a product of this last, but at its most intense and creative, the triumphant achievement of an anti-self so powerful that it became a touchstone for everything else - the creation of the lama.

The lama is an attractive figure- not an 'anti-self'.  

This involved imagining a point of view and a personality almost at .the furthest point of view from Kipling himself;

Kipling wasn't a disgusting pervert. He liked good people same as the rest of us do.  

yet it is explored so lovingly that it could not but act as a catalyst towards some deeper synthesis. Out of this particular challenge - preventing self-obsession, probing deeper than a merely objective view of reality outside himself,

there is nothing deeper than what is objective. That's why we think Physicists are smart while Poets are mentally retarded.  

enabling him now to see, think and feel beyond himself - came the new vision of Kim, more inclusive, complex, humanised, and mature than that of any other work.

What is missing in Kim is companionable bears or panthers or pythons. Also there should be at least one or two song and dance sequences.  

However much we may agree with some of the insights in this extraordinarily subtle reading, there is, in my opinion, too abistorical an element in it to be accepted. Yes, the lama is a kind of anti-self, and yes, Kipling can get into the skin of others with some sympathy. But no, Kipling never forgets that Kim is an irrefrangible part of British India:

unless he gets on a boat and goes to Brazil. 

the Great Game does go on, with Kim a part of it, no matter how many parables the lama fashions.

But Kim can quit and jump on a ship and head off somewhere new to have adventures. Maybe the Lama gets invited to the court of the Emperor of Japan. Perhaps, bandits in Brazil have come into possession of a Buddhist sacred treasure.  

We are naturally entitled to read Kim as a novel belonging to the world's great literature, free to some degree of its encumbering history and political circumstances.

But we mustn't do so if we are virtue signaling Professors whose job it is to say 'Whitey be Debil'.  

Yet by the same token, we must not unilaterally abrogate the connections in it, and carefully observed by Kipling, to its contemporary actuality.

This is fiction. Kipling imagined the story. He wasn't himself an ex Intelligence agent.  

Certainly Kim, Creighton, Mahbub, the Babu and even the lama see India as Kipling saw it, as a part of the Empire.

There was British paramountcy but rule was indirect. The Zamindar or Maharaja ran things. The Brits did Imperial Defense and had a small but effective administrative and judicial cadre. India had had many Emperors though, more often than not, the same lineages controlled the same territories at the district level. Now, of course, India has the Nehru-Gandhi Dynasty. 

And certainly Kipling minutely preserves the traces of this vision when he has Kim re-assert his British priorities, well before the lama comes along to bless them.

Kim is welcome to make that choice. Don't forget there were plenty of Brown Sahibs back then. Motilal engaged an Englishman as tutor for his son whom he later sent to Harrow and Cambridge.  

Let us now look more closely at Kim as an integral part of the history, mutually dependent, of India and Britain in India.

This would require a good knowledge of Indian and British history. I have it. Said didn't.  

Readers of Kipling's best work have regularly tried to save him from himself.

Fuck off! They like the book and may re-read it from time to time. But they don't try to 'save him from himself'. Let the fellow have a wank now and again.  

Frequently this has had the effect of confirming Edmund Wilson's celebrated judgement about Kim:

Wilson is dead. Kipling lives.  

Now what the reader tends to expect is that Kim will come eventually to realise that he is delivering into bondage to the British invaders those whom he has always considered his own people

But ICS officers like Hume, Wedderburn, Cotton etc were working with the Indians to deliver 'responsible government' which became 'representative government' by 1917. British policy in the White Commonwealth was to withdraw garrisons and leave the settlers to defend themselves and manage their own affairs. They wanted the same thing in India because British Members of Parliament didn't relish having to sit through long debates about 'taqavi' or 'peshkash'. Let there be an Indian Legislative Assembly to pass laws with respect to stuff only of interest to Indians.  

[Wilson refers here to the novel's ending, in which Kim returns to the British Secret Service as, in effect, an enforcement officer for British imperialism against the Indians among whom he has lived and worked] and that a struggle between allegiances will result.

This is silly. We know that Kim will go elsewhere and have adventures. He isn't going to be pushing files in the Secretariat.  

Kipling has established for the reader - and established with considerable dramatic effect - the contrast between the East, with its mysticism and sensuality, its extremes of saintliness and roguery, and the English,

Marie Corelli's 'Sorrows of Satan' had been a best-seller in 1895. England had plenty of mysticism and sensuality and saintliness and roguery. Come to think of it, Lord Curzon- a very superior person- had an affair with Elinor Glyn, with whom all longed to sin.  

with their superior organisation, their confidence in modern method,

Coz Dukes and Viceroys are really modern- right?  

their instinct to brush away like cobwebs the native myths and beliefs.

Fuck off! The Brits gave legal personality to Hindu Temple deities. They implicitly accepted the concept of 'Tanasukh' w.r.t the Aga Khans. They respected the Maharaja of Travancore's explanation that his Kingdom had been gifted to a particular Hindu God. Indeed, the place had been created by an avatar of Vishnu.  

We have been shown two entirely different worlds existing side by side, with neither really understanding the other,

or understanding the other so well as to make lots of money 

and we have watched the oscillation of Kim, as he passes to and fro between them. But the parallel lines never meet; the alternating attractions felt by Kim never give rise to a genuine struggle . . . The fiction of Kipling, then, does not dramatise any fundamental conflict because Kipling would never face one.

We all face a fundamental conflict coz death occurs. We too will perish.  

Wilson goes on to say that Kipling's relative failure with novels,

Some of his novels continue to sell well. Many have been adapted for the screen. The man was no failure.  

his inability to show large social forces in conflict, or 'uncontrollable lines of destiny' opposing each other, are all traceable to this unwillingness to face the reality of what India really meant.

Wilson didn't know shit about India. His star faded long ago in America though he wrote well.  

Kipling's partisans interpret this unwillingness in Kim

why was he not shouting 'Whitey be Debil!'? 

not as a failure but, in the words of Kinkead-Weekes, as a deliberately unresolved tension between, or a creative synthesis of, different ways of seeing.

Also, how come Kipling did not speak up for the rights of trans-gender people? Oh. India already gave plenty of rights to Hijras.  

Another alternative to these two views is, I believe, more accurate, more sensitive to the actualities of late nineteenth century British India as Kipling, and others, saw them.

My view is better because I know about both India and Britain. Stupid Americans know shit.  

There is no resolution to the conflict between Kim's colonial service and loyalty to his Indian companions not because Kipling could not face it,

Kipling knew and didn't like pro-Indian British ex-Civil Servants. To some extent this reflects the view of the older Punjab Civilian. The odd thing is, by 1908, HG Wells had a bigger hand in shaping British policy on India, than Kipling who was regarded as an old fogey. But Wells also knew England better thus giving the lie to the notion that 'they little know England who only England know'. Shaw and Wells helped set up the LSE- though it was Haldane who enabled it to rise- which, by about 1910, was the recipient of a munificent donation from the Tatas. Meanwhile, in the Punjab, it was Cambridge graduates like Harkishen Lal Gauba- or Alama Iqbal, come to that- who were deciding the future. Dyer and O'Dwyer were antiques. 

but because for Kipling there was no conflict and, one should add immediately, one of the purposes of the novel was, in fact, to show the absence of conflict once Kim is cured of his doubts and the lama of his longing for the River, and India of a couple of upstarts and foreign agents.

Indian- but also many British- readers of Kipling knew that he was writing about a vanished era. He romanticizes things, true- but Indian authors are welcome to praise their own people provided they don't offend the religious sensibilities of other septs.  

But that there might have been a conflict had Kipling considered India as unhappily subservient to imperialism, of this we can have no doubt. The fact is that he did not:

because he was looking back at a time when almost everybody- barring some elderly 'ghaddarites'- was loyal. But this had changed by the 1890s. Kipling reflects the disenchantment felt by the workhorses of the Raj though, it must be said, many- like Lawrence Durrell's father- were happy to exchange 'Covenanted Service' for the chance to make real money working alongside Indian contractors or for Indian business houses. As for Army officers, they hoped for an appointment as Political Agent, or as a Tutor to an Indian Prince.  

for him it was India's best destiny to be ruled by England.

Sadly, America refused that destiny. That's why they had to have a Civil War so as to end slavery.  

The trouble is that if one reads Kipling not simply as an 'imperialist minstrel' (which he wasn't) but as someone who had read Frantz Fanon, met Gandhi, absorbed their lessons, but had remained stubbornly unconvinced by both, then one seriously distorts the defining context in which Kipling wrote, and which he refines, elaborates, illuminates.

This is nonsense. Kipling could quite easily have met Gandhi in South Africa or London. But Gandhi was an ultra-loyalist prior to about 1916. Fanon was just plain silly. Martinique was careful not to get rid of French rule.  

There were no appreciable deterrents to the imperialist world view held by Kipling.

Nonsense! His own Aunties were radical. West Ken had a lot of extreme Progressives when he was a kid holidaying here. Kipling would certainly have known of W.S Blunt who wrote ' The white man's burden, Lord, is the burden of his cash' in 1896. England had plenty of anti-Imperialists. Kipling, however, was an old fashioned Unionist with foolish views about Ireland and Suffragettes and so on. Still, he refused a Knighthood. Iqbal didn't. 

Hence, he remained untroubled, although it is true to say, I think, that his fiction represents both the Empire and conscious legitimizations of it, both of which, as fiction (as opposed to discursive prose), incur ironies and problems, as we shall soon see.

This cretin is blind. Ignorance has that effect.  

Consider two episodes in Kim, Shortly after the lama and his chela leave Umballa they meet the elderly and withered former soldier 'who had served the Government in the days of the Mutiny'.

Which the Nawabs of Pataudi referred to with horror as 'Ghaddar'. Later, the Indian Revolutionaries, more particularly those in America, appropriated this derogatory term. They wanted an Indo-German alliance. Their tactic in an even greater game failed but by 1917, India was pushing against an open door. The problem was that everybody was trying to squeeze through first, so after Gandhi's unilateral surrender in 1922, the Brits dictated the pace and scope of reform. 

To a contemporary reader 'the Mutiny' meant the single most important, well-known and violent episode of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian relationship: the Great Mutiny of 1857, which began in Meerut on TO May, 1857 and spread immediately to the capture of Delhi by the mutineers. An enormous amount of writing, British and Indian, covers the Mutiny.7 What caused the Mutiny directly was the suspicion of Hindu and Muslim soldiers in the Indian Army that their bullets were greased with cow's fat (unclean to Hindus) and pig's fat (unclean to Muslims). In fact the causes of the Mutiny were constitutive to British imperialism itself, to an army largely staffed by natives and officered by sahibs, to the anomalies of rule by the East India Company.

Nonsense! What caused the Mutiny was stupidity. Equally, it failed because of stupidity. By 1916, Indians learned an important lesson. The British Indian Army tended to have really stupid commanders. Moreover, the Army- as it still does in Pakistan- could defy the Civilian Administration. When Kitchener got into a scrap with Curzon, Kitchener won. 

In addition, there was a great deal of underlying resentment at the fact of white Christian rule in a country made up of many races and cultures, all of whom most probably regarded their subservience to the British as degrading.

A guy with an MA from Aberdeen discovered that the vast majority of Indians didn't know they were ruled by foreigners in 1912. The Raj was Imperial, not Colonial.  

It was lost on none of the mutineers that numerically they vastly outnumbered their superior officers. Without going into the very complex structure of actions, motives, events, moralities debated endlessly since (and even during) the Mutiny, we should acknowledge that it provided a clear demarcation for Indian and for British history.

What the Mutiny showed Delhites was that if the Brits left, the fucking Meos would descend and not one virgin or silver rupee would be left within its walls. Also, Sikhs would gladly team up with the Brits to loot Delhi. The Maharaja of Patiala would tell the Nawab of Pataudi that the string of pearls he wore around his neck had been looted from the latter's toshkhana.  

To the British, who finally put the Mutiny down with brutality and severity, all their actions were retaliatory; the mutineers murdered Europeans, they said, and such actions proved, as if proof were necessary, that Indians deserved subjugation by the higher civilization of European Britain.

But Disraeli warned the House that India had not been conquered. The Brits had gained sway only because they preserved the traditional laws and ways of doing things- which, sadly, were really really shitty.  

After 1857 the East India Company was replaced by the much more formal Government of India.

There was little change. As Mathew Arnold well knew, the bad old days of drunken Nabobs had given way to the Evangelical piety and puritanism of the new breed of Public School men.  

For the Indians, the Mutiny was a nationalist uprising against British rule, which uncompromisingly re-asserted itself despite abuses, exploitation and seemingly unheeded native complaint. When in 1925 Edward Thompson

who was disliked in Bengal 

published his powerful little tract, The Other Side of the Medal - an impassioned statement against British rule and for Indian independence - he singled out the Mutiny as the great symbolic event by which the two sides, Indian and British, achieved their full and conscious opposition to each other.

This was foolish. Most parts of India remained loyal. The Doab, however, had neither forgotten nor forgiven. But it crowned Nehru who was, as he said, the last Englishman to rule India.  Only when he died, did Mountbatten cease to have influence in either Britain or India. 

Thompson quite dramatically shows that the writing of Indian and British history diverged most emphatically on representations of the Mutiny.

Not in Bengal. Maharashtra- sure- but they had post-Mutiny heroes like Vasudev Balwant Phadke who inspired the Savarkar brothers and countless other Maratha patriots.  

The Mutiny, in short, reinforced the difference between colonizer and colonized.

Not really. On the other hand, Otto Trevelyan's 'Letters of a Competition Wallah' did show that Post Mutiny 'carpet-bagging' 'Anglo Saxons' were hated by 'Anglo Indians'. But the indigo problem already existed. The Brits had somewhat mended matters after the 'Indigo rebellion' but, as Curzon would realize, the bigger problem was how to get the factors to switch to tobacco. That's why the first Agricultural Research Institute was set up near Champaran. 

In such a situation of nationalist and self-justifying inflammation, to be an Indian would have meant feeling natural solidarity with the victims of British reprisal.

Sympathy for innocent victims is universal. The Brits had disgraced themselves. Queen Victoria's proclamation sought to apply a balm to the wounds. Still, the fact is, Indians who had sided with the Brits did very well out of it. Incidentally, the Nehrus had been Vakils to John Company. The truth is the Emperor wanted to stay loyal so as to continue to receive his pension. The sepoys- and later the jihadis- forced his hand. Sir Syed Ahmed tried to defend the old man by pretending he was a half-wit. Still, for the Muslims of North India, the Mutiny was an intimation of their fate in a country where they were a minority.  

To be British meant feeling repugnance and injury — to say nothing of righteous vindication — given the terrible displays of 'native' cruelty.

Most natives had supported them. Some were very richly rewarded. For the Princes, the Mutiny was a blessing in disguise. No more 'Doctrine of lapse'. Also, the Brits repented trying to replace zamindari with ryotwari. In other words, the landlords and compradors got richer and richer while the condition of the laboring class deteriorated.  

For an Indian, not to have had those feelings would have been to belong to the small minority that did exist to be sure, but which was distinctly unrepresentative of majority Indian sentiment.

This simply isn't true. Oudh was discontented- that's true enough- and there was a 'Wahabbi' element here and there but the majority of urban Indians wanted British rule. The rural areas were seldom aware any such thing existed.  

It is therefore highly significant that Kipling's choice of an Indian to speak about the Mutiny - the major historical event that antecedes the action of Kim in the 188os - is an old loyalist soldier

a Sikh risaldar. The Punjabis were happy to get revenge for Chilianwala on the sepoys from the Doab. Don't forget, a Mughal Emperor had martyred a Great Sikh Guru. 1857 was a great opportunity for getting payback from 'Babur ke aulad'. 

who views his countrymen's revolt as an act of madness.

Militarily, it was worse than mad. Crazy people can win battles. Staying on the defensive and getting harassed by Meos represents incapacity of a high order. Some Marathas showed military capacity but it is telling that Elphinstone prevailed in their own territory of origin.  

Not surprisingly this man is respected by British 'Deputy Commissioners'

Plenty of Indians were 'Dipties'  

who, Kipling tells us, 'turned aside from the main road to visit him'. What Kipling simply eliminates is the likelihood that the soldier's compatriots regard him as (at very least) a traitor to his people.

Why the fuck would Sikh Punjabis regard this old man as a traitor? He had got revenge on the spawn of those who martyred H.H Guru Ajran & H.H Guru Tegh Bahadur. 

And when, a few pages later, the veteran tells the lama and Kim about the Mutiny, his version of the events is highly charged with the British rationale for what happened:

No. The soldier isn't saying all people from Doab are wicked. He respects them as fighting men. But some madness had gripped them- which is what happens if you have crap officers (or elderly NCOs who should have been pensioned off) 

A madness ate into all the Army, and they turned against their officers. That was the first evil, but not past remedy if they had then held their hands. But they chose to kill the Sahibs' wives and children. Then came the Sahibs from over the sea and called them to most strict account.

It is a fact that if an Army starts killing women and children then troops will be demoralized. They won't want to fight well armed soldiers. Demoralization causes collective madness. Each man is on the lookout for loot and is planning to desert with as much ill gotten wealth as possible. Nobody wants to go to the frontline to face artillery. Raping and looting are a much pleasanter way to pass the time.  

To reduce Indian resentment to 'madness', to characterize Indian resistance (as it might have been called) to British insensitivity as 'madness', to represent Indian actions as mainly the decision to kill British women and children - all these are not merely innocent reductions of the nationalist Indian case against the British, but tendentious ones.

No. This is pretty much what a Sikh risaldar would have said at that time. But then a Pakistani General descended from one of the Princely Houses of Delhi was saying the same thing in one of his books at about the time Said wrote this. 

The fact is the Brits conquered Punjab with sepoys from the Doab. The Sikhs got pay-back. Karma is a bitch- right?  

Moreover, when Kipling has the old soldier describe the British counter-revolt - with all its horrendous reprisals by white men bent on 'moral' action - as calling the Indian mutineers 'to most strict account', we have left the world of history and entered the world of imperialist polemic, in which the native is naturally a delinquent, the white man a stern but moral parent and judge.

The risaldar might just as easily have served under a Sikh Raja. He does not give an account of what the Brits did nor what Sikhs like himself might have done. Raping and looting are not things which one boasts about as one approaches the grave.  

The point about this brief episode is

that Kipling is showing Kim to be an artful fellow who can convince even an old NCO that he has had a true vision involving senior Army officers.  

not just that it gives us the extreme British view on the Mutiny, but that Kipling puts it in the mouth of an Indian whose much more likely nationalist counterpart is never seen in the novel at all.

Because they had been killed in 1857 or else had escaped to Nepal.  

(Similarly Mahbub Ali, Creighton's faithful adjutant, belongs to the Pathan people who historically speaking were in a state of unpacified insurrection against the British during the nineteenth century. Yet he, too, is represented as happy with British rule, and even a collaborator with it.)

He is a paid agent and loyal to his salt. So what? The fact is Peshawar was prospering. Kabul was not. Pathans are smart people.  

So far is Kipling from showing two worlds in conflict, as Edmund Wilson would have it, that he has studiously given us only one, and eliminated any chance of conflict altogether.

Which would not have been cool if his novel was set in Calcutta or Pune. Tagore had flirted with the Revolutionaries but is stern with them in Ghare Bhaire and Char Adhyaya. But this is also true of Gora.  

The second example confirms the first. Once again it is a small moment in Kim, but a significant one just the same. Kim, the lama, and the widow of Kulu

a Princess like the Rani of Sirmur who may well have allied with the Brits to expand her territory or save it from the Gurkhas 

are en route to Saharunpore in Chapter 4. Kim has just been exuberantly described as being 'in the middle of it, more awake and more excited than anyone', the 'it' of Kipling's description standing for 'the world in real truth; 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'.

Kids do like journeys of that sort. What they don't like is motorways. There is no 'are we there yet?' in Kipling.

We have already seen a good deal of this side of India, with its colour, excitement and interest exposed in all their variety for the English reader's benefit. Somehow it seems, however, that Kipling also felt the necessity for some authority over India, perhaps because only a few pages earlier he had sensed in the old soldier's minatory account of the Mutiny the need to forestall any further 'madness'.

The encounter with the Risaldar establishes Kim's native cunning. His exchanges with the Sahiba show his gamin side.  

After all it is India itself which is responsible both for the local vitality enjoyed by Kim, and the threat to Britain's Empire. A district superintendent of police trots by, and his appearance occasions this reflection from the old widow: These be the sort to oversee justice. They know the land and the customs of the land. The others, all new from Europe, suckled by white women and learning our tongues from books, are worse than the pestilence. They do harm to Kings.

This makes sense. When I was a kid, I heard from some 'Uncle' who was in the Karnataka cadre about an old woman who took a shine to him because he was a good equestrian. She felt that she was being cheated by the clerks in the Revenue Department and demanded he look into the matter. She turned out to be right. This 'Uncle' put the fear of God into those rascals and then went to see the old lady who observed that he was almost human. Pity, he'd have to marry some she-monkey of his own caste.  

Doubtless some Indians believed that English police officials knew the country better than the natives, and that such officials - rather than Indian rulers - should hold the reins of power.

Nobody likes the police. They wanted 'justice on horseback' from the District Collector/Magistrate. Everybody hated lawyers and held it a sacred obligation to tell nothing but lies under oath.  

But note that in Kim no one is seen who challenges British rule, and no one articulates any of the local Indian challenges that must have been greatly in evidence - even for someone as obdurate as Kipling - in the late nineteenth century.

The villains in Kim are the Rooskies. But, clearly, some Indians- including Princes- are on their side, or- at least- in their pay.  I should mention, Kitchener, at about this time, was saying that the Russians, with 60,000 men might defeat the British Indian Army even if it had 250,000. 

Instead we have one character explicitly saying that a colonial police official ought to rule India

he had been chaffing her in her own language. But his wet-nurse was from Himachal Pradesh. Hence, his familiarity.  

and in saying that also adding that she preferred the older style of official who, like Kipling and his family, had lived among the natives and was therefore better than the newer, academically trained bureaucrats.

Who the fuck likes bureaucrats? As for people who have been 'academically trained', they should be fed to alligators.  

Not only does Kipling reproduce a version of the argument of the socalled Orientalists in India, who believed that Indians should be ruled according to Oriental-Indian modes by India 'hands',

as opposed to Cambridge educated Dynasts- right?  

but in the process he dismisses as academic all the philosophical or ideological approaches contending with Orientalism.

So do we all. That shite is stoooooopid.  

Among those discredited styles of rule were Evangelicalism (the missionaries and reformers, parodied in Dr Bennett)

Mr. Bennett. An army chaplain is unlikely to be a Doctor of Divinity. The Evangelicals and Utilitarians were influential in the Eighteen Twenties and Thirties.  

, Utilitarianism and Spencerianism (who are parodied in the Babu),

Harbhat Pendse was the Messiah of the Maratha, not Bengali, revolutionaries. 

and of course those unnamed academics lampooned as 'worse than the pestilence'. It is interesting that phrased the way it is, the widow's approval is wide enough to include police officers like the Superintendent, as well as a flexible educator like Father Victor, and Colonel Creighton.

This is foolish. The Superintendent showed a lively wit in the vernacular. It turned out he was born in Himachal. That meant he must be fundamentally sound.  

Having the widow express what is in effect a sort of uncontested normative judgement about India and its rulers is Kipling's way of demonstrating that natives accept colonial rule, so long as it is the right kind of rule.

Or the kind of rule which keeps them rich and secure. Princesses may well look with favour on Imperial police officers who, it turns out, were natal to the same region. 

Historically this has always been the way European imperialism made itself more palatable to itself,

Whereas American Imperialism makes itself palatable to itself by describing the ugly and obscene manner in which it carried out genocide.  

for what could be better for its self-image than native subjects who express assent to the outsider's knowledge and power, while implicitly accepting European judgement on the undeveloped, backward or degenerate nature of native society?

What is best for one's self-image is if writers from your part of the world write well and show objectivity. Said would have been revered by Palestinians had be been capable of any such thing.  

If one were to read Kim as a boy's adventure story, or as a rich and lovingly detailed panorama of Indian life, one would not be reading the novel that Kipling in fact wrote,

says a cretin who knows nothing about adventure stories or Indian life 

so carefully inscribed is the novel with such considered views, suppressions and elisions as these. As Christopher Hutchins puts it in The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India, by the late nineteenth century, an . . . India of the imagination was created which contained no elements of either social change or political menace.

But this 'India of the imagination' is wholly imaginary. The fact is India was an important trading partner of the UK and thus a lot of people wanted factual information about it. This put a curb on the writing of fiction about the place. On the other hand, there was plenty of Newspaper coverage on political and social developments in India. Moreover, by the end of the 1860s there were educated Indians in London who were getting articles published with a view to changing the policies of the Raj. 

Orientalization was the result of this effort to conceive of Indian society as devoid of elements hostile to the perpetualization of British rule, for it was on the basis of this presumptive India that Orientalizers sought to build a permanent rule.

Very true. Meanwhile Uganda was able to colonize Scotland by conceiving of it as a place which longed to be ruled by Idi Amin. Said does not understand that stupid professors or guys who write novels have ZERO power. Money and military power determine geopolitical outcomes.  

Kim is a major contribution to this orientalized India of the imagination,

No. Southey and Tom Moore contributed to that. Kipling was a journalist. He was trained to observe and to report back that which readers would find interesting. No doubt, he invented places and situations but it was on the basis of observation. Blavatsky, you might say, turned India into a place rich and strange. But she could have easily done the same thing to Peoria.  

as it is also to what historians have come to call 'the invention of tradition'. There is still more to be noted. Dotting Kim's fabric is a scattering of editorial asides on the immutable nature of the Oriental world, particularly as it is distinguished from the white world, no less immutable. Thus, for example, 'Kim could lie like an Oriental';

i.e could spin a yarn. But this also true of many an O. Henry character living in 'Baghdad-on-the-Hudson'. 

or, a bit later, 'all hours of the twenty-four are alike to Orientals';

or New Yorkers not to mention Cocaine addicts or Cocaine addicts in New York.  

or, when Kim pays for train tickets with the lama's money he keeps one anna per rupee for himself which, Kipling says, is 'the immemorial commission of Asia';

Kipling was a small boy when the Brits abolished the purchase of commissions in the Army. Previously, an officer in charge of public funds was allowed to keep a percentage for himself. 'Offices of Profit' were precisely that.  

later still Kipling refers to 'the huckster instinct of the East'; at a train platform, Mahbub's retainers 'being natives' had not unloaded the trucks which they should have; Kim's ability to sleep as the trains roared is an instance of 'the Oriental's indifference to mere noise'; as the camp breaks up, Kipling says that it is done swiftly 'as Orientals understand speed - with long explanations, with abuse and windy talk, carelessly, amid a hundred checks for little things forgotten';

What is Kipling getting at? The answer is he wants to convey a picaresque, Arabian Nights, atmosphere to a deeply boring country.  

Sikhs are characterized as having a special 'love of money';

an endearing quality in this instance.  

Hurree Babu equates being a Bengali with being fearful; when he hides the packet taken from the foreign agents, the Babu 'stowed the entire trove about his body, as only Orientals can'.

The suggestion is that the Orient has always been and will always be a magical and thrilling place- rather than a place which either bores the shit out of you or else causes you to die of dysentery. But then, English novels set in English Country Houses feature ghosts or else murder on an industrial scale rather than boring folk boringly observing to other equally boring folk that it's nice weather- for ducks. 

Nothing of this is unique to Kipling.

What is unique about Kipling is his ability to 'show more than he knows'. If Said believes Whitey be Debil, why not just say so?  

The most cursory survey of late nineteenth-century culture reveals an immense archive of popular wisdom of this sort,

What is the point of furriners if we can't have silly stereotypes regarding them? The truth, sadly, is that they too are as boring as shit.  

a good deal of which, alas, is still very much alive today. Furthermore, as John M. McKenzie has shown in his valuable book Propaganda and Empire, a vast array of manipulative devices, from cigarette cards, postcards, sheet music, music-hall entertainments, toy soldiers, to brass band concerts, board games, almanacs and manuals, extolled the late nineteenth-century Empire and often did so by stressing the necessity of Empire to England's strategic, moral and economic well-being, and at the same time characterizing the dark or inferior races as thoroughly unregenerate, in need of suppression, severe rule, indefinite subjugation.

 But it wasn't propaganda or cigarette cards which had created and sustained that Empire. Any bunch of people can be very racist towards everybody else. But they won't get to rule over them unless there is a compelling financial and military reason for that outcome. 

The cult of the military personality was prominent in this context, usually because such personalities had managed to bash a few dark heads.

Or get bashed by them like 'Chinese' Gordon.  

Different rationales for holding overseas territories were given during the course of the century; sometimes it was profit, at other times strategy, at still others it was competition with other imperial powers - as in Kim.

If the thing could be done without any expenditure of blood or treasure, everybody would have got to rule the World.  

(In The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, Angus Wilson mentions that as early as sixteen years of age Kipling proposed at a school debate the motion that 'the advance of Russia in Central Asia is hostile to British Power'.)

That was the sort of question these boys preparing for the Army Exams needed to have glib answers to.  

The one thing that remains constant, however, is the inferiority of the non-white.

The Irish are actually East Asian in appearance. Russians are darker than Zulus. 

To this view everyone, from the ordinary lower-middle-class jingoist to the highest of philosophers, seems to have subscribed. This is a very important point. Kim is a work of great aesthetic merit; it cannot be dismissed simply as the racist imagining of one fairly disturbed and ultra-reactionary imperialist.

Bertrand Russell and Keynes thought more advanced people have a natural right to conquer the territory of less developed people. If those 'natives' suddenly disappeared en masse, no blame attached to anybody.  

George Orwell

who was born in Bihar and who served in Burma as a police officer

was certainly right to comment on Kipling's unique power to have added phrases and concepts to the language - East is East, and West is West; the white man's Burden; somewhere East of Suez - and right, also, to say that Kipling's concerns are both vulgar and permanent, of urgent interest.

Not after 1947- or '57 if we include Eden's blunder. It is foolish to moan about Imperialism decades after it disappeared.  

Now, one reason for Kipling's power is that he was an artist of enormous gifts; what he did in his art was to have elaborated ideas that would have had far less permanence, for all their vulgarity, without the art.

Fuck off! Any ideas Kipling had about India or Africa existed before he was born. Kipling was a poet and a good observer. That which has 'oft been said but ne'er better expressed' will live.  

But the other reason for his power is that he was also supported by (and therefore could make use of) the authorized monuments of nineteenth-century European culture, for whom the inferiority of non-white races, the necessity for them to be ruled by a superior civilization, and the absolute unchanging essence of Orientals, blacks, primitives, women were more or less undebatable, unquestioned axioms of modern life.

Nineteenth century Islam may have had similar 'monuments' to the inevitability of the entire globe being united under the Caliph. Twenty-first century Socioproctology is committed to the notion that the day is nigh when Iyers will return to Iyerland- from which they were chased away by leprechauns. So what? This changes nothing. It so happened that Kipling was born in India and returned to work there because British paramountcy had made this outcome profitable. Later, it would make it profitable for two Punjabis from East Africa to settle in Britain where their son is now Prime Minister. 

The extraordinary status of racial theory, in which it was scientifically proven that the white man

unless he was Irish 

stood at the pinnacle of development and civilization, is a case in point. It would be tedious here to run through the arguments and the names: I have discussed these notions in Orientalism.

Which was tedious enough 

Suffice it to say that Macaulay, Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, J. A. Froude, John Robert Seeley, even John Stuart Mill, plus every major novelist, essayist, philosopher, and historian of note accepted as fact the division, the difference and, in Gobineau's phrase, the inequality of the races.

I could reel off a dozen names of Muslim or Hindu savants who thought the Brits were unclean, albino, monkeys from a demonic isle. Come to think of it, 

Said and Farrakhan probably saw eye to eye with regard to Jews and Israel.  

Moreover these views were regularly adduced as evidence for the desirability of European rule in less-developed regions of the world.

ISIS may have similar propaganda but that don't seem to be having much success.  

Much the same situation obtains in France, Belgium, Germany, Holland, and the United States. True, there were debates about how the colonies were to be ruled, or whether some of them should be given up. Yet no one with any power to influence public discussion or policy demurred as to the basic superiority of the white European male,

unless Irish 

who should always retain the upper hand when dealing with natives.

unless natives were Boers and their land had lots of gold and diamonds 

Statements like 'the Hindu is inherently untruthful and lacks moral courage' were the expression of wisdom from which very few, least of all the governors of Bengal, dissented;

plenty of such Governors were pro-Hindu. These guys dined with Hindu aristocrats or arrivistes like the Tagores. 

similarly when a historian of India like Sir H. M. Elliot planned his work, central to it was the notion of Indian barbarity.

Nope. Central to it was the object of being useful to the Administration and those seeking employment with John Company. If Indians were barbarians then the Raj should have scrapped the entire administrative and fiscal machinery and started afresh. It was because Indians had stopped being barbarians long before the Brits, that it was useful to look back and see what had worked in the past and might profitably be revived now.  

Contra Said, the reason we read history is not to feed our sense of grievance but to find 'concrete models' for the success of policy innovations we hope to profit by. 

An entire system of thought clustered around these conceptions. Climate and geography dictated certain character traits in the Indian;

and the Europeans and African and so forth.  

Orientals, according to Lord Cromer, one of their most redoubtable rulers,

He established a 'veiled protectorate' in Egypt which hadn't been barbaric for five thousand years 

could not learn to walk on sidewalks, could not tell the truth, could not use logic;

Oddly, Cromer wasn't utterly stupid. Still, if you are swindling a great people, you may as well depict them as stupid.  

the Malaysian native was essentially lazy, the way the northern European was energetic and resourceful.

Though most British noblemen were idle and off their heads on drink.  

V. G. Kiernan's book The Lords of Human Kind gives a remarkable picture of how widespread these views were.

He was a Communist. Stalin wasn't vile at all. He was a cuddly teddy bear.  

Disciplines like colonial economics, anthropology, history and sociology were built out of these dicta,

No they weren't. They were deeply boring. Still, at one time there was sciencey looking racial theory. Karl Pearson- a genius- was taken in by it. But once the thing was shown to be statistically unsound, it was dropped. Science works that way. 

with the result that almost to a man and woman the Europeans who dealt with colonies such as India became insulated to the facts of change and nationalism.

Which was fine if what they were paid to do involved being 'insulated'.  

Even Karl Marx succumbed to thoughts of the changeless Asiatic village, or agriculture, or despotism.

He was as stupid as shit. There was a view promoted by early Victorians in Bombay Presidency that the self governing village could be collectively taxed with the wealthier paying the share of the poorer because such villages were just one big happy family. The Utilitarians and those who had worked in finance in India, ridiculed this. Even if the thing had been true in the days of the Peshwa, it was no longer the case. The wealthy in the village gobbled up the land of the poor.  

And as colonial work progressed in time it became specialized. A young Englishman sent to India would belong to a class whose national dominance over each and every Indian, no matter how aristocratic and poor, was absolute.

Nonsense! The Englishman was subject to the law. Anyway, he was susceptible to a dagger thrust.  

He would have heard the same stories, read the same books, learned the same lessons, joined the same clubs as all the other young colonial officials.

That was irrelevant. On arriving in India, he boarded with his superior officer who showed him how things were done in the District. Any 'book learning' or other type of prejudice he might have had was soon sweated out of him. What mattered was consistency. Consider the case of a Ronnie Heaslop sent to a District whose Collector was an Irishman. He had to learn to do things the Irish way- i.e. in a conciliatory and pragmatic manner- because on succeeding to the office of Collector he must continue to keep up precedent while only very gradually and imperceptibly putting his own stamp on things. Soon he too would have an understudy- perhaps an Indian- whom he'd show the ropes. It was a pity this 'guru-shishya parampara' was abandoned after Independence. However, by then, elected politicians ruled the roost. Sycophancy was the stepping ladder to success and getting out of the boondocks to the State Capital was the goal. 

Ronnie Heaslop in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India is a well-known portrait of such an official.

Come to think of it, Heaslop is on the judicial side- i.e. a nitwit. He will retire as a High Court Judge and maybe, by brown-nosing, get some sort of sinecure after that. Had he been a District Commissioner, he would have been trained to show shrewdness and decisiveness.  

All of this is absolutely relevant to Kim, whose main figure of worldly authority is Colonel Creighton.

Kipling did have a mentor- the Mason in Paget & Mason's 'Record of Expeditions against the North West Frontier tribes' which, when I was young, Pakistani officers used to consult. There are other candidates from different regiments who might also fit the bill.  

This ethnographer scholar-soldier

the man is a soldier. He was assigned a particular job and did it with diligence.  

is no mere accidental creature of invention, sprung fully grown and ready from Kipling's imagination. He is almost certainly a figure drawn from Kipling's experiences in the Punjab, and he is most interestingly interpreted both as an evolution out of earlier figures of authority in colonial India 

No. The man is a soldier. In India- 'Authority' always meant the Civil Service not the Military. But the Army had greatly changed from what it was under John Company. There was no 'evolution'. There was a clean break. Officers assigned Intelligence roles visited the Continent and tried to keep up to date with developments in the theory of War. Surveying and 'ethnographic' research had been completely overhauled. I believe, the War Office quietly brought in experts from other Armies though I am not aware of any evidence for this.  

as well as someone whose role answered to Kipling's own needs. In the first place, although Creighton is seen infrequently and his character is not as fully drawn as either Mahbub Ali's or the Babu's, he is nevertheless very much there, a point of reference for the action, a discreet director of events, a man whose power is eminently worthy of respect.

No. He is a soldier. He has a mission. He will complete it even if is obviously misguided. The fact is, the British Indian Army- or even the British British Army!- made its own calculations and fought its own corner. But those calculations could be very shitty indeed.  

Yet he is no crude martinet.

Because that isn't his mission.  

He takes over Kim's life by persuasion, not by imposition of his rank.

Kim is not a soldier. Not even the C-in-C can impose on him by virtue of his rank. We are speaking of British India not the Kaiser's Germany or Tzarist Russia.  

He can be flexible when it seems reasonable - who could have wished for a better boss than Creighton during Kim's footloose holidays?

one could wish for a better boss but not a better assignment. It was that which Kim liked and found to be within his powers. 

- and stern when events require it.

A soldier who isn't stern when events require it is also likely to keep shitting his pants.  

In the second place, what makes Creighton especially interesting is Kipling's rendition of him as a colonial official and scholar.

He is not an official! He is a soldier.  

This union of power and knowledge is

like that of Sleeman or Meadows Taylor or actual 'Stricklands' like Tegart. 

contemporary with Conan Doyle's invention of Sherlock Holmes (whose faithful scribe, Doctor Watson, is a veteran of the North-West Frontier), also a man whose approach to life includes a healthy respect for, and protection of, the law, allied with a superior, specialized intellect.

No. The soldier is not concerned with the law. He has a mission and that is all that matters.  

In both instances, Kipling and Conan Doyle represent for their readers men whose unorthodox style of operation is rationalized by relatively new fields of experience turned into quasi-academic specialities.

Strickland isn't particularly interesting. Also he gets married. Yucky!  

Colonial rule and crime detection appear now to have almost the respectability and order of the classics and chemistry.

Police officers don't 'rule'. Neither do soldiers. In India, the ICS ruled. Their work was as boring as shit. Not even Kipling could pretend otherwise though Mrs Hawksbee does mold one or two such drudges. 

When Mahbub Ali turns Kim in for his education, Creighton, overhearing their conversation, thinks 'that the boy mustn't be wasted if he is as advertised'. Creighton sees the world from a totally systematic viewpoint.

No. He is a soldier- not a very senior one- who sees the world from a tactical point of view. Perhaps if he had been sent to the United Services Institute, he might have an inkling of the larger strategic picture. But, while the Duke of Cambridge was C-in-C, I doubt the War Office had any sort of viewpoint other than that of blinkered Blimpdom. 

Everything about India interests him, because everything in it is significant for his rule.

Mission. He doesn't rule shit. Being attached to Intelligence generally means having no command though, as a matter of fact, some did command troops with brevet Colonel rank. 

The interchange between ethnography and colonial work in Creighton is fluent; he can study the talented boy both as a future spy and as an anthropological curiosity.

Anthropology wasn't an academic discipline then. The first Professors of the subject were appointed in the 1890s.

In any case, there were plenty of other Eurasian boys. What made Kim different was his mother too had been White. In such cases, some better provision would have been made. Kipling explains this away by pointing to a delinquent step-mother of some slatternly type. The truth is, if the father had sunk too low, his passage home would have been arranged. The official policy was to deport poor Whites. Half-breeds were welcome to go to the devil if they spurned the chance to work as stokers on the Railways. 

Thus when Father Victor wonders whether it might not be too much for Creighton to attend to a bureaucratic detail concerning Kim's education, the colonel dismisses the scruple. 'The transformation of a regimental badge like your Red Bull into a sort of fetish that the boy follows is very interesting.'

This is Kipling speaking. Creighton is acting out of character. This is a matter of Regimental honour- a genuine fetish for a soldier- and takes precedence over everything else. After all, to maintain morale, the squaddies must know that one of their own was well taken care of.  

Two further points should be made about Creighton the anthropologist. Of all the modern social sciences, anthropology is the one historically most closely tied to colonialism,

It only reared its ugly head when the thing was on its death-bed. US Aid gave it a shot in the arm. Then everybody realized that accepting American largesse increased poverty. Also, female anthropologists started showing up all over the place. They raped tribal elders. One such had to be dragged off some hapless Chieftain by the Indonesian Army. 

since it has often been the case that since the mid-nineteenth century anthropologists and ethnologists were also advisors to colonial rulers on the manners and mores of the native people to be ruled. Claude Levi-Strauss's allusion to anthropological investigations in The Scope of Anthropology as 'sequels to colonialism' is a recognition of this fact;

Levi-Strauss, being French, thought colonialism was a good thing. So did Hitler- but he wanted to do in Europe what Europeans had done in Tasmania.  

the excellent collection of essays edited by Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, develops the connections still further.

Colonialism got on fine when it concentrated on making money. After that, it turned to shit, Anthropologists swarmed in. But, quite soon, those Anthropologists started taking drugs and humping anything that moved. Thus, they were shunned by the locals.  

And, finally, in Robert Stone's recent novel on United States imperialist involvement in Latin American affairs, A Flag for Sunrise, its central character is Holliwell, an anthropologist with ambiguous ties to the CIA .

There's nothing ambiguous about taking money from that bunch of clowns.  

Kipling was simply one of the first novelists to portray a logical alliance between Western science and political power at work in the colonies.

Western Science built the ships which got Europeans to the Tropics. Smollett was a Naval Doctor back when the US was a colony.  But Defoe's Robinson Crusoe predates Rodrick Random. Said truly was as stupid as shit. 

There were scientists in India at that time and it is certainly true that they contributed to the manufacture of instruments for use in military surveys but that could as easily have been done in Europe. 

Secondly Creighton is always taken seriously by Kipling, which is one of the reasons the Babu is there. The native anthropologist is clearly a bright man whose reiterated ambitions to belong to the Royal Society are not entirely unfounded. Yet he is almost always funny, or gauche, or somehow caricatural not because he is incompetent or inept in his work - on the contrary, he is exactly the opposite - but because he is not white, that is, he can never be a Creighton.

Mukherjees had made plenty of money working for the Brits. They knew, as Tagore knew, that if the Brits departed, the Muslims would cut their throats. Seriously, the dude probably knew Anandmath by heart.  

Kipling, I think, is very careful about this. Just as he could not imagine an India in historical flux out of British control,

Fuck off! He could easily imagine it. He had visited Princely states and knew what was happening in Nepal. 

he could not imagine Indians who could be as effective and as serious in what Kipling and many others of the time considered to be exclusively Western pursuits.

Global Empires have been an exclusively Western European pursuit.  

Hence, lovable and admirable though he may be, there remains in Kipling's portrait of him the grimacing stereotype of the ontologically funny native, hopelessly trying to be like 'us'.

Kipling has a story about a Bengali student in London who seems very affluent though his father back home is a mere clerk earning one tenth what a 20 year old 'griffin' would earn. The hint is clear. The clerk was making lakhs while the District Commissioner would retire on an exiguous pension.  By 1950, in Eric Linklater's Mr. Bycula,  an ex-ICS officer is living on tea and toast in a boarding house. Then Thugee puts him out of his misery. 

I said above that the figure of Creighton, is, in a sense, the culmination of a change taking place over generations in the personification of British power in India.

It had started off as fun and frolics and the making of vast fortunes. It ended in boredom and red tape and finally an exiguous pension back in bombed out Blighty.  The one constant was dysentery. Even Viceroys got the shits. The thing was so not worth it. 

Behind Creighton are late eighteenth-century adventurers and pioneers like Warren Hastings and Robert Clive,

who weren't soldiers. Creighton sat for exams and got into the Army and worked his ass off. Then he either dyed of typhoid or retired to a Bournemouth boarding house- or Basil Fawlty's more pretentious place in Torquay- where he would be a figure of fun to the shabby genteel.   

men whose innovative rule and personal excesses required legislation in England to subdue the unrestricted authority of the Raj.

Nope. Westminster increased the power and authority of the Governor General. That's what curbed the depredations of the  'interloper'. Still by the 1840s, India was no longer a place where fortunes could be made though putting down the Mutiny did yield some prize money. 

What survives of Clive and Hastings in Creighton is their sense of freedom, their willingness to improvise, their preference for the informal over the formal.

Fuck off! Clive and Hastings were doing deals worth crores. Creighton is trying to save the Exchequer a lakh or two from the money-pit that was the North West frontier. 

Standing behind Creighton, also, are the great scholar figures for whom service in India was an opportunity to study an alien culture - men like Sir William ('Asiatic') Jones, Sir Charles Wilkins, Nathaniel Halhed, Henry Colebrooke, Jonathan Duncan.

Fuck off! Creighton wouldn't have got a salary increment for learning Sanskrit like an ICS man. He was a soldier &  a bit of Army Hindustani and maybe a little literary Persian (if he hankered for a transfer to the Political Service) were all he was expected to know. But ICS men were no longer trying to attract the attention of Europe. German heavy industry had taken over Indology. One or two might translate from vernacular languages like Sindhi. But they didn't expect to get much out of it. 

But whereas such men belonged not to a national but to a principally commercial enterprise, they seemed never to have had what Creighton (and Kipling) had, the feeling that work in India was as patterned and as economical (in the literal sense of the word) as running a total polity.

It was boring bureaucratic shite done for a diminishing reward because the silver Rupee kept falling against gold backed Sterling. 

What distinguishes Creighton from the Clives, the Colebrookes, and the Halheds, is that

he is a soldier. If he is lucky he gets made a Political Agent to some small Princedom. If he is unlucky his regiment is merged and he is sent home on half-pay. In practice this means he has to settle in Italy or some other such place where the cost of living is much lower. 

his norms are those of disinterested government, government based not upon whim, or personal preference, but upon laws, principles of order and control.

No. He has his orders and only some limited tactical freedom of manoeuver.  Even so, Westminster might decide to let the North West Frontier look after itself and so his regiment is cannibalized and he is on half pay. 

Creighton embodies the notion that you cannot govern India unless you know India, and to know India means understanding the way it operates.

Fuck off! The Brits ruled India. The Secretary of State may never have set foot there. The Viceroy might know nothing of the place prior to his appointment. It was the British Parliament which decided to raise taccavi or abolish peshkash even if not a single MP understood what either word meant. 

This immediately sets the governor apart from the ordinary human being, for whom questions of right and \vrong, of virtue and harm are both emotionally involving and important.

Nonsense! The Governor was accountable for his actions. During the second war there was a Governor of Madras who stole money from the Red Cross fund. To preserve morale during war-time, the matter was hushed up. Otherwise the fellow would have been made an example of unless he took the gentleman's way out and had an 'accident' while loading his shotgun.  

To the government personality, the main prerogative is not whether something is good or evil, and therefore must be changed or kept, but whether something works or not, whether it helps or hinders one in ruling what is in effect an alien entity.

This is true of everybody doing what they do for a living. If it aint broke don't fix it. Also the thing may be evil but if dealing in it keeps the wolf from the door than why not hold your nose and just get on with it? 

Thus Creighton satisfies the Kipling who had imagined an ideal India, unchanging and attractive, as an eternally integral part of the Empire.

No. Kipling identified with the Punjabi Civilian. He knew that the Army could pull the plug on any project simply by saying that it would invite depredation of a type it would be costly to defend against. That's why you always had to be nice to Military Johnnies. Flatter them. Buy them drinks. Tell the Memsahib to call on the Colonel's wife even if that crazy biddy pours gin from her teapot and swears like a trooper. 

For his part, Kipling liked technology and the building of bridges and motorways and so forth. At least some contractors could make decent money. Anyway, that's one reason people join the Masons. 

This was an authority one could give in to.

Not for Britishers like Kipling. He lived in India because he was paid to do so. As soon as he could get more money elsewhere, he fucked off never to return. Sir Valentine Chirol, on the other hand, did like India and would often visit. But he was brought up in France and Germany before being recruited by the Foreign Office. Clearly, there is some truth to the adage that 'wogs start at Calais'. I mean, there's nothing wrong with learning French at Public School. That way no Frenchman can understand what you are saying. The truth is furriners can understand English well enough if you raise your voice sufficiently. 

In a celebrated essay, Noel Annan presented the notion that Kipling's vision of society in his novels was similar to that of the new sociology - as put forward by Durkheim, Weber and Pareto.

Pareto was smart. Weber was mad and very very stupid though his younger brother was an okay economist. Durkheim was simply wrong. Tarde was on the money. Mimetics matter. Markets matter. But the division of labour does not change anything in Social psychology

[The new sociology] saw society as a nexus of groups; and the pattern of behaviour which these groups unwittingly established, rather than men's wills or anything so vague as a class, cultural or national tradition, primarily determined men's actions.

Then the wills of a Kaiser and a bunch of Generals caused a complete revolution in every advanced Society while making the end of Imperialism inevitable. Durkheim died during the Great War, his heart broken and all his hopes and dreams shattered.  

They asked how these groups promoted order or instability in society, whereas their predecessors had asked whether certain groups helped society to progress.

It only takes a couple of guys with power doing stupid shit for Society to be wholly remoulded.  

Annan goes on to say that Kipling was similar to the founders of modern sociological discourse to the extent that he believed efficient government in India depended upon 'the forces of social control [such as religion, law, custom, convention, morality] which imposed upon individuals certain rules which they broke at their peril'.

No. Societies depend on incentives. Otherwise people run away or pretend they are too stupid to understand rules. Moreover, Society isn't controlled by religion or morality or the law. These are supervenient on Society. They are not determinants of it. There have to be incentives to bring about the punishment of rule breaking. Otherwise, no one will do it.  

In the late nineteenth century it had become almost a commonplace of British imperial theory that the British Empire was different from (and therefore better than) the Roman Empire in that the latter was just robbery and profit, whereas the former was a rigorous system in which order and law prevailed.

The Roman Empire was infantry based. The British Empire was based on Naval supremacy. The Romans had more 'pietas' and thus paved the way for Christianization. The Brits were transactional and individualistic, not to say opportunistic. They don't have an Empire any more. But their Commonwealth is huge. 

America may be a country of lawyers and France a country of notaries. Brits are on the side of order- spontaneous order- but sceptical about the Courts. After all, Justice is a service industry. But so is Prostitution. 

Cromer makes the point in Imperialism Ancient and Modern,

but he only matters to Egyptians like Said. He was wrong about- for example- the Bengal administration. There was precious little room for 'individualism' there. That's why A.O Hume was forced out.  

and so does Conrad's Marlow in Heart of Darkness.

The Congo Free State was not an Imperial possession. 

Creighton understands this perfectly, which is why he works with Muslims, Bengalis, Afghans, Tibetans without appearing ever to belittle their beliefs or slight their differences.

No. Creighton works with those who can help him complete his mission. On the other hand, he would often alight from his horse so as to debate with it and belittle its beliefs.  

It was, I think, a natural insight for Kipling, to have imagined Creighton as a scientist whose speciality included the minute workings of a complex society, rather than as either a colonial bureaucrat, necessary but dull, or a rapacious profiteer.

In India, the view is that Creighton had a real life model. Different regiments claimed him for their own. Lurgan's model is well known- Simla being a small place- but there are a lot of candidates for Strickland or Creighton. The trouble is the more plausible ones tended to be Churchy types. I suppose Kipling wanted to suggest a Disraeli or Bulwer Lytton type 'superman'.  The French went in for that sort of thing but if the Brits had anything similar they kept it under their hats. Anyway, only the Royal Navy mattered. 

Creighton's Olympian humour, his affectionate but detached attitude towards people, his eccentric bearing, are Kipling's embellishments of an ideal Indian official, whose genealogy is a long one, but whose present state is the refinement of many costly antecedents, numerous failures, and a fair number of major achievements.

No. Kipling knew that there was less and less money in the kitty for costly campaigns across the Frontier. Retrenchment meant things had to be done on the cheap.  

But Creighton the organization man not only presides over the Great Game

he is a small cog in an ultimately unimportant sector. A Franco-Russian alliance would immediately result in France losing its colonies. The Sikhs and Dogras could shut the gates of the Punjab while Afghan tribes were bribed to turn on the invader.  

(whose ultimate beneficiary is of course the Kaisar-i-Hind, or Queen Empress, and her British people),

'Frontier Arithmetic' made the Durand line not worth defending. Simply arm the Sikhs and Dogras and bribe some Sheikhs and Emirs till the invader's baggage trains look more and more inviting.  

he also works hand-in-hand with the novelist himself. If there is a consistent point of view to be ascribed to Kipling, it is in Creighton, more than anyone else, that it can be found.

No. Kim is Kipling.  India was the material for Kipling's own bildungsroman. He felt his 'black sheep' days in Blighty were a permanent blight. He'd been happy at Westward Ho but its students were marked for careers overseas. His principal steered him to journalism and his dad got him his first job in Lahore where he could stay with his family. 

Like Kipling, Creighton respects the distinctions within Indian society. When Mahbub AH tells Kim that he must never forget that he is a sahib,

just as an Afridi must never forget he is an Afridi 

we should remember that, in a sense, he speaks as Creighton's trusted, experienced employee.

We should also remember that the guy has his own side businesses. Creighton may well drop Kim. Indeed, the Colonel may be transferred to a theatre of war. But Kim can be useful even if he is 'country bottled'. Maybe, if he turns out to be good at book-learning, money can be raised to turn him into a British barrister. That could be an excellent investment.  

Creighton, again like Kipling, never tampers with the hierarchies, the priorities and privileges of caste, religion, ethnicity and race; neither do the men and women who work for him.

Because they don't belong to the administrative branch. Plenty of such tampering was going on all the time. Such and such sept wants to be recognized as of superior caste. Others are notified as 'Criminal tribes'. Stuff like that mattered. The Army too could downrank a caste for recruitment purposes. That is what happened to Ambedkar's Mahars.  

By the late nineteenth century the so-called Warrant of Precedence which began, according to Geoffrey Moorhouse in India Britannica by recognizing 'fourteen different levels of status' had expanded to 'sixty-one, some reserved for one person, others shared by a number of people'.

This was a cheap way to buy support or reward effort. It didn't matter in the slightest.  

Moorhouse speculates that the special 'love-hate' relationship between the British and Indians derived from the complex hierarchical attitude present in each people - class for the British, caste for the Indians.

Very true. That is why Rishi Sunak is now ruling innit? He has classified BoJo as a 'pariah'. BoJo cried and cried.  

'Each grasped the other's basic social premise

Fuck off! Indians don't understand the caste system of adjoining States. North Indians were baffled by the distinction between Right-hand and Left-hand castes in the South. Those from the West couldn't get their head around Bengali kulinism. As for the 'basic social premise' of Engyland- what the fuck was it? Why is sex with miners still banned? Was it because King Arthur Scarface was raped by Mrs Thatcher and took his people underground to dig coal till Parliament made such assaults illegal? Who can tell? 

Incidentally, Madam Blavatsky could have been a big hit in London if she'd stuck to speaking French. But she was determined to speak the English her governess had taught her. Sadly, that lady had a broad Yorkshire accent. You can't pose as a great mystic if you sound like a Tyke. 

and not only understood it but subconsciously respected it as a curious variant of their own.'

This is nonsense. In India, Brahmins had high status. In England, a curate was decidedly below the salt.  

One sees this everywhere in Kim - the patiently detailed register of different races and castes,

there is no such register in the book.  

the acceptance by everyone (even the lama) of the doctrine of racial separation,

India had no such doctrine. Some American states had laws against miscegenation. Nothing of the sort obtained in England or India. 

the lines and the customs which cannot easily be traversed by outsiders.

Lines and customs aren't meant to be 'traversed' by anybody though outsiders may be readily forgiven for doing so. 

Everyone in Kim is therefore equally an outsider to other groups and an insider in his.

Everybody is an outsider to groups they don't belong to. I'm not actually a member of the Royal Family, though I might refer familiarly to the King as my brother-in-law. This is why I'm turned away at the gate of Buckingham Palace any time I stop by and ask to use the Royal loo.  

Thus Creighton's almost instinctive appreciation of Kim's abilities, his quickness, his capacity for disguise and for getting into a situation as if it were native to him, is

common to everybody.  

like the novelist's interest in a complex and chameleon-like character, who can dart in and out of adventure, intrigue, episode.

We all find such people fascinating. They have good stories to tell. 

The ultimate analogy is between the Great Game and the novel itself.

Both sought to control 'the cockpit of  Central Asia'. Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' had been a smash hit with the Hazaras and Uzbegs. Kipling was commissioned to write 'Kim' so as to appeal to the Tajiks and the Yusufzais. 

To be able to see all India from the vantage of controlled observation: this is one great satisfaction.

No it isn't. I just looked at a satellite picture of India. It didn't satisfy me at all.  

Another is to have at one's fingertips a character who can sportingly cross lines and invade territories, a little 'Friend of all the World', Kim O'Hara himself.

I don't want my fingertips any where near little boys of any description.  

It is as if by holding Kim at the centre of the novel (just as Creighton the spy master holds the boy in the Great Game) Kipling can have and enjoy India in a way that even imperialism never dreamed of.

Why didn't he write a novel about Germany so as to have and enjoy that country when it started a war which cost his son's life? 

What does this mean in terms of so codified and organized a structure as the late nineteenth-century realistic novel? 

Nothing at all. Either the thing sold well or the author cursed his luck. Novels don't matter very much unless they are about some pressing socio-political problem in one's own country.  

Along with Conrad, Kipling is a writer of fiction whose heroes belong to a startlingly unusual world of foreign adventure and personal charisma.

No. Conrad and Kipling weren't in the business of writing books about heroes like Sherlock Holmes. 

When we think of Kim or, say, Lord Jim and Kurtz, we immediately bring to mind creatures with a flamboyant will who presage later adventurers like T. E. Lawrence in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Malraux's Perken in La Vole royale.

Nonsense! Kim was born in India. He brings to mind Meadows Taylor. Conrad was a sailor. He brings to mind guys who knock about in boats. T.E Lawrence was a Classicist turned Arabist. He brings to mind WS Blunt, Doughty and so forth.  

Conrad's heroes, I said earlier, have been bitten by an unusual power of reflection and cosmic irony, but they remain in the memory as strong and often heedlessly daring men of action.

Very true. Conrad wrote the Horatio Hornblower series.  

Like Conrad, Kipling had difficulties with romantic love, with women, with domesticity.

No. Kipling was uxorious. Conrad suffered from depression and poor health and had money problems. His working-class wife some years younger to him, took good care of him. Like most Poles, he was fearsomely bright. This was un-English.  

The interesting thing about the two men is that although their fiction belongs to the genre of adventure-imperialism (along with Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Charles Reade, Vernon Fielding, G. A. Henty, and dozens of lesser writers) they are nevertheless writers with a claim on serious aesthetic and critical attention.

Conrad, yes. Kipling, no- unless you have an interest in India and want to know what Kipling means to a Hindu. I've asked around. Nobody does.  

True, their world was the world of heroes like 'Chinese' Gordon, Cecil Rhodes,

a pal of Kipling- but he didn't write about him 

Lord Curzon, Livingstone and Stanley, Richard Burton - a world brilliantly described in Martin Green's Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire,21 which he correctly traces back to Robinson Crusoe

No. Hakluyt, Coryate & Purchas- sure. That genre was well established before Defoe cashed in on it.  

- and yet there is in the writing of Conrad and Kipling an additional complexity that makes them more interesting than all their other contemporaries, whom we only read today as sociological or perhaps historical exhibitions.

Conrad has complexity. Kipling has 'dhvani'- allusiveness. Kipling was a poet, Conrad- an intellectual.  

One way of grasping what is unusual about Kipling's best work of long fiction, Kim, is to recall briefly who his other great contemporaries were. We have become so used to seeing him alongside Haggard and John Buchan that we have forgotten that, as an artist, he can justifiably be compared with Thomas Hardy,

his Jude the Obscure is about a little boy who has adventures in Patagonia.  

with Henry James,

who wrote about little boys who had amazing adventures in Manchuria.  

George Meredith, George Gissing, the later George Eliot, George Moore, Samuel Butler.

why not mention Hegel? His Phenomenology of Spirit is about a little boy who has amazing adventures in Madagascar.  

In France, Kipling's peers are Flaubert and Zola, even Proust and the early Gide.

No. In France, Kipling's peers are the Eiffel Tower- which wrote a book about the amazing adventures of a little boy in Kamchatka- and the other Eiffel Tower- which didn't but wanted to and definitely would have done so had it ever been built.  

Yet the major difference between all these writers and Kipling is that their works are essentially novels of disillusion and disenchantment, whereas Kim, for instance, is not.

They wrote for grownups. Kipling was profoundly legible to me as a boy. Proust- not so much.  

Almost without exception the protagonist of the late nineteenth-century novel is someone who realizes that his or her life's project - the wish to be great, rich, or distinguished - is mere fancy, illusion, dream. If we think of Frederic Moreau in Flaubert's Sentimental Education, or Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, or Ernest Pontifex in Butler's The Way of All Flesh, we will bring to mind a young man or woman bitterly awakened from a fancy dream of accomplishment, action or glory, forced instead to come to terms with a considerably reduced status, a betrayed love, and a hideously bourgeois world of crass mammonism and philistine taste.

Kipling did write 'the Light that failed'- which failed. The guy was paid to write stuff for a particular market- which included youngsters or the overgrown boys most of us are at heart.

This awakening is by no means to be found in Kim. Nothing brings the point home more powerfully than a comparison between Kim and his nearly exact contemporary Jude Fawley, the 'hero' of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1896). Both are eccentric orphans, objectively at odds with their environments: Kim is an Irishman in India,

which meant he was eligible for a free, decent enough education and quite good employment in the Railways.  

Jude a minimally gifted rural English boy who is more interested in Greek than he is in farming.

Why 'minimally gifted'? With a bit of luck, the local Squire or Lady Bountiful might have sent him to Grammar School and then he'd have been a sizar at Cambridge where he could choke on Greek after which he'd have become a curate and then maybe gone abroad as a missionary.  

Both imagine lives of appealing attractiveness for themselves and both try to achieve this life through apprenticeship of some sort, Kim as chela to the wandering abbot-lama, Jude as a supplicant student at the university. But there the comparisons stop, and the contrasts begin. Jude is ensnared by one circumstance after the other; he marries the ill-suited Arabella, falls in love disastrously with Sue Bridehead, conceives children who commit suicide,

they are killed by Jude's son from his first wife- a strange fellow called 'Little Father Time'- who also kills himself. It must be said, Hardy had a rare talent for comedy. 

ends his days dying as a neglected man after years of pathetic wandering.

He dies within a year of his beloved leaving him while his ex-wife shacks up with him. The thing to do is to read out these passages in a rich Wurzel Gummidge accent.  

Kim, on the other hand, graduates from one brilliant success to the other. By the end of the novel he is at the beginning of a new and satisfying life, having helped the lama achieve his dream of redemption, the British to foil a serious plot, the Indians to continue enjoying prosperity under Britain. Yet it is important to insist again on the similarities between Kim and Jude the Obscure

why not the similarities between Kim and Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit?  

the better to appreciate the difference in tone between these two striking novels by two great writers. In each case we have an odd or somehow eccentric young man

Kim is charming, not odd or eccentric.  

who is compelled, like Robinson Crusoe or Tom Jones, to make his own way in the world.

Kim was a boy- not a guy who got shipwrecked or a lusty young fellow banished from home comforts for drunkenness and fighting 

Both boys, Kim and Jude,

Jude is a man. That's why he can be seduced and thus forced to give up his academic plans. In Jude, Way of all Flesh and Gissing- sex is the lure which buries the scholastic or clerical ambitions of the protagonist. Also working class women turn out to be alcoholic harridans.  

are singled out for their unusual pedigree;

what is unusual about relatively poor people having kids who inherit that condition? Kim is unusual in that he is pure White and as such should have been taken into care once his father died.  

neither is like 'normal' boys whose parents and family are there to assure a smooth passage through life.

Jude is perfectly normal. Even had his parents been alive, they could scarcely have paid for him to attend Oxford. He had a slender chance to rise- either through the Church or in a Solicitor's office- but probably got better wages as a stone-mason. But this meant a harridan pounced upon him.  

Central to their predicaments as individuals is the problem of identity - what to be, where to go, what to do.

Jude knows his identity but can't fulfil his plan of life because women get in the way. Also, fuck Greek. Just qualify as a Student Teacher and pretend to be Holier than fucking Thou. Under the capitation system, you can find a way to line your pockets while opening a school or two.  

Since they cannot be like the others therefore, who are they? Impelled by these questions they are restless seekers and wanderers.

Jude could have fucked off to Germany and given English lessons while preparing himself for Collidge. Things were a lot cheaper on the Continent. Alternatively, why not pretend to convert to Catholicism and let the Jesuits raise you up?  

In this they are like the archetypal hero of the novel form itself, Don Quixote, who, according to Georg Lukacs in The Theory of the Novel decisively marks off the world of the novel in its fallen, unhappy state, its 'lost transcendence', from the world of the epic, which is happy, satisfied, full.

Lukacs had ka-ka for brains. The Novel- more particularly if published in serial form- is a phenomenon of the market. The Epic predates not just Guttenberg but even the alphabet.  

Every novelistic hero, Lukacs says, attempts to restore a lost world of his or her imagination which, particularly in the late nineteenthcentury novel of disillusionment, is shown to be doomed everlastingly to wish unsuccessfully for an unrealized dream.

Only in the same sense that every time we take a dump we are seeking to restore a lost world of the imagination. Sadly, constipation can occur. 

Disillusionment was Continental because they had 1848 and all that. Britain didn't. The Chartists were told to fuck off or get blown to pieces. They fucked off with their tails between their legs. The French could dream of once again storming the Bastille and maybe, this time, not ending up under a fucking Bonaparte. 

Clearly Jude, like Frederic Moreau, like Dorothea Brooke, like Isabel Archer, Ernest Pontifex, and all the others, is condemned to such a fate.

Pontifex does great. His aunty took her money out of Consols and put them into Railway Shares. Thus she ends up a heck of a lot richer than Ernest's daddy. That money comes to Ernest. This re-establishes his character as a gentleman. 

The paradox of personal identity is that it is implicated in that unsuccessful dream.

No. A sense of personal identity predicated on an incompossible dream- like mine of being crowned Miss Teen Tamil Nadu- may have pathos. But no paradox is involved.  

Jude would not be who he is were it not for his futile wish to become a scholar.

No. He would not be unhappy unless he had wanted, and failed, to become a scholar. Take a hint, dude! You aint going to be crowned Miss Teen Tamil Nadu even if you get a fucking PhD in Greek.  

What promises him relief from his mediocre existence, therefore, is an escape from his identity as a social nonentity.

So escape seems promising- just as my prospects of being hailed as Miss Teen Tamil Nadu appear promising to me, which is why I gave up on Greek because my special talent is flatulence. 

The structural irony that is basic to every late nineteenth-century realistic novel is precisely that very conjunction: what you wish for is exactly what you cannot have.

This is also the reason death occurs. Seriously, we've got to abolish death. Do it soon.  I'm not getting any younger, you know.

Hence the utter poignancy and defeated hope that by the end of Jude the Obscure has become synonymous with Jude's very identity.

Jude was important because of the adultery & premarital sex. Otherwise, the idea is that this was a 'Village Hampden' and a story about why Britain needed more places like Ruskin College or Birkbeck. But Gissing gassing on about how hard it is to discuss Theocritus when your wife is a working class lush and the publishers won't pay properly for your Anacreontics coz all they want is sex, sex, and little boys having amazing adventures in Patagonia.  

It is exactly in getting beyond this paralysing, dispiriting impasse that Kim O'Hara is so remarkably optimistic a novelistic character. Kim's search for an identity that he can be comfortable with by the end of the novel is successful.

Though he was comfortable enough when the novel starts. It is the obscure intimation of belonging to a particular Regiment which draws him on. The fact is, had he gone into a Military Orphanage he could have joined the Regiment himself. But that 'oikeiosis' could itself become the basis for an adventure. Don't forget that back then boys joined the Royal Navy at the age of ten. Mountbatten, it is true, was a virtually senile 13 year-old when he was sent off to Sea. Still, his blood was very blue and so allowances must be made.

Like many of the other heroes of imperial fiction (as we read about their exploits in Conrad and Haggard, for example) Kim's actions result in victories not defeats.

He could still be a hero and survive some defeats.  

He restores India to health, as the invading foreign agents are apprehended and expelled.

No. The machinations of some disaffected Princes etc. in India were defeated. Kipling doesn't dwell too much on that aspect of things. It wasn't what the market wanted.  

And, indeed, throughout Kim itself we are impressed with the boy's resilience, his capacity for standing up to extreme situations such as those trials of identity engineered for him by Lurgan Sahib.

Very true. Had he shat himself and screamed loudly, Lurgan Sahib might have taken against him. Anyway, that's the reason I had to quit the try-outs for Miss Teen Tamil Nadu last year. 

Part of the boy's strength is his deep knowledge, almost instinctive in its wellspring, of his difference from the Indians around him; after all he has a special amulet given him during infancy, and unlike all the other boys he plays with -this is established right at the novel's opening - he is endowed, through natal prophecy, with a unique fate of which he wishes to make everyone aware. Later this develops explicitly into his awareness of being a sahib, a white man, and whenever he wavers there is someone to remind him of the basic fact that he is indeed a sahib, with all the rights and privileges of that quite special rank.

The same would be true if he discovered he was a Pathan or a Rajput or a descendant of a Ghaddar rebel.  

Even the saintly guru is made by Kipling to affirm the difference between a white man and a non-white.

The lama, as is right and proper, wants Kim to receive the 'samskars' of his sept. Later, he is welcome to take refuge in the Sangha.  

But that fact about Kim does not by itself impart to the novel its curious sense of enjoyment and confidence. Compared to James or Conrad, Kipling was not an introspective writer, nor - from the evidence that we have - did he think of himself like Joyce, as an Artist.

You don't if you are being paid lots of money by magazines.  

The force of his best writing comes from his ease and fluency, his seeming naturalness as narrator and master of characterization, where the sheer variousness of his creativity rivals Dickens and Shakespeare.

Kipling, like Chesterton, was a master of the ballad. Churchill, it must be said, took the trouble to memorize all sorts of ballads so as to fine tune his sense for the cadences of the tongue- its hidden potential for power and for pathos. Kipling, who got his start as a reporter, has an edge to do with having a gut instinct for the story 'out there'. Chesterton's genius was to turn private nightmares into things which seemed at home in the world- indeed they seemed to provide it its 'hypokeimenon' or secret scaffolding or undergirding. But neither created such a variety of characters as Shakespeare or Dickens.  

Language for him was not, as it was for Conrad in particular, a resistant medium; it was transparent, capable of many tones and inflections without too much trouble, all of them directly representative of the world he explored.

This is because poetry undergirds prose. Kipling was a master of the first. The second was always serviceable but seldom showy.  

It is precisely this aspect of Kipling's writing that gives Kim his sprightliness and wit, his energy and attractiveness. In many ways Kim resembles a character who might have been drawn much earlier in the nineteenth century, by somebody like Stendhal, for example, whose vivid portrayals of Fabrice del Dongo and Julien Sorel have the same blend of adventure and occasional wistfulness, which Stendhal called espagnolisme.

This is silly. Kim aint 'chikna'. He won't become the favourite pimp of the ladies of the badnam gali. 

We can speculate, I think, that the reason Kim is so unlike Hardy's Jude is that for him, as for Stendhal's characters, the world is full of possibilities, much like Caliban's island, 'full of noises,/Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not'.

Hardy was writing a Greek tragedy- a Malthusian one. Kipling was being paid a lot of money to do what he alone could do.  

Certainly danger threatens from time to time, but we never seriously doubt that Kim will somehow wiggle out or that he will outsmart his opponents. At times, that same world is restful, even idyllic. So not only do we get the bustle and vitality of the Grand Trunk Road, but also the welcoming, gentle pastoralism of that scene en route with the old soldier (Chapter 3) as the little group of travellers reposes peacefully: 40 There was a drowsy buzz of small life in hot sunshine, a cooing of doves, and a sleepy drone of well-wheels across the fields. Slowly and impressively the lama began. At the end of ten minutes the old soldier slid from his pony, to hear better as he said, and sat with the reins round his wrist. The lama's voice faltered - the periods lengthened. Kim was busy watching a grey squirrel. When the little scolding bunch of fur, close pressed to the branch, disappeared, preacher and audience were fast asleep, the old officer's strong-cut head pillowed on his arm, the lama's thrown back against the tree-bole, where it showed like yellow ivory. A naked child toddled up, stared, and moved by some quick impulse of reverence, made a solemn little obeisance before the lama - only the child was so short and fat that it toppled over sideways, and Kim laughed at the sprawling, chubby legs. The child, scared and indignant, yelled aloud. On all sides of this sort of Edenic composure there is the 'wonderful spectacle' of the Grand Trunk Road where, as the old soldier puts it, 'all castes and kinds of men move here . . . Brahmins and chumars, bankers and tinkers, barbers and bunnias, pilgrims and potters - all the world coming and going. It is to me as a river from which I am withdrawn like a log after a flood.'

Tagore kept gassing on about rivers. But that last line is better than any penned by the great bore of the Brahmaputra. It reminds us that Sikhism is not just a recapitulation of all Spiritual wisdom- Brahman, Shraman, Sufi or Baul- it is an advance on and critique of the very notion of 'Sangam'- union such as that of a confluence of rivers- and an elaboration of what we understand and are drawn to as Service. The log abandoned by the flood may serve some purpose though itself dead to all aspiration. Yet, might that not be the other side of the coin of life? This elucidates the mysterious saying Uttana vai devagava vahanti 'Cows that belong to the deities move on their backs'. The meaning is obvious to everybody except pundits because it has been thousands of years since the last cow, hooves trussed and slung over a pole held up by hefty adhvaryus was taken to the sacrificial fire. 

One especially fascinating index of Kim's way with this teeming and yet strangely hospitable world he lives in is his remarkable gift for disguise. We first see him perched on the ancient gun in a square in Lahore (where it still stands today), an Indian boy among other Indian boys. Kipling carefully differentiates the different religions and background of each boy (the Muslim, the Hindu, the Irish) but is just as careful to show us that none of these identities, though they may hinder each of the other boys, is a hindrance to Kim. He can pass from one dialect, from one set of values and beliefs, to the other. Throughout the book Kim takes on the dialects of numerous Indian communities, Muslim, Hindu, northern and southern. He speaks Urdu, English (Kipling does a superbly funny, but gentle, mockery of the boy's stilted Anglo-Indian, which he rather finely distinguishes from the Babu's orotund verbosity), Eurasian,

what language is that?  

Hindi, Bengali; Mahbub speaks Pashto, and Kipling, so to speak, gets that, as apparently does Kim; the lama speaks Chinese Tibetan,

just Tibetan 

and he can be understood too.

this is nonsense. There was a lingua franca with some variation. On the other hand, King James's jester, Coryate did learn all the languages of India.  

As orchestrator of this Babel of tongues, this veritable Noah's Ark of Sansis,

who speak like the Jats around them 

Kashmiris,

Kashmiri is a separate language but Kashmiri traders speak very good Urdu

Akalis, Sikhs

Akalis are Sikhs 

and many others,

who, nevertheless had a lingua franca 

Kipling also manages Kim's progress through it all, chameleon-like in his gift for dancing in and out of it, like a great actor who passes through all situations, at home in each of them.

It is credible that a street urchin picks up these tricks. The problem is that he doesn't have the education or higher indoctrination to maintain the pose as he grows up.  

How very different this is from the dull, mediocre and lustreless world of the European bourgeoisie,

or American or Mexican or Chinese bildungsburgertums.  

whose ambiance as it is rendered by every novelist of importance reconfirms the utter debasement of all contemporary life, all dreams of passion, success and exotic adventure.

Nonsense! Plenty of middle class people were becoming Scientists and discovering fundamental particles way more exotic than Sansis or Akalis.  

Hence the antithesis offered by Kipling's fiction: his world, because it is set in an India dominated by Britain, appears to hold nothing back from the expatriate European.

Very true. Kim could pop down to the Cafe Royale and exchange epigrams with Oscar Wilde. Then he could stroll down to Westminster and take part in a parliamentary debate. Lahore had teleportation booths set up all over the place.   

Kim, therefore, is expressly designed as a novel to show how a white sahib can enjoy life in this lush complexity; and, I would argue, the apparent absence of resistance to European intervention in it -- symbolized by Kim's abilities to move relatively unscarred through India - is due precisely to the imperialist vision of the world.

Aurobindo, who arrived in England at the age of 7- went through some very tough times as a 12 year old boy in London studying at St. Pauls. I believe he generously shared his scholarship money with his brothers. He got into the ICS who paid for his undergraduate studies. He spoke 12 languages including Latin and Greek. It seems Indians too had a vision of the world in which England wasn't a racist shithole. It was and is a great country where merit can rise and even morons, like me, are tolerated regardless of colour or creed. 

The truth is that Kim's ability to move unscarred through India was predicated on the fact that Indians are nice people- not me, I'm pukka British and closely related to the Royal Family. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo. 

For what one cannot do in one's own Western environment, where to try to live out the grand dream of a successful quest is only to keep coming up against one's own mediocrity

unless, like Kipling, you aren't mediocre at all 

and the world's corruption and degradation, one can do abroad.

or find a more congenial occupation 

Isn't it possible in India to do everything, be anything, go anywhere with impunity?

It was more possible for Indians to do this in London. That's why a relatively poor man like Aurobindo's father moved his three sons there. The boys soon had to fend for themselves. But they made good. There were plenty of refugees- e.g. from Tzarist Russia- who had it much worse. Yet, they too rose by their own efforts.  

Consider, also, the pattern of Kim's wanderings as they affect the structure of the novel. Most of his voyages within the Punjab, occur around the axis formed by Lahore and Umballa, an Indian Army (hence British) garrison town on the frontier of the United Pro\inces. The Grand Trunk Road, built by the great Muslim ruler Sher Shah in the late sixteenth century, runs from Peshawar to Calcutta, although the lama never goes further south and east than Benares. There are excursions made by Kim to Simla, to Lucknow, and later to the Kulu valley; with Mahbub Kim goes as far south as Bombay and as far west as Karachi. But the overall impression created by these voyages is that of a relatively carefree meandering.

One might just as easily look at the meanderings in Chesterton's 'Flying Inn'. What could be better than a barrel of ale, a big round of cheese and this for a drinking song?-

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

Occasionally Kim's trips are punctuated by the requirements of the school year at St Xavier's but the only serious agendas in the novel, the only equivalents of temporal pressure on the characters, are, firstly, the abbot-lama's Quest, which is fairly elastic and, secondly, the pursuit and final expulsion of the foreign agents trying to stir up trouble in the North-West Frontier region. There are no scheming money-lenders here, no village prigs, no vicious gossips or unattractive and heartless parvenus as there are in the novels of Kipling's major European contemporaries.

Who were writing for a different market.  

Now contrast Kim's rather loose structure based as it is on a luxurious geographical and spatial expansiveness, with the tight, relentlessly unforgiving temporal structure of the European novels contemporary with Kim. Time, says Lukacs in The Theory of the Novel, is the great ironist, almost a character in these novels, as it both drives the protagonist further into illusion and derangement, in that with the passing of time the illusions grow, and contact with reality decreases, and at the same time reveals his or her illusions to be groundless, empty, bitterly futile.

This stuff happens to grown-ups. Kipling himself would have his disillusionments. But there was a moment when he, not yet out of his sixteenth year, stood on the wharf of Bombay harbour and knew he had come home. By the age of 21 his first volume of verse had been published. By 30 he was acknowledged as a master of his craft. He got the Nobel at 42. By then his poem 'Recessional' had entered the Hymnal of England and America. Writers as different as Mark Twain, James Joyce and Henry James considered him to have genius- a daemon of his own. The thing was uncanny.  

In Kim, you have the impression that time is on your side, because, I think, its geography to an English reader as India might be to a modern Western tourist - is yours to move about in more or less freely.

Just like England to Indians of that period. In America, they faced Jim Crow.  

Certainly Kim feels that, and so, too, in his patience, and the sporadic, even vague way in which he appears and disappears, does Colonel Creighton.

He was a soldier. There was nothing vague about his movements.  

The opulence of India's space, the commanding British presence there,

which would have been irrelevant if the people were not kindly and well disposed to travelers 

the sense of freedom communicated by the interaction between those two factors: this adds up to an overwhelmingly positive atmosphere irradiating the pages of Kim. This is not a driven world of hastening disaster, as in Flaubert and Zola.

Who weren't writing about kids having splendid adventures 

Kipling's rather unique geographical and spatial preference in Kim over the temporal element governing metropolitan European fiction, is, of course, a privileged aesthetic fact.

There are no privileged aesthetic facts- or fictions come to that. What this cretin means is Kipling was White. Whitey be debil. Boo hoo! 

But I would want to insist that it expresses an irreducible political judgement on Kipling's part. It is as if he were saying that India is ours and therefore we can see it in this mostly uncontested, meandering and fulfilling way, rather than as a narrow little site of class conflict and hopelessly middle-class values.

But the Lama- who was Tibetan was equally free to meander around uncontested. But then so had Blavatsky- who was Russian- and Olcott- who was American. A wonderful African American choir- the Fisk Jubilee singers- meandered about India and Bhutan in 1889. They received a rapturous welcome wherever they went from all classes of folk.   

India is 'other'

not for Kim. Not for Kipling 

and, importantly, for all its wonderful size and variety, it is safely held by Britain.

But Brits-like Coryate- had been meandering around in India back when the Mughals were kicking ass and taking names. Its not as though Brits suddenly became unsafe after 1947. Indeed, plenty of hippies started turning up by the end of the Sixties. They did a lot of meandering. So would you if you smoked what they smoked. Charles Sobhraj kept killing them. He was French. The French are like that only. 

The irony, for older Indians reading Said, is that we know plenty of people who can't retrace Kim's path though they were born in Punjab or UP but, in 1947 had to cross the border. If, like Rushdie you had a British passport you could still meander all you liked. But if you had a Pakistani passport, India might be barred to you from time to time and vice versa. 

There is, however, another aesthetically satisfying coincidence that Kipling arranges, and it, too, must he taken into account. This is the. confluence between Creighton's Great Game and Kim's inexhaustibly renewed capacity for disguises and adventure. Kipling keeps the two things tightly connected in the novel. The first is the device of political surveillance and control;

No. What Kim is doing is counter-intelligence.  

the second, at a much deeper and more interesting level, is the wish-fantasy of someone who would like to think that everything is possible, that one can go anywhere and be anything.

Plenty of Indians would like to be able to speak Punjabi like a Punjabi and Tamil like a Tamilian. A Kashmiri shop-keeper in Janpath- who thought I was some sort of sweeper-caste fellow who made a little money cleaning toilets at Heathrow- asked me which part of Pakistan I was from. I was staggered. I'm obviously Madrasi. He pointed out that I was using certain expressions only found on the wrong side of the border. It occurred to me that Pakistani Urdu had rubbed off on me in London. Also I watched a lot of Umar Sharif Liaquatabadi's comedy videos. I explained this and his anxiety was appeased. Perhaps he had been hostile to me because he thought I was some clumsy sort of Intelligence operative. Later, I discovered the truth from a Pathan friend. I had wanted to buy a rather gaudy shawl for my mother. The fellow refused to sell it to me. Apparently, that sort of shawl is only given by shepherds to their catamites. The Kashmiri didn't want people in Pakistan to think that, in Delhi, Muslims give such presents to their dear old Mums. 

Incidentally, Muslims in India often mistook me for a Muslim. Why? Perhaps, as second class citizens, they had come to have a negative self-image. The fact that I am ugly and uncouth made them jump to the conclusion that I must be a particularly degraded member of their own faith. Hindus, of course, assume I'm either from Bihar or, if they are themselves from Bihar, from Jharkhand.

T. E. Lawrence in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom expresses this fantasy over and over, as he reminds us how he - a blond and blue-eyed Englishman - moved among the desert Arabs as if he were one of them.

He looked Circassian- i.e. an Ottoman agent. But it was the Turks who buggered him. Incidentally they also buggered all the British POWs, who were already suffering dysentery, they got after Kut-al-Amara except for General Townshend whom they treated very well. The C-in-C back in Simla was dismissed.  He took to the bottle and shot himself.  

Say what you like, Ataturk was a great man who restored the good reputation of the Turkish soldier. Buggering dudes suffering from dysentery is a dirty business. Don't do it. 

I call this a fantasy because, as both Kipling and Lawrence endlessly remind us, no one - least of all actual whites and nonwhites in the colonies - ever forgets that 'going native' or playing the Great Game are facts built on rock-like foundations, those of European power.

Nonsense! Plenty of peeps can go native in countries far from their own. But don't do it if you are likely to be buggered while suffering dysentery.  

Was there ever a native fooled by the blue or green-eyed Kims and Lawrences who passed among the inferior races as agent adventurers?

Sure- in countries where the thing is rare but not unknown. On the other hand, my attempts to pass as the Duchess of Suffolk have been an embarrassing failure because everybody mistakes me for the Archbishop of York.  

I doubt it, just as I doubt that there existed any white man or woman within the orbit of European imperialism who ever forgot that the discrepancy in power between the white rulers and the native subject was absolute, intended to be unchanging, rooted in cultural, political, and economic reality.

Fuck off! I knew plenty of people in the ANC. They never thought the Apartheid regime would endure for a single day if Reagan withdrew support. Some may have known that the head of BOSS was putting out feelers for a negotiated settlement. In the end, once the Cubans left Angola, White Rule collapsed on its own. 

Of course, it is foolish to compare India with South Africa or, indeed, with Catholic Ireland. 

Kipling never lets us forget that Kim, the positive boy hero who travels in disguise all over India, across boundaries and rooftops, into tents and villages, is everlastingly responsible to British power, represented by Creighton's Great Game.

He is responsible to the Army because he is an Army brat and is doing work which might save the lives of men in his father's old Regiment. There is oikeiosis here but it is not Imperial. We can imagine a street urchin growing up in Iran who is recruited by Mossad because they can show him proof that his parents were Jews killed at the time of the Revolution.  

The reason we can see that so clearly is that since Kim was published, India did become independent of Britain

it was ruled by a party set up by British Civil Servants when Kipling was 20.  

and was partitioned,

which put a stop to some native, but not British passport holder, meandering along the Grand Trunk road 

just as since the publication of Gide's The Immoralist and Camus's The Stranger, Algeria became independent of France.

The French saw Algeria as a settler colony. This was never the case for India.  

To read these major works of the imperial period retrospectively, then, is to be obligated to read them in the light of decolonization, but, we must immediately add, it is neither to slight their great aesthetic force, nor to treat them reductively as imperialist propaganda.

Pakistani officers- at least the sort who attended Aitchison- can quote 'Frontier Arithmetic' faultlessly. They inherited the problem Kipling wrote of. After all, it was only in 1979 that the Rooskies broke the pact they made with the Brits in 1907. Since then, things have gotten even more complicated. Let us see if China can win the Great Game and create a prosperous, peaceful, Eurasian power block. 

It is a much graver mistake, nevertheless, to read them stripped of their countless affiliations with the facts of power which inform and enable them, to interpret them as if the many inscriptions of race and class in the text were not there at all.

Very true. I had a friend who made this very grave mistake. His eyes fell out of his head. All the other kids in the class laughed except Prof. Said who pointed out the evils of neoliberal biopolitics in connection with the fact that the fucking Israelis took my land! 

The plain fact is that the Palestinians were screwed over by both the Ottomans and the Brits. Also Christian Palestinians did crazy shit- like killing Bobby Kennedy or provoking Black September.  

Thus, as I have been saying, Kim is a master work of imperialism:

No it isn't. Suppose Lockwood Kipling was working for the Nizam and Rudyard spent a lot of time meandering over his dominions. Then there would be no fucking Imperialism though there might be an counter-intelligence operation directed against (German backed) Ottoman intrigue. Screw that. It is the French you have to watch out for. 

I mean this as an interpretation of a rich and absolutely fascinating, but nevertheless profoundly embarrassing novel.

Coz Whitey be debil. Why is Kipling not writing about British soldiers with dysentery who are incessantly sodomized by Turks?  

The device invented by Kipling, by which British control over India (the Great Game)

which had nothing to do with controlling India. It was merely a matter of keeping India's defence expenditure under control. Another Afghan war would mean the restoration of Income tax. Seriously, nobody wanted that.  

coincides in detail with Kim's disguise fantasy to be at one with India, is a remarkable one precisely because it would not have occurred without British imperialism.

Nope. You can run a counter-intelligence operation on the soil of a much more powerful country. As a matter of fact, there were British agents in Ottoman Turkey who were supposed to be keeping the Germans in check. They were all utterly shit. The Embassy decided that the 'Young Turk' movement was a Jewish conspiracy! Incidentally, at a later point, an Indian Muslim in the pay of the Brits, turned up to try assassinate Ataturk. On the other hand, Prof. Zaehner- a great 'Orientalist'- turned up in Teheran along with Kim Roosevelt and got rid of Mossadegh. I believe Zaehner, Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics, persuaded an Iranian Professor of Ethics to invite Mossadegh's Security Chief to dinner and then bump him off. This was witty and erudite. The literary reference is to that double dyed traitor who wrote the Akhlaq-e-Nasiri. 

As such, then, we must read the novel as the realization of a great cumulative process, which in the closing years of the nineteenth century is reaching its last major moment before Indian independence.

Fuck off. Bengal and Maharashtra were important. Punjab and the NWF didn't matter at all. The Great Game ended in 1895. The Viceroy correctly identified the Hindus and the Congress Party as the existential threat to British Paramountcy. By then one or two Indians had got elected as MPs in Westminster.  

On the one hand, surveillance and control over India;

which was done by Strickland, not Creighton, and which, it must be said, was first class. During the Second World War, it was the IPS who ruled Congress states. They made a good fist of things. It was Wavell who was defeatist. 

on the other, love for and fascinated attention to its every detail.

Neither Lahore nor even the Nehru's Allahabad were important back then. Had Kipling been posted to Calcutta or Bombay, he might have got on the right track.  

What Kipling also saw is what makes possible the overlap between the political hold of the one and the aesthetic and psychological pleasure of the other, British imperialism itself; yet many of his later readers have refused to see his implicit recognition of this troubling and embarrassing truth.

What is so embarrassing about admitting that the Brits offered value for money when it came to Institution Building in India? We still have their Courts and Legislative bodies and the Election Commission and so on. Even Israel is keeping its independent Judiciary- at least for the moment. 

The joke here is that the Brits in India- as Kipling did point out once or twice- weren't getting paid very well while the Indians who sucked up to them were getting or staying very very fucking rich without lifting a hand to defend their country or keep its population from starvation.  

And not just Kipling's recognition of British imperialism in general,

which guys like Gandhi and Nehru thought was a 'good thing' back then 

but imperialism at that specific moment in its history when it had almost completely lost sight of the unfolding dynamics of its own human and secular truth: the truth that India was once independent, that control over it was seized by a European power, and that, over time, Indian resistance to that power had grown so much as inevitably to struggle out from under British subjugation.

This is nonsense. India was always a notional Empire with a 'Chakravartin'. There was a period when Muslim dynasties did quite a good job at being actual Emperors but we must admit that the Brits did a better job because they weren't trying to force their religion on anybody. India should have progressed to self-government and self-garrisoning along with Canada and Australia etc. This could have happened quite rapidly from the 1880s onward. When A.O Hume started the INC, he thought the Indians would clamour for agricultural reform as the most pressing matter. But the Indians didn't give a fart about agriculture. Many Hindus did care about cows but the fact is some Hindus do eat beef. They'd prefer to turn a blind eye to cow slaughter just as the Muslim might not want alcohol to be banned even only because of the negative fiscal effect. 

What did Indians care about? Talking bollocks and shrilly denouncing each other. Stalin soon discovered that Indian Communists were the shittiest in the world. Each and every one would demand a private audience and then denounce his best friend as a Right deviationist as well as a Left adventurists, who should be sent to the Lubyanka immediately. 

The variously qualified pleasure we can derive from reading Kim today, therefore, is that in it we can watch a great artist blinded in a sense by his own insights about India,

Nonsense! He was paid to take a particular position at the age of 22 or 23 and saw no reason to change his mind. Perhaps if some money had been offered him, he'd have had some inducement to do so. Otherwise, why bother? 

confusing the realities before him, which he saw with such colour and ingenuity, with the notion that these realities were permanent and essential.

In which case there would be no need for an Army or for Counter Intelligence. Essential means 'true in all possible worlds'. Said, being a Professor of Literature, doesn't know the meaning of the words he uses. Still, so long as he says 'Whitey be debil', or words to that effect, he deserves to be considered a great savant.  

What Kipling takes and adopts from the novel form he tries to bend to this basically obfuscatory end.

Nope. He is writing a bildungsroman set in India and it takes on some of the colours and hues of Indic religion. Nothing wrong in that. The book isn't turgid shite.  

But it is surely one of the greatest of novelistic ironies that not only does he not truly succeed in this obfuscation, but his very attempt to use the novel for this purpose reaffirms the quality of his aesthetic integrity.

Kipling said that writers can't lie. They always reveal what they want to hide. In Kim, the hiding is in plain sight. Kim is a Sanskrit word. For a Hindu, it brings to mind Rig Veda 10.130.3 and the notion that what establishes identity might itself be a sacrifice descending from the Godhead. 

This gives rise to the notion that when Kipling attacked the Vedantist A.O Hume he was showing 'virodha bhakti'. His anger was 'samrambha yoga'. More generally, the ardent Imperialist- like the Roman legionary- was paving the way for a very different type of King of Kings. Mahatma Gandhi was born 4 years after Rudyard. Not a pale Galilean, but a dusky Gujarati triumphed. 

Kim most assuredly is not a political tract.

The irony is that many of Kipling's stories showed that Hume was right. The government blundered and was ignorant for systemic reasons. Representative government was needful to set the country right. Sadly, Democracy has its own pitfalls.  

Kipling's choice of the novel form to express himself, and of Kim O'Hara to engage more profoundly with an India that Kipling obviously loved but could never properly have, this is what our reading should keep resolutely as its central strand.

He was welcome to settle anywhere in India.  

Only then will we be able to see Kim both as a great document of its historical moment,

No. That moment had passed. The child Kim is repairing what Ripon had, allegedly, left undone.  

as well as an aesthetic milestone along the way to midnight 15 August, 1947,a moment whose children have done so much to revise our sense of the past's richness and its enduring problems

Fuck that! Midnight's Children revises our sense that people who study history at Cambridge can learn from history. All they can do is babble incontinently till fatwa'd and stabbed- unless their assassins too are equally crap.