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Kim: Conflict Between Imperial Authority and Colonial Struggle
 “Like all the great
imperialists, Kipling was haunted by a sense of the mortality of the empire,
so that one is forced to question how essential was empire to his larger
philosophy?” As the title of this essay suggests, Kipling’s burden was
synonymous with the ‘white man’s burden,’ which so far as culturally
patronizing imperialists of Kipling’s era were concerned, a genuine burden.
Rudyard Kipling felt the impact of the British Empire and the ‘Imperial
Idea’ more tangibly than any other Victorian novelist, because Kipling’s
imperialism is not completely synonymous with British imperialism. This is
because Kipling experienced a personal involvement with India, a far-away
and unfamiliar world to many of his contemporaries. Thus, Kipling’s Kim,
whilst being a tale of colonial power and native struggle, serves more as an
extraordinary recognition of British imperialism at a specific moment in its
history. As such, Kipling admirably tells a story that has both political
and literary merit. Although, Kipling the writer is always more prominent
than Kipling the political man in the text and this is what makes Kim an
intriguing novel. What remains of great interest within the focus of my
essay, however, is the way Kipling describes this strained “hegemonic”
relationship between the British imperialists and the natives from a new,
and sometimes controversial, perspective. How far does Kipling understand,
and thence describe, Anglo-Indian hybridization during the Imperial milieu?
Many of Kipling’s critics like Edward Said in his article “Kim: The
Pleasures of Imperialism” (1987) and Richard Cronin in his article “The
Indian English novel: Kim and Midnight’s Children” (1987) have attempted to
re-open the question about cultural hybridity and hegemony in Kipling’s
text. This is because Kim was written at a time of rising Indian
nationalism, which fuelled critical debate about the British colonization of
the Indian subcontinent. But for Kipling, this epoch was a time when the
relationship between the empire and the colony was a changing one, a time
when British rule was being overtly questioned. Thus, through Kim, Rudyard
Kipling attempts to deconstruct the transfer of power between the colonizer
and the colonized. Consequently throughout the text, Kipling maintains a
feeling of persistent cultural heterogeneity and a shift in focus from
empire to empire building. Hence as a novelistic device, Kipling’s story
unfolds on two very different levels; Firstly as a personal history of Kim
and his interaction with the other characters around him, and secondly, as a
representation of the collective enactment of the establishment of the
British Empire in India. Essentially, Kipling uses Kim to contend that a new
understanding of imperialism is the only means of ensuring the future
prosperity of the British Empire. In other words, in the context of Kim, the
empire is a living reality. So, to read the novel in terms of politics or
history alone is highly superficial and would not transport us beyond the
surface meaning of the novel. Therefore, it is important to acknowledge that
the feeling of imperialism of the late Victorian period went far deeper than
great political discourse of the time seems to suggest. Thus, Kipling’s
treatment of imperialists and imperial subjects alike becomes a contentious
and fascinating topic of discussion.
What makes Kim a text of great literary merit in terms of a text of the
imperialistic period, however, is Kipling’s skilful framing of two leading
characters. These characters enable Kipling to explore the way colonialism
defined its own social boundaries and Kipling uses this to show how native
mentality and British supremacy often came into confrontation. The way he
assigns Kim the protagonist and Babu Hurree Chander oppositional positions,
for example, is crucial to the power relations within which the narrative
operates. The relationship between the colonizers and the natives was indeed
a complex one, because there was no tidy transfer of power between the two
parties. What became was a complex state of cultural hybridity, where
competing discourses of national identity (Irish, Indian and British) were
not uncommon. Thus, Kipling’s understanding and presentation of Kim and the
Babu stalls on the brink of ambivalence and is not as clearly defined as
once imagined. For example in Chapter One, Kim attempts to question his
identity and whether he sees himself as a true Hindu boy or not:
Oh, Mahbub Ali, but am I a
Hindu?’ said Kim in English. [Chapter One, page 67]
However it is common
knowledge that by birth, Kim is nothing other than a white Irish boy who has
grown up on the streets of Lahore as an orphan, “a poor white of the very
poorest.” (Chapter One, page 49). There are connections between the
portrayal of Kim and the Babu but it becomes Kipling’s challenge to assign
these two characters distinct roles in his political narrative. It is
difficult to assert whether Kipling portrays native characters like the Babu
as inferior individuals or as somehow equal but different. However, this
literary paradox is the very essence of Kim and the source of inspiration
for this essay. Though Kipling believed passionately in the British Empire
and in British supremacy, he was not blind to the dangers inherent in ruling
India. Hence through Kim, Kipling tried to warn the world, his world, of the
burgeoning power of the Indian people, of their patience and cleverness in
waiting to reclaim their country. Whether this classifies Rudyard Kipling as
a potential racist is debatable, but his ambivalence towards the British
Empire enables Kipling to render a vision of India unconstrained by typical
limits of perspective. As such, it would be easy to ignore the traces of
Kiplingian politics within the novel but in Kim, this political mode adopts
a more serious role, which projects a vision of colonial India hitherto
unknown.
Within Kipling’s politics, race, and in particular, racial superiority, have
a crucial role to play insofar as explaining the ‘hegemonic’ relations
between Britain and its colonial subject. Kipling attempts to represent this
colonial relationship through his protagonist Kim and the struggles he
encounters in finding or creating an identity for himself. Kim’s ‘white
blood’ is referenced in a number of places, due to its significance in the
context of India being a colony run by men who were essentially white:
Since the English held the
Punjab and Kim was English. Though he was burned black as any native; though
he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped
uncertain sing-song. [Chapter One, page 49]
As the extract shows, even
the opening lines of the novel identify Kim without complication as “white,
a poor white of the very poorest.” This is the very essence of Kim’s
personality and several of his non-Indian mannerisms and instincts can be
attributed to his English heritage, despite his complete lack of white
nurturing. Kim flirts with the ‘great game’ of imperialism and thus has the
ability to ignore caste divisions and instead gets to experience true
freedom. This is not without turmoil and strife however, because the
division between white and non-white worlds in India is something that
Kipling (and Kim) have to negotiate, and this notion is alluded to
throughout the novel. The remaining challenge for Rudyard Kipling, however,
is the way in which he is able to construct the identity of Kim with all of
these constraints and constrictions in place. Essentially, the motif of
Kim’s white blood delivers the unifying theme for the portrayal of India’s
struggle between British imperialism and national pride. Thus, Kim opens up
a path into the heart of the novel and, in this manner, he is very much
aware of contemporaneous social and political baggage that accompanies this
responsibility as protagonist.
Kim has to balance a very fragile role when amongst other white men in the
novel. When the story opens, the influences on Kim have been almost
exclusively Indian. Kim has grown up dressing like an Indian and thinking
like an Indian by “yelling at a Hindu festival” or going “to eat with his
native friends” [Chapter One, page 51]. However even at this stage, it is
clear that Kim cannot regard himself a true native. He remembers his father
and his prophecy and carries his identity papers in a leather amulet case
around his neck as proof. However, Kim has white skin and his attitudes are
at least partly those of a white ruler and partly those of native. On page
35 of Chapter Five for example, when he finds “nine hundred first-class
devils, whose God was a Red Bull on a green field,” (the English) Kim is
captured by the white soldiers. This is the first encounter Kim has with
white men and Kipling uses it to hold aspects of British mentality up for
criticism. For example he shows how crude and ignorant the British were when
they discuss the spiritual lama and Kim: To the ignorant white soldiers, the
lama is a “street beggar”, and Kim is an “ignorant little beggar…brought up
in the gutter…a wild animal.” who talk(s) “the same as a nigger.” [Chapter
Six, page 150-153.] However despite this criticism of the British, we should
not accept Kipling’s interpretation without further scrutiny at the real
motives behind the author’s criticism of the British imperialists. To some
extent, we can applaud Kipling for exposing the ignorance and bigotry of the
colonizers for he is clearly showing how in many ways, the natives of India
were superior people of the British. But a moment’s reflection shows that
Kipling’s championing of the natives and denigration of the British has to
be turned back against himself; firstly because we cannot help but feel that
Kipling thought of himself as being very generous and self-effacing by
praising the natives, and secondly because he never questioned the right of
the British being in India in the first instance.
Thus, Kipling immediately engrosses his audience with the complex
characterization of Kim. Young and naïve, yet sharp and insightful, Kim
embodies the absolute divisions between the white and non-white that existed
in India and elsewhere at a time when colonialism was rife. It is with this
social and political context in mind that exposes Kipling’s imperialist
ideology as being nothing more than a narrative strategy, to represent Kim’s
authority over the native inhabitants of the colony. However, Kipling was
arguably an imperialist, and Kim embodies attitudes towards British rule in
India, which these days are wholly unacceptable and unpalatable. Kipling
believed it was right and proper for Britain to ‘own’ India and rule its
people, and so the possibility that this position might indeed be
questionable never seems to have crossed Kipling’s mind. However, at the
time that Kipling was writing, there was considerable ferment of revolt
amongst Indians against British rule but Kipling appears to dismiss this at
points in the novel when he could have acknowledged it. This is particularly
apparent in Chapter Three when he has an old soldier comment on the Great
Mutiny of 1857, dismissing it as mere “madness”:
A madness ate into all the
army, and they turned against their officers. [Chapter 3, page 100]
This quotation reveals a
side to Kipling’s text that perhaps Kipling intended to avoid. As a writer
of the Victorian era, he did not want to be branded with the terms ‘racist’
or ‘imperialist’ but in the words of Edward Said, Kim is “a master work of
imperialism…a rich and absolutely fascinating, but nevertheless profoundly
embarrassing novel.” This very word “embarrassing” reveals more about
Kipling’s novel than Kipling aimed to project. Kipling never fails to make
countless rash and biased generalizations about India and her people, which,
interestingly, come from the adult narrator as opposed to Kim himself. In
Chapter Four, for example, Kipling has a native woman assert that the
British who seem to know India are:
…the sort to oversee
justice. They know the land and the customs of the land. [Chapter 4, Page
124.]
This quotation has an
element of sarcasm, because it comes from the voice of a native and the
Indians certainly were not in favor of the British or British rule. Thus in
this context, the term ‘imperialism” is a loaded one. Kipling makes his
attitude towards Anglo-Indian hybridization clear, which sets up the
challenge for the novel as it progresses. But can the British effectively
colonize India and if so, how does Kipling communicate this to his
readership?
In terms of explaining colonization and imperialism, therefore, Kim is the
ideal embodiment of the conflicting Indian and English worlds.
Interestingly, it appears that all of the events of the Great Victorian
Empire are inbred in Kim’s own character. As the British Empire sought to
discover and entrench its imperial authority in India, so too does Kim seek
to find a place in the country in which he was born. Thus, Kim faces an
ongoing struggle to create a new identity for himself. “Who is Kim?” “What
is Kim?” are two questions that Kim asks himself as the novel progresses.
For example on page 331 of Chapter 15, Kim poses exactly these questions
from “his soul”:
‘I am Kim. I am Kim. And
what is Kim?” His soul repeated it again and again.’ [Chapter 15, page 331]
But what is this
much-discussed identity that Kim ponders about? What is Kim? As the above
quotation suggests, there is no definitive assertion about who Kim precisely
is, however he does arrive at a sense of self, an identity that he has been
defining cumulatively through his own experiences. Kim desperately tries to
be true to himself but essentially, he really is a “mixture o’ things”
(Chapter Six, page 160); neither wholly Indian nor wholly British. So, in
building his identity, Kim has to partly adopt the white man’s habits of
mind, combining their ‘colonial’ strength, whilst facing the difficult
challenge of attempting to preserve the stability of the Anglo-Indian world,
which nurtured him. Everyone in Kim is, therefore, equally an outsider to
other social groups as they are insiders to their own. Thus, Kipling is
always trying to reach a compromise between the East and the West; between
the natives and the headstrong imperialists. Despite this, Kim is always
able to remain true to his emotional and spiritual roots, which are mainly
native, and he does not have to betray them by becoming something he is not.
For Kim has accepted and developed the European element of his character but
he realizes that he does not have to become a white ruler himself. It is
clear that Kim is too much of a native at heart to forget his Indian roots.
For example, we might refer to the point in the novel when Kim refuses to
become an English soldier, instead preferring to serve the sahibs
discreetly, tangentially in a way that makes use of his native instincts and
experiences. Thus Kim is a novel of struggle and racial compromise, a text
in which Rudyard Kipling and his ideologies are not short of imperial
references and ideas. This is best communicated through the characters that
Kipling creates and the relationships that they forge with one another.
These relationships are indicators of whether there can ever be cultural
hybridity in the British colonies or whether cultural heterogeneity is
indeed triumphant over all others.
Kipling’s portrayal of Babu Hurree Chander Mookerjee, a native employee in
the British administration, is another literary device used by Kipling to
depict imperial authority. Indeed for Kipling, who believed that it was
India’s own destiny to be ruled by England, it was imperative to stress the
superiority of the white man, whose colonial mission was to rule the dark
and ‘inferior’ races. He does this by locating the educated Hurree Babu in a
position that is subordinate to Kim. Thus it is important to focus my essay
on the way Kipling, in his novel, projects Babu Hurree Chander with powerful
ramifications about the colonial power-dynamics within a certain historical
period. Thus the Babu, in terms of literary technique, is the binary
narrative opposite to Kim, which enables Kipling to create an unequal
dichotomy. In terms of the social hierarchy enforced by colonial order,
therefore, Kim occupies the privileged position by belonging to the ‘rulers’
whilst the Babu is his insignificant ‘other’. Despite this notable fact,
both characters are, undeniably, products of a colonial upbringing in a
colonized society. Thus, Kim develops as a superior in his role of
authority, whilst Babu Hurree Chander is his excluded opposite. In other
words, the Babu is Kim’s anti-self, to whom Rudyard Kipling assigns a
negative value in relation to Kim. In fact the relationship between the
coloniser and the colonized is a tense one, because of the intensity of the
British colonial period. This is Kipling’s major dilemma in the novel and a
problem that he attempts to overcome. The characters are merely there to
highlight how the British Empire affected those at grassroots level, the
people most affected by colonial authority. This is also why we see so many
male relationships forged throughout the novel. Colonies were essentially
run by men and imperialism was driven from a predominantly male perspective.
Interestingly, Kipling’s fascination with imperialism, cultural hegemony and
colonial dominance make Kim a male-orientated novel. Many of Kipling’s
critics, including Edward Said, have even labelled Kim a ‘male’ novel in
terms of the characters Kipling creates and the problems they deal with. In
fact this male perspective seems appropriate to Kipling due to the social
climate of the Victorian era that Kipling was writing in. Even George Eliot
characterized Kipling’s distinctive attitude as one “of comprehensive
tolerance,” after calling him a “jingoistic imperialist.” However, while
this may hold some truth, it is important to understand the political
complexities behind Kim, as opposed to treating the novel reductively as
imperialist propaganda. What remains of great interest to me, however, is
the way that Kipling tackles the topic of the British Empire and the British
colonies directly. Whilst on the one hand it appears that Kipling may have
wanted to convey his admiration for native characters like Babu Hurree in
his novel, his attempt is seriously marred by his overtly imperialistic
attitudes. For example, he has Kim regard the Lama as “his trove”, of which
he “proposed to take possession” [Chapter One, page 60]. Although, there are
other ways in which Kipling seems to deny the lama the dignity and authority
he deserves.
At every opportunity, even in relation to the most respected native
characters in the text, Kipling unfailingly presents a picture of European
superiority and native dependence. This is perhaps why Kim is such a male
orientated novel because Kipling presents us with a picture of male
domination in a wider context of colonial repression. Thus, in terms of male
representation, Kim is perhaps as sexist as it is, arguably, racist a novel.
Women do play some role in the novel, but not as objects of romantic or
sexual attachment. Instead, women feature as prostitutes or providers,
though Kipling shows some respect for the two principle women characters,
the woman of Shamlegh and the widow of Kulu. Despite this, the male/female
relationships in the novel mirror the relationship between the British and
the natives, in terms of representing superiority and inferiority in the
text. “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.” In terms of European imperialism, therefore, Kipling
makes it clear that the natives accepted colonial rule, so long as it was
the right kind of rule. Whether indeed it was, is another question entirely.
What is clear, however, is that it was Kipling himself who said that East is
East and West is West, and Kim corroborates his faith that the distinction
would always stand true.
The influence of the British Empire in Kipling’s work, as in his life,
assumed a positive force in the sense that it ordered and unified his
creativity. This is perhaps what is so interesting about Kim. The Great
Empire had a profound effect on Rudyard Kipling’s literary creativity,
especially in the creation of his characters and the distinctive lives that
they lead. As in the words of Edward Said, “we have been shown two entirely
different worlds existing side by side, with neither really understanding
the other, and we have watched the oscillation of Kim, as he passes to and
fro between them.” As such, Kipling renders a vision of India where
intellectual, moral and political boundaries are less than equal. Indeed, if
Kipling believed, as he well argued, that East and West can never really
meet in the Indian colony, then in Kim he makes sure they do not. Instead,
Kipling consolidates this ruling-class hegemonic divide by achieving an
alliance, as opposed to equality among classes. All of these factors
constitute the greatness of Kim as a novel and it is clear how Rudyard
Kipling arrives at a sense of India, which is almost timeless. But the India
he depicts is not without her problems. Indeed, whilst many Victorian
writers tried to create a colonial society in which there was a fusion of
culture and identity, in Kim, Kipling ensures that no such society exists.
Kipling’s attitudes towards the Empire cannot necessarily be excused or
defended, but we can acknowledge the historical fact that they were no
different to some of his contemporaries, and be especially glad that the
fact is indeed a historical one.
– Alicia Mistry
June 12, 2005
Bibliography
Kim by Rudyard Kipling by Ian Mackean, November 2001
http://www.literature-study-online.com/essays/kipling.html
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