Kim by Rudyard Kipling

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Plot:

Once upon a time (because at its heart, Kim is a fairy tale), there was an orphan boy named Kimball O'Hara, Kim for short. In fact, this isn't just any old fairy tale time: this book takes place specifically around the late 1890s in British India. (For more on this time period, check out the "In a Nutshell" and "Setting" sections.) Kim spends his time in the city of Lahore running around, scrounging food, and generally leading a carefree and mischief-heavy life.

But there is a prophecy surrounding Kim. No, not "neither can live while the other survives"— that's about a different orphan boy. Kim's prophecy comes down from his now-deceased father: Apparently, Kim's luck will change once he finds a Red Bull on a green field. And two men will appear first to prepare the way for the arrival of this Red Bull.

So one day Kim is playing in front of the Lahore Museum (which everyone in the book calls the Wonder House) and he spots someone wearing clothes of a style he's never seen before. This man is a lama, a Tibetan Buddhist from the North. The lama wants to speak to the curator of the Wonder House because he has heard that the curator is a wise man. He needs to talk to smart people, because he is looking for something extremely important to him: the River of the Arrow.

According to the lama, once during a test of strength the Buddha shot an arrow out far beyond his furthest target. Where the arrow landed, a River sprung up. If the lama can find that river and bathe in it, then he will be Enlightened. Kim is so interested by the lama—by his strangeness and his seriousness—that he volunteers to go along with him on his journey to find the River of the Arrow. The lama is glad to have a chela, a disciple, and the two make plans to go to the holy city of Benares (now Varanasi).

The night before Kim and the lama leave Lahore, they spend the night with Kim's old friend Mahbub Ali, a horse-trader. Mahbub Ali has an exciting side job in the British Indian Secret Service. He likes Kim because the kid is a dependable carrier of messages and because he is really good at disguises and hiding.

When he hears that Kim is going south, he thinks this is the perfect opportunity to get a little kid to do a dangerous job for him, so Mahbub Ali hands Kim a secret, coded message to bring to an Englishman in the city of Umballa (now called Ambala, right on the border of the Punjab and Haryana states) when he and the lama pass through. Kim is delighted to do it—he just loves trouble.

As Kim and the lama travel south by train and on foot, they bond, but Kim's mind is always on his little side-errand for Mahbub Ali. When they reach Umballa, he quietly leaves the lama behind while he goes to the compound of the Englishman to whom he is supposed to pass on his message.

Once he has given this Englishman his note confirming that there are five kings in northern India who are planning to break away from the British Indian government, he secretly sits and waits to hear what comes of it. When he sees the Englishman planning troop deployments to the North, he gets really excited. This is the life as far as Kim is concerned; delivering information that has real impact on state decisions.

Kim goes back to the lama and they continue their search for the lama's River of the Arrow. But as they are walking the Grand Trunk Road (an ancient highway that cuts north and south across India) they happen upon Kim's prophesied Red Bull.

They are standing in a field when they see two guys—advance scouts—looking for a place for their regiment to camp. Once they choose a place, they plant their regimental flag: it's a Red Bull on a green background. It turns out that Kim's father's prophecy was actually a description of the flag that belongs to his former regiment in the British Army, the Irish Mavericks.

Kim slips into the army camp and gets caught by an Anglican priest attached to the regiment. He and Father Victor, his Catholic colleague, both finally figure out that Kim is none other than Kimball O'Hara, Sr.'s son. They also speak to the lama about Kim. The lama is amazed that Kim is actually a British boy—since Kim speaks Urdu and has been traveling with him in Indian clothing, he doesn't seem English at all. But now that the lama knows that Kim is British, he wants Kim to have the best education that money can buy. So the lama offers to pay Kim's tuition to St. Xavier's, a great (fictional) school in Lucknow.

What a transformation: Kim goes from this smart, charming little wiseass kid (kind of like Lyra Belacqua in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series) to a reluctant British schoolboy in a matter of days. Kim hates his early days at the regimental school, and he writes to Mahbub Ali to please, please, please come rescue him. Mahbub Ali does come by, but he doesn't rescue him—instead, he does something much better: he recommends Kim to Colonel Creighton, the Englishman who received Mahbub Ali's message in Umballa.

Creighton keeps tabs on Kim when he moves south to start school at St. Xavier's in Lucknow. And he is impressed enough with Kim's sass, creativity, and resourcefulness that he arranges for Kim to spend time over summer break with a legend named Lurgan in the city of Simla. This man Lurgan teaches Super Special Spy Skills, like remembering where objects are (seriously, this is a vital spy skill), assessing people's character, and resisting hypnosis (Kim is a natural at this one).

Between Lurgan, his ongoing friendship with Mahbub Ali, and his more formal education at St. Xavier's, Kim grows up prepared to become what Creighton wants him to be: an agent in the British Indian Secret Service. Kim has a particular talent for getting people to talk to him and for hiding his identity as a British guy. These are (apparently) useful traits when you want to spy for the British colonial government of India. And at seventeen, Kim is ready to go back on the road the way he used to when he was a kid.

Creighton is a little reluctant to let a seventeen-year-old just wander around India on the government's dime, so he gives Kim a probation period: he wants Kim to travel for six months to remind himself what real life in India is like. And since Creighton doesn't want Kim to go alone, Mahbub Ali tells Kim to go back to his old friend the lama in the city of Benares.

Another employee of the Service, an Indian man the novel just calls the Babu (for more on this term, check out Chapter 2 in the "Detailed Summary" section) escorts Kim down to Benares. He gives Kim a silver amulet that will identify him as a member of the Secret Service to other members, and then sends him on his way.

Backtracking a bit, while Kim has been off learning how to make maps and do spy stuff, the lama has been traveling all over India. He has visited all of the holy sites of Buddhism in the country. But the more he has traveled, and the more wise men that he has spoken to, the more convinced he is that his real quest is for the River of the Arrow. And the lama believes that he won't be able to find this River without the help of his beloved disciple, Kim. So when Kim leaves school, the lama is thrilled to find him ready to rejoin the search for the River, and for Enlightenment.

Back in the present, Kim and the lama are planning to stay for a bit at the house of a woman they met during their first round of searching for the River of the Arrow: the Kulu woman. Kulu (or Kullu, really) is a region in the foothills of the Himalayas. Once they arrive there, they find a familiar face: the Babu, disguised as a hakim (a Muslim doctor).

The Babu quickly brings Kim up to speed about why he's here: the thing is, he has spotted two Russian agents (well, one of them is French, but they both represent the Russians) making friends with two of the five potentially rebel kings right on the northern borders between British India and Afghanistan.

(It's worth noting, by the way, that the countries that are now India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan were all under some degree of British control after the Second Afghan War in 1878, so the whole Indian subcontinent is supposed to be loyal to Britain during the setting of Kim.)

The Babu wants to steal any messages or papers these guys might be carrying, but (and here's the problem for the Babu) he doesn't want to do something so dangerous on his own. The Babu wants a lively young guy like Kim to come with him.

Together, Kim and the Babu convince the lama that his River is probably in the north, in the foothills of the Himalayas. The lama is glad to hear this suggestion, since (being from Tibet) he loves mountains and feels at home there.

They all travel north, Kim and the lama as pilgrims and the Babu in his hakim disguise. The Babu rushes on ahead and befriends these two Russian agents; he pretends to be a guide, and volunteers to bring them to Simla (the summer capital of British India). He also takes care to badmouth the British and praise Russia at every opportunity, which totally fools these two guys into thinking he is loyal to them.

But everything comes to a head when the two foreign agents, led by the Babu, bump into Kim and the lama on the road. The lama is showing Kim his illustration of the Great Wheel of Existence (for more on this, go and see our analysis in the "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory" section). The Russian guy likes the look of this drawing and tries to take it from the lama, actually hitting the lama in the face when he refuses to sell this piece of religious art for money.

When the people of the valley see this foreigner hitting a holy man, they immediately turn against these two Russian agents, and it's only thanks to the lama's request that the two men get away with their lives. But as the two men flee (along with the Babu, who is still pretending to guide them), they leave behind their baggage. When Kim searches it, he finds a locked box filled with letters and messages from the hill kings that speak of treason against the British Indian government. In other words, from the point of view of a Secret Service agent, Kim has found the jackpot.

In the aftermath of his Brush With Death, the lama has a crisis of faith. In the split second after the Russian guy hit him in the face, the lama wanted him to die. The lama gave into anger and a desire for vengeance—for a little while at least—so he is convinced that he has begun to wander from his religious path.

The lama and Kim travel south to the house of the Kulu woman. By the time they arrive, the lama is sick in the soul (thanks to his guilt over his brief flare-up of anger at the Russian agent) and Kim is sick in the body (because he's been lugging this locked box full of papers all over the Himalayas while trying to take care of the lama). Concerned over his health, the lama hands Kim over to the Kulu woman, who gives him a long massage and puts him to bed. Kim sleeps for thirty-six hours with his super-secret stolen papers under his bed—that's how tired he was.

When Kim wakes up he finds that big things have been happening: first, the Babu has arrived at the Kulu woman's house to find Kim. He guided the two agents all the way to Simla, while deliberately steering them away from closer European settlements, so that he could delay any action they might take over their lost luggage.

When the Babu left them, they actually wrote out a recommendation for him for future employment as a guide—that's how good his performance as a loyal employee and Russian sympathizer was. But now the Babu is ready to take over Kim's secret papers proving the betrayal of these northern kings. He will bring them to Creighton in the South, and Kim's first real secret mission as a grown-up is officially a total success.

The other thing that's happened while Kim has been sleeping is that the lama has had a vision. After two days of fasting, he saw himself flying high above the world and coming right to the edge of the Great Soul at the center of creation. But just as he was about to receive Enlightenment, a voice asked him what would happen to Kim if the lama died. Hearing this, the lama decides to go back to his body to bring wisdom back to his beloved disciple.

He comes out of his vision soaking wet, since he apparently walked into a nearby river in his trance… and this river must be none other than the River of the Arrow. So the lama has found his River at long last, and he is ready to show it to Kim to bring him wisdom. The lama has come to a spiritual understanding of his place in the world and of his grandfatherly relationship to young Kim.

Characters:

Kim: At the start of the book, he's sitting on a cannon outside the Lahore Museum having the time of his life—how much more exciting can you get? From the first chapter of Kim, we know that Kim is a orphan who lives by his reasons, charming people and cheating them all around the city of Lahore.

In an opposite movement from, say, Luke's introduction to the Rebel Alliance and the Force in Star Wars or Bilbo's sudden quest for dwarvish gold and dragon-slaying in The Hobbit, the "adventure" of Kim's life is to get him to go to school (sadly, not a wizarding school) and calm down. He already starts out so free and easy that Kim's main quest over the course of the novel is to learn enough responsibility and discipline to become a British Indian Secret Service agent.

In a way, Kim's quest reminds us a lot more of our own growth into adulthood than, say; Katniss Everdeen's thrilling but highly lethal Hunger Games. While very few of us have had

 To use our archery skills to defend our lives in highly public fights to the death, a lot of us have had to go to school to gain the skills necessary to perform our chosen jobs. Even though Kim's character is unusual, his life in British India is exciting, and his future job is as Ultra-Cool Super Spy, honestly, his narrative arc is a lot more recognizable to us than most adventure stories.

 The Teshoo Lama: The Teshoo lama and Kim have a lot in common. First, both of them are outsiders to Indian society—Kim because he doesn't totally fit in to any of the castes or groups that he imitates so well, and the lama because he is not from India (he's Tibetan) and he is only traveling through the country for religious reasons. (BTW, a lama is a spiritual leader in Tibetan Buddhism.)

Second, both Kim and the lama seem to inspire a lot of help from strangers. Kim is hugely charming, and he is great at manipulating people into giving him what he wants. The lama is pretty charming in his own right, but he is also so clearly a holy man that he receives donations on the road from the people he passes.

But we have to be honest: the number of differences between the lama and Kim definitely outnumbers their similarities.

The lama is hugely disciplined and dedicated to his Buddhist faith. Kim, by contrast, doesn't seem to have a religion, and his main dedication is to becoming a spy—a job that seems pretty far from religious salvation. The lama is actually a wealthy man—he used to be the Abbot of Suchzen Lamassery when he was still living in Tibet—which means that he has the resources to send Kim to school. Meanwhile, Kim is "a poor white of the very poorest".

And the list of differences goes on: the lama is old and Kim is young. The lama always appears exactly the same, in his priestly robes, while Kim is always changing.

Mahbub Ali: Mahbub Ali is an Afghan Muslim living in Lahore. His official job is as a horse trader, and he makes a ton of money buying and selling horses in the city… But secretly, Mahbub Ali is also a member of the huge network of information gatherers employed by the British Indian government to keep a secret eye on their interests in the state. His official registration number as a spy.

Mahbub Ali is like a talent scout for the British Indian Secret Service: long before it turns out that Kim is going to be adopted by the Irish Mavericks regiment and sent to St. Xavier's school; Mahbub Ali knows that Kim is going to be a great information gatherer for the state. We know that Mahbub Ali can tell "the boy's value as a gossip", and that he has been paying Kim in food to follow people and to deliver messages.

In fact, Mahbub Ali is the one to give Kim his first real mission: when Kim first sets out with the lama to travel south in search of the River of the Arrow, Mahbub Ali tells Kim to bring a secret message to an Englishman who turns out to be Colonel Creighton.

Without Mahbub Ali's help, Kim would never have been introduced to the Great Game. And Kim does thank Mahbub Ali for his assistance in keeping Kim in school (even against Kim's wishes) and bringing him to the attention of Colonel Creighton: "I say now, Hajji [a term of respect for a Muslim who has made a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca], that it was well done; and I see my road all clear before me to a good service".

The Kulu Women: The Kulu woman is pretty much the only major female character in this book, which makes us wonder why Kipling can't seem to imagine an adventure with women taking an active part in it. However Kim takes place when adventurous quests were mostly supposed to be for boys—the gender roles in this book are pretty consistent with the fact that it appears in 1901. (Side note: The Wizard of Oz was published in 1900 and is basically an adventure story about a girl realizing her power and potential just saying'.)

Anyway, so the Kulu woman is a tough, feisty lady who enjoys Kim's ridiculous flattery (even though she knows that he is teasing) and the lama's learned religious discussions (even though the two of them disagree on the value of charms to ward off sickness for her grandsons). She reappears several times as a reliable person to take care of the lama while Kim is at school or otherwise not available for questing.

We first meet this elderly woman from the region of Kulu (now spelled Kullu), which lies in the foothills of the Himalayas, while Kim and the lama are traveling south to Benares but before Kim finds his father's regiment.

The narrator explains that many wealthy Indians keep their wives and daughters hidden in public in order to protect their modesty. But for elderly women past childbearing age, they want a little excitement in their lives, and modesty no longer seems to be quite so much of an issue. (In fact, the novel puts this idea really cruelly: these women are "withered and undesirable" and so do not "object to unveiling" in public. These women are much less careful about being seen as they travel around India, even though they may ride in curtained wagons to stay sheltered from the other people around them.

Kim spots just such a woman on the Grand Trunk Road, traveling with guards from her home town in Kulu and men hired by her son-in-law to escort her south for a visit. So once again, Kipling introduces all of these social and cultural details to give us the feeling that the Kulu woman is less of an individual and more of a type of person you might meet on the Grand Trunk Road.

The Babu: This character does actually have a name—Hurree Chunder Mukherjee—but the narrator almost never calls him that. Instead, the narrator usually calls him "the Babu." (Actually, the Babu, like Mahbub Ali, also has an official letter and a number for Secret Service records but still, he mostly gets called "the Babu.")

A Babu can mean an Indian clerk in a low-level government position; it's also a term for a certain racist character type in British literature: the Indian person who tries really hard to fit in with British culture but can't speak proper English.

By calling Hurree Chunder "the Babu," Kipling is clearly inviting us to read his character as a common stereotype. From his awkward, overweight body to his odd, stilted English, the Babu seems to fit all of the worst assumptions about Indians that racist British people might have.

At the same time, Hurree Babu's character can surprise us. When Kim first meets the Babu when the Babu escorts him back from Simla (where Kim has been staying with Lurgan) to Lucknow (where Kim goes to school), Kim thinks, "How comes it that this man is one of us?” Kim can't imagine how someone as stupid-seeming as the Babu can possibly have something as exciting as a price on his head as proof of his excellent, risky spy activities.

But the text gives us all kinds of hints that the Babu is not a totally one-dimensional, unaware character. When the Babu lets Kim off at the Benares train station to join the lama for his second search for the River of the Arrow, Kim asks if it is dangerous for them to be speaking English in public.

The Babu dismisses Kim's concerns by saying, "All we Babu’s talk English to show off". The Babu seems to be aware (at least to some extent) of how he appears to the people around him when he speaks English with his British colleagues: as a "show-off." And of course, the Babu also gives plenty of evidence over the course of his mission against the Russian agents that he is braver than he will ever admit.

So we cannot take the Babu's appearances totally at face value. Yes—there is a lot of prejudice in the ways in which Kipling invites his readers to laugh at this guy; yet while the Babu is superstitious and easily intimidated by the customs and beliefs that he is supposed to be studying oh-so-scientifically, he is still brave enough to ask the Russian agents he has been betraying all along for a recommendation for future employment, which takes some serious cojones. So Kim appears to mock the Babu while also suggesting that he deserves some respect at the same time.

The complexity of the Babu's character might come from the fact that he stands between two cultures. While he has grown up in Bengal, India and clearly does not identify himself as a European (in fact, he calls himself an "Asiatic", the Babu is totally committed to the British government and to English social sciences and institutions.

The Babu might be kind of hard for us to figure out as a character because he sits outside of the categories of Sahib and native that the book keeps pressing on us. The Babu's identity is not as flexible as Kim's because he is Indian and Kim is white (which means a huge difference to a character's power in this book), but the Babu still has a lot more depth to his character than Mahbub Ali or even Lurgan. The fact that he is such a puzzle is what makes him interesting—even when he also frustrates the heck out of us.

Themes:

      1)   Loyalty: Our hero Kim is an orphan, but he has about a billion parent figures: the lama, Mahbub Ali, Creighton, Lurgan, the Kulu woman—even the Babu could count as a slightly annoying older-brother-figure. All of these characters are linked together by love and a sense of responsibility rather than by relations of blood. The novel Kim strongly highlights the importance of networks between people who can provide emotional (and financial and professional) support for one another.

At the same time, Kipling's importance on personal attachment has some definite political effects. For example, the novel describes the revolt against British authority by the Five Kings in the north of India as disloyalty in other words, as a disloyalty of the personal relations between colonial India and the British Empire.

And it is Kipling's expectations about the moral and emotional correctness of the bonds between India and Britain that has made Kim such a controversial, complicated novel now that India is a strong, independent nation in its own right.

     2)   Race: Race is everywhere in Kim. We find out on the first page that, below Kim's darkly tanned skin, Kim is still "white". There is no single character in this book whose race we don't know.

And there's an important historical reason for this attention to race: Rudyard Kipling is writing about India during the period of British colonial domination at the turn of the twentieth century. Kipling's India includes a huge mix of people from different nationalities, traditional groups, religions, you name the category, and it appears in this book. But even though people of many cultures appear in Kim, race still makes a big difference to how much financial and social mobility the different characters have.

Definitely, Kipling is writing according to a pro-imperial, racist worldview. So even though Kim is very poor, he has the opportunity to make a great profession for himself partly because he is white. Indian characters such as the Babu have some degree of flexibility and power in this book, but there are still limits to what they can achieve because of their race.

However, while Kipling has a lot of preferences going into his description of India, he also strongly criticizes white racism and he portrays all of his characters, no matter what their background, with depth and compassion. Kim includes a lot of puzzling contradictions in its representations of race, which is one reason why we keep coming back to read this book even today.

3)   Cunning and Cleverness: Kim seems to spend about 90% of his time watching other people and trying to figure out what their game is. And when Kim isn't watching other people, he's coming up with his own schemes to deliver secret messages or to run away from school and see the world. Except when he's hanging out with his spymaster mentors (Lurgan and Mahbub Ali), Kim is pretty much guaranteed to be the smartest person in the room—and by the end of Kim, we get the idea that he might outpace even Lurgan and Mahbub Ali in his skills with observation and guidance. Most of Kim's character development over the course of this book focuses on the turn of his natural cunning and cleverness toward the greater good: Kim is an amazing cheater and liar, but as he continues on his adventures, he learns to handle people on behalf of the British Empire. And actually, that makes all the difference to his moral fiber (at least, according to Kipling).

4)   Appearances: We've mentioned in another place that we are told the races of every single character in Kim. Race really seems to matter for Kipling, since he is representing the deeply graded, unfair society of British colonial India at the turn of the twentieth century. But while we as readers may get a lot of information about the different characters' races, the other characters don't necessarily get this same information.

Kim and the Babu often appear in disguise on their adventures for the Secret Service, as they pretend to be people of different societies, religions, professions—whatever you can imagine. The irony of the importance of appearances in this book is that because these agents know that appearance can totally change a person's social status in this place and time, it can also be another way to handle the people around them. In a world where everybody judges other people based on how they look, all they need to do is change their faces to change their destinies.

5)   Spirituality: Kipling spends a lot of time arrangement the absolute number of kinds of people in India. Every time there's a crowd scene, we see at least a dozen different representatives of different racial and cultural groups. But race, class, and culture aren't the only ways that Kipling divides people up: he also strongly highlights religious background. This novel includes Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist characters, all socializing together in the highly diverse social spaces of British India.

Still, for a novel with so many religions mixing together, Kim doesn't seem that invested in religious belief as per others. While the lama is obviously a deep Buddhist, Kim's carefully earthly, non-religious method to the world seems much more in tune with the attitudes of the book as a whole.

But while the novel itself may not take a stand on religious faith, it does appear to have a lot of respect for what spirituality can do for the moral character of its characters. The lama is a good and honest man thanks in part to his religious vow, and a lot of the charity and kindness that Kim and the lama find on the road arises from the respect the people of India have for the lama's holy status.