Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Kim(ball O'Hara) is a young boy growing up in India in the late 19th century. He has no current family to speak of, since his Irish parents both died when he was young, and so the country of India has been left to raise him. When we first encounter him, he is navigating the world as a 'native' Indian, in the sense that he does not interact with or travel with white/English people, but rather passes his time with a variety of Indian characters of various ethnic and religious persuasions. He begins a quest with a lama, who is looking for a particular river which contains enlightenment (you know, this river has freshwater, that one has enlightenment) but the quest is interrupted when Kim is placed in close quarters with Englishmen, who decide he must be returned the English and raised as a 'sahib'. Kim is not at all interested in this plan, but the lama decides it will be good for him, so he sponsors Kim's education at a British school. Over the years, Kim makes various sojourns away from the school and that way of life, disguising himself as a non-Sahib, and he even makes an agreement with one of the Englishmen who is taking care of him: Kim will attend school and learn to become a 'good Sahib' if he can do whatever he likes on his holidays, and roam India far and wide. The Englishman is not particularly thrilled with this plan, but he acquiesces, and so passes the boyhood and journey into manhood of Kim. Kim encounters other men who are playing 'the Great Game', which is the conflict between Russia and Britain over Afghanistan, and, transfixed by the intrigue, he's desperate to join. So Kim emerges from school to rejoin his lama on their quest, but he is also something of a spy, working on secret projects as part of the Great Game. After a variety of adventures, the lama decides that their quest for enlightenment is over, and Kim is left to take on the world.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here
Hello, dear blobbists!
It's been some time since my last post, and much has happened here and abroad. It felt incongruous to be reading Kim in the midst of this moment, since it's both temporally removed and takes place on a different continent, but as usual, I found myself enjoying the opportunity to inhabit a different space for a time, and reflect on how its sameness and its difference from my own time.
On the whole, I liked Kim. I had a vague notion in my head that Kipling was racist, so I wasn't sure how to approach it, and while I agree there are certainly opinions, expressions, and terms that are deeply racist, I felt it still had a lot to offer as a narrative. So we'll put it in the 'problematic, but I liked it' category. My thoughts, in no real order:
On whiteness
If you haven't been living under a rock for the last month (or decade, or century) then you've likely been thinking about race, and what it means to our lived experience. I have to admit, I was super surprised when I read the line early on: 'Kim was white.' I think I thought Kim was going to be this young Indian boy, and what was going to be problematic was that Kipling was 'claiming' that experience and defining it for Indians. So imagine my surprise when Kim was, in fact, white. Now, certainly, there are some things he does that would definitely not fly today (think face paint and disguise) and shouldn't, but I thought it was an interesting part of the premise that Kim is a white boy who has lost his whiteness, so to speak. Let me tell you a bit about Kim, whose Irish parents died and left him an orphan in India.
A portrait of Kim
- Kim is known and referred to often as -'Friend of all the World' - which feels quite endearing, and is generally quite true. Kim's great power is his ability to comfortably inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously, and it's this quality that makes him an excellent potential spy.
- Kim does not stand for other people's nonsense. I loved this line when the British men first decide they want to send him to a religious school for white boys:
Kim smiled compassionately. If these men lay under the delusion that he would do anything that he did not fancy, so much the better. lolololz.
- Kim is not one to trust things right away.
Life as a Sahib was amusing so far; but he touched it with a cautious hand.
- Kim is reflective.
I am Kim. This is the great world, and I am only Kim. Who is Kim? He considered his own identity, a thing he had never done before, till his head swam. He was one insignificant person in all this roaring whirl of India, going southward to he knew not what fate.
- Above all, Kim is an adventurer. I loved how he disappeared into the fabric of India on his school holidays. Here's an example of how he spent one, recounted to his friend Mahbub Ali:
I stayed for a while with an old man near Umballa; anon with a household of my acquaintance in Umballa. With one of these I went as far as Delhi to the southward. That is a wondrous city. Then I drove a bullock for a teli (an oilman) coming north; but I heard of a great feast forward in Puttiala, and thither I went in the company of a firework-maker. It was a great feast (Kim rubbed his stomach). I saw Rajahs, and elephants with gold and silver trappings; and they lit all the fireworks at once, whereby eleven men were killed, my firework-maker among them, and I was blown across a tent but took no harm. Then I came back to the rel with a Sikh horseman, to whom I was groom for my bread; and so here.
On unfriends
At one point, one of Kim's buddies says this, of some men trying to kill him: They were unfriends of mine. I thought this was hilarious. Oh them? They're unfriends of mine. Nbd. Would-be assassins, you know, unfriends.
On the te-rain
Okay, so I get that it's racist/problematic that this is part of Kipling's (a white man's) description of native Indians, but I still loved that several people made reference to the 'te-rain'. At one point, Kim rides it with his lama, and one man says to another, who looks hesitant:
Do not be afraid. I remember the time when I was afraid of the te-rain.
It reminded me of my sister's ex-husband, who is from Sénégal, and how he was (/maybe still is) terrified to ride in elevators, because they were a bit like magic to him. I remember him telling a story of how he just stood there, watching people get on the elevator, when he was trying to apply for a job on an upper floor, and he couldn't quite will his feet to cross the threshold. What doesn't seem like magic when you're wholly unused to it?
On the magic of writing
Speaking of magic, I loved this line, from Kim's education:
Moreover - this was magic worth anything else - he could write.
At several earlier points in the novel, Kim wants to send letters to people, and he has to ask for someone to draft (and post) a letter for him, usually without any money to offer in return. Since Kim is wily and crafty, he manages to do this frequently without too much trouble, but he is delighted when the power to craft a letter lies within himself.
On thinking in Hindi and dreaming in Hindustanee
One of the things I found most beautiful about Kim's coming of age was the way Kipling narrated his language processing. It reminded me that I was so pleased when, after several months living there (and several years of study prior) I finally dreamed in French, and I felt I had arrived, linguistically. Here's one example of this:
So far Kim had been thinking in Hindi, but a tremor came on him, and with an effort like that of a swimmer before sharks, who hurls himself half out of the water, his mind leaped up from a darkness that was swallowing it and took refuge in - the multiplication-table in English!
On racism, sexism, classism, and all the other isms
I read a few articles after I finished Kim (as usual, I wanted to give it the chance for me to experience it on my own first) and several of them talked about how complex the issue of race and racism is in thinking about Kipling's work. Because while he says things like:
'One can never fathom the Oriental mind.'
and this:
'One must never forget that one is a Sahib, and that some day, when examinations are passed, one will command natives.'
He also playfully explores a tremendous variety of experiences in India, from Muslims, to Sikhs, to Hindus, to Jainists, to Buddhists, and his characters come from any number of castes, from lowest to highest. He also writes a few female characters who are not cookie-cutter stereotypes, but challenge notions of femininity, and on the whole, the most likable characters in the work (and the most nuanced) are all non-English/Indian. So we won't excuse or omit the concept that Kipling takes English occupation of India for granted as a 'fact', but we will grant that there are complexities in thinking this through.
I was amused to read this on the copyright page of my copy:
Note: This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations as it would if it were written today.
because I'd never seen it before. And at first, I thought, ah yes, as I thought, Kipling wrote some racist things in his time. But in reading it back, it feels like a weird excuse. Because if you think about it, we have tons of racists in today's society, and plenty of bigoted, intolerant people with troublesome views on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, etc. So I understand that they're trying to acknowledge that part of Kipling's apparent racism for us today is 'simply an expression of the status quo' from back then; but in that moment, it was also racist. And a book being written today doesn't make it free of any of those issues. So on the whole, I think the disclaimer is sort of useless.
Lurgan Sahib
There were quite a few characters that came across Kim's path, and by the end, I had a hard time keeping up, but Lurgan Sahib was one of my favorites. He teaches Kim how to inhabit a variety of different identities, but when Kim first arrives and stays the night, his visit is not well received by Lurgan Sahib's servant boy.
My boy is jealous, so I have put him in the corner and I shall not speak to him to-day. He has just tried to kill me. You must help me with the breakfast. He is almost too jealous to trust, just now.
and then later - Come out, and next time thy heart is troubled, do not try white arsenic quite so openly. Surely the Devil Dasim was lord of our table-cloth that day! It might have made me ill, child, and then a stranger would have guarded the jewels. LOLOLOl. I thought this exchange was fantastic.
Phrases in the running for the title of this blob:
- It is all illusion.
- Do ye both dream dreams?
- He has gone back to the Road again for a while.
- All the world may tell lies save thou and I.
- There is no holding the young pony from the game.
- One does not own to the possession of money in India. It was a real magic trick how much Kim accomplished over the course of this novel with absolutely no money to his name. Amusingly, when he did have money for his travels, he never admitted to having any, but rather begged and bartered his way to what he wanted.
- We be but two souls seeking escape.
- The boat of my soul staggers.
- These are the hills of my delight!
Lines I Liked
- Golden, rose, saffron, and pink, the morning mists smoked away across the flat green levels.
- All India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues; shaken and consumed in the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers, and visionaries: as it has been from the beginning and will continue to the end. I thought this line, and the exploration of a variety of sometimes warring faiths in India, was really interesting, especially having read some other works by Indian authors that deal with similar themes and similar complexities.
- Together they set off through the mysterious dusk, full of the noises of a city below the hillside, and the breath of a cool wind in deodar-crowned Jakko, shouldering the stars.
Well, blobbists, with that I will leave you! I'm off to bake some of the strawberries my family has brought me into a strawberry-rhubarb pie, and paint my nails rainbow for Pride. Onwards to Suzy's Decision, or something of that ilk. ;)
Keep faith, keep safe, good night.
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