Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [152]
John Howard Davies’s adaptation of Kim, which aired on television in 1984, was also shot on location in India. In this version, Kim is a street urchin living hand to mouth in Lahore. Ravi Sheth portrays Kim as streetwise teenager, but one who is ultimately kindhearted. Kim must weigh his two possible futures: one as the disciple of a wizened Buddhist monk, played impeccably by Peter O’Toole, and the other as a spy among horses, led by Mahbub Ali (Bryan Brown) . The drama ensues as the toughened Ali cannot seem to get along with the lama, who will not be ruffled, while Kim, searching for his true identity, learns that he is the son of a soldier who deserted from the British Maverick Regiment. Davies’s Kim, which also features John Rhys-Davies (of The Lord of the Rings trilogy) as Babu and Julian Glover as Colonel Creighton, is a thought-provoking portrait of 1890s India at the height of the British Raj.
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Rudyard Kipling’s Kim through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
COMMENTARY
ANDREW LANG
At last there comes an Englishman with eyes, with a pen extraordinarily deft, an observation marvellously rapid and keen; and, by good luck, this Englishman has no official duties: he is neither a soldier, nor a judge; he is merely a man of letters. He has leisure to look around him, he has the power of making us see what he sees; and, when we have lost India, when some new power is ruling where we ruled, when our empire has followed that of the Moguls, future generations will learn from Mr. Kipling’s works what India was under English sway.
—from Essays in Little (1891)
HENRY JAMES
I cannot overlook the general, the importunate fact that, confidently as [Kipling] has caught the trick and habit of this sophisticated world, he has not been long of it. His extreme youth is indeed what I may call his window-bar-the support on which he somewhat rowdily leans while he looks down at the human scene with his pipe in his teeth; just as his other conditions (to mention only some of them), are his prodigious facility, which is only less remarkable than his stiff selection; his unabashed temperament, his flexible talent, his smoking-room manner, his familiar friendship with India—established so rapidly, and so completely under his control; his delight in battle, his “cheek” about women—and indeed about men and about everything; his determination not to be duped, his “imperial” fibre, his love of the inside view, the private soldier and the primitive man.
—from his introduction to Kipling’s
Mine Own People ( 1891 )
NEW YORK TIMES
According to Mr. Howells “Kim” should be strictly forbidden to the public libraries. It is a book to be owned, not borrowed, to “linger over and delay, to return to again and yet again,” for it is one of the few novels of these latter days that have enriched both literature and life.
—September 28, 1901
THE NATION
‘Kim’ is neither a novel nor a romance, but an imaginative tale of a kind long known and perpetually interesting. Its literary lineage has been clearly traced from the “boy and beggar” tales and plays of the fifteenth century, down through the Spanish picaresque (rogue) tales of the sixteenth, Le Sage’s ‘Gil Bias,‘ and a distinguished English ancestry, including the early Elizabethans, taking on a definite national expression in Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe.’ However widely these tales vary in scene, time, and treatment, they are essentially alike. They are tales of adventure on the high-road, the sea, at home, or in a foreign land, and the hero is a youthful vagabond, sometimes accompanied by an aged master or friend, and sometimes wandering alone in quest of fame, or fortune, always a vagrant born. It is to the vagrant instinct, never extinguished by civilization, that the tale of the rogue and the road for ever appeals, always recognized as old and always as good as new. All these tales, from the earliest to the latest, are realistic, for they rely on exact observation and report of actual events, and on literal description of the manners and appearance of the people encountered by the way; they avoid extravagance and exaggeration, and they closely reflect human nature