Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [7]
The Tibetan Buddhist lama rejects the world and searches for salvation. Mahbub Ali, the Afghan Muslim horse trader, works with the English but retains his traditional customs. Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, the Hindu Bengali and “semi-anglicized product of our Indian colleges,”11 tries to adopt British behavior and speech. The Protestant and Catholic clergymen, Mr. Bennett and Father Victor, try to co-opt Kim into their religions. Lurgan, English but born in India, tests Kim and trains him for the Great Game of espionage. Colonel Creighton, a secret agent masquerading as an ethnologist (Kim, an expert on castes and keen on mimicry, is himself an amateur ethnologist), recognizes Kim’s unique potential and exploits his rare talents. Kim asks: “‘What am I? Mussalman, Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist?”’ (p. 140) and is none of the above. But in a brief, touching scene he combines the British, Muslim, Buddhist, and Jain elements in his character and culture and forgets “even the Great Game as he stooped, Mohammedan fashion, to touch his master’s feet in the dust of the Jain temple” (p. 185).
Kim and each of his native mentors have a different and quite idiosyncratic way of speaking. Kipling vividly conveys the flavor of vernacular speech and the formulaic repetitions of unlettered folk by using traditional proverbs and archaic diction from the seventeenth-century English of the King James Bible and Shakespeare. The lama keeps repeating the same solemn banalities in a singsong cadence: “ ‘They are all bound upon the Wheel.... Bound from life after life. To none of these has the Way been shown’ ” (pp. 64-65). Mahbub Ali’s declamatory phrases express his hearty ruffianism: “ ‘God’s curse on all unbelievers! Beg from those of my tail who are of thy faith”’ (p. 22). The babu Hurree, pompous and slightly absurd, drops his definite articles, mispronounces long words, and misuses English idioms: “ ‘I am of opeenion that it is most extraordinary and effeecient performance. Except that you had told me I should have opined that—that—that you were pulling my legs’ ” (p. 156). The seductive Woman of Shamlegh speaks with languid insinuations: “ ‘I do not love Sahibs, but thou wilt make us a charm in return for it. We do not wish little Shamlegh to get a bad name’ ” (p. 245). Kim shifts from stilted English before his formal education: “ ‘Every month I become a year more old’ ” (p. 135), to old-fashioned schoolboy slang after he’s been to St. Xavier’s:“ ‘By Jove! ... This is a dam’-tight place’ ” (p. 235). T. S. Eliot observed the contrast between Kipling’s portrayal of native characters in the early stories and in Kim:
There are two strata in Kipling’s appreciation of India, the stratum of the child and that of the young man. It was the latter who observed the British in India and wrote the rather cocky and rather acid tales of Delhi and Simla, but it was the former who loved the country and its people.... The Indian characters have the greater reality because they are treated with the understanding of love.... It is the four great Indian characters in Kim who are real: the Lama [not Indian], Mahbub Ali, Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, and the wealthy widow from the North.12
Constantly appealing to the senses, deceptively transparent, and as lucid as the reflection of a lake, Kipling’s rich prose, after more than a hundred years, is still surprisingly fresh and vivid. India springs to life in the bustling activity of men and animals in the crowded Kashmir serai, described in a series of cinematic flashes: “Here were all manner of Northern folk, tending tethered ponies and kneeling camels; loading and unloading bales and bundles; drawing water for the evening meal at the creaking well-windlasses; piling grass before the shrieking, wild-eyed stallions; cuffing the surly caravan dogs; paying off camel-drivers; taking on new grooms; swearing, shouting, arguing, and chaffering in the packed square” (p. 20) . The sun rises on the burning plain in a stunning rainbow of colors: “Golden, rose, saffron, and pink, the morning mists smoked away across the flat green levels. All the rich Punjab lay out in the splendour of the keen sun