Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [9]
Though Kim is called the “Little Friend of all the World,” he’s more hostile than friendly. He’s in constant conflict not only with the Russian and French enemies, but also with the Lahore police, the native boys fighting for position on the cannon Zam-Zammah, the railway clerk who tries to cheat him, the cheeky sweeper, the two chaplains of the regiment, the sergeant who restrains him, the drummer boy who guards him, the Eurasian boys at school, the villains plotting to murder Mahbub, the Hindu boy in Lurgan’s shop, and the Woman of Shamlegh.
Kim easily slips in and out of various disguises and roles and adapts to each of his teachers. But, cut off from his assumed race and mother tongue, he’s troubled and confused about his personal identity. Whiteness never disturbed his Indian identity during his first thirteen years in Lahore, but after he leaves his native city he twice asks himself the overwhelming question: “ ‘Who is Kim?”’ (p. 116) “ ‘And what is Kim?”’ (p. 272). He experiences a corresponding loneliness when he lives among white men, when he reaches Benares, and when, cut off from Hurree, he nurses the sick lama.
A mixture of Aladdin and Huck Finn, skilled in strategies of survival and expert in obscene curses (especially about the questionable parentage of his adversaries), Kim searches for, yet hides, his true self. Despite his cockiness, he is orphaned, alone, outcast and personally insecure during the malleable years between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. Like the vulnerable Kipling, he is amenable to education, change, and exploitation. His lack of fixed identity allows him to be shaped for many different roles—for the Indian caste system and the British army each has a rigid hierarchy—and his mentors prey on his weaknesses to bring out his strengths. His English education blends with his Irish father’s influence and Indian culture to produce, as Colonel Creighton foresees, an ethnological hybrid who’s perfect for the Secret Service. Everything that Kim has done and learned and is leads to this foreordained end. In The Jungle Books even the much wilder Mowgli finally joins the Forest Service. The doubles or second selves who haunt the troubled heroes in the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Robert Louis Stevenson split them apart and drive them mad. But Kim, despite his manic-depressive oscillations, his hysteria and despair, has the extraordinary ability to harmonize and integrate the “separate sides to [his] head” (p. 129).
There are two parallel but conflicting quests in the novel: Kim’s search for his father’s regiment, which leads to the Great Game, and the lama’s search for the sacred River of the Arrow, which leads to enlightenment. Kim must choose between them. The father-son relationship of the celibate monk and orphaned boy provides a moving contrast as well as a close bond. Kim is intelligent, resourceful, and adventurous; the lama is hopelessly impractical, dependent, and unworldly. The protean Kim constantly changes; the lama remains the same.
Kipling frequently states that the lama is deep in meditation, considering vast matters and illuminating knowledge with brilliant insight. The lama’s ascetic holiness inspires the respect of the native characters. But Kipling never reveals the insights of the intellectually limited lama, who (like many holy men) merely repeats the same old formulaic phrases. Instead of profound perceptions, he offers vague abstractions like Desire, Wheel, Way, Enlightenment, Search, and Cause of Things that emphasize his detachment from the world. One authority on Buddhism, skeptical of this superstitious tradition, defines “Primitive Lamaism... as a priestly mixture of Sivaite mysticism, magic and Indo-Tibetan demonolatry, overlaid by a thin varnish of Mahayana [search for salvation] Buddhism.”16
The lama seeks the River to free himself from the Wheel, and these two symbols also structure the book. He follows the endless flow of the Ganges as it runs parallel to the Grand Trunk Road from Lahore to Benares, and repeats the circular motion of the Wheel as he travels from the Himalayas to the flatland, returns to the mountains of Kashmir, and then circles down to the Indo-Gangetic Plain. When he finally finds the River he goes into a trance, nearly drowns himself in it, and has to be rescued by Hurree, who pulls him back into the real world. If the River of the Arrow really existed, it certainly would have been discovered during previous millennia and become a holy place for pilgrims. It