Rudyard Kipling died in January 1936, in London, at seventy, of a perforated duodenal ulcer he had misdiagnosed for years as a stomach complaint. He was buried in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey, three days after his death, after a funeral attended by his surviving friends — the generation that had won the South African War and lost the sons who had fought the First, and who had spent the twenty years between the Armistice and Kipling’s death watching the imperial order he had celebrated dismantle itself by inches.
I do not write the obituary for the man. The man was defended in his century by the people who admired his politics, and attacked in the century that followed by the people who saw through them, and the final accounting is still being argued. I write the obituary for the book — for Kim, published in 1901, written at the height of his powers, and still, a hundred and twenty-five years later, the most morally complicated novel in the English imperial canon.
The problem with Kim is that it is a great novel. Its apologists overstate this, and its prosecutors understate it, but a fair reader on a fair first encounter with the book comes out of it knowing that something large has just happened. The prose is extraordinary. The narrative pacing is perfect. The title character — Kimball O’Hara, orphaned son of an Irish soldier, raised in the bazaars of Lahore, passed fluently between Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and British worlds, eventually recruited into the British intelligence service against Russian encroachment in the Great Game — is one of the great characters in the novel of the twentieth century, and his teacher, the Tibetan lama searching for the River of the Arrow, is the most serious and tender portrayal of a Buddhist in any Victorian or Edwardian English novel. The book’s sympathy for India, at the level of detail, is enormous. Kipling loved the subcontinent. Kipling had grown up there. Kipling spoke the languages and knew the food and knew the rhythms of the road and the bazaar and the railway station, and none of this is false.
The problem is the frame. The frame of Kim is that all of this beautifully rendered Indian texture — the lama, the horse-trader Mahbub Ali, the red-haired priest Bennett, the Ressaldar, the whole parade of human varieties across the Grand Trunk Road — exists inside a novel whose young hero’s destiny is to become an agent of British intelligence. The Great Game is not a background. The Great Game is the plot. Kim’s apprenticeship is not an apprenticeship in becoming a sympathetic participant in the country he loves. It is an apprenticeship in becoming an instrument by which the British Empire preserves its hold on the country he loves.
And Kipling cannot, or will not, see the contradiction. He writes the lama with absolute tenderness, and then he writes the scene in which Kim, the lama’s chela, delivers intelligence to his British handlers that will protect British rule in the subcontinent the lama is walking through. Kipling presents this as a comfortable dual loyalty — the boy can love his teacher and serve the empire, and the novel does not need him to choose. The novel is wrong about this. The century that followed Kim proved it wrong. The Indian independence movement proved it wrong. Every colonial liberation movement of the twentieth century proved it wrong. Kipling thought the contradiction could be held. It could not. He lived to see it tear apart, slowly and then quickly, and he died still writing the kind of imperial verse he had been writing at forty, because the alternative was to rewrite his entire interior life, and at seventy he was not going to do it.
What he got right: the human texture. Nobody before Kipling, and very few writers since, rendered the human plurality of British India at the ground level — the colors, the smells, the speech rhythms, the physical presence of the road and the train and the bazaar — with the granular respect Kipling brought to it. He loved the texture. He loved the people in the texture. This love was real.
What he got wrong: the conclusion he drew from the love. He concluded that the love justified the imperial framework that had produced the conditions of his encounter with the texture. It did not. A man can love a country and still be obligated to leave it, and Kipling never reached that obligation, and the novel does not know it exists.
A reader coming to Kim for the first time should read it. Should love the lama. Should admire Mahbub Ali. Should sit, as Kipling sat, by the firelight of the caravan at night, and feel the Grand Trunk Road moving around the characters. Should then, afterwards, read Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, which has the fairest and most careful critical account of Kim I have read. Should also read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land. The novel sits at a crossroads in the English-language treatment of India. You can see the crossroads clearly, at this distance, only by reading both sides of it.
Rest easy, Rudyard. You were wrong about the largest political question of your century. You were also one of the great writers of your language. Both are true. The prosecution gets the politics. The defense gets the prose. The book is on its own, between them, and will continue to be argued about long after both of us are beyond caring.
A related vagobond.com piece: Travel Writing — Dangerous Business.
Readers and fans of Kim will really enjoy Vagabonds — my road novel about boys who have slipped the leash of a country that does not know what to do with them, and the older men who teach them how to survive on the road. Different empire. Different road. Same lesson. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
