Masaryk University in Brno
Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American studies
English Language and Literature
British Imperial Experience as Reflected on Different Identities in
Kipling’s Novel Kim
B. A. Major Thesis
Klára Šumberová
Supervisor: PhDr. Lidia Kyzlinková, CSc., M. Litt.
Brno, 2006
1
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. Klára Šumberová
2
I would like to thank my supervisor, PhDr. Lidia Kyzlinková, CSc., M. Litt., for her advice and help.
3 Table of Contents
Introduction 5
Chapter One: Rudyard Kipling and Contemporary British Attitudes
to Native India 8
Chapter Two: The Concept of Identity and Kim 16
Chapter Three: The Double Identity of Kim 27
Chapter Four: The Character of the Lama and the Colonial Experience 30
Chapter Five: The Native Environment and Colonialism in Kim 34
Conclusion 38
Notes 42
Bibliography 44
4 Introduction
The object of this thesis is an analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim , first published in 1900, as a source of knowledge of colonial thinking and its influence on the depiction of the identity of the characters in the novel. The book assumes a prominent place in the British literature and its existence has provoked numerous critical studies, often contradictory. The reason for this has not always been the variety of opinions in the field of literature; the text has also been attractive for cultural studies scholars because of its place in the colonial and post-colonial literature. Whereas Oscar Wilde can, as a literary critic, claim that “how far Mr. Kipling’s stories really mirror Anglo-Indian society I have no idea at all, nor, indeed am I ever much interested in any correspondence between
1 art and nature. It seems to me a matter of entirely secondary importance” , and on the basis of his own examination of the novel appreciate the literary talent of
Kipling, a cultural studies scholar is not only interested in the book itself but the object of his investigations is the author as well. A scholar of the area of cultural studies would also direct his effort towards the thoughts and ideas of the time when the book appeared, which must have influenced the author and is undoubtedly reflected in the book.
Rudyard Kipling is closely related to British society of the nineteenth century. The first chapter therefore deals with some of the basic characteristics and attitudes of the period, and also with the ideas of Kipling as the author of
Kim . A useful material in this area proves to be F. Max Müller’s book India-
5 2 What Can It Teach Us , providing a lot of information on the problematic relationship between the British civil servants and the native Indian population, and also addressing the issue of the contemporary level of the British studies at universities. A considerable attention is paid to the impact of Kipling’s social environment on his ideas.
The second chapter focuses on the concept of identity in the intellectual atmosphere of Great Britain in the nineteenth century, on the way Kipling understood it and on his elaboration of the identity of his literary characters in
Kim . The chapter assesses the effects of state nationalism and contemporary belief in inequality of human races on Kipling’s writing. In Kim , there are two characters, which are suitable to compare. They are Kim and Hurree Babu, living in the world created by Kipling. Their world offers them a number of values to which they do or do not develop ties. Complex of these links of a particular person forms his or her identity. I examine Kipling’s approaches to his characters, and consequently to the values that the characters accept. In other words, Kipling’s treatment of the bearers of particular values within the world he presented in Kim is of major interest. This part of my thesis is mostly devoted to the issues of ethnicity and culture. They themselves can also be taken as concepts. The next topic is thus the concept of Britishness and its traits in the case of Kim.
Chapter three explores Kim’s problem of double identity. Kim is British and
Indian at the same time, depending on the point of view. Achis Nandy considers
6 3 a similar question in Kipling’s life. Nandy concentrates on how Kipling managed to interrelate the issues of his time and environment with his own standpoint. Here the attention will also be paid to the reflection of Kipling’s
European views in the concept of identity in the novel.
The next chapter is devoted to the character of the lama. According to
Kipling, this person is an example of an ideal native. He embodies Kipling’s admiration for the world of native India, and at the same time the approach of the colonizers as rulers of India and propagators of modern inventions. The chapter concentrates on Kipling’s representation of the lama, who can be both dominant and respected, and also serve as an example of European simplification of a native: recessive and impractical. In the end, the lama’s positive and negative features are discussed.
The last chapter examines the picture of Indian society offered in the novel.
Kipling used his unusual talent for observation to present the meeting of British colonizers with the world of the natives. The novel Kim may be seen as a celebration of native culture and local colour and its numerous minor characters contribute to creating the colourful and glowing environment, where the main characters perform their tasks.
This essay attempts to reveal Kipling’s ideas constituted in Britain in the period of British colonialism as they penetrated into the novel Kim.
Nevertheless, it would be very unsuitable to try to judge such a complex and controversial issue as British colonialism in India in a work of this length.
7 Chapter One: Rudyard Kipling and Contemporary British Attitudes to Native
India
Rudyard Kipling lived in a period of a strange mixture of prejudices and various contradictory opinions concerning native India, both of the people who showed contempt for the culture of the natives and considered it inferior to European culture, and of those more unbiased and more familiar with it. This is the main topic of the first chapter.
In the year 1883, an extraordinary indologist F. Max Müller published his famous collection of lectures delivered to the candidates for the Indian Civil
Service at Cambridge University under the title India - What Can It Teach Us. It gradually influenced thinking of the British colonizers and their views of native
India in a significant way. Müller’s book thus became a source of knowledge of contemporary attitudes to native India among the candidates for the Indian Civil
Service and also among the academics. In the 1880s, during the preparation for their future occupation, the candidates for the Indian Civil Service could encounter different, even contradictory, approaches to the studies of the native
Indian culture. Apart from the older sceptical opinions concerning Indian culture, a new, completely different attitude appears at the same time, of which
Müller’s work mentioned above is an excellent representative. Although he did not visit India either, his writings owe their quality and progressiveness to his scholarly approach, objectivity and indisputable knowledge. Müller believed that it is of great use for the candidates for Indian Civil Service to learn Sanskrit.
8 4 It was Müller and other first scholars interested in India who knew what it means to study Indian culture. As Johannes G. Voigt claims: “The publication of the seven lectures in 1883 did not meet with approval and praise in all quarters, but it certainly supported the turn of policy towards India that Prime Minister
Gladstone wished for a Viceroy Lord Ripon inaugurated. It helped to blunt the
5 impact of the advancing march of imperialism.”
Müller’s India - What Can It Teach Us provides information on the knowledge of India at universities at the time when the Sanskrit literature was a new object for British scholars and when candidates for Indian Civil Service often viewed their future stay in India as a kind of exile in a country regarded as
6 uninteresting and inferior. One of the reasons was prejudice, addressed by
Müller in the following example: “It has become almost an article of faith with every Indian Civil servant that all Indians are liars; nay, I know, I shall never be
7 forgiven for my heresy in venturing to doubt it.” Then he continues with underlying of the consequences of this faith in the relationship between a civil servant and a native. Müller’s book reveals other problems by delivering a contemporary observation of the situation of many candidates for Indian Civil
Service:
After they have passed their first examination for admission to the Indian Civil Service, and given proof that they have received the benefits of a liberal education, and acquired that general information in classics, history and mathematics, which is provided at our Public Schools, and forms no doubt best and surest foundation for all more special and professional studies in later life, they suddenly find themselves torn away from their old studies and their old friends, and compelled to take up new subjects which to many of them seem strange, outlandish, if not repulsive. Strange
9 alphabets, strange languages, strange names, strange8 literatures and laws have to be faced [...] not from choice, but from necessity.
There often existed a gap between the natives and British officials because of very little knowledge of local circumstances on the officials’ part, making the administration difficult:
That village-life, however, is naturally the least known to English officials, nay, the very presence of an English official is often said to be sufficient to drive away those native virtues which distinguish both the private life and the administration of
justice and equity in an Indian village. Take a man 9out of his village-community, and you remove him from all the restraints of society.
The ignorance of the local conditions had a long tradition in the period of the
10 British colonial rule in India. In his text, Nicholas B. Dirks quotes a statement of Lord William Bentinck, the governor of Madras, from the beginning of the nineteenth century: “we are necessarily very much confined to our houses by the heat; all our wants and business which would create a greater intercourse with the natives is done for us, and we are in fact strangers in the land.”
Another sociolinguistic problem can be mentioned at this point, the
Whorfian hypothesis, even though it has not been satisfactorily proved and has
11 its opponents. It claims that the language shapes the way the speaker sees the world and that, as Wardraugh summarises, “language and culture are inextricably related so that you cannot understand or appreciate the one without
12 knowledge of the other.” The supposition would support the idea of the existence of two different intellectual worlds and ways of thinking. To
10 conclude, it should be pointed out that the differences between the Europeans and the Indians were also of a linguistic character.
Müller’s position the Indian culture signifies advancement of a very basic characteristic in the relationship between the Europeans and the Indians. He was a respected scholar and from this post he highlights the necessity to study
Indian culture just because of its worthiness, for the sake of European history and because of the knowledge of the history of human thinking. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the candidates for the Indian Civil Service were examined from James Mill’ s History of British India , published in 1817. James
Mill (1773 – 1836) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist and radical politician. In 1819, he started working as an official in India House. His Indian history book was strongly disapproved of by Müller, who refused it as biased,
13 mainly because of the passages unfavourable to Indians. Between the editions of Mill’s and Müller’s books, as stated above, there are several decades, which brought significant changes in the approaches of the scholars to Indian culture.
However, one has to take into consideration that it took some time before these changes forced their way into the attitudes of the Indian civil servants.
Colonizers were not always used to regard Indian culture as something having its value on its own. The Indian studies were often viewed only as an aid to the
British administration, as a source of the necessary knowledge contributing to the powerful and determined control of the land, or on the other hand, just as a matter of interest. If this fact is kept in mind with what Johannes G. Voigt says
11 in this context that Macaulay’s opinion of a single shelf of a good European library being worth more than the whole native literature of India was current at
14 the time, Müller’s words “I shall not attempt to prove that Sanskrit literature is
15 as good as Greek literature. Why should we always compare?” addressed to the candidates for the Indian Civil Service should be regarded as a sign of a change in the way of thinking.
As far as the ideas of the British people about native culture are concerned, it was Kipling who most influenced the minds of the common people because he wrote literature of high quality, interesting for these classes, and at the same time intellectually accessible. Charles Carrington even speaks about Kipling’s cult and claims that “no man had done more than Kipling to stimulate interest in
16 the opening-up of the new worlds in the east and south” .
Kipling’s scope of mind was shaped by his talent for observation, social environment and curiosity. He had the advantage of being kept from contemptuous opinions, such as Mill’s, because he was born in India, his early childhood and then his youth were also spent there and his father, John
Lockwood Kipling, was an extraordinary expert on the Indian native art. As
Edward W. Said states, “Kipling not only wrote about India, but he was of
17 it.” In his autobiography, Kipling remembers: “Meeta [Kipling’s Hindu bearer] would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room [...] with the caution ‘Speak English now to
12 Papa and Mamma.’ So one spoke ‘English’ haltingly translated out of the
18 vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in.”
There was one more fact that led to Kipling being brought near the natives. It was his extraordinary talent for perception that he employed when creating his characters. Charles Carrington gives interesting information on Kipling’s usage of detail in writing. Kipling carefully studied the people he wrote about, in particular those from the lower classes of the native population.
However, Kipling left India at the very young age of twelve before he could get acquainted to it closer. Similarly to other British people living in India, the
Kiplings sent their children to schools in England and young Kipling returned to India as late as 1882. Because of his genuine interest in literature, his stay in
England was very beneficial. Charles Carrington points to his sense of belonging to two worlds - to the world of the school and his friends and at the same time to the world of literary London. “Kipling seemed to have read
19 everything, all sorts of grown-up books.” When in 1882 young Kipling arrived back in India, he was a man identifying himself with his social class and, according to Carrington, with the literary London to which he looked. He therefore had to rediscover India.
It is always necessary to keep in mind that Kipling was an educated British man of the nineteenth century and this moulded his opinions. The nineteenth century had its particular character. It was a time when social Darwinism appeared and modern racism was formed in writings of the people such as
13 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and these trends affected public consciousness.
Chamberlain (1855 – 1927) was a germanophile politician, one of the founders of modern racism. His pernicious ideas are included in his work Die grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts , published in 1899, in English The Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century , 2 vol., 1911. This anti-Semitic book affected National
Socialist movement in Germany.
Nationalism had a strong position and particular nations were often ascribed certain roles in the world. Kipling is usually classified as a colonialist, but it should be added that this term can be put together with all sorts of connotations and covers different opinions, frequently contradictory. As Charles Carrington explains, at the time, it was not generally accepted that all nations were equal.
Even prominent personalities considered their nations more advanced than others: “No one will assert that Rhodes and Kipling and Theodore Roosevelt believed in the political equality of all men, regardless of their social status, as it is asserted today [... but] it is equally unjust to suppose that they believed in the
20 absolute superiority of certain racial types.”
As Carrington puts it, in Kipling’s view, Britain had a specific task to civilize the world and, due to its heritage, it should bring liberty and civilization for other
21 nations. However, this should be done as an unselfish (and frequently unrewarding) task. In other words, Kipling admired the work of ordinary civil servants, engineers, architects and other helpful people and saw especially the progress that these people brought to colonies. F. Max Müller also expresses this
14 contemporary feeling of appreciation of the work of British civil servants when he urges that civil servants should “show to the World that Englishmen who have been able to achieve by pluck, by perseverance, and by real political genius the material conquest of India, do not mean to leave the laurels of its intellectual
22 conquest entirely to other countries.”
As Carrington claims,
If India was being wickedly exploited, certainly they [the English officials] were not the exploiters. It could not be denied, by anyone who took the trouble to enquire, that they were giving India internal security, communications, precautions against famine, irrigation, afforestation, even the rudiment of an educational system, on a scale that no other country in continental Asia or Africa could approach. These young
Englishmen had much to be proud of, and 23it was a matter of pride with Kipling to serve for seven years in this unselfish army.
To conclude, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the British attitudes to native India were not united. Apart from the older rather contemptuous approaches, new ideas stressing the value of Indian culture appeared. An excellent representative of this current is F. Max Müller’s book India – What Can
It Teach Us. Rudyard Kipling was an author, who was kept from the negative views of India of his contemporaries by his deep knowledge of this country. Even though his colonialist persuasion prevented him from understanding of certain aspects of the Indian society, as it is also pointed at in the following chapter, his pride of progress brought to India by the British was justifiable.
15 Chapter Two: The Concept of Identity and Kim
Rudyard Kipling’s book Kim is a product of the nineteenth century, the environment of its origin and not lastly of its author’s opinions and abilities.
These are the factors that formed the content of the book in a decisive way and their comprehension is a key to the intellectual world of British colonizers. Kim is a picture of India under the colonial rule viewed by the author, whose vision is delimited by the time and society he lived in. In various sources going back to the time of colonialism and originating in the European background, the question of the ability of the colonizers to understand native India is repeated.
The contemporaries were aware of this problem.
Before focusing on the identity of Kipling’s characters, it is important to concentrate on the concept of identity itself. The perception of identity is connected with the society in which an individual lives, its values and ways of thinking. As far as Europe is concerned, every period brought new ideas, social changes, new ways of examining the world, and all these resulted in new formations that directed an individual and his or her behaviour. In his article,
Patrick Williams points out an example of Kipling’s work having an impact on
24 the opinions of a colonialist. However, Kipling’s ideas were also shaped by the thoughts of his period, and this is reflected in his novels and characters.
In the nineteenth century, especially in the second half of it, nationalism was a powerful issue. Norman Davies describes this phenomenon in his history of
25 Europe. Davies classifies Great Britain and the United States of America, both
16 of which were tied with Kipling’s life, as the examples of the countries where a kind of nationalism labelled as “state nationalism” was favoured. Unlike “ethnic nationalism”, for the adherents of “state nationalism”, the concept of
“nationality” meant “citizenship”. State nationalism was supported by the upper ruling classes and appeared in Great Britain when “the propagation of the dominant English culture, and the promotion of its loyal Protestant and English- speaking servants, gradually consolidated a strong sense of overlaying British
26 identity.” As the author says: “In official British usage, nationality has been made to mean citizenship, that is, something granted by British law.”
This kind of feeling has its place in Kim as well, it is reflected in the identity of sahibs, and especially in the descriptions of people who have to solve the questions of their identity. Davies emphasizes that the government tried to support “state nationalism” by promoting the official culture. If one keeps his mind on the fact, the identity of characters such as Kim gains peculiar features, as it will be shown later.
Apart from state nationalism, there is one more current that formed the
27 concept of identity of Kipling’s characters. In his essay, George Shepperson points to an amount of racialism present in Kipling’s days marking his writing.
28 These characteristic factors in Kim were disclosed by Patrick Williams. In the novel, there appear two figures, which could be taken as contradictors, Kim and
Hurree Babu. Both of them clearly display Kipling’s understanding of state nationalism and race.
17 By now, there have existed a lot of values for a person to identify with. It can be ethnicity, state, religion, descendancy, language, culture, surroundings, class, social ties and others. It will be examined which of these are important for
Kipling and his characters and how he deals with the bearers of particular traits and values. This leads to discovering of Kipling’s definition of identity. The opposites of Kim and Hurree allow a useful comparison.
On the one hand, Kim’s descendancy and ethnicity is definitely European.
His father was a soldier and hoped that Kim would become one too. However, this is the only European heritage that Kim has. All the other values of consequence in Kim’s life are Indian. Of course, this can be mainly applied for the early years of his life because the second half of the book deals with the later
European influences on Kim, but the proceeding of the story is also a part of the way the author treats his chatacters, and for this comparison, the properties of a character at the beginning of the story are decisive. If the membership of the
Church of England is taken as a way of expression of the British and European identity, then this does not work in the case of Kim, even though he was baptized. Kim’s religious views are based on oriental religions, he is a disciple of the lama and his knowledge of Christianity is minimal. The author indirectly characterizes his religious views by letting him utter a sentence “‘Who am I?
29 Mussulman, Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist? That is a hard knot.’” Let us put aside the fact that Kipling sometimes simplifies some of the features of his Indians,
Williams even claims that they are “‘contemned’ as incompetent apers of the
18 30 English.” For this comparison, it is decisive how Kipling lets his characters behave within the world he produced in his book. Patrick Williams points to a method of Pierre Macherey, who examines possible discrepancies in the text that may reveal a certain degree of ideology hidden in an untrue and distorted piece
31 of writing. His method is very useful for this essay as well. As far as Kim’s social ties are concerned, he is nothing but Indian. Achis Nandy stresses the fact that when ruling India, the conquerors “were overwhelmed by the experience of
32 being colonial rulers.” This experience is mirrored in Kipling’ s writings.
Kipling depicted India as a country where the Europeans are confronted with the most various nationalities and castes of Indians and are often confused with this finding. For example, he tells the story of Kim being caught and guarded by two white priests within a British military unit. Kim, who hates the situation, writes to his friend Mahbub Ali to rescue him, which is the very easy task for Mahbub.
Nobody knows him, and when he puts Kim on his horse and rides away, nobody knows where to search for them on account of the lack of the knowledge of the native surroundings. The incident is only one of several similar instances.
Kipling therefore presents this kind of knowledge, as well as social relationship, friendship and acquaintanceship with the natives, as an important value in the life of the Indians. This is what Kim experiences in the same degree as the
Indians and can use it when necessary, having been brought up among the natives by a half-caste woman. Kim’s close friends are all Indians and his knowledge of native India is deep. However, he is completely bewildered by the
19 world of the Europeans, which signifies that he is culturally separated from them and belongs only to the Indian world. He refers to the priests as to the “thin fool”, the “camel-like fool” or the “fat fool”. At the beginning of his captivity among the British soldiers, he claims that it is an interesting experience to be a sahib, and having been recognized as a European by them, he believes that it is an amusing cultural change, temporal, just one of many. He was chela , he is now sahib. As far as the language is concerned, Kim thinks in Hindi and the task to translate his ideas into English seems to be very problematic for him. What is more, Kim is not acquainted with the English-speaking authors celebrated in
Europe, such as Shakespeare or Wordsworth, who have always been regarded as an inevitable part of the European culture. In the case of Kim, neither of the values that play a key role in a delimination of one’s identity are European, he shares all of them with the natives. The only tie to the Europeans is Kim’s biological descendancy (Kim is said to have Irish blood), but Kipling claims that he lost his European parents when he was only about three years old. Even though the extraction and cultural heritage from parents could be powerful, if we take into account the impact of the native culture, it does not explain Kim’s enthusiasm for soldiers and rulers. Because of the fact that Kipling puts the stress on descendancy and ethnicity at the expense of other values, he ascribes to Kim, who has grown up in the native environment, this strange trait.
Hurree is the opposite of Kim. He is of Oriental origin, but otherwise pro-
European and pro-British. Being a spy, he risks his life for the British,
20 moreover, he is very interested in the official celebrated British culture and has got classical education of the European kind. Now let us observe how the author approaches these different characters. Even though Hurree is as pro-British as he can be, the author treats him as an Oriental. He even ascribes him the following claim: “‘I am unfortunately Asiatic, which is serious detriment in some respects.
33 And all -so I am Bengali - a fearful man.’” Hurree is not a negative character, he has also his positive features. In the scene when Hurree listens to the lama reverentially, he is presented in such a way that he wins the reader’s appreciation immediately:
He [Hurree] himself had been taught by the sahibs, who do not consider expense, in the lordly halls of Calcutta; but as he was ever first to acknowledge, there lay a wisdom behind earthly wisdom - the high and lonely lore of meditation. Kim looked on with envy. The Hurree Babu of his knowledge - oily, effusive, and nervous - was gone; gone, too, was the brazen drugvendor of overnight. There remained - polished,
polite, attentive - a sober,34 learned son of experience and adversity, gathering wisdom from the lama’s lips.
In this paragraph, Kipling depicts a change of a character who seems to exist in two forms. The “oily, effusive, and nervous” Hurree gains dignity when he advances towards the lama’s wisdom. This is the exact opposite of his constantly pointing to his classical British education, for example, his use of
Latin words and when speaking about Shakespeare. What is of interest for us is the relationship between Hurree’s appearance, attractive or unattractive, and the target of his aspirations at the moment, whether it is in some way connected with the European or the Oriental environment. As far as Hurree expresses his positive attitude towards the Oriental culture, such as in this scene, he is
21 perceived positively, but his inclination to western values is always depicted as funny. Babu is described as an Oriental and his effort to get close to the
European culture can never, as the author presents it, end up in a likeable picture, but seems rather funny and opportune. The problem is that Kipling’s characters have no freedom to choose what they want to be, everything is determined by their ethnicity. In his article, Williams disagrees with the opinion that in Kipling’s writings “the Indians are as superior to the British in matters of
35 religion as the British are to them in material power.” The character of Hurree, who is depicted as ridiculous with his effort to grasp all European culture and who is dignified when he approaches the knowledge of lama, confirms this view at first sight, but in reality, the issue does not consist in European knowledge being worse than the Oriental wisdom. Hurree is of Oriental origin and by portraying his approaches to the western culture as funny, the author does not allow him to be anything but the Oriental with Oriental knowledge. Hurree simply cannot choose any other culture than that of his own ethnic nation. The author maintains that there is no other cultural surroundings that would suit
Huree than that produced by the people of his own ethnicity. In his book, Hilton
Brown deals with the topic of stratification of the society in India, as it was assumed by Kipling. According to Brown, “Rudyard Kipling described [the class where Hurree belongs, ‘the newly emerging middle class of India’] as
‘university-trained hybrid’ [... who] was laughable or pestilential (according to
36 the taste) because he had been instructed by British professors.”
22 37 George Shepperson views that in his novels, Kipling hardly approves mixing of races. In fact, this can be extended to the cultures in this case. To sum up, the character of Hurree Babu confirms that the most decisive trait that designates the identity of Kipling’s characters is ethnicity, whatever the cultural aspirations of the character are.
As far as Kim is concerned, this rule is applied as well, but here the situation is a lot more complicated. A new problem appears here. As has already been noted, one can shape his identity according to various values and choose those which he considers crucial. The multicultural surroundings of India in Kipling’s writings offers many points of view, there are the aspects of language, social status, culture, religion and many others. The most important one for Kipling, which is therefore reflected in his characters is ethnicity, as mentioned above, but there is one more distinguishable influence which emerges in the case of
Kim, and this is the colonial superiority. This shapes Kim’s identity and in the self-learning process Kim forms a new image of Britishness. To be more concrete, I will try to illustrate the point. Already at the beginning of the book, there is a scene when Kim kicks a native boy off the trunnions, because Kim thinks that he is English, and this should justify him. The concept of Britishness can be grasped in different ways. It is usually perceived with some connection with British culture, English language or even sometimes with the membership of the Church of England. Neither of these plays an important part in
Kim’s world of values. But Kipling stresses the descendancy from parents and
23 ethnicity, and on that ground, Kim is seen as British. His Britishness thus gains a specific flavour. The narrative offers several instances, displaying what the concept of Britishness means to Kim. The given example shows that a Britisher may be equated with the holder of Punjab, the ruler. In another place, Kim clearly explains his idea: “‘Kimball, I suppose you’d like to be a soldier?’ -
‘Gorah-log [white-folk]. No-ah! No-ah!’ Kim shook his head violently. There was nothing in his composition to which drill and routine appealed. ‘I will not
38 be a soldier.’” Kim does not comprehend Englishness, Britishness or whiteness as cultural concepts, but rather as social positions. The British appeared in India in the posts of soldiers, civil servants and rulers, they were perceived by the natives as such, and therefore the concept of Britishness gained a new connotation. This is also a matter of semantics. The picture of “whites”, as recognized by Kim, is a produce of both the author’s stress on ethnicity and the existence of colonialism. Generally, the term ‘Britishness’ covers various elements and values, and according to one’s priorities, choices and attitudes to them, an individual creates his or her picture of what it means to be British.
Kim’s peculiar idea of Britishness originates from accentuation of new, different values, and in his case, the traditional value of culture is not among them. This meaning was separated from the original concept of Britishness and substituted by new elements brought about by colonization. In the character of Kim, the consciousness of belonging to Great Britain exists without the consciousness of belonging to the British Isles, both of which were fused in that area. T. S. Eliot
24 explains how Kipling comprehended his British citizenship. For Kipling, it did not mean to live in a particular place. He understood it in the same way as
Davies defines state nationalism. Eliot says: “He had been a citizen of the
British Empire, long before he naturalised himself, so to speak, in a particular
39 part of a particular county of England.” Bonamy Dobré, the author of English
Literature in the Early Nineteenth Century and studies of Kipling, shows what the relationship between “Britishness”, “Englishness”, and “Indianness” was in
Kipling’s life:
Indeed, his craving for roots makes even the deck of P. and O. British soil; British, not English, because he is a citizen of the Empire, not of England alone: for if it were essential to be the latter, he would be partly dispossessed. Having spent so many of his early years in India, he is not wholly of England: indeed, India is the place where he really belongs. [...] But he is not an Indian, he is an Englishman; therefore to be an integral whole, he must at all costs make England and the Empire one. His love of the Empire, and his admiration for those virtues it brings out in men, make him apt to
find qualities in Englishmen40 only which really exist in all races; and this is part of the deformation […]
André Chevrillon brings a new aspect to this topic in his text Three Studies in
English Literature . He pays attention to Kipling’s usage of the terms
“English” and “British”. His ideas are summed up in the following claim:
When the term British became the official designation of the Queen’s subjects, Kipling never calls them anything but the English . This word he uses sometimes in the widest sense [...] but this is pre-eminently the political nation, the one that worked in the country as its organising force, the one that gave it its power of action and expansion. [...] The idea is that if the Five Nations include different races, yet it was the English who founded them and built them up - that they are an English
achievement, English in formation, type and culture; that England41 owes her Empire to the descendant of the Angle, the Saxon, the Northman [...]
25 Dobré solved the basic problem concerning Kipling’s conception of the British citizenship and the relationship between it and his ties to India. This author accentuates the fact that the understanding of the nationality as a citizenship enables Kipling to be a British with his home in India. Dobré agrees with the idea expressed by Chevrillon that, as far as the cultural environment is concerned, Kipling assigned the English culture the dominant place in the
English-speaking world. His opinions are a law for the identity of his characters, the reason why he is able to create a character like Kim as a sahib. Kim has an
Irish blood, and due to his descendancy he stands for the British. His understanding of citizenship as a nationality renders it possible to keep his
Indian culture and remain British. At the beginning of the book, Kipling even insists that Kim was English. Kipling’s use of the word “English” in the sense of
“British” was an important topic of Chevrillon’s and Dobré’s studies.
In short, Kim’s feeling of the British identity and Hurree’s sense of belonging to Oriental culture is explicable only if the reader understands Kipling’s peculiar view of Britishness, which does not consist in the traditionally accepted indicators of identity, such as culture, language, social ties and so on, but rather in the origin and descendancy.
26 Chapter Three: The Double Identity of Kim
The character of Kim could also be examined as a symbol. In Kim, there are symbolically mixed the elements of British ruler with those of insensitively ruled Indian. On the one hand Kim thinks: “‘One must never forget that one is a sahib, and that some day, when examinations are passed, one will command
42 natives.’” This new meaning of British identity is already stressed by Achis
Nandy’s statement that Kipling believed in the necessity of the relationship ruler
- ruled between the Indians and the British and considered it to be the right of
43 both of the sides. George Orwell highlights Kipling’s emotional ties to the
44 British governing class. The question of different aspects of Kim’s identity is very complicated, and this is why a paradoxical situation arises in the book:
Having been brought up in the native environment, Kim is very unhappy as a captive within a British military unit due to the strangeness of the surroundings and also by reason of the treatment of the Europeans. This is because of his
European descent, of which, in fact, Kim was proud. If Kim had not had
European parents and had been a native, he would not have suffered from the foreignness of the European treatment.
Achis Nandy tries to explain the double identity of Kipling from the perspective of psychology, mainly by emphasizing his negative experience from
45 childhood spent at Southsea. Even if we may not attach so much importance to it and although we might refuse to accept its impact as a decisive influence on
27 Kipling’s adult opinions, the author managed to precisely catch the double identity of his characters. Nandy writes about Kipling:
His oppressive English years inevitably gave Kipling the message that England was a part of his true self, that he would have to disown his Indianness and learn not to identify with the victims, and the victimhood that he had known in England could be
avoided, perhaps even glorified, through 46identification with the aggressors, especially through loyalty to the aggressor’s values.
A similar instance can be discovered in Kim’s Britishness. It is marked by the constituents of soldier and ruler, and these people are exactly those whom Kim hates when he is imprisoned among the white British soldiers. At the same time, according to the prophecy delivered by his father, Kim believes that one day, he will become a military leader and is proud of it.
Achis Nandy discusses the differences between the western and the eastern worlds, especially the impact of this cultural meeting on one’s perception of identity. In Nandy’s book, the East is described as multicultural and
47 cosmopolitan whereas the West is bicultural. This view can be applied on the novel Kim . Kipling’s characters are described by the author from western society from the western point of view, even though they are natives. Some scholars point to the fact that Indians do not find Kipling’s Indian characters’
48 identity truly Indian and criticise his writings as not authentic. Kim and Hurree try to solve the problem of their double identity in the same way as the
Europeans because both of them pronounce the author’s ideas. Nandy tries to elucidate the intellectual world of Kipling in these words: “This other Orient was [...] beyond the dreary middle-class horizons of Kipling and his English
28 contemporaries. They forced themselves and every bicultural Westerner to make
49 his choice.” Nandy’s book would explain a lot, but it has one disadvantage: it should be more concrete and the author should illustrate the statements with more proofs or at least with examples. When critics blame Kipling for the lack of authenticity of his Indian characters, they should take into consideration the question of the very possibility for Kipling to understand the natives and to get close to them. Kipling was a product of his period and the opening chapters should give a picture of opinions and omnipresent prejudices that the Europeans had and that prevented them from being interested in the Oriental views. This is reflected in their writings. Patrick Williams points to the frequent occurence of stereotypes in the colonial literature and underlines them as “the principal mechanism in ideologies of discrimination and domination at work in
50 colonialism.” It is true, but it is more than that. It reveals the gap between the intellectual worlds of the Europeans and the natives and it was very improbable for an individual to escape completely from the attitudes and prejudices of the society he or she had grown up in. To sum up, for modern readers, Kim is not a source of knowledge of the Indians but of the European thinking and a quest for identity in a foreign country.
To conclude, in the character of Kim, there are two components fused:
Kipling’s praise of Indian culture and his partial identification with it, and at the same time his persuasion that the British are the rightful rulers of the natives.
29 Chapter Four: The Character of the Lama and the Colonial Experience
51 Kim is often celebrated as Kipling’s masterpiece, a book in which his fondness for the native culture is shown to the highest degree. But it is also a book allowing to see where there are boundaries between Kipling’s pure admiration of the natives and his own position as a representation of a British ruler, the reason why he is often criticised by adversors of colonialism. The character of the lama is definitely among the most likeable ones, and displays therefore
Kipling’s respect, but he is also a native and hence a subject to the British rule.
52 Patrick Williams argues that Kim is not a picture of perfect racial equality.
This would not fit in the world of an imperialist who formed his opinions in the nineteenth century. Some writers even claim that complete racial equality was not compatible with colonialism. Achis Nandy and others speak about a kind of
“two voices” occuring in Kipling’s writings, and the first of them is the voice of
53 the British rulers. These attitudes are also directed towards the lama. As already stated, Kipling believed in the existence of a special law concerning the relationship between the British and the natives. According to it, the British should be the rulers and the natives have the right to be ruled by the British. This law is also present in Kipling’s characters and it is not applied accidentally. It helps to create a world where each character assumes his or her place according to the ethnicity and other given chracteristics. The fact that Kipling’s characters cannot choose their path has already been analyzed. It is highly probable that it corresponds with Kipling’s sociological view as it was elucidated by Noel
30 54 Annan. The other influence on the presentation of the characters is the author’s genuine love for the Indian culture, as Nandy puts it, “the other voice of
Kipling”.
The lama is, besides Kim, the most positive and enjoyable figure in whole book. This is not only due to his knowledge of the Oriental religion. Apart from this, there are even more moving traits, such as his respect for all living creatures and his love for children, which give him a feature of humanity that minimalises the distance between the lama as an oriental scholar and the
European reader, especially the reader of the nineteenth century. It is also the character that embodies contemporary European views of a native intact by the
European influences. The character of the lama is unique in the book because whereas other protagonists are the natives used to the European rule to a large extent, the lama is the right opposite. His inexperience with the Europeans is obvious. This enables Kipling to depict the Europeans as wise rulers and bearers of progress to, as he saw it, the less civilised Oriental countries. Kipling usually stresses the benefits of the European rule as a work of devoted civil servants and
55 these were praised in his writings. As it was already shown, for Kipling, ethnicity is very important, and thanks to this, the lama as an Oriental fits into his world as somebody who should be ruled by the British, and his character is shaped according to this scheme. He is the acceptor of the progress brought by the British, for example in the scene when he travels on the train. As Patrick
Williams states, Kipling indirectly explains to the reader that the lama,
31 otherwise an excellent scholar, is also a naive native who is not used to the advantages of civilisation which would make his life easier. He has little knowledge of the railway, and has to be assisted by Kim, who, in this instance, is dominant because he knows how to buy a ticket. Kipling’s scenes are sometimes strikingly simplified and it was Patrick Williams who disclosed the hidden contemporary racism in these instances of harmony between the British and the Indians. In fact, the lama is dominant among the “whites” only once, when the Russian spies were almost killed, because one of them offended him.
Williams explains the link between the character of a Russian and the situation of contemporary negative relations of the British to the Russians that
56 predisposed their occurence in the novel. But the lama is never in the position of dominance towards the British.
Even such a positively portrayed native character as this one may be seen as stereotypic in a way. He is exacly the case discussed in Achis
57 Nandy’s analysis, who complains about stereotypical descriptions of the natives in colonial literature, where the natives assume the form of a child, either
58 teachable or nasty. As Williams points out, the lama is so helpless in a foreign
59 part of India that he almost starves. Again, it is in the case of Hurree where
Kipling expresses the same attitude. He strictly divides his characters according to the ethnicity, the natives are predisposed to belong to the culture inherited from the people of their ethnic nation and in this social environment, their positive features appear. The lama is a native, and as far as he is related to the
32 native culture and religion, Kipling concentrates on his dignity. He is most respected in the villages that he and Kim visit, but whenever he finds himself in the European surroundings or in relation to the British, he turns to be a dependent, recessive character comparable to a child.
Kipling also presented the lama as somebody extremely impractical, living outside the real world and not being able to understand the political events that happen around him. In the chapter about his meeting with a native British soldier, it is the soldier who is dominant, the lama shows all his ignorance of the different culture and politics and their dialogue is absurd because the necessary common knowledge to produce a dialogue is almost missing, so their communication suffers. It is exactly this type of dialogue that resembles a speech of a parent talking to a child. Kipling depicted the lama as an expert on religion, but in the more practical situations he behaves like a child that needs the parent European to help him. Hilton Brown expresses the same opinion. He claims that, according to Kipling, “the Real Indians, for all their excellence of heart, were in many ways backward and inefficient; if the Sahibs did not control
60 their interests and spur them to higher achievement, who would?”
The lama is a native and the natives have, according to Kipling, the right to be ruled by the British, who are predisposed to this task. Williams cites an interesting example of a British polititian that was persuaded that the natives cannot rule themselves, although he never visited India. Believe it or not, he got
61 this impression from Kipling’s writing.
33 Chapter Five: The Native Environment and Colonialism in Kim
However much numerous critics of colonialism underline the negative influence of a kind of colonial thinking on Kipling’s works and on the stereotypic characters appearing in his narratives, it would be very misrepresenting to see his literature only from this point of view. Kim is, above all, a unique celebration of the native culture of India. Kim sums up this attitude in his declaration that his home is “this great and beautiful land” crowded with
62 Indians, “his people”, who are brought to the reader incarnated as numerous little figures meeting the main characters and contributing to an original atmosphere of the book.
63 The novel Kim is more descriptive than centred on a story. It allows its author’s forte, his talent for observation, to come to light. This lays the emphasis on his minor characters. The aim of Kipling’s Kim is to celebrate India. Of course, the main characters have their own pursuits, but all of this happens within the frame of the Indian country. For example, Kim’s search for his identity is connected with the reader being drawn into the process of discovery of the natives’ characteristics, as understood by Kipling.
The beauty of India does not consist in extraordinary events or personalities,
64 but it is embodied in the lives of common people. The critics agree that
Kipling was able to see ordinary everyday tasks both with curiosity, and at the same time in specific poetic light, he could understand what the people feel when doing so. In the cited work, Renwick emphasizes Kipling’s faculty for
34 catching an exact character of movements of his soldiers. Carrington notices that “he wrote poems about what a farmer felt watching his fat cattle go through
65 a gate, [...] what the average man felt to be romantic in his daily life.”
“Knowing what the peoples, animals, plants, weathers of the world look like, sound like, smell like, was Kipling’s métier, and so was knowing the words that
66 could make someone else know.” This kind of description pervades through the whole text of Kim . If the book dealt with deeds of extraordinary heroes, the style would be more dynamic, but Kim treats the country of India. The major character’s exploits have often only temporal impact on the proceeding of the story, whereas the minor characters and their meetings with the major characters have a permanent importance in the creation of the local colour of India. The minor characters are significant because they provide a unique detail.
These little figures are necessary for the elaboration of the domestic picture of India, even though they are not worked up well from the psychological point of view. They display aspects of life different from the search for identity,
Kipling introduced them to focus on the glamour of everyday experience of the
Indian people. As C. S. Lewis claims, “with a few exceptions, imaginative literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had quietly omitted, or at least thrust into the background, the sort of thing which, in fact, occupies most of the waking hours of most men. [...] It was Kipling who first reclaimed for
67 literature this enormous territory.”
35 Kipling thus successfully catches this everyday ordinariness. The seemingly unimportant persons do not express directly what they imagine to be their identity, however, there is an instance, when Kim speaks about himself, he at the same time characterises the whole country. He declares that his home is the great and beautiful land of India . It was his home, but it was also the home of many more people represented by the minor characters.
Kipling describes the world of the native India, but he also formulates its relations to the world of colonizers. He gives an image of an Indian city which supports the idea of distance between the civil servants and the native community. He describes Smile as a conglomeration of verandas, alley-ways and bolt-holes, and the city where the police controlling the inhabitants familiar
68 with the place encounter serious difficulties.
In Kim , the reader can notice a gap between the natives and the European officials. Kipling as a colonialist admires the work of civil servants who bring
European inventions and progress, but he also points to the mistakes they make.
As Carrington puts it, “‘the Native-Born’ [is] an appeal from the colonial born
69 overseas for a little understanding on the part of his English brother.” This attitude can be found in Kim as well, for example when Kipling presents a scene
70 in which sahibs who are ignorant of Hindi, unintentionally offend the natives. It is a well known fact that knowledge of a language consists of two parts: the knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary and that of the culture of the natives in connection with the appropriate usage of the language. The second part of this
36 knowledge was problematic for a number of Europeans to obtain. This is the core of a complaint of one of the minor native characters in Kim when she accuses the
“whites” that they learn the language from books only.
In Kim Kipling describes India as a mixture of old customs and traditional lifestyles of the native castes with the modern inventions and progress brought to the country by the British, nevertheless, these two parts of everyday life of the natives are unmixed, or remain divided in an outstanding way. Kipling mentions a contemporary and often repeated event when the natives are irritated by the conductor on a train, who wants to punch what they believe to be magic
71 tickets. In this novel, Kipling shows a character of Colonel Creighton, who embodies this contemporary belief in the British task to enlighten the other nations and declares that there is no bigger sin than ignorance. He is portrayed as an etnographer with respect to the native culture and knowledge of it and who believes that sahibs should not look on the natives with contempt.
37 Conclusion
Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim is not only an extraordinary piece of writing, but also a complex of opinions created by a British admiring India. The author appreciated its beauty from the point of a colonizer, who was persuaded that
Britain had a specific task to be a ruler of India. This led to Kipling highlighting particular features of both his British and Indian fictitious characters.
This analysis focuses on the expression of identity in the novel affected by some of the prejudices that had a prominent place in the society where the author lived, and therefore has to deal with some negative aspects of the novel.
However, it does not mean that Kipling’s work should be perceived negatively.
To which extent the environment allowed Kipling to escape from the twisted ideas about the non-European ethnicities would be an issue for another essay.
Nevertheless, Kim can also be viewed as a celebration of the Indian culture, even if presented in places quite stereotypically.
In the concluding chapter, I attempt to summarize the main features of the identity of some of Kipling’s characters in the novel Kim , the treatment of which reveals his contemporary ideology.
For Kipling’s protagonists, the values significant for their identity is ethnicity and descendancy. Kim is of European origin, and this classifies him as a sahib, even though he tries to retain his Indian culture. On the other hand, Hurree can never become a sahib, no matter how hard he tries to get as close as possible to the official British culture. Kipling’s division of Indian society into the sahibs,
38 the Indians and “the minor strata between them” was examined by Hilton
72 Brown, and this scheme can also be discovered in Kim . The novel examines the issue of colonialism, and through the characters, such as Kim, the concept of
Britishness gains a new form: A British citizen is tied to cultural values different from the traditional ones, celebrated in the British Isles.
Kim tries to define his bond to the worlds of the British colonizers and the native population. This is where Kipling’s opinions of the relationship between the native population and the British are most noticeable. As Achis Nandy emphasizes, Kipling believed that the British were the rightful rulers of India and the Indians should receive the benefits of civilization from them. In Kim’s image of “the whites”, there are strong elements of a ruler and a soldier. Kim is also a victim of the ruler’s arrogance to the natives, but, as shown in Achis
Nandy’s argument, Kim’s double identity is depicted from the standpoint of an educated British colonialist. George Orwell gives an interesting account of
Anglo-Indians and their reactions to Kipling’s writings: “I know from several private sources that many of the Anglo-Indians who were
Kipling’s contemporaries did not like or approve of him. They said, no doubt truly, that he knew nothing about India, and on the other hand, he was from their
73 point of view too much of a highbrow.” The novel therefore does not offer a scrutiny of the native population of India living in the period under the British colonial rule, but rather a picture of them created by the colonizers, corresponding to Kipling’s ideas formed in the environment of the nineteenth-
39 century colonial power. As Hilton Brown asserts, “he painted not the Thing as
74 he Saw It, but the Thing as he Thought It Should Have Been”.
In the story of Kim , there is a prominent character of the lama. Besides Kim, he is the most likeable figure, the outcome of all of the author’s respect for
Indian culture, and at the same time, he also creates a representation of an exceptional native designed by a colonizer. Even though he is portrayed as a much wiser person than the two British priests, his picture remains in agreement with the ruler’s ideology, and the lama’s positive features and weaknesses are shown accordingly. For example, as a native, he is the acceptor of the assets of modern inventions brought to the country by the British. Patrick Williams and
Achis Nandy complain in their essays that in colonial literature, the native people are depicted stereotypically. Nandy compares a native to a child. With all his wisdom, the lama also resembles a child who has not yet developed a taste for the practical activities in life, and as Williams points out, he almost starves as a consequence. This character perfectly fits in the colonizers’ pattern of the
British being the rulers and the Indians the ruled. That is the reason why the lama is dominant only in the native environment, for example, when he and Kim visit villages, they are held in reverence, but in the relations with the British, the lama is recessive, he does not even assert his authority when Kim is taken from him to be educated at school. Kipling created a world where each protagonist has his place which predetermines his behaviour. Kipling did not fully approve when an Indian approaches some of the tasks associated with the British or their
40 cultural environment. The lama cannot understand British culture and politics, this area is reserved for the British, and it appears that a native can only serve in the British army to gain the author’s approval. A Bengali Hurree is treated similarly. He looks ridiculous with all his knowledge received at university, and grows wise only when he approximates to the wisdom of the lama.
The novel offers a vision of Indian society admired by a Britisher. Kipling managed to catch an impressive image of India thanks to his observation talent and the ability to convey the atmosphere of everyday work and efforts of ordinary people. It is prevailingly the minor characters that create the local colour of Kipling’s India. The focus of the book is not the story. Kim is a very descriptive novel centered on the differently flavoured atmosphere of India delivered to the reader in the form of the whole variety of characters. The relationship between the British and the representatives of the native population is an indispensable part of India presented in Kim , revealing the distance between their worlds and cultures.
41 Notes:
1 Wilde, Oscar. “from The True Function and Value of Criticism. ” Kipling and the Critics. Ed. Elliot L. Gilbert.
2New York: New York UP, 1965. 8. 3 Müller, F. Max. India - What Can It Teach Us. New Delhi: Penguin, 2000. Nandy, Achis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1999, 64
4-113. 5 They are pointed to in: Müller, 4. 6 Voigt, Johannes G. “Introduction.” Müller, op. cit. xx. 7 Müller, 32. 8 Ibid. , 33-4. 9 Ibid. , 2. 10 Ibid. , 45. Dirks, Nicholas B. “Homo Hierarchicus: The Origins of an Idea.” Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the
11Making of Modern India. Princeston: Princeston UP, 2003. 22. 12 Wardraugh, Ronald. An Introduction to sociolinguistics, second ed . Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 222-4. 13 Ibid. , 218. 14 Müller, 39-41. 15 Voigt, xvi. 16 Müller, 5. 17 Carrington, Charles. Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. London: Macmillan, 1955. 274. 18 Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994. 160. 19 Kipling, Rudyard. Something of Myself. London: Macmillan, 1937. 3. 20 Carrington, 28. 21 Ibid. , 276. 22 Ibid. , 301. 23 Müller, xxv. 24 Carrington, 83. Williams, Patrick. “Kim and Orientalism.” Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Ed.
25Patrick Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 481. 26 Davies, Norman. Europe: A History. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. 27 Ibid. , 813. Shepperson, George. “The World of Rudyard Kipling.” Kipling’s Mind and Art: Selected Critical Essays. Ed.
28Andrew Rutherford. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1966. 127. 29 Williams, 480-97. 30 Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. London: Penguin, 1994. 192. 31 Williams, 483. 32 Ibid. , 482. 33 Nandy, 32. 34 Kipling, Kim, 297. 35 Ibid. , 301. 36 Williams, 483. 37 Brown, Hilton. Rudyard Kipling. A New Appreciation. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1945. 54-5. 38 Shepperson, 130. 39 Kipling, Kim , 127. 40 Eliot, T. S. “The Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling.” Gilbert, op. cit. 120. 41 Dobré, Bonamy. “Rudyard Kipling.” Gilbert, op. cit . 45. Chevrillon, André. “Rudyard Kipling’s Poetry.” Three Studies in English Literature. London: William
42Heinemann, 1923. 24-5. 43 Kipling, Kim , 168. 44 Nandy, 64. Orwell, George. “Rudyard Kipling.” The Nobel Prize Internet Archive. 10 Nov. 2005
45
42 48 Among these there are for example Orwell, George. “Rudyard Kipling.” The Nobel Prize Internet Archive. 10 Nov. 2005
4988. 50 Nandy, 72. 51 Williams, 481. Hopkins, R. Thurston. Rudyard Kipling: A Character Study. Life, Writings and Literary Landmarks. London:
52Simpkin, 1921. 123. 53 Williams, 496. 54 Nandy, 70. 55 Annan, Noel. “Kipling’s Place in the History of Ideas.” Rutherford, op. cit. 97-125. 56 Lewis, C. S. “Kipling’s World.” Gilbert, op. cit. 102. 57 Williams, 489. 58 Nandy, 15-16. 59 Ibid., 16. 60 Williams, 484. 61 Brown, 59. 62 Williams, 481. 63 Kipling, Kim , 182. Boris Ford says that the novel is plotless but he means it in the negative sense. Ford, Boris. “A Case for
Kipling?”64 Gilbert, op. cit. 61. Among them Renwick, who points to “his great gift of sympathetic appreciation of other men’s
Craftsmanship”65 in Renwick, W. L. “Re-Reading Kipling.” Rutherford, op. cit. 16. 66 Carrington, 346. 67 Jarrell, Randall. “On Preparing to Read Kipling.” Gilbert, op. cit. 137. 68 Lewis, 102. 69 Kipling, Kim , 196. 70 Carrington, 259. 71 Kipling, Kim , 191. 72 Ibid., 264. 73 Brown, 54. Orwell, George. “Rudyard Kipling.” The Nobel Prize Internet Archive. 10 Nov. 2005
74 Brown, 66.
43
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