View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Online Repository of Birkbeck Institutional Theses Birkbeck, University of London Imagining Enlightenment: Buddhism and Kipling’s Kim Susan Karin Paskins Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2017 1 Declaration I, Susan Karin Paskins, declare that this thesis is all my own work. Signed declaration………………………………………………… Date...................................... 2 Abstract In this thesis I situate Kipling’s shaping of Buddhist ideas in Kim against the background of Victorian constructions of the religion, deriving from scholarly, popular, Christian and theosophical positions. Kipling’s presentation of the lama in Kim challenges many of these interpretations since Kipling fashions himself as one who ‘knows’ about Buddhism, just as he claims to be one of the ‘native-born’ who understands India. I trace Kipling’s hostility to the missionary endeavour and also show his deep-rooted antagonism to theosophy, as manifest in three of his short stories as well as in Kim. Comparing Kim and The Light that Failed, I show that both novels deal with Kipling’s childhood experiences in Southsea, the one imagining the adult he could have been, and the other a fantasy of what life could have been like had he stayed in India and fully immersed himself in its religious life. Kipling’s biographical self-positioning thus motivates various degrees of resistance to and recrafting of the Victorian construction of Buddhism. The thesis presents a reading of Kim in which consideration of its religious ideas takes precedence over the post- colonialist analysis that has dominated critical approaches to the novel in recent decades. 3 Table of Contents Page Acknowledgements 5 Introduction 6 Chapter 1: Kipling and Arnold: Two Interpreters of 38 Buddhism Chapter 2: Theosophy and its Discontents 80 Chapter 3: Who is Kim? 127 Chapter 4: The Lama and his Search for Enlightenment 170 Conclusion 212 Bibliography 218 4 Acknowledgements The idea for this thesis took shape while I was studying for the MA in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck, and I should like to thank all the staff and students whom I met on that course for providing a friendly and stimulating environment which encouraged me to carry on with my studies after the MA had finished. In particular, the nineteenth-century reading group has been a constant source of pleasure as we discuss familiar and unfamiliar texts, and indulge our common delight in all things Victorian. I also benefited greatly from two courses on Buddhism that I attended at the School of Oriental and African Studies while researching the thesis and should like to thank Dr Tadeusz Skorupski and Dr Louise Tythacott. Alex Bubb, David Gillott, and Erin Louttit kindly sent me copies of their completed theses to encourage me on my way, and I have had many enjoyable conversations about Kipling with Erin Louttit. My friends Claire, Jill, and Kathryn helpfully read portions of the text. Dr Catherine Robinson and Dr David Scott kindly sent me copies of articles they had written when I was unable to obtain them. Many thanks also to Emma Curry for proofreading the text. Everyone who researches Kipling must be grateful to those who maintain the Kipling Society website with its comprehensive notes on his writings. This is a real labour of love. The resources of the London Library and its incomparable collections have also been of enormous help to me. My greatest debt is to two people. Carolyn Burdett has been an exemplary supervisor: kindly, conscientious, and firm when required. I could not have wished for better supervision. Barrie has heard every word of this thesis many times with the utmost patience, always ready to suggest a new line of enquiry or to make a fresh cup of coffee as required. To him, and to my ‘best beloved’ Dan and Mat, most supportive and loving of sons, this thesis is dedicated. 5 Introduction This thesis is concerned with the religious context of one important novel, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901). My aim is to provide a revisionist reading which gives due weight to its presentation of Buddhist ideas, something that has been little studied despite the substantial literature on Kipling and this popular work.1 The thesis will also contribute to a growing field of work concerned with the impact that the discovery of Buddhism had on Victorian culture in the late nineteenth century. I first encountered Kipling’s writings as a child growing up in London in the 1950s. The book that caught my imagination was The Jungle Book (1894), in which my favourite character was the valiant mongoose Rikki Tikki Tavi who protected an English family living in India against dangerous cobras. This story offered a glimpse of life in a land completely foreign to me, but one where my family had strong connections, since my father and grandfather were both born in northern India in the time of the British Raj. However, influenced by my father’s socialism and by George Orwell’s view of Kipling as a ‘jingo imperialist’, I did not read Kipling again for many years, until, as part of a Master’s degree in Victorian Studies, I became interested in Kipling’s presentation of the anxieties of Empire in some of his Indian short stories.2 This led me to Kim for the first time, and, like many readers, I was enraptured by the novel’s portrait of India and its people. Kim is by common consent 1 Three notable examples of critics who do take the Buddhist ideas in the novel seriously are James H. Thrall, ‘Immersing the Chela; Religion and Empire in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim’, Religion and Literature, 36 (2004), 45–67; Corinne McCutchan, ‘Who is Kim?’ in Transforming Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction of the 1890s, ed. by Nikki Lee Manos and Meri-Jane Rochelson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 131–54; Christel R. Devadawson, Reading India Writing England: The Fiction of Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster (Delhi: Macmillan, 2003). In addition, the Indian critics K. Bhaskara Rao, Rudyard Kipling’s India (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), Vasant A. Shahane, Rudyard Kipling: Activist and Artist (London: Feffer and Simons, 1973) and K. Jamiluddin, The Tropic Sun: Rudyard Kipling and the Raj (Lucknow: Lucknow University Press, 1974) comment on aspects of Buddhism in the novel. More recently, there are references to Buddhism in Kim in Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Kim’, in The Cambridge Companion to Kipling ed. by Howard J. Booth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 126–40 and Harish Trivedi, ‘Introduction’ in Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Penguin, 2011).The edition of Kim edited by Máire ni Fhlathúin (Plymouth: Broadview, 2005) has an appendix on ‘Buddhism in Victorian Britain’. However none of these critics has an extended discussion of the subject. 2 George Orwell, ‘Rudyard Kipling’, in In Time’s Eye: Essays on Rudyard Kipling, ed. by Jan Montefiore (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 28–41 (p. 28). Some of Kipling’s short stories which deal with the anxieties of Empire are ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’ (1885), ‘Thrown Away’ (1888) and ‘At the End of the Passage’ (1890). 6 Kipling’s masterpiece, and has been much analysed, particularly by post-colonialist critics following Edward Said’s ground-breaking introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel in 1987. However one fact about the numerous critical writings on Kim struck me immediately as curious. The central character is of course the boy Kim, but he spends much of the novel as the disciple of a Tibetan Buddhist monk, the lama, and the novel culminates in the description of the religious ‘enlightenment’ of the lama, a Buddhist term. This part of the novel was invariably almost completely ignored in favour of the overtly political aspect of the book, which takes the form of a spy story set against the background of the ‘Great Game’, the term given to British manoeuvrings against Russian power in the late nineteenth century.3 Some critics ignored the lama and the religious dimension of the book completely; others dismissed the lama, seeing him as ‘selfish’ or possessing ‘an atrophied absence of adulthood’.4 I determined to research the religious context out of which the novel was produced, both to understand what Kipling knew about Buddhism and what he could have expected his early readers to have known, and also to examine what role the lama and his beliefs played in the novel and what Buddhist ideas were employed. Western engagement with Buddhism proved a vast field to explore. Interest in Eastern religions generally came into European culture in the eighteenth century in a movement that the French writer Raymond Schwab in 1950 termed the ‘Oriental Renaissance’.5 Schwab’s central idea was that the discovery of Sanskrit and ancient Indian religious texts enlarged the thinking of European writers in a way comparable to the Renaissance discovery of the classical world. This fascination with Indian texts was widespread among European thinkers and spread to America, where Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry Thoreau (1817–1862) incorporated Hindu ideas into their thinking.6 Until the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Buddhism was not widely known in the West as a 3 For instance the authoritative Norton edition of the novel contains virtually nothing about Victorian perceptions of Buddhism and the way that Kipling uses Buddhist ideas in the novel. Rudyard Kipling, Kim, ed. by Zohreh T. Sullivan (New York and London: Norton, 2002). 4 Alan Sandison, The Wheel of Empire (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 97; Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of British India (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p.