Kim (1982)
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sutcliff_spaceSutcliff's essay of about 3000 words on the 1901 novel of the same name by Rudyard Kipling. It was written for a "revisiting my childhood fave" series in the journal Children's Literature in Education and included in the anthology Celebrating Children's Literature in Education edited by Geoff Fox, which you can see here on Internet Archive.
Some of this text is repurposed from the section on Kim in her 1960 monograph Rudyard Kipling, as you can see here, but there's a good deal of new material as well. Sutcliff had a family connection to India, mentioned in Blue Remembered Hills and "The Man Who Died at Sea": her maternal uncles spent their engineering careers there.
Have you read Kim?
KIM
I can claim no remembrance of the first time I read Kim, or rather, of the first time Kim was read to me, for I was one of those fortunate children possessed of a parent – in my case my mother, which was just as well, since my father, being a sailor, was liable to be away from home for two years at a time – who loves reading aloud and does it beautifully. I can only say that by the time I was eight or thereabouts, the book was a long-familiar and much-loved part of my life, as were the Just So Stories, The Jungle Books, Puck of Pook’s Hill, and Rewards and Fairies. I loved them all equally, though in slightly different ways, and I think I still do. Yet it is Kim that has a permanent place along with The Secret Garden, The Wind in the Willows, Professor Gilbert Murray’s translation of the Hippolytus, and half-a-dozen more, on my bedside windowsill.
Quite why, I do not know. I am in much the same predicament with regard to Kim as my first editor with regard to The Wind in the Willows, who told me long ago when we were both new to our careers, that he could not judge how good the book was because he loved it so much.
Since that first meeting with Kim, whenever it may have been, I have read and reread it many times; not, maybe, regularly once a year, yet I doubt if I have ever gone much longer than three years between readings, and I do not think that I have often gone two. My feeling for the book has of course changed with the passage of time, but it has never grown less. Always the delight has been there, waiting for me. Last week, rereading the book for the first time for a purpose (a purpose, that is, apart from the pleasure of reading it), I was nervous. Would the purpose drive out the delight? Break the spell? I pulled out the battered volume – my Grandmother’s, when it was new – greeting as usual the elephant with the lotus flower held in the tip of his trunk, whose embossed head decorates the cover, turned somewhat hesitantly to page 1, and began to read.
On the surface, Kim is a spy story, and such plot as it has, which is not much, for Rudyard Kipling himself described it as being nakedly ‘picaresque and plotless’, as are a surprising number of the great stories of the world, concerns a boy’s education to be a Secret Agent in the service of the Raj; and that is probably the level at which a child first reads it, with undertones of magic lying sensed but unrecognised beneath. But the plot is little more than a thread on which to string jewels as curious and entrancing as any in the shop of Lurgan Sahib, ‘The Healer of Sick Pearls’. This is why the large-scale and vastly expensive film made from the book some twenty or more years ago, as watched for a third time by me on TV recently, is merely the husk, though a colourful and entertaining husk, with all the peculiar essence of Kipling’s story drained out of it.
The film is a spy story, its climax the hero’s encounter with Russian spies among the High Hills of the Frontier. But the book is so much more, and the encounter is merely an incident on the way, though admittedly one which forms a turning point in the quest of Kim and his Lama. For the story is, among so many things, a Quest story – of the Lama for his sacred river, and release from the Wheel of Things, of Kim for his true self.
This is the quest that takes them drifting among the drifting vagabond life of India too far down to be coloured by any question of State or politics. Kipling’s account of this life is so evocative that reading it, one catches the scent of dust and withered marigolds and the smoke of dung fires where the village elders gather under the peepul tree in the dusk:
Second, there is its sense of crowding riches – riches so vast that they overflow untidily in all directions and much could not be used at all, though one senses them behind what actually appears, a shifting background ‘speckled with little flames and alive with half-caught forms and faces and shadows’.
Kipling himself, in his autobiography, describes the process of smoking over the book with his father:
I suppose it must have been about the time that I started to write, and my awareness of the working of the craft in others was therefore beginning to waken, that I first realized the kinship that undoubtedly exists between Kim and The Jungle Books. Kimball O’Hara, whose father was a Colour-Sergeant in an Irish regiment and his mother a nursemaid in the Colonel’s family, and who, after the death of his parents, was brought up – insofar as he was brought up by anyone except himself – by a half-caste woman who smoked opium ‘and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait’, is in the same position as Mowgli, a boy belonging by birth and heritage to one world, thrown into and accepted by another, and faced in the end with the same choice to be made. Mowgli has to choose between the Jungle and the Village, Kim between the world of action for which he has been trained, and the timeless Eastern world which he knows in his bones and in his heart’s core. And though we are not actually told so, we know that like Mowgli he will go back to the Village, leaving the Jungle behind him, and that he too will break something within himself in doing so. But because of the very nature of the world for which he has been trained, he will remain always just a little a citizen of two worlds, with all the strains and stresses and heartbreaks that such a position entails. For to be even just a little a citizen of two worlds must of necessity mean to be not completely a citizen of either.
Like Mowgli, too, Kim has his sponsors in his adoptive world, and in his case, in the world of the Secret Service, the Great Game, also. First and foremost there is the lama himself, the most completely good character that Kipling ever created; the only perfectly good character, I think, that I have ever met between the covers of a book, who contrives also to be unreservedly attractive – generally speaking, human beings, actual or fictional, need a fault or two before it is possible to love them. Then there is the masterful old dowager of Saharunpore, the owner of the jewelled finger aforementioned, who emerges vividly and irrepressibly and outrageously among the rest, though she remains (more or less) behind her embroidered curtains and is never actually described at all. Mahbub Ali, the lean and ferocious horse dealer with the dyed red beard, is the only one of Kim’s sponsors to stand for him in both worlds, and is believed to be based on a friend of Kipling’s early days, a Pathan ‘of indescribable filth but magnificent mien and features’, who brought him the news of Central Asia beyond the Khyber Pass. Lurgan Sahib, ‘The Healer of Sick Pearls’ and another player of the Great Game, was also based on a real character, the keeper of a curiosity shop in Simla, Alexander Jacob by name, a man of Turkish ancestry, and possessed of uncanny powers. And for the fifth and last, there is the soft-bellied Bengali babu (clerk) with the heart of a lion – for surely no courage can match that of the man who is always afraid. Ironically, he is the clever, half-Westernised Hindu whose kind later spread to form a ‘middle class’ which India had never had before, and from which much of the backing for Self Rule was to come.
But this, having little feeling for politics, Rudyard Kipling could not foresee. Nor could he foresee that by that time the word ‘Empire’ would begin to take on shameful undertones. Empire building and holding, all the things that much of his work seems to stand for, would be widely considered a disreputable occupation. Further, he could not foresee that because he stood for these things, the charge of jingoism would be flung at him by people would had not noticed that the accent of his work is on service, rather than mere mastery. His A Ballad of East and West (1889) would be quoted in support of the charge: ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’, by people who had taken the lines out of context, without reading far enough to see that the verse ends:
So, in the later part of his life, in the years after his death, and by some people even today, Kipling was and is looked on as the jingoistic upholder of an oppressive Raj. And yet the Bengali writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri could claim that Kim was not only ‘the finest story about India in English’, but also that the book was the outcome of Kipling’s vision of a larger India than meets the most penetrating outward eye, ‘A vision whose profundity we Indians would be hard put to it to match, even in an Indian language, not to speak of English. . . . We Indians should never cease to be grateful to Kipling for having shown the many faces of our country in all their beauty, power and truth.’
Kipling loved India, and not with a love that stemmed from the outside looking in, but very much from within, from the long hot fever-smelling nights when as Assistant Editor of the Civil and Military Gazette published at Lahore, and still in his late teens, he would explore the ancient Muslim city crouched under its fortress from which Ranjit Singh, the Lion of the Punjab, had ruled his short-lived Sikh kingdom. On such nights, no one could sleep much, and most of the life of Lahore went on in the streets and the rooftops. These night-time prowling were to bear fruit and flower later:
The only ‘shop’ which he does not seem to have drunk in with joyful avidity was that of the Church. He had above all no use for the Missionary, however valiant and well-meaning, who did not understand native culture or traditions or allow for the possibility of other truths than his own. He had a deep religion of his own, but it was not particularly a Christian religion. And he stated his own belief in his splendid Song to Mithras (1917):
The lama possesses charity in its broadest sense of love with understanding and acceptance; the two Army Chaplains, one Anglican, one Roman Catholic, good, well-meaning men both of them, are entirely lacking in that quality. But even the lama only gains his vision of his Sacred River after, for love of Kim his chela, he has denied his own philosophy of unattachment to earthly things and the severing of all human bonds.
Kim is a strange, beautiful book, written on many levels, and beneath the Secret Service adventure story, and below the spread of constantly changing scenes, curious incident and laughter, and the delights of smell and sound and colour, the raggle-taggle riches and the half-glimpsed glories, at the deepest level of all, it is a story that has to do with the Soul of Man; a story whose real theme is love.
Some of this text is repurposed from the section on Kim in her 1960 monograph Rudyard Kipling, as you can see here, but there's a good deal of new material as well. Sutcliff had a family connection to India, mentioned in Blue Remembered Hills and "The Man Who Died at Sea": her maternal uncles spent their engineering careers there.
Have you read Kim?
KIM
I can claim no remembrance of the first time I read Kim, or rather, of the first time Kim was read to me, for I was one of those fortunate children possessed of a parent – in my case my mother, which was just as well, since my father, being a sailor, was liable to be away from home for two years at a time – who loves reading aloud and does it beautifully. I can only say that by the time I was eight or thereabouts, the book was a long-familiar and much-loved part of my life, as were the Just So Stories, The Jungle Books, Puck of Pook’s Hill, and Rewards and Fairies. I loved them all equally, though in slightly different ways, and I think I still do. Yet it is Kim that has a permanent place along with The Secret Garden, The Wind in the Willows, Professor Gilbert Murray’s translation of the Hippolytus, and half-a-dozen more, on my bedside windowsill.
Quite why, I do not know. I am in much the same predicament with regard to Kim as my first editor with regard to The Wind in the Willows, who told me long ago when we were both new to our careers, that he could not judge how good the book was because he loved it so much.
Since that first meeting with Kim, whenever it may have been, I have read and reread it many times; not, maybe, regularly once a year, yet I doubt if I have ever gone much longer than three years between readings, and I do not think that I have often gone two. My feeling for the book has of course changed with the passage of time, but it has never grown less. Always the delight has been there, waiting for me. Last week, rereading the book for the first time for a purpose (a purpose, that is, apart from the pleasure of reading it), I was nervous. Would the purpose drive out the delight? Break the spell? I pulled out the battered volume – my Grandmother’s, when it was new – greeting as usual the elephant with the lotus flower held in the tip of his trunk, whose embossed head decorates the cover, turned somewhat hesitantly to page 1, and began to read.
He sat, in defiance of Municipal Orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher, the Wonder House as the natives called the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-breathing dragon’, hold the Punjab; for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot.And instantly the delight was there, and the old spell weaving itself again.
On the surface, Kim is a spy story, and such plot as it has, which is not much, for Rudyard Kipling himself described it as being nakedly ‘picaresque and plotless’, as are a surprising number of the great stories of the world, concerns a boy’s education to be a Secret Agent in the service of the Raj; and that is probably the level at which a child first reads it, with undertones of magic lying sensed but unrecognised beneath. But the plot is little more than a thread on which to string jewels as curious and entrancing as any in the shop of Lurgan Sahib, ‘The Healer of Sick Pearls’. This is why the large-scale and vastly expensive film made from the book some twenty or more years ago, as watched for a third time by me on TV recently, is merely the husk, though a colourful and entertaining husk, with all the peculiar essence of Kipling’s story drained out of it.
The film is a spy story, its climax the hero’s encounter with Russian spies among the High Hills of the Frontier. But the book is so much more, and the encounter is merely an incident on the way, though admittedly one which forms a turning point in the quest of Kim and his Lama. For the story is, among so many things, a Quest story – of the Lama for his sacred river, and release from the Wheel of Things, of Kim for his true self.
This is the quest that takes them drifting among the drifting vagabond life of India too far down to be coloured by any question of State or politics. Kipling’s account of this life is so evocative that reading it, one catches the scent of dust and withered marigolds and the smoke of dung fires where the village elders gather under the peepul tree in the dusk:
The lama, very straight and erect, the deep folds of his yellow clothing slashed with black in the light of the parao fires precisely as a knotted tree-trunk is slashed with the shadow of the long sun, addressed a tinsel and lacquered ruth [ox-cart] which burned like a many-coloured jewel in the same uncertain light. The patterns on the gold-worked curtains ran up and down, melting and re-forming as the folds shook and quivered to the night wind; and when the talk grew more earnest the jewelled forefinger snapped out little sparks of light between the embroideries. Behind the cart was a wall of uncertain darkness speckled with little flames and alive with half-caught forms and faces and shadows.This description of a night scene on the Grand Trunk Road expresses perfectly two of the aspects of Kim that linger most strongly in the mind. First, its preoccupation with light. Kipling could never visualise any incident without its setting of light and weather, time of day, and season of the year, but in Kim more than any other of his books, one is constantly aware of this play of changing light, windy sunlight brushing against the tawny grass of a hillside, the chill grey of dawn on the waking camp in a railway siding, the smoky flare of torches, white peaks lifting themselves yearning to the moonlight while all the rest is ‘as the darkness of interstellar space’.
Second, there is its sense of crowding riches – riches so vast that they overflow untidily in all directions and much could not be used at all, though one senses them behind what actually appears, a shifting background ‘speckled with little flames and alive with half-caught forms and faces and shadows’.
Kipling himself, in his autobiography, describes the process of smoking over the book with his father:
Under our united tobacco it grew like the Djin released from the brass bottle, and the more we explored its possibilities, the more opulence of detail did we discover. I do not know what proportion of an iceberg is below the water-line, but Kim as it finally appeared was about one tenth of what the first lavish specification called for.And that is exactly the impression that the reader gets.
I suppose it must have been about the time that I started to write, and my awareness of the working of the craft in others was therefore beginning to waken, that I first realized the kinship that undoubtedly exists between Kim and The Jungle Books. Kimball O’Hara, whose father was a Colour-Sergeant in an Irish regiment and his mother a nursemaid in the Colonel’s family, and who, after the death of his parents, was brought up – insofar as he was brought up by anyone except himself – by a half-caste woman who smoked opium ‘and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait’, is in the same position as Mowgli, a boy belonging by birth and heritage to one world, thrown into and accepted by another, and faced in the end with the same choice to be made. Mowgli has to choose between the Jungle and the Village, Kim between the world of action for which he has been trained, and the timeless Eastern world which he knows in his bones and in his heart’s core. And though we are not actually told so, we know that like Mowgli he will go back to the Village, leaving the Jungle behind him, and that he too will break something within himself in doing so. But because of the very nature of the world for which he has been trained, he will remain always just a little a citizen of two worlds, with all the strains and stresses and heartbreaks that such a position entails. For to be even just a little a citizen of two worlds must of necessity mean to be not completely a citizen of either.
Like Mowgli, too, Kim has his sponsors in his adoptive world, and in his case, in the world of the Secret Service, the Great Game, also. First and foremost there is the lama himself, the most completely good character that Kipling ever created; the only perfectly good character, I think, that I have ever met between the covers of a book, who contrives also to be unreservedly attractive – generally speaking, human beings, actual or fictional, need a fault or two before it is possible to love them. Then there is the masterful old dowager of Saharunpore, the owner of the jewelled finger aforementioned, who emerges vividly and irrepressibly and outrageously among the rest, though she remains (more or less) behind her embroidered curtains and is never actually described at all. Mahbub Ali, the lean and ferocious horse dealer with the dyed red beard, is the only one of Kim’s sponsors to stand for him in both worlds, and is believed to be based on a friend of Kipling’s early days, a Pathan ‘of indescribable filth but magnificent mien and features’, who brought him the news of Central Asia beyond the Khyber Pass. Lurgan Sahib, ‘The Healer of Sick Pearls’ and another player of the Great Game, was also based on a real character, the keeper of a curiosity shop in Simla, Alexander Jacob by name, a man of Turkish ancestry, and possessed of uncanny powers. And for the fifth and last, there is the soft-bellied Bengali babu (clerk) with the heart of a lion – for surely no courage can match that of the man who is always afraid. Ironically, he is the clever, half-Westernised Hindu whose kind later spread to form a ‘middle class’ which India had never had before, and from which much of the backing for Self Rule was to come.
But this, having little feeling for politics, Rudyard Kipling could not foresee. Nor could he foresee that by that time the word ‘Empire’ would begin to take on shameful undertones. Empire building and holding, all the things that much of his work seems to stand for, would be widely considered a disreputable occupation. Further, he could not foresee that because he stood for these things, the charge of jingoism would be flung at him by people would had not noticed that the accent of his work is on service, rather than mere mastery. His A Ballad of East and West (1889) would be quoted in support of the charge: ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’, by people who had taken the lines out of context, without reading far enough to see that the verse ends:
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,I can sympathise, as Kipling could, with the Native’s hunger to have his land and culture to himself again (I have made that clear enough in some of my own books.) But born and bred as I have been in the tradition of the so-called Fighting Services, I feel very close to Kipling in most of his values. I do not think that an Empire is necessarily a good thing, but I do not feel that it is necessarily something to be ashamed of either. I can appreciate also, from the same Service background, his opinion of people behind desks or in pulpits at home, who have no clear idea of what things are actually like at the scene of action, but who know exactly how everything should be done nevertheless. I can appreciate his feeling for the difference between the outsider, sometimes to be considered as ‘fair game’ by the initiated, and the individualist and rebel, to be encouraged within reason (Kim belongs very much to the second of these two categories).
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
So, in the later part of his life, in the years after his death, and by some people even today, Kipling was and is looked on as the jingoistic upholder of an oppressive Raj. And yet the Bengali writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri could claim that Kim was not only ‘the finest story about India in English’, but also that the book was the outcome of Kipling’s vision of a larger India than meets the most penetrating outward eye, ‘A vision whose profundity we Indians would be hard put to it to match, even in an Indian language, not to speak of English. . . . We Indians should never cease to be grateful to Kipling for having shown the many faces of our country in all their beauty, power and truth.’
Kipling loved India, and not with a love that stemmed from the outside looking in, but very much from within, from the long hot fever-smelling nights when as Assistant Editor of the Civil and Military Gazette published at Lahore, and still in his late teens, he would explore the ancient Muslim city crouched under its fortress from which Ranjit Singh, the Lion of the Punjab, had ruled his short-lived Sikh kingdom. On such nights, no one could sleep much, and most of the life of Lahore went on in the streets and the rooftops. These night-time prowling were to bear fruit and flower later:
He [Kim] knew the wonderful walled city of Lahore from the Delhi Gate to the outer Fort Ditch; was hand in glove with men who led lives stranger than anything Haroun al Raschid dreamed of; and he lived in a life wild as that of the Arabian Nights, but missionaries and secretaries of charitable societies could not see the beauty of it. His nickname through the wards was ‘Little Friend of all the World’; and very often, being lithe and inconspicuous, he executed commissions by night on the crowded housetops for sleek and shiny young men of fashion. It was intrigue, of course,—he knew that much, as he had known all evil since he could speak,—but what he loved was the game for its own sake—the stealthy prowl through the dark gullies and lanes, the crawl up a water-pipe, the sights and sounds of the women’s world on the flat roofs, and the headlong flight from housetop to housetop under cover of the hot dark.And Kipling’s contact with ‘White Man’s India’ was not Vice-Regal Lodge or the Simla parties fro which he had a splendid contempt, but the company at the Lahore Club, where tired representatives of Army, Education, Canals, Forestry, Engineering, Irrigation, Railways, Medicine and Law met and talked in great detail each their own particular brand of ‘shop’.
The only ‘shop’ which he does not seem to have drunk in with joyful avidity was that of the Church. He had above all no use for the Missionary, however valiant and well-meaning, who did not understand native culture or traditions or allow for the possibility of other truths than his own. He had a deep religion of his own, but it was not particularly a Christian religion. And he stated his own belief in his splendid Song to Mithras (1917):
Many roads Thou hast fashionedAnd in Kim, when he wishes to make a saint, he makes him a Buddhist, not a Christian.
All of them lead to the Light.
The lama possesses charity in its broadest sense of love with understanding and acceptance; the two Army Chaplains, one Anglican, one Roman Catholic, good, well-meaning men both of them, are entirely lacking in that quality. But even the lama only gains his vision of his Sacred River after, for love of Kim his chela, he has denied his own philosophy of unattachment to earthly things and the severing of all human bonds.
Kim is a strange, beautiful book, written on many levels, and beneath the Secret Service adventure story, and below the spread of constantly changing scenes, curious incident and laughter, and the delights of smell and sound and colour, the raggle-taggle riches and the half-glimpsed glories, at the deepest level of all, it is a story that has to do with the Soul of Man; a story whose real theme is love.
