Hard questions about race and colonialism are hurdles Kipling first-timers must initially confront, but Kim remains a glorious novel filled with adoration for Victorian India
I could hurl plenty of appreciative adjectives and cliches at Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. But there is one common phrase I can’t use: Kim is not an “unalloyed pleasure”; it’s more complicated than that. There are stumbling blocks for all but the most innocent in our post-colonial world.
I hesitate to reduce Kim to crude questions of black and white (or even, as so delineated in the book, the shades in between) – especially since last week’s inspiring, informative chat showed, there’s so much more to talk about. However, race and empire are hurdles all Kipling first-timers like me must face. He is one of the dragons our society had to slay, in order to come to a settlement with the colonial past – and the scars remain. I tried to come to Kim with an open mind – but I felt like I was having my worst fears confirmed when I came across sentences like the following:
My experience is that one can never fathom the Oriental mind.
Dynamite was milky and innocuous beside that report of C25; and even an Oriental, with an Oriental’s views of the value of time, could see that the sooner it was in the proper hands the better.
That would have been a fatal blot on Kim’s character if Mahbub had not known that to others, for his own ends or Mahbub’s business, Kim could lie like an Oriental.
You cannot have Shakespeare, but not like it to look like antisemitism (The Merchant of Venice), or misogyny (The Taming of the Shrew). You cannot enjoy Kipling but claim you cannot take him when he looks like an imperialist. Well, you can. But it seems to me to demonstrate a lack of imagination, or creative sympathy and of empathy... For anything you might say about, or against [Kipling], there is one (and probably more than one) counter-example from his own work.”
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