Kim Kipling Essay

In Kim, Kipling creates an exotic atmosphere, full of vivid characters and incidents, and immediately draws the reader into his strange world. The novel concerns a religious quest and a quest for identity, and includes both enlightenment and espionage, tranquility and violence. Kim, the orphaned son of a drunken Irish sergeant and a nursemaid mother, has been brought up by a Eurasian opium eater, given free run of the narrow streets and back alleys of Lahore, and become completely assimilated to Indian life. The rainbow coalition of indigenous teachers, who lead him to his true identity and real vocation, are increasingly Europeanized; his English teachers, who train him as a spy, are increasingly sophisticated and significant.

He will start a life of disguise and deception, never able to disclose his true motives to anyone. Again on the road with the llama, Kim encounters Babu who assigns him to join his mission to intercept two foreign spies, one Russian, one French, who are operating in the Himalayas. Babu meets with the spies and travels with them while Kim and the llama travel on the same route. Makean comments on this:

"Kim is instrumental, along with the Babu, in thwarting the foreign spies, their mission being particularly successful because the foreign spies never realize that Kim and the Babu are secret agents, as far as they know their expedition has been wrecked by a chance encounter with a holy man and his young disciple. This fight and Kim's triumph will be a coup for Kim which will surely secure his career as a spy". (Justifiable approach to

We figure out on the first page that, underneath Kim's darkly tanned burned black skin as any native, Kim is still white. The reason for this attention to race is historical and important. Rudyard Kipling is writing about India during the era of British colonial domination at the turn of the twentieth century. The people are mixed up from different nationalities, ethnic groups, and religions. But even though people of many cultures appear in Kim, the different characters have different economic and social mobility.

Undeniably, Kipling is a pro-imperial, and racist worldview. So even though Kim is very poor and lives in destitute, he has the chance to make a great position for himself partly because he is white. Indian characters are powerless and get inflexible because of their race. Kipling has a lot of discriminations going into his portrayal of India, as well as, he strongly criticizes white racism and he portrays all of his characters, irrespective to their background, with deep compassion. Kim involves a lot of mysterious contradictions and paradoxes in its representations of