For many readers throughout the twentieth century, children and adults alike, Kim was India. Kim’s world was a land of gripping suspense and perilous adventure: of romance and intrigue, of exotic sights and tastes, smells, and sounds; of hot, dusty roads, crowded bazaars; and cool, pine-covered mountains.

The orphaned Kim O’Hara, growing up more or less unsupervised on the streets of Lahore, is a child’s dream of a romantic Everyman. With no real authority set over him and yet apparently quite capable of surviving and even thriving in what should be a life of hardship, Kim—the “Little Friend of all the World,” as the Afghan horse-trader and British agent Mahbub Ali names him—is able to roam as he will, free from limitations of race and caste, to learn from a wealth of father-figures and mentors. Companion and guide on a Tibetan lama’s spiritual quest and foot soldier in training for the “Great Game” of espionage, Kim is able to choose and shape his own destiny in a world that is utterly familiar and known to the protagonist. He moves through this world with enviable surety and grace, to become not only an adult, but also one of heroic potential.

 

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 call 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.

There was some justification for Kim, — he had kicked Lala Dinanath’s boy off the trunnions, — since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English. Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white — a poor white of the very poorest. The half-caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait) told the missionaries that she was Kim’s mother’s sister; but his mother had been nursemaid in a colonel’s family and had married Kimball O’Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an Irish regiment. He afterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi railway, and his regiment went home without him. The wife died of cholera in Ferozepore, and O’Hara fell to drink and loafing up and down the line with the keen-eyed three-year-old baby. Societies and chaplains, anxious for the child, tried to catch him, but O’Hara drifted away, till he came across the woman who took opium and learned the taste from her, and died as poor whites die in India. His estate at death consisted of three papers — one he called his ‘ne varietur’ because those words were written below his signature thereon, and another his ‘clearance-certificate.’ The third was Kim’s birth-certificate. Those things, he was used to say, in his glorious opium-hours, would yet make little Kimball a man. On no account was Kim to part with them, for they belonged to a great piece of magic — such magic as men practised over yonder behind the Museum, in the big blue and white Jadoo-Gher — the Magic House, as we name the Masonic Lodge. It would, he said, all come right some day, and Kim’s horn would be exalted between pillars — monstrous pillars — of beauty and strength. The Colonel himself, riding on a horse, at the head of the finest regiment in the world, would attend to Kim, — little Kim that should have been better off than his father. Nine hundred first-class devils, whose god was a Red Bull on a green field, would attend to Kim, if they had not forgotten O’Hara — poor O’Hara that was gang-foreman on the Ferozepore line. Then he would weep bitterly in the broken rush chair on the veranda. So it came about after his death that the woman sewed parchment, paper, and birth-certificate into a leather amulet-case which she strung round Kim’s neck.

‘And some day,’ she said, confusedly remembering O’Hara’s prophecies, ‘there will come for you a great Red Bull on a green field, and the Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes, and’ — dropping into English — ‘nine hundred devils.’
‘Ah,’ said Kim, ‘I shall remember. A Red Bull and a Colonel on a horse will come, but first, my father said, will come the two men making ready the ground for these matters. That is how, my father said, they always did; and it is always so when men work magic.’

 

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in 1865 in Bombay, India, where his father, Lockwood Kipling, was the principal of the Art School. His maternal family moved in notable circles; an aunt married the celebrated pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, and Stanley Baldwin, three-time Prime Minster of England, was his cousin. Kipling’s early upbringing was typical of Anglo-Indian families of that era; he was in the care of Indian servants and spoke Hindustani as a second language. In 1871, he was sent back to England, a common practice for English families in India. Kipling later returned to India as a reporter, and lived in the United States for a few years after marrying an American. He was the first British writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

 

 

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