Summary of "Kim" by Rudyard Kipling / Riassunto di "Kim" di Rudyard Kipling

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Introduction to Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was regarded as the greatest living English poet and storyteller from the 1890s to the 1920s. He was primarily an artist and seems to give expression to a whole phase of national experience (sense of imperial destiny, confidence in engineering and technology, respect for craftsmanship). He is the last English author to appeal to readers of all social classes and all cultural groups.

An innovator and a virtuoso in the art of the short story, within which he moved confidently between the poles of sophisticated simplicity (in his earliest tales) and the complex, closely organised, symbolic mode of his later works. His portrayal of Anglo-Indian life ranges from cynical triviality to stoical nobility. He established the world of Empire in all its pettiness and grandeur, its variety and energy, its miseries, its hardships, and its heroism.

Kipling's View of Life

Kipling’s view of life is a deeply pessimistic one. Man is at war with his surroundings in a world without intrinsic order: chaos and anarchy constitute its true moral reality. Existence becomes a perpetual struggle between the individual self battling to sustain its integrity and a deeply hostile universe where man has no natural ally. The best that can be done is to encourage anything that offers to impose pattern and order upon this lawless nature.

The Indian Stories and "Kim"

Many of Kipling’s stories draw their inspiration and power from this perception of reality. India itself with its vastness, its oppressive climate, its plagues, and its diversity acts as a powerful symbol of a nature intrinsically hostile to man. The Indian stories are nearly all concerned with conflict. Those whose ideas and conduct seem to threaten those structures which are all man has to protect his fragile identity are to him subversives, agents of cosmic disorder. Amongst the Indian stories, however, Kim is a glowing exception: there is no conflict there.

Kim is a plotless, highly episodic novel. Yet the result is not a rambling, incoherent narrative, for a powerful unity is established by other highly sophisticated means, such as a unity of moral precept. The chapter-heading of the first chapter is a recognition of man’s mortal insufficiency.

Structure and Themes in "Kim"

The story opens with Kim outside the Lahore Museum astride the gun Zam-Zammah and it closes with the lama seated like Buddha, his quest concluded. This balancing of activist and quietist principles is a good example of that structural patterning which is one of the principal methods whereby the book’s unity is firmly established. Youth is balanced by age, the secular against the spiritual, towards a compelling symmetry.

Though Kim’s nickname is “Little Friend of all the World”, he is identified not only with the communal life of his own city, but with the idea of human community and his ready command of vernacular speech and proverbial wisdom, his intimate knowledge of native customs and even native secrets, confirms him in the role.

India is almost unique in its immense diversity of people. The variety of race, creed, and profession is the characteristic product of the subcontinent. Kipling shows us an India of immense antiquity, the possessor of a vast history which cuts the latest conqueror’s ephemeral victory down to its proper size. Kim is the expression both of this exhilarating diversity and its unity: there is a way of living in this whirl and he has found it.

The Quest in "Kim"

Another means to maintain the book’s unity is through the theme of the quest and the manner in which Kim and the lama conduct their wholly different quests with the deepest devotion to each other. Kim is engaged upon a search for an identity without being fully aware of it, nor, so rich is he in identities, being conscious of the deficiency. The lama’s search is for a mystical river.

Juxtaposed with the lama’s river, is another one: wherever Kim’s glance falls, a river of life springs up. The river is one of the two symbols which recur throughout the work further unifying it. The other is that of the wheel. The Wheel of Life: the cycle of life, death, and rebirth to which men are condemned because of their slavery to earthly desires and ambitions; when they free themselves from it, they interrupt the cycle and reach Nirvana (this is why the lama is searching for the river). Then there is the Wheel of Things, of utilitarian and mundane life.

Moral Value and Identity in "Kim"

The moral value of Kim’s vision is firmly established in his utterly passionate and self-consuming love for the lama. It is reciprocated, the lama comes back, after having reached the river, to assist Kim.

Kim accepts that he is a Sahib (a member of the ruling imperial class) only on the strictest conditions: he will be a Sahib while at school but at other times, he insists, he must be free and go amongst his own people. It is simply one more facet of his multi-faceted existence. All of India – the less salubrious parts included – is home to Kim, the catholicity of whose taste is matched by the amplitude and diversity of the country’s resources.

Kim's Growth and The Great Game

Yet Kim has endured a moment of crisis in his relations with his worlds, and it is one wholly characteristic of Kipling’s concern for individual self-consciousness. During the length of the story, Kim passes from childhood to early manhood. From a boyish unselfconscious delight and immersion in the roaring whirl of India, he moves in the natural process of growth to an awareness of his difference, of his individual identity, and of his possible alienation. His mind goes free upon speculation as to what is called personal identity and he asks himself “Who is Kim – Kim – Kim?”

Then there is the Great Game. Hitherto, knowledge is something which Kim has sought purely for the sake of satisfying his curiosity about his country and its people. The sort of knowledge venerated by the Game’s players is of a very different character: to them, it has a specifically utilitarian or political function. Its forces are directed to repulse a threat from outside.

In the end, nothing has been settled: Kim has not formally chosen between the lama and Government Service. Kim and the lama do not stumble out of one adventure into another: what we get is not a series of adventures so much as a series of pictures, all of them with a moral significance. Scene after vivid scene has arrested itself until we seem to find ourselves in a superb picture-gallery, in the centre of which is a magnificent portrayal of the Indian landscape.

Final Thoughts on "Kim"

Kim is essentially a pastoral composition. There is, centrally, a landscape suffused by a beneficent spirit whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. Kipling’s Indian pastoral is however modified in an interesting and very Victorian way: for these subsidiary pictures are remarkably similar to the narrative-pictures favoured by so many painters of the time. The book has never shown any sign of this sort of development where character and event interact so as to provide a steady progression to some sort of resolution. What we are given is the presentation in Kim and the lama of two fundamentally opposed attitudes to life: the activist and the contemplative.

Chapter 1

Kim is sitting on the gun Zam-Zammah, a cannon that is outside the Lahore Museum, also known as the Wonder House or the old Ajaib-Gher. They say that who holds the Zam-Zammah, holds the Punjab, as it is one of the first spoils of the conquerors. Kim was justified in doing so, because he was English and the English held the Punjab.

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. His mother had been nursemaid in a Colonel's family and had married Kimball O'Hara, a young sergeant of the Irish regiment. The wife died of cholera 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. Kim now lives with this woman. He left Kim three pieces of paper, one of which is his birth-certificate and another his clearance-certificate, and Kim always brings them with him because they would yet make little Kimball a man.

As Kim reached the years of indiscretion, he learned to avoid missionaries and white men of serious aspect who asked who he was, and what he did. For Kim did nothing with an immense success. 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.

Kim knows a lot of people and places in Lahore, people from different social classes and backgrounds, and everybody in the city seems to know him. Variety is a characteristic of his life. The woman who looked after him insisted with tears that he should wear European clothes—trousers, a shirt and a battered hat. Kim found it easier to slip into Hindu or Mohammedan garb when engaged on certain businesses.

While he is playing with a Hindu child and a Muslim one (refusing to let them on the Zam-Zammah because their people were not in power), he sees a man as he, who though he knew all castes, had never seen.

The Lama

He was nearly six feet high, dressed in fold upon fold of dingy stuff like horse-blanketing, and not one fold of it could Kim refer to any known trade or profession. At his belt hung a long open-work iron pencase and a wooden rosary such as holy men wear. On his head was a gigantic sort of tam-o'-shanter. His face was yellow and wrinkled, like that of Fook Shing, the Chinese bootmaker in the bazar. His eyes turned up at the corners and looked like little slits of onyx.

The old man, speaking in Urdu, asks the children what the big house is. Kim tells him it is the Wonder House. Kim asks him “What is your caste? Where is your house? Have you come far?” He is a lama (a guru in their language) from Tibet. He is going to see the Four Holy Places before he dies.

Kim accompanies the lama inside the Wonder House, where they see Greco-Buddhist sculptures, fragments of statues and slabs which had encrusted the walls of the Buddhist stupas, alto-reliefs representing Buddha. He is astonished at what he sees.

A white-bearded Englishman was looking at the lama, who gravely turned and saluted him and after some fumbling drew forth a note-book and a scrap of paper. On the paper, there is the white man’s (the curator) name. A pilgrim had given it to the lama and had told him of the Museum. The curator talks to the lama and explains to him everything about the Museum and what it contains. Kim listens but doesn’t understand much.

The Four Holy Places are: the Birthplace, the Mahabodhi (where Buddha attained enlightenment), the Monastery and the place of His Death. He wants to free himself from the Wheel of Things.

When the Lord (Buddha) was young and looking for a mate, at the test of the bow he threw the arrow far beyond sight, and when it touched earth, there broke out a stream which presently became a River and who bathes in that river washes away all taint and speckle of sin. He will start his journey by going to Benares by train and by road.

He had a chela (disciple) with him but he died of a fever so now he is alone and will have to go on his own. The curator gives him a notebook and some pencils for him to write.

This man was entirely new to all his (Kim’s) experience and he meant to investigate further. Kim takes the lama’s bowl and gets some food from the shopkeepers he knows. A yogi is a holy man, a religious mendicant.

The lama sleeps and when he wakes up he thinks that the boy who had gone to him in place of his dead chela has gone away: “It was a boy who came to me in place of him who died, on account of the merit which I had gained when I bowed before the Law within there. He came upon me to show me a road which I had lost. He led me into the Wonder House, and by his talk emboldened me to speak to the Keeper of the Images, so that I was cheered and made strong. And when I was faint with hunger he begged for me, as would a chela for his teacher. Suddenly was he sent. Suddenly has he gone away. It was in my mind to have taught him the Law upon the road to Benares.”

Kim tells him he is his chela and that he is on a quest of his own: he is looking for a red bull on a green field who shall help him (the prophecy of his dying father).

The lama wants to go immediately, but Kim tells him to wait until the morning because in the night there are thieves. Kim will get them somewhere to sleep. Kim goes to Mahbub Ali, a Muslim horse-trader to whom he had done some services (following people and reporting to Mahbub Ali).

The lama is now convinced that Kim was sent to him to guide him to the River. Mahbub Ali gives Kim a job to do in exchange for three silver rupees: they must stop at Umballa, which is on the way to Benares, and carry a message about a horse: “The pedigree of the white stallion is fully established, Mahbub Ali has given me the proof.” He gives him a piece of paper to deliver too.

Kim and the lama lay down for the night. The papers have information about some out-of-the-way mountain principalities and gun-trade. While they are sleeping Kim hears and sees a man searching through Mahbub Ali’s things, so Kim wakes up the lama in the middle of the night and they depart. Kim understands that the man was probably looking for the pedigree of that made-up horse-lie.

Chapter 2

Kim and the lama go to the railway station. 'This is the work of devils!' said the lama, recoiling from the hollow echoing darkness, the glimmer of rails between the masonry platforms, and the maze of girders above. Kim is amazed at the lama’s immense simplicity. The lama gives Kim the purse and he goes to buy the tickets for Umballa, then for Amritzar. They enter the carriage and meet people of all sorts. The train is often called the te-rain and it is defined as the work of the Government.

The lama wants to seat on the floor because it is against the rule to sit on a bench, but a passenger tells him “there is not one rule of living which these te-rains do not cause us to break. We sit, for example, side by side with all castes and people.”

At Amritzar the guard comes to check tickets and tells Kim to get out. He starts crying, saying he has to accompany the lama, the lama says he is willing to pay if it is necessary but Kim bids him silence and a girl gives them the money out of charity. Kim defines her a woman with a golden heart, even if she is a courtesan. The lama, who can’t look at women, says she must be a nun. Kim returns with a ticket and they continue their journey.