Literature / Kim

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A 1901 novel by Rudyard Kipling. The title character is a street urchin named Kimball O'Hara (called Kim throughout the novel), the orphan son of an Irish officer and his wife. Kim has been befriended by the Pathan horse trader and spy Mahbub Ali. He wanders around the streets of the city of Lahore happily, mingling with all the many races, and occasionally running secret errands for Mahbub. He meets Teshoo Lama (usually called the Lama) who is Walking the Earth seeking enlightenment. Kim follows him and has adventures over a long period leading all the way to the Himalayas, where he foils a Russian and a French agent. It is left with an open ending as Kim must decide whether to continue as the Lama's disciple or become a full time spy.

This novel is a formless one in plot, almost Picaresque, and depends primarily on character and setting which is not unknown for Rudyard Kipling. It is one of the first spy novels ever told though it was in fact something of a Genre Buster because its focus went beyond espionage. Interestingly it captures the feel of Real Life espionage quite well. The actual nature of given missions is seldom revealed, nor is the identity of the enemy they are facing at a given time (with the exception of a Russian expedition in The Shangri-La at the end) and at first Kim doesn't even know who his own side is; which is of course what things would be like for a real spy. One of the book's strengths is its beautiful cross-section of life in British India.

In 1950 Kim had a film adaptation directed by Victor Saville: see here.

In 2008, it received its first Animated Adaptation from Italian production companies Mondo TV and Rai Fiction. Tropes in relation to that adaptation go here. Not to be confused with that OTHER teenage spy named Kim.

This work contains examples of:

• The Artful Dodger: Living a vagabond existence in India under British rule in the late 19th century, Kim earns his living by begging and running small errands on the streets of Lahore. He occasionally works for Mahbub Ali, a Pashtun horse trader who is one of the native operatives of the British secret service. Kim is so immersed in the local culture that few realise he is a white child.
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  • Kim may have been an expression of Rudyard Kipling's nostalgia for his boyhood.
  • The keeper of the Lahore museum or "wonder house" is a portrait of Kipling's father who really was the curator of a museum there.
• Bilingual Backfire: Many Indians amuse themselves by acting subservient to the British while hurling terrible insults at them in Hindi. At one point a street-sweeper does this to Kim, currently in European dress, which turns out a mistake.
• Boarding School: Kim spends three years at one, but "A boy's time at school is of no interest to anyone but his parents, and Kim was an orphan."
• Canon Welding:
  • The "Woman of Shamlegh" who gives Kim and the Lama sanctuary in her village is the central character of Kipling's early short-story Lispeth. (It's not very important to the plot, though if you've read the story you will get a whole new insight into the way she behaves around Kim, and why.) This is also is an example of Canon Discontinuity, as the Downer Ending to Lispeth ("in a little time, she married a woodcutter who beat her after the manner of paharis, and her beauty faded soon") is ignored and as the Woman of Shamlegh she is a woman of substance who lords it over her two husbands and would not mind making Kim her third.
  • Strickland, the police officer who "arrests" E23, appeared in several earlier short stories, starting with "Miss Youghal's Sais", which like "Lispeth" was collected in Plain Tales from the Hills.
  • Mahbub Ali (or at least a character with the same name) appears in Ballad of the Kings Jest.
• The Champion: The Lama's inexperience causes Kim to be this for him. There is a bit of calculation to this as being the disciple of a wandering seeker makes for good cover in India, a fact that Kim is well aware of. However Kim does have affection and a considerable protective instinct for the unworldly Lama. And the calculation is mainly on the part of Kim's superiors. The boy had voluntarily been the Lama's disciple before being officially involved in the spying, and to him, playing the "Great Game" and being a disciple are just different parts of himself.
• Character Development: The novel is mostly about Kim's coming of age story, but the Lama also changes, becoming much more comfortable with crowded India and modern transport, travelling all over India with trains and steamships while Kim is stuck in school.
• Covert Group with Mundane Front: Colonel Creighton, the head of the Ethnological Survey of British India, doubles as the director of the secret service. There is an overlap between the two organisations; for instance, both Creighton and one of his top agents, Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, write and publish legitimate ethnological papers and share the ambition of being admitted to the Royal Society.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • Kim is so good at this that it is his primary defensive mechanism. He can shoo away bad guys by embarrassing them.
  • The Rissaldar-Major, a veteran of the Mutiny they met along the road said "The police of this land are thieves but at least they allow no competition."
• Eloquent in My Native Tongue: Several characters — including Hurree Babu and Kim himself, at least until he becomes the recipient of an English education at St. Xavier's — speak poor English but are much more fluent in the passages where they are speaking Hindi-translated-into-English.
• Exotic Extended Marriage: The Woman of Shamlegh already lives in a polyandrous marriage — which was then and still is Truth in Television for a number of cultures in the Himalayas — when she indicates to Kim that she would like him to become her husband too.
• Fatal Fireworks: On his way to find Mahbub Ali, Kim joins a firework-maker who takes him to a party for a local king in Patiala. At the party, the fireworks are lit all at once, causing a blast that kills eleven men, including the firework-maker.
• Fat and Skinny: Father Victor and Reverend Bennett, the Mavericks' chaplains for the Catholic Church and the Church of England, respectively. Kim calls them "the fat fool" and "the thin fool that looks like a camel".
• Felony Misdemeanor: Inverted. Lurgan Sahib's apprentice poisoned his plate, out of envy of him showing more attention to Kim. How does Lurgan Sahib respond? By sending him to a corner.
• Fish Out of Water:
  • The reaction of some British like Reverend Bennett and Father Victor when coming to the unfamiliar environment of India. On the other hand, Colonel Creighton, Strickland and Lurgan Sahib have almost gone native.
  • The Lama, as a Tibetan Buddhist and someone more accustomed to using Chinese than e. g. Punjabi, also is very much this, at least at the beginning of the novel. Things change, especially after he meets up with the Sahiba, a fellow Buddhist, if a lapsed one. In later chapters he is shown navigating through India by train and steamer with much more ease and he also for a time finds a home away from home in a Jain temple.
• Flowery Insults: The trading of flowery insults is very much part of the joy of conversation in India, with a definite note of one-upmanship. Kim forms a rather low opinion of an English drummer boys set to watch over him, in part for Europeans' lack of imagination in this respect, when "all he heard from his companions were the few useless words which seemed to make two-thirds of the white man's abuse. Kim knew and despised them long ago."
• Gambit Pileup: A continuous Gambit Pileup nicknamed The Great Game. There are multitudinous players friendly and enemy and little is told about any of them.
• Gender-Blender Name: Kim (although not at the time of the writing - it only became a popular girls' name in the 1920s).
• Genre-Busting: Is this book a spy story or is it a gigantic Slice of Life? Or is it a Coming of Age story? Actually it's all of these.
• Going Native: Kim can effortlessly go native as both a Hindu and a Muslim in India. However, he's warned at school that while Britains in India expected to blend in with the locals, "going fully native" was out of the question, and Kim steps back.
• Hate Plague: The Old Soldier who accompanies Kim and the Lama to the Grand Trunk Road claimed the Indian Rebellion of 1857👁 Image
  was this. According to him, the gods sent a curse that drove his countrymen to violence against their British overlords. And that though he at first sympathized with them, he lost that sympathy when they started killing the women and children, and went on to fight in its suppression, even if that meant killing his own brethren.
• Honey Trap: A prostitute secretly working for some unnamed Rebel Leader tries to do this to Mahbub Ali. He is too smart for them and hides the message he is carrying before she can steal it, and recount gleefully later that he could sense how frustrated she was.
• Intrepid Merchant: Mahbub Ali is an Afghan horse-trader. If his caravan is ambushed and shot at twice in one season, it's unusual, but not quite shocking.
• Magical Asian: Teshoo Lama. He charms everyone around him with his wisdom and honesty, be they travellers in a train, Hindu priests, an old captain, an English museum caretaker, and even Kim himself. He's on a quest for the River of the Arrow of the Buddha, which is claimed that it can cleanse anybody from sin, and could detach him from the Wheel of Things. Kim was already marvelled on first meeting him because he couldn't tell his race or caste, having previously thought he knew them all in the world.
• Master of Disguise: Kim is pretty good at this. He can dress up in proper clothes and act like a member from any caste and religion. One of the reason the Intelligence is so interested in him.
• Meaningful Name: Kim is "the little friend of all the world". The Espionage profession is called the Great Game, especially when the phrase is said to be inspired by chess and the main opponent is Russia.
• Mighty Whitey: Subverted in that Kim, who is of Irish parentage, learns a lot from his European schooling, but also from his adopted homeland and the Lama, and he feels more at home being a native rather than a "Sahib" (word used to call Anglos in India). Kim himself puts it rather snarkily while referring to a British priest. However, towards the end, Kim starts to think of himself as a Sahib and this creates tensions between him and the Lama.
  Kim: The thin fool who looks like a camel says that I am the son of a Sahib... he thinks that once a Sahib is always a Sahib.
• MultiTribal team: Played straight and quite well. Aside from the major characters which come from diverse castes people from all over India are met randomly along the road, or what not. There are no major villains and most characters come off as more or less likeable. The feeling is that India is a rainbow of castes and the British while the ruling class, are treated by the locals and perhaps even by themselves as just another caste. To a large degree this is Truth in Television, though presented in something of a Lighter and Softer manner.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Used often enough by Kim and Mahbub Ali, but Hurree Babu is the master of this. (A Babu was an Indian clerk or minor official and in this context Hurree is practically Clark Kenting. (Babu is a term of respect as well as affection.)
• Orphan's Plot Trinket: Kim had his amulet, which was a sewn leather bag that contained three documents: his birth certificate, his father's clearance certificate and something called "ne varietur". These documents identified him as the son of a sergeant in a regiment of the British Indian army, and the regiment takes him in after he encounters them and they find the documents inside.
• The Prophecy: There are two prophecies in the novel about Kim in the book, one handed down from his father and garbled by the people who raised him, and another uttered by a Hindu priest in a village he and the Lama pass through. Both turn out to be true.
• Raised by Natives: Kim's parents were both from the British Isles, but he was raised by a Hindu attorney from Bengal, a Muslim warrior (specifically a Pashtun/Pathan tribesman from the foothills of Afghanistan), a Buddhist monk from Tibet, and a British colonel. The product: Kimball O'Hara: Friend of the Stars/Friend of All the World, the perfect warrior for the Great Game.
• Real Award, Fictional Character: Both Colonel Creighton and Hurree Chunder Mookerjee dream of being inducted into the Royal Society for their legitimate ethnological research.
• Ripped from the Headlines: In the years before the book was written, a young, light-skinned, blue-eyed Indian man was charged with murder. Around his neck, the police found a leather bag which the man claimed was a charm. When the bag was opened, it proved to contain a birth certificate proving his father was an Irish soldier. The case received a fair bit of publicity, and too many details add up for it not to have been Kipling's source of inspiration.
• Rule-Abiding Rebel: Kim bristles at service and authority figures but gradually he comes to accept his role and function as a spy in the service of the British Empire.
• The Shangri-La: Subverted. Teshoo Lama as a former abbot of a Tibetan monastery arguably comes from there, but Kipling deals with Lamaism pretty much realistically. Towards the end of the book he and Kim travel into a different part of the Himalayas (further to the West) which does not fit the "mystical place in the mountains" stereotype. There is no Deathtrap or Tome of Eldritch Lore, it is simply another country. And the Lama receives his enlightenment only after he leaves the mountains and returns to the plains.
• The Spymaster: Colonel Creighton. Often considered "a fool" by the laymen because he's a "colonel without a regiment"; but that's because his "regiment" consists of a network of scholars, traders and nomads (with the newly addition of a Street Urchin) who spy and gather information for him and the British Army.
• Teen Superspy: Kim is a moderate example, and also one of its earliest. He starts off in a plausible non-super way as a Street Urchin who is used by a passing spy to carry messages for him. The only thing super about him is his ability to flawlessly enter every culture in India.
• Time Out: Lurgan Sahib sent his apprentice to a corner after he tried to kill him by poisoning his food, in an odd inversion of Felony Misdemeanor. Apparently, he did it out of jealousy, as Lurgan Sahib was showing more attention to the newly arrived Kim.
• Translation Convention: Characters who speak Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tibetan or Pashtu as their native language will often be shown speaking English brokenly and with a bit of a Funetik Aksent, but when they switch to accent-free English the reader can tell they are actually speaking in the language they are accustomed to most. There are also a few other tell-tale signs, for instance Hindi-rendered-as-English will appear a little more archaic, most notably for including "thou" and "thee" as well as "you" in order to reproduce the distinction between formal and informal address that most languages other than English have. Also, sometimes there are slight changes in vocabulary, e. g. certain special words are replaced by non-English equivalents and near-equivalents (pultoon for "regiment", topkhana for "artillery") or even by an English synonym (for instance, Kim overhears a British officer saying "this is not a war, it is a punishment" in English, and later reports that in Urdu or Hindi as "this is not a war, it is a chastisement"). And there are also instances where Kipling renders something in English, but also remarks that in the "vernacular" the statement includes a pun that is not present in the English translation.
• Verbal Judo: Kim defends himself and the Red Lama by making fun of potential aggressors.
• Walking the Earth: Much of the book is about just travelling around like any other traveller.