All posts tagged coolies

Typhoon by Joseph Conrad (1902)

Cast

As in all Conrad’s narratives, the story focuses on one central protagonist so vividly that it’s easy to overlook the way it describes many others, obviously the rest of the crew on the ship which experiences the typhoon, but a host of others, the crew’s family members back in Blighty. A full cast list includes:

Captain Thomas MacWhirr, son of a petty grocer in Belfast who ran away to sea at 15 and is now captain of the Nan-Shan.

His Dad, a corpulent man, with a gift for sly chaffing, which to the end of his life he exercised in his intercourse with his son, a little pityingly, as if upon a half-witted person.

His Mother, ‘wept very much after his disappearance’ (p.4).

MacWhirr’s wife, Lucy, ‘the daughter of a superior couple who had seen better days’, now Mrs MacWhirr, ‘a pretentious person with a scraggy neck and a disdainful manner’, and in her neighbourhood considered ‘quite superior’. (p.11)

Their daughter, Lydia, a ‘lanky girl, upon the whole… rather ashamed of him’. (p.11)

Their son, Tom, ‘frankly and utterly indifferent in a straightforward, delightful, unaffected way manly boys have’. (p.11)

Young Jukes, chief mate on the Nan-Shan i.e. MacWhirr’s number two, a lively loquacious young man who frets against his captain’s lack of imagination and blunt speech.

Jukes’ friend who he writes his letters to and who is the second officer on a trans-Atlantic liner (p.13).

Mr Solomon Rout, the chief engineer, also known as Long Sol, Old Sol, or Father Rout, to be found smoking his morning cigar over the skylight. As the tallest man on every ship he joins, he is used to stooping to hear the tales of other seamen.

Mrs Rout, ‘a big, high-bosomed, jolly woman of forty’. (p.12)

Mr Rout‘s toothless and venerable mother, quite deaf, who Mrs Rout has to shout at to communicate with. (p.12)

The new curate near Mrs Rout’s home who she confuses when she talks about ‘Solomon’ saying this or that, because he momentarily thinks she’s referring to the Biblical Solomon and doesn’t realise she’s talking about her husband (p.12).

The ship’s steward who secretly reads MacWhirr’s letters home (p.11).

The cook who the steward gossips to about MacWhirr’s letters (p.68).

The elder and younger of the shipbuilders in Dumbarton where the Nan-Shan was built, and who are described discussing the appointment of MacWhirr as captain.

Bates, foreman of the joiners on the shipyard who is told off when MacWhirr identifies faulty locks on the new ship’s doors.

Old Mr Sigg and young Mr Sigg, owners of the firm in Siam which commissioned the Dumbarton shipbuilders to build the Nan-Shan.

The Bu Hin company’s Chinese clerk who attends the voyage to supervise to the 200 coolies who are being shipped back to China.

Harry, the second engineer, who gets cross at Jukes for not moving the stokehold ventilators to maximise the air flow into the stiflingly hot engine room.

Jack Allen, the second officer who fell overboard into an empty coal lighter, broke some bones and was invalided home (p.20/21), leading to the hurried recruitment of…

The second mate, ‘an oldish, shabby little fellow, with bad teeth and no hair on his face’.

The boatswain or boss’n, ‘an ill-favoured, undersized, gruff sailor of fifty, coarsely hairy, short-legged, long-armed, resembling an elderly ape’ (p.36), who has a wife, ‘a fat woman, and two grown-up daughters [who] kept a greengrocer’s shop in the East-end of London (p.45).

Beale, the third engineer, who never says a word.

Hackett, the heroic helmsman who keeps the ship’s direction through the mayhem of the typhoon (p.47).

The donkeyman, ‘a dapper little chap with a dazzling fair skin and a tiny, gingery moustache, worked in a sort of mute transport’ (p.51).

The coolie who threw his head up like a baying hound in the hold.

The bummer, a tall individual with thin legs, a round belly, wearing ‘a soiled suit of blue flannel with a pair of dirty cricketing shoes; a dingy gray moustache drooped from his lip, and daylight could be seen in two places between the rim and the crown of his hat’, who greets the second mate on the quay at Fu-Chau after MacWhirr has sacked him (p.66).

Twenty-nine identifiable characters in total, not counting the unnamed coolies.

Imagination, the enemy

As in Conrad’s other fictions, having a vivid imagination is regarded as a bad thing and the point of the character of MacWhirr and, to some extent, of the entire story, is as a portrait of a man totally bereft of any spark of imagination whatsoever:

Having just enough imagination to carry him through each successive day, and no more, he [Captain MacWhirr] was tranquilly sure of himself; and from the very same cause he was not in the least conceited. It is your imaginative superior who is touchy, overbearing, and difficult to please; but every ship Captain MacWhirr commanded was the floating abode of harmony and peace.

Old Solomon describes Captain MacWhirr’s honesty as having ‘the heavy obviousness of a lump of clay’ and the captain’s literal-mindedness is reinforced with scores of instances, for example the way he doesn’t get jokes or Jukes’s flights of fantasy. He even dislikes the use of metaphor or simile in speech and tells Jukes off for using them: as when Jukes says the oppressive heavy weather makes him feel as if he had his head tied up in a woollen blanket and MacWhirr asks him when he’s ever had his head tied up in a blanket and why? Or when Jukes jocularly refers to the 200 Chinese coolies as the ‘passengers’ and MacWhirr irritably exclaims:

The Chinamen! Why don’t you speak plainly? Couldn’t tell what you meant. (p.23)

This is a man who speaks with ‘the utmost simplicity of manner and tone’ (p.24). I’ve just come from reading Conrad’s long novel ‘Lord Jim’ which is, arguably, the portrait of a good man undone by his over-active imagination. It’s almost as if Conrad made MacWhirr a conscious study of the extreme opposite.

Would we now think of MacWhirr as having ADHD, the condition which is being diagnosed in ever-growing numbers of people nowadays?

Eight reasons why ADHD diagnoses are increasing (The Conversation)

Because at one point this is how Jukes describes him:

He told me once quite simply that he found it very difficult to make out what made people always act so queerly. (p.14)

‘To be silent was natural to him, dark or shine’ (p.29). Maybe some aspects of his character are ‘on the spectrum’, as we say nowadays.

Anyway, within the narrative MacWhirr’s stolid literal-mindedness is deliberately contrasted with his young chief mate, Jukes, a man of quick wit, ‘liveliness of fancy’, fondness for colourful comparisons and inventive figures of speech – all of which MacWhirr deprecates and criticises, much to Jukes’s muttered resentment. Yin and tang. Chalk and cheese. A stark contrast for the purposes of making the narrative more schematic.

So, for example, when the typhoon hits, MacWhirr keeps soldiering stolidly on, making sensible decisions, while Jukes is overcome with panic-fear and wastes all his energy, not managing the situation and its challenges but managing his feverish imagination.

Being very young, he had found the occupation of keeping his heart completely steeled against the worst so engrossing that he had come to feel an overpowering dislike towards any other form of activity whatever. (p.37)

Incommunication

In my reading of Conrad’s other early stories I’ve developed the notion of incommunication to refer to the way so many characters in Conrad can barely communicate with each other.

Mumbling

The number of times the characters murmur, mutter under their breath, look down at their boots, look at the horizon and generally do everything except say what they mean directly to the person they’re talking to.

The second mate made in his throat a noise of an unfriendly nature… (p.20)

Their [the crew’s] grumbling and sighing and muttering worried him [the boatswain] greatly… (p.39)

With his sharp nose, red at the tip, and his thin pinched lips, he always looked as though he were raging inwardly; and he was concise in his speech to the point of rudeness. (p.21)

MacWhirr’s few words

This is notably true of Captain MacWhirr, ‘a man of few words’, (‘He never talks’ complains Jukes), ‘the silent man’, who says nothing unnecessary.

With a temperament neither loquacious nor taciturn he found very little occasion to talk.

Or mutters or mumbles:

This unusual form of address, though mumbled rather than spoken…

But it’s true of other crew members, too, who are endlessly muttering or mumbling under their breath:

‘None of you here shall make a fool of me if I know it,’ he mumbled to himself.

Carried over into letters

Conrad cleverly and rather beautifully takes the time to show how the characters’ ability or inability to express themselves is carried over into the letters they write home to their loved ones, which reflect their characters. Thus the letters MacWhirr writes home to his wife once a month are masterpieces of incommunication, sticking entirely to the banal facts, lacking any colour or expression:

as if the words so long used by so many men were, apart from their shape, worn-out things, and of a faded meaning.

Whereas the letters Old Solomon writes to his wife are full of gossip and comments which his wife reads out loud to his deaf mother.

Mother and curate, deaf and confused

And the episode of the curate, at first sight so arbitrary and random, is in fact a further demonstration of the incommunication theme. What episode? Well, Mrs Rout receives monthly letters from her husband and she enjoys reading them out to Old Solomon’s mother. But because the old lady is deaf, Mrs R has to shout them out loud at the top of her voice – and this is yet another form of incommunication.

The incident of the curate is that, on his first visit to Mrs Rout he is genuinely confused at the talkative woman repeating ‘Solomon says this’ and ‘Solomon says that’, so the curate is worried that she had access to a version of the Bible he didn’t know. It is an instance of comic misinterpretation and confusion, until finally she clarifies that she’s referring to Solomon her husband.

So just this one fairly short digression includes two elements which demonstrate the central theme of incommunication, deafness and misunderstanding.

Foreign

Another form of incommunication is that between people of different languages, such as when Jukes speaks bad pidgen English to the Chinese.

‘No catchee rain down there – savee?’ pointed out Jukes. ‘Suppose all’ee same fine weather, one piecie coolie-man come topside.’

Or when one of the coolies, badly knocked about in their below-decks hold, starts to talk, in a language none of the white characters can begin to understand and so find outlandish and alien.

Suddenly one of the coolies began to speak. The light came and went on his lean, straining face; he threw his head up like a baying hound. From the bunker came the sounds of knocking and the tinkle of some dollars rolling loose; he stretched out his arm, his mouth yawned black, and the incomprehensible guttural hooting sounds, that did not seem to belong to a human language, penetrated Jukes with a strange emotion as if a brute had tried to be eloquent. (p.58)

Maybe Conrad missed a trick by not having any members of the crew be foreign i.e. from another European country, as they are in Lord Jim and other tales (Captain Gustav in Jim; Falk is himself Scandinavian, the German hotel-keeper Schomberg, etc). But maybe he thought that he had a sufficient range of types of incommunication – just among English speakers.

The language of facts

All this inept and clumsy communication stands in start contrast to the world of facts, which, unlike human utterances with all their metaphor and ambiguity, speak to people like MacWhirr in a clear and precise language.

There were matters of duty, of course – directions, orders, and so on; but the past being to his mind done with, and the future not there yet, the more general actualities of the day required no comment – because facts can speak for themselves with overwhelming precision.

The China seas north and south are narrow seas. They are seas full of every-day, eloquent facts, such as islands, sand-banks, reefs, swift and changeable currents – tangled facts that nevertheless speak to a seaman in clear and definite language.

This interpretation is, of course, inflected by the presence of MacWhirr in the sense that Conrad makes us see the world of facts through MacWhirr’s mind, ‘faithful to facts, which alone his consciousness reflected’. If it had been Marlow narrating all this is would have been riven with ambiguities and puzzlement. The entire tone and, in a sense, the worldview of ‘Typhoon’ is set by the bluff stolidity of its central figure so it is his natural world of readily ascertainable facts, which the narrator refers to…

Language shredded by the typhoon

Having been sensitised by all this to the way men communicate (or not) you notice that the arrival of the storm compounds the already-existing communication problems.

The voices of the lost group reached him after the manner of men’s voices in a gale, in shreds and fragments of forlorn shouting snatched past the ear.

And this is then dramatised, as the wind and rain become tumultuous, by Juke’s fragmented attempts to speak to MacWhirr:

All at once Jukes appeared at his side, yelling, with his head down.
‘Watch—put in—wheelhouse shutters—glass—afraid—blow in.’
Jukes heard his commander upbraiding.
‘This—come—anything—warning—call me.’
He tried to explain, with the uproar pressing on his lips.
‘Light air—remained—bridge—sudden—north-east—could turn—thought—you—sure—hear.’

We pride ourselves on being the animal with language, the animal which speaks, but in practice – the story suggests – it is a gift we misuse and abuse as we struggle to convey even the simplest things to each other.

The speaking-tube

Another variation on the theme of speaking and communication is the speaking-tube which connects the bridge with the engine room. In the middle of the storm this acquires a genuine real-world importance as engineer Rout tries to speak to the captain on the bridge but this, also, is a very flawed medium because – at several vital moments – either Rout or the captain are distracted and end up shouting down the tube with no reply, fearing the worst.

In this way the speaking-tube becomes yet another symbol of the vital importance of human speech, of communication, and yet its terrible fragility.

The violent sea

MacWhirr’s lack of imagination and calm unruffled, largely silent mode of life is not only contrasted with Young Jukes (on the human level) but, on a more cosmic level, with the life of the sea itself and this is what the story is about: the man of few words and no imagination for the first time in his life confronting ‘the wrath and fury of the passionate sea’ (p.14).

The typhoon as intensification of normal levels of incommunication

I suppose the typhoon can be seen either as the opposite of the everyday, a grand assault on norms of people’s communications so that they have to put their mouths next to the auditor’s ear and yell their heads off to be heard.

Or, it could be seen as more of an intensification of the normal world. The typhoon represents, on some level, the reality we live in, the storm of confusion and miscommunication which dogs all our lives, with the mask of the everyday stripped away.

Plot summary

So, having established the quite sizeable cast and the central themes of the text, it’s relatively easy to summarise the ‘plot’.

If the story is based on the time Conrad spent working as the chief mate on the Highland Forest under a Captain John McWhir (as most biographers think), then the voyage is set in 1887.

Captain MacWhirr sets off in the Nan-Shan, a British-built steamer flying the Siamese flag, to sail north to the Chinese treaty port of Fu-chau, with some cargo in her lower holds and two hundred Chinese coolies returning to their village homes in the province of Fo-kien, on the fore-deck. They run into a typhoon, the name given to a tropical cyclone in the northwestern part of the Pacific Ocean.

Although MacWhirr’s bluff, unimaginativeness has up till then been criticised by other members of the crew – notably lively young Jukes and the chief engineer Solomon Rout – his refusal to give in to the typhoon or change course, somehow masters the storm and sees the ship safely through it, resulting in the grudging admiration of the senior crew members.

And MacWhirr’s mastery comes to be symbolised by the sound of his steady emotionless voice. Thus when the storm hits the ship, MacWhirr and Jukes are both on the bridge and these temperamental opposites find themselves clinging to each other for dear life. And while the (over) imaginative Jukes repeatedly thinks the ship is doomed, is breaking up, they’re all going to die and so on, while he is cowering in terror, it is the quiet solidity of MacWhirr’s voice which saves him.

Again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but with a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the black wastes of the gale; again he heard a man’s voice – the frail and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of thought, resolution and purpose… (p.33)

And Jukes heard the voice of his commander hardly any louder than before, but nearer, as though, starting to march athwart the prodigious rush of the hurricane, it had approached him, bearing that strange effect of quietness like the serene glow of a halo. (p.34)

He heard with amazement the frail and resisting voice in his ear, the dwarf sound, unconquered in the giant tumult. (p.35)

And presently the voice returned again, half submerged in the vast crashes, like a ship battling against the waves of an ocean… small, lonely and unmoved, a stranger to the visions of hope or fear… (p.35)

Presently a small voice shoved aside the shouting hurricane quietly. ‘You, Jukes? – Well?’ (p.52)

After the initial descriptions of the devastating impact of the typhoon on the ship, the main action or event is that the bosun arrives on the seaswept bridge to tell MacWhirr there’s trouble in the ‘tween-deck where the Chinese are sheltering. So MacWhirr orders Jukes to go below decks to check things out and the narrative follows (a reluctant) Jukes on his journey down into the swaying, black, dangerous bowels of the ship where he discovers the Chinese being thrown all over the place, that some of their luggage has burst open and leaked silver dollars everywhere which they’re now fighting over. So Jukes gets some of the crew to storm the hold and calm the Chinese down (not without cuffs and blows) before establishing lifelines running across it for them to hold onto and then gathering up the silver in order to prevent fights.

During his belowdecks odyssey Jukes also arrives in the engine room, thus giving Conrad the opportunity to describe the heroic leadership of Mr Rout and the work of the stokers, stripped to the waist to keep shovelling coal into the furnaces to keep the engines running. Jukes’ odyssey allows Conrad to give a kind of schematic diagram of the working of the crew in extremis.

The storm descriptions

All the things I’ve listed are perhaps less obvious to the average reader than what most people remember, which is its super-vivid descriptions of the ship, sea and sky in the buildup to, and then the experience of, the thundering typhoon. There are 1) straightforward descriptions:

The darkness palpitated down upon all this, and then the real thing came at last.
It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath. It seemed to explode all round the ship with an overpowering concussion and a rush of great waters, as if an immense dam had been blown up to windward. In an instant the men lost touch of each other. This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one from one’s kind. An earthquake, a landslip, an avalanche, overtake a man incidentally, as it were – without passion. A furious gale attacks him like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seeks to rout his very spirit out of him.
Jukes was driven away from his commander. He fancied himself whirled a great distance through the air. Everything disappeared – even, for a moment, his power of thinking… (p.30)

And:

The gale howled and scuffled about gigantically in the darkness, as though the entire world were one black gully. At certain moments the air streamed against the ship as if sucked through a tunnel with a concentrated solid force of impact that seemed to lift her clean out of the water and keep her up for an instant with only a quiver running through her from end to end.

And:

The Nan-Shan was being looted by the storm with a senseless, destructive fury: trysails torn out of the extra gaskets, double-lashed awnings blown away, bridge swept clean, weather-cloths burst, rails twisted, light-screens smashed – and two of the boats had gone already. They had gone unheard and unseen, melting, as it were, in the shock and smother of the wave. (p.32)

Science fiction

And then 2) there are millenarian visions, when Conrad invokes the powers of the entire universe or sees things on a cosmic scale, when he reaches a kind of science fiction intensity:

At its setting the sun had a diminished diameter and an expiring brown, rayless glow, as if millions of centuries elapsing since the morning had brought it near its end. (p.19)

And:

An outburst of unchained fury, a vicious rush of the wind absolutely steadied the ship; she rocked only, quick and light like a child’s cradle, for a terrific moment of suspense, while the whole atmosphere, as it seemed, streamed furiously past her, roaring away from the tenebrous earth. (p.43)

Is there a touch of H.G. Wells in these descriptions, the sense of all normal human values and experiences far exceeded by the extremity of the storm? This next passage reminded me of ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’:

And then a hand gripped his thigh… and he felt himself pawed all over. It was the boatswain. Jukes recognized these hands, so thick and enormous that they seemed to belong to some new species of man. (p.36)

Did Wells’s inhuman horrors strike a chord in Conrad’s imagination? At other times the cosmic viewpoint adopts a semi-religious tone:

The Nan-Shan… had about her the worn, weary air of ships coming from the far ends of the world – and indeed with truth, for in her short passage she had been very far; sighting, verily, even the coast of the Great Beyond, whence no ship ever returns to give up her crew to the dust of the earth. (p.66)

It’s only a ship caught in a storm but like the stories of his ship’s chandlers and sea captains and business agents in the jungle, Conrad makes it into an allegory of all humanity and the entire universe.

The great ellipsis and part 2

The twenty pages or so which describe the storm in such blistering intensity in fact only describe the first half of the storm. There is a lull or intermission when the ship breaks into the centre of the typhoon, things calm down and they can hear themselves speak, but there is, of course, then to follow the second part of the storm and this is where Conrad makes his Big Artistic Decision which is… not to depict it. Once, he decides, is enough, and so the ship is just heading into the second part of the typhoon and MacWhirr mutters to himself, ‘I wouldn’t like to lose her’ when this section of the text (which is divided into six parts) abruptly ends with one short, bald sentence.

He was spared that annoyance.

And the narrative cuts away to the sixth and final part, cutting to a few days later when the Nan-Shan finally steams into Fu-chau, severely damaged but still going. Its docking causes a stir but is dramatised by Conrad solely in terms of the ratty second mate, having been fired by MacWhirr, coming ashore and venting all his resentment on the first seedy water rat or ‘bummer’ he encounters, who invites him for a drink.

But most of this last six pages cuts right away from the ship and the Far East altogether, to describe the reactions of the recipients of letters from MacWhirr and Rout and Jukes, letters each describing the storm in different ways, which are received by the different wives (and chum) according to their character.

1) Hoity toity Mrs MacWhirr barely bothers to read it, skimming past the description of the storm and slighting on the only bit that interests her, her husband’s threat to come home soon and see her and the children. Oh why does he want to do that, she complains, not for the first time. And the letter which only briefly describes desperate men risking their lives at sea for pitiful pay ends with an account of Mrs MacWhirr taking her lanky daughter out shopping and greeting other wives in the street.

2) Then Conrad describes Mrs Rout reading out Old Solomon’s letter to his ancient mother and being peeved that Old Sol says the captain did a very clever thing during the typhoon but doesn’t specify what. She is irritated.

3) Then Conrad describes the reception of Juke’s letter by his chum aboard the Atlantic Ocean liner, who goes on to share it with his crew mates and Conrad summarises it for us. It takes four pages and is a quite elaborate coda. Basically Jukes was terrified that the way they sent the Chinese coolies belowdecks and then waded into break them up when they were fighting and then took away all the loose dollars they could find, would have made the Chinese riotous and angry. He worried a lot about what would happen when they finally docked and the mutinous Chinese might demand a public enquiry or a trial and so on, worrying that, as the man who made the decision, he’d be the one in the firing line.

Jukes had only barely gone to bed after 30 hours straight on deck when he’s woken up and told the captain is opening the hatch and letting the Chinese on deck. Terrified there’ll be a riot, Jukes leaps into his clothes and orders one of the crew to distribute rifles, joining eight or so armed crew on the bridge.

It is here that Captain MacWhirr ridicules this stupid over-reaction and tells Jukes to have the rifles locked away immediately before someone gets harmed. Instead he works with the Chinese interpreter from Bu Hin to explain to the coolies that they were locked below for their own safety (witness the damage they can all see on deck), that the lifelines were installed for their own safety, and that all the money the crew could find was confiscated to stop them fighting. Now MacWhirr proposes totalling up all the dollars they confiscated and dividing it up equally and fairly between the Chinese. To Jukes’ astonishment they all agree to this plan as they know that the alternatives are worse: 1) if asked, each of them would exaggerate the sum they’re owed, 2) if MacWhirr hands the hoard over to a Chinese official in the port, it will simply disappear.

To Jukes’ astonishment the Chinese are quite happy with this plan, and it must be the ‘clever decision’ that Rout mentioned in his letter to his wife but didn’t go into details about.

It is also, of course, demonstrates the gulf between over-imaginative Jukes (terrified there’s going to be a riot and so arming the crew in a way that might have led to accidental gunfire which might in fact have triggered a riot) and calm, phlegmatic and unimaginative MacWhirr, who with no mental effort, simply does the right thing.

The last page of this complex text entirely quotes Juke’s letter and the very last sentence of it is deeply ironic as we see Jukes completely misinterpret the character of MacWhirr and the high quality of his leadership decision, paranoidly thinking the captain only did it to avoid the fuss of a public enquiry whereas MacWhirr obviously just thought it was the fair thing to do:

‘This certainly is coming as near as can be to keeping the thing quiet for the benefit of all concerned. What’s your opinion, you pampered mail-boat swell? The old chief says that this was plainly the only thing that could be done. The skipper remarked to me the other day, “There are things you find nothing about in books.” I think that he got out of it very well for such a stupid man.’ (p.74)

But it is Jukes, of course, who is the stupid man.

UnEnglish phrasing

Sometimes Conrad’s bending of the English language, most of the time extremely enjoyable and rewarding, ends up snapping it. These occasions are enjoyable in their own way, for their incongruity:

Yet the uninteresting lives of men so entirely given to the actuality of the bare existence have their mysterious side.

Unbounded wonder was the intellectual meaning of his eye, while incredulity was seated in his whole countenance. (p.25)

29,750 words.

Credit

Typhoon by Joseph Conrad was first published in the Pall Mall Magazine in 1902. Page references are to the Oxford World’s Classics paperback edition, revised and republished in 2008.

Conrad reviews

Joseph Conrad reviews

Kim and Orientalism

Edward Said’s 1978 book ‘Orientalism’ mounted a sustained attack on the way eighteenth and nineteenth century Western scholars paved the way for the imperial conquest of the Middle East and India by creating and then maintaining a false concept of ‘the Orient’ and then attributing to its inhabits, so-called ‘Orientals’, a range of negative qualities such as laziness, incompetence, corruption, sensuality, luxury, squalor and so on. They did this in order to bolster and reinforce Western imperialists’ notions of themselves as, by contrast, hard working, chaste administrators of fair play and justice etc.

Said’s huge study aimed to show how all-pervasive these stereotypes and received ideas about ‘the Orient’ had become by the start of the twentieth century, and had endured, in one form or another, right up to the time of writing. His critique was a powerful insight and continues to be influential to this day.

Said’s sophisticated critical perspective moves his reader well beyond a straightforward enjoyment of Kipling’s 1901 novel, Kim, as ‘simply’ a realistic portrait of the India that Kipling grew up in, knew and loved so well, and digs deeper, to critique it as a complex web of ‘Orientalist’ stereotypes designed to bolster and justify British rule.

I’ve just been rereading both Kim and Orientalism and so am well aware of the debate, but I’d like to see it from a slightly different perspective. I’d make four points about the use of ‘stereotypes’ in language and literature.

(Before we begin, the dictionary definition of a stereotype is: ‘a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.’)

1. All language is stereotyped

I suggest that language is always based on stereotypes. Language is general, it is based on very general categories. When I say ‘go’ or ‘red’ or ‘tree’ these are alarmingly imprecise terms. We each have a stereotyped (‘widely held and simplified’) impression of what ‘go’ or ‘red’ or ‘tree’ mean. Specific enough to make communication possible, but vague enough to contain a wide variety of personal connotations, memories and meanings. Language is always, in this sense, a compromise with reality.

When anyone speaks or writes or reads, they bring to their language a wealth of experiences which include not only what they have personally seen and experienced, but what they’ve read, and for the last few generations, what they’ve seen on TV and in the movies and, nowadays, all over the internet and social media.

In other words, if you were test of how accurate most people’s ideas are about any subject you care to choose, when tested against ‘reality’, I bet you’d find that all of us are adrift, askew, influenced by family, friends, early experiences, what we’ve read or watched etc, so as to harbour personal opinions which are, more often than not, generalised and inaccurate.

To recap: in order for language to work, it requires a high level of generalisation, which comes close to the notion of stereotype, of a simplification of the multifarious, continually changing reality which our senses present to us.

2. All fictions are stereotyped

Building on the notion that stereotypes are required for language to even function, I’d then suggest that stereotypes (‘widely held and simplified’ opinions about people or things) are necessary for all fictions to work. In a sense most fictional characters are types. Especially in genre fiction, in the adventure stories of the 1890s I’ve been writing about, it’s widely accepted that the characters are often cardboard thin; the interest isn’t in their interior life but in what happens to them; in external events and adventures.

The most basic form of fictional stereotyping is dividing characters into good guys and bad guys. Throughout written literature good guys and bad guys proliferate, starting with the heroes celebrated by Homer and the pious kings and prophets celebrated by the writers of the Bible, at about the same time (let’s say 500 BC).

For most of its history literature has been tied up with a strong sense of morality, meaning readers or viewers of plays are supposed to assess and judge the characters depicted. Often narrators or characters explicitly ask us to do just that.

What we consider ‘literature’ can be defined as works that give a bit more complex depictions of human psychology, which show people as neither black or white but complex characters, often caught in difficult situations. That’s why we all look back to the Greek tragedies as the beginning of this kind of ‘serious’ literature, because even 2,400 years ago writers and audiences were stimulated by the depiction of complex moral dilemmas. But most classical and pretty much all Christian literature, from the Dark Ages to the 18th century, embodied and promoted relatively straightforward, schematic concepts of morality which relied – I’m arguing – on essentially stereotypical characters.

In Chaucer holiness and virtue, piety and devoutness are praised, as in his beautiful if conventional dream visions. Chaucer’s works become more ‘literary’ when they dramatise conflicting moral schemas, such as setting the Wife of Bath’s attractive vigour and sassiness against traditional Christian notions of chastity and restraint.

Similarly, Shakespeare is universally considered great literature, partly because of his extraordinary use of language, but centrally because of the unparalleled psychological complexity of the characters he creates. There’s a pretty simple scale from cardboard characters = pulp at one end, through to complex characters = literature, at the other.

In the mid-nineteenth century, some writers started to try and wriggle loose from the constraints of the oppressive moralising of Victorian society. Grown-ups like Flaubert and Maupassant in France or the rather more childish Oscar Wilde in Britain, were among the many writers claiming that good literature has nothing to do with ‘morality’, and should be judged purely on style and technical achievement. But they were struggling against their own instincts. Flaubert’s masterpiece, Madame Bovary, is a highly moralistic story of a woman who brings about her own ruin, and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is a fairy tale with a childlike moral (an innocent young man, led astray, ultimately gets his come-uppance).

Although by 1900, when Kim was written, there was already an enormous, an incomprehensibly huge variety of fictions, ranging from pulp Westerns, horror, fantasy and sensation stories, countless types of plays, operettas and music hall skits, all the way through to the subtlety and sophistication of a Henry James novel – but deep down, almost all these fictions operated within this framework of moral meaning.

It’s very hard to escape the prison-house of morality. It’s almost impossible for us to stop judging on a strongly moral basis, the characters and storylines in all the cultural products we’re faced with, whether plays and TV shows, films and books.

Back to Said’s book and I would suggest that his entire critique of ‘Orientalism’ is itself based on an pretty traditional moral claim, that the Orientalists were (and are) being unfair in negatively stereotyping ‘Orientals’ in order to justify conquering and ruling them and that, in order to be more fair, in order to create a fairer, more just world, we need to overturn these prejudices and biases. Despite Said’s awesome display of erudition and sustained attempts to write like a Parisian intellectual it is, in the end, an almost playground level of moral thinking.

3. Adventure fiction depends on stereotypes

Thirdly, Kim is an adventure story for boys. To treat it as an academic study of Indian society and find fault with it, to accuse it of promoting racist stereotypes, is surely as inappropriate as accusing Star Wars of promoting scientific errors or pointing out that the Sherlock Holmes stories rely on pretty improbable coincidences.

They are adventure stories, they are entertainments, and these genres, by definition, simplify things – they rely on simple plots, simple motivations, simple psychology and simple characters.

I agree with Said’s broad point, that Kim could be seen as just one cog in a vast interlocking cultural machine, a huge, patronising and basically racist worldview which defined ‘Orientals’ without any agreement or participation by them, which wrote their scripts for them, invented their characters for them, gave them opinions and actions and generally portrayed them in ways which, either blatantly or subtly, helped to underpin Western hegemony over ‘the Orient’. I agree with his basic point.

I’m just adding my own perspective on Said’s massive critique, which is to that it’s difficult to say anything about anything which doesn’t, at some level, rely on the generalising (what I’ve called ‘stereotyping’) qualities 1) of language itself, 2) of almost any fiction, and 3) of adventure fiction in particular.

The boy hero (Kim), the remote but authoritative father figure (Creighton), the tough assistant (Ali), the bookish colleague (Babu), the man who’s good with gadgets (Lurgan), just writing the list makes me realise how these stereotypical roles anticipate James Bond (boy hero), his father figure (M), his tough assistant (Felix Leiter), the gadget guy (Q) and so on. Lots of difference in surface detail, same underlying archetypes.

4. Kim is surprisingly unstereotypical

Mentioning the three types of simplification or stereotypicality generally found in this kind of adventure yarn helps to highlight a surprising result, which is the extent to which Kim is very much not a work of stereotypes and clichés. On the contrary, Kim tends towards the ‘literature’ end of the spectrum (as I’ve sketchily defined it above) precisely because it is unexpectedly complex, full of variegated detail, full of contradictions which surprise the reader.

Indian profusion i.e. not a simple binary

The whole purpose of Kim the novel is that it revels in the sheer profusion of Indian life, in its countless ethnic groups and religions and languages. It is littered with characters from different provinces and racial groups and religions, careers and professions.

The book contains a profusion of places – Kim is constantly on the move himself, so we directly get to see Lahore, Lucknow, Benares and Simla, Bombay, Karachi and Umballa, with smaller towns in between – but other characters refer to incidents elsewhere such as picking up the secret message left at Chotra or incidents right up on the North-West frontier, so that it (deliberately) gives the reader a sense of geographic breadth and variety.

And the text itself is absolutely packed with what feels like as many Indian phrases Kipling could cram into it, from multiple Indian languages, sometimes embedded in the narrative passages but absolutely infesting the dialogue and direct speech, almost every speech by any character including at least one native term.

My point being that Said’s repeated accusation against the Orientalist mindset is that it erected an entirely factitious binary opposition between ‘East’ and ‘West’ and ignored the complexity of actual peoples on the ground. On that axis, Kim is anti-Orientalist in the way that that hoary old binary is swamped and erased by the overwhelming complexity and confusion of races, religions, languages and characters which flood the text. At some points some characters do voice sentiments about how the white man will never understand ‘the Oriental’ etc but the characters who say that are implied to be in error, lesser characters, obtuse white characters, who are outside the marvellous world Kim inhabits.

Anti-white passages

Kipling very obviously plays with stereotypes, sometimes giving us what we expect, sometimes playing against expectation. Thus if he was directly and simply the imperial propagandist that critics make him out to be, then all the British characters would be good and a representative of Britain’s state religion, the Church of England, would be expected to be a shining beacon of morality. Instead Kipling goes out of his way to portray the Anglican chaplain as both physically and morally thin and pinched, unimaginative and bigoted.

Elsewhere British officials are routinely criticised by Indian characters for being ignorant, bad administrators, quick to show off their knowledge of horses (when they don’t know what they’re talking about), or easily hoodwinked (like the officer in charge of police searching the train for agent E23 in chapter 12) precisely because they rely on racial stereotypes, predictable narrow expectations, and so can be played.

Babu Hurree Chunder Mookerjee unexpectedly complex

Admittedly, the head of ‘the Department’, Colonel Creighton, is depicted as a ramrod-backed beacon of intelligence and discretion. It’s not difficult to see that he is a kind of moral foundation to the narrative whose efficiency and integrity justifies British imperial rule as just and wise and fair – but that’s precisely why he’s kept in the background, playing a surprisingly peripheral role.

More typical of a Kipling character playing against type is the Babu Hurree Chunder Mookerjee. Babu is a form of address for a Brahmin but by 1900 it had become a term of abuse by the English, suggesting an Indian who’s had some Western education, and aspires to Western cultural values, but falls hopelessly and embarrassingly short.

And indeed, to begin with, this is how Mookerjee is presented, with Kipling playing his half-educated speech, his references to European thinkers he only part understands and so on, for laughs. And, in our body-image-conscious times it may be worth pointing out the Babu is presented as fat with big fat wobbly legs, a back like jelly, and that this also is, initially, part of the barrage of mockery he’s subjected to. But, as the story progresses, Kim, and the reader, slowly come to respect his abilities more and more, until he plays a hero’s part in accompanying the Russian and French spies through the mountains to Simla, despite them abusing and beating him, putting up with all that and the threat of worse, to ensure that they are chaperoned into the heart of the Raj’s security setup where they can be safely monitored. Kim explicitly says that, completely contrary to the stereotypical figure of the fat cowardly Bengali Babu, Mookerjee is fat, and continues to make comically half-educated remarks, but is in fact deeply brave and, what matters most to Kipling, dutiful.

Indian piety easily trumps Western religion

To go back to the chaplain, it’s not just Bennett who is held up to scrutiny and found wanting, it is his entire religion, the religion of Westerners, Christianity itself, which is fairly regularly mentioned and 100% of the time seen as inferior to Indian religions.

Take the fight with the foreign spies in the mountains, where the Russian’s supposed Christianity is shown to be a poor, thin, hypocritical thing which allows a bully to beat up an old man, compared to a) the superstitious but infinitely more ‘moral’ response of the mountain coolies or shikarri for whom hitting a holy man is inconceivable blasphemy, and b) the genuine depth of the lama’s Buddhist faith. The way the lama has a moment of weakness before insisting on ordering the coolies not to go back down and take revenge on the two foreigners (i.e. shoot them) has genuine psychological veracity and shows a moral depth and principle absent in almost all the white characters.

In praise of Buddhism

And, to stay on religion, there is, of course, the end of the novel which, in a startling move, appears to authenticate and validate Buddhist belief. Kipling in all seriousness describes the lama’s moment of nirvana when he feels his soul leaving his body, leaving the constraints of time and place, and touching the Great Soul of the Universe. Christianity is nowhere to be seen. The lama’s religious epiphany is profoundly moving and believable.

A review of these four or five elements explains why I don’t see how a fiction which mocks the British authorities, mocks British religion and throws itself wholeheartedly behind the wisdom and restraint and morality and religious superiority of India’s native peoples, can, on the face of it, be described as simply upholding British hegemony. It may well, eventually, deep down, be premised on British rule in India, but in a rather more subtle and interesting way, by means of its fundamental assumptions.

The cure

The cure for generalisations from all sides i.e. stereotyping, whether racial, sexist and so on, is to be as specific as you can be, about individuals, about situations, and about texts.

That’s why I pay such close attention to the exact wording of texts and quote so extensively from works I’m reviewing. The more precise you are to the actual words of the text, the more enjoyable, strange, often unexpected and pleasurable the experience. The further you move away from the text, the more likely you are to start generalising, the more likely you are to give in to moralising generalisations. In Wilde’s day the authorities criticised his books for being ‘decadent’ and ‘corrupting’ (which, in fact, in one sense, they were). In 2023 woke academics criticise books for being ‘sexist’ and ‘racist’ (which, in fact, they often are). Different terminology, but the same impulse to judge.

Doesn’t mean that all of these books, old and new, beneath whatever elements we disapprove of, don’t also contain interesting and enjoyable uses of language and the entire point of literature, in my view, is to entertain the widest possible range of human thoughts, feelings, characters, situations, thoughts and so on. It’s about being open. Which is why I’m against people who say ban this or rewrite that. Whether authoritarian regimes or revisionist academics or anxious publishers, they are against openness. They are on the side of closing down.

At the highest level of generalisation, when you are furthest removed from the strangeness and unpredictability of the text, you get lazy journalists or literary critics simply dismissing Kipling as ‘racist’ or ‘orientalist’, without knowing or caring for the complex interplay of linguistic elements in his actual texts. But it’s precisely the interplay and unexpectednesses which those kind of people ignore in order to make their political points, which make literature worthwhile.

In fictions, characters stereotype each other

The modern author has to be careful not to offend against modern concerns about gender or racial stereotyping. But their characters can. Fictional characters are allowed to think and talk like actual people actually do. And so part of the enjoyable complexity of Kim is that much of the ‘stereotyping’ where it goes on, isn’t done by the author but by the characters, and on the whole by the Indians themselves. They come from a huge and diverse country where, as in many nineteenth century countries, people were far more attached to their family, their clan, their religion and their region than they were to any notion of the ‘nation state’. And so part of the fun of the story is listening to characters taking each other down and knowingly, comically, satirically making generalisations about this or that regional or religious or business or gender type.

I think it’s still alright for us in England, in 2023, to take the mickey out of Scotsmen for liking a wee dram, or Yorkshiremen for being boomingly convinced of their county’s superiority, or Welshmen for being peevish, or bankers for being braying Hoorays, Germans for being Teutonically efficient, the French for shrugging their shoulders and saying ‘Bouf!’, and so on. Same here, a hundred years ago, in India, where certain ethnic or regional groups were associated with certain characteristics, and part of the enjoyment of the book is reading about their views about each other, done with a pleasurable absence of modern self consciousness, done, on the whole, for comedic ends.

I’ve no idea whether any of it is ‘true’, I’ve only a shaky grasp who any of these people are or what part of India they come from, but the use of stereotypes by the characters themselves, between themselves, is one more way the text works to make the reader feel part of that world. Bergson famously said there’s something robotic about comedy, about the predictability of character types and behaviour, and so the deployment of so many types, is not a negative thing: it’s comic and welcoming.

Pathans

‘Trust a snake before an harlot, and an harlot before a Pathan.’

Mahbub Ali is a Pathan and depicted as being quick to anger but quick also to forgive. His Pathan-ness is frequently referred to as making him a certain type.

Jats

He picked up his lathi – a five-foot male-bamboo ringed with bands of polished iron – and flourished it in the air. ‘The Jats are called quarrelsome, but that is not true. Except when we are crossed, we are like our own buffaloes.’

Sikhs

One advantage of the Secret Service is that it has no worrying audit. That Service is ludicrously starved, of course, but the funds are administered by a few men who do not call for vouchers or present itemised accounts. Mahbub’s eyes lighted with almost a Sikh’s love of money. (p.148)

Just a few examples of the many generalisations the author, or his characters, make about the many, many races which lived in Victorian India.

The Irish

And don’t forget that the single ‘race’ which Kipling makes most generalisations about isn’t Indian at all, but much closer to home, the Irish, or ‘the Rishti’, as Kim puts it.

It is a central fact of the entire narrative that Kim is not of English descent, but of the much more interesting and colourful Irish descent. ‘Colourful’ because there was a widespread view at the time (and still is to this day, among many Irish people I know or see in the media) that the Irish are more passionate, uninhibited, more in touch with their feelings (as we’ve said since the 1960s) than the uptight, emotionally constipated English, all vicars and maiden aunts.

This binary comes over very starkly in the contrast between the quick-to-judgement, unsympathetic English chaplain, Bennett, and the much more sympathetic and kindly Irish Catholic priest, Father Victor, a difference Bennett himself is uneasily aware of:

It was noticeable that whenever the Church of England dealt with a human problem she was very likely to call in the Church of Rome. Bennett’s official abhorrence of ‘the Scarlet Woman’ [derogatory Protestant term for the Catholic Church] and all her ways was only equalled by his private respect for Father Victor.

The word ‘Irish’ occurs nine times in the text:

Kim followed [the lama] like a shadow. What he had overheard excited him wildly. This man was entirely new to all his experience, and he meant to investigate further, precisely as he would have investigated a new building or a strange festival in Lahore city. The lama was his trove, and he purposed to take possession. Kim’s mother had been Irish, too.

Which means he was Irish on his father and mother’s side as well, the implication being that he is curious, excitable, imaginative, and prepared to cross boundaries and break rules as a purely English boy probably wouldn’t. Of his secret meeting with Creighton:

Kim flipped the wad of folded paper into the air, and it fell in the path beside the man [Creighton], who put his foot on it as a gardener came round the corner. When the servant passed he picked it up, dropped a rupee – Kim could hear the clink – and strode into the house, never turning round. Swiftly Kim took up the money; but for all his training, he was Irish enough by birth to reckon silver the least part of any game. What he desired was the visible effect of action.

He is up for what Irish people still, I believe, call the craic, the fun, the action, the excitement. Viewed from one perspective, Kim can be seen as a kind of embodiment of the craic, always up for naughtiness, scampishness, kicking against restraints and sensibleness but, in his own way, deeply reliable and dutiful. Oh and hot-headed, as in the climactic scene where the Russian spy hits Kim’s beloved lama.

Before Kim could ward him off, the Russian struck the old man full on the face. Next instant he was rolling over and over downhill with Kim at his throat. The blow had waked every unknown Irish devil in the boy’s blood, and the sudden fall of his enemy did the rest.

As it happens the last mention of ‘Irish’ in the text, presumably deliberately, collates both the Irish and the Oriental in Kim’s make-up. After the fight they all hide in the forest.

They [the coolies] arranged and re-arranged their artless little plans for another hour, while Kim shivered with cold and pride. The humour of the situation tickled the Irish and the Oriental in his soul.

Asiatic, Oriental and the East

Lastly, a detailed look at the most ‘stereotyping’ or words, the key words Said highlights in his study. I collected mentions of these key words – ‘Asiatic’ occurs 15 times, ‘Oriental’ 15 times, ‘the East’ 9 times – to see what Kipling’s use of them shows, if anything.

Asiatic

Asiatics do not wink when they have outmanoeuvred an enemy, but as Mahbub Ali cleared his throat, tightened his belt, and staggered forth under the early morning stars, he came very near to it.

Kim dived into the happy Asiatic disorder which, if you only allow time, will bring you everything that a simple man needs.

He threw the blanket off his face, and raised himself suddenly with the terrible, bubbling, meaningless yell of the Asiatic roused by nightmare. ‘Urr-urr-urr-urr! Ya-la-la-la-la! Narain! The churel! The churel!’

A very few white people, but many Asiatics, can throw themselves into a mazement as it were by repeating their own names over and over again to themselves, letting the mind go free upon speculation as to what is called personal identity.

E23, with relaxed mouth, gave himself up to the opium that is meat, tobacco, and medicine to the spent Asiatic.

The Englishman is not, as a rule, familiar with the Asiatic…

Kissing is practically unknown among Asiatics, which may have been the reason that she leaned back with wide-open eyes and a face of panic.

She brewed drinks, in some mysterious Asiatic equivalent to the still-room—drenches that smelt pestilently and tasted worse.

I’m not really qualified to say whether any of these passages are ‘racist’ or not. Some of them seem pretty factual: when I went down into the streets of Bombay I was overwhelmed by what seemed to me to be wild disorder; as to the meditation, my impression is that this is something Indians, Tibetans et al brought up in the tradition do better than Westerners who learn it late. It seems pretty reasonable to suggest that Englishmen are not, on the whole, familiar with Asians (though these days, I appreciate, many millions of Englishmen are Asians.)

What immediately struck me about them is how much Kipling wants to be regarded as an expert. They seem less about asserting the West’s ‘hegemony’ over Indian subjects, than asserting Kipling’s hegemony over this subject matter. It sounds more to me like an expert flourishing his credentials and bolstering his brand. To go a bit further in this direction, it’s almost like his flaunting of his expertise amounts to a sales pitch.

Oriental

Those Kings’ Prime Ministers were seriously annoyed and took steps, after the Oriental fashion. They suspected, among many others, the bullying, red-bearded horse-dealer whose caravans ploughed through their fastnesses belly-deep in snow. At least, his caravan that season had been ambushed and shot at twice on the way down.

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.

Now and again a night train roared along the metals within twenty feet of him; but he had all the Oriental’s indifference to mere noise, and it did not even weave a dream through his slumber.

The gentlemen were delighted. One was visibly French, the other Russian, but they spoke English not much inferior to the Babu’s. They begged his kind offices. Their native servants had gone sick at Leh. They had hurried on because they were anxious to bring the spoils of the chase to Simla ere the skins grew moth-eaten. They bore a general letter of introduction (the Babu salaamed to it orientally) to all Government officials.

These are a bit more pejorative, aren’t they? Kipling generalises that ‘Orientals’:

take revenge in a violent and underhand manner
are proficient liars

No fewer than four of them focus on ‘the Oriental’s’ poor sense of time or lack of sense of urgency, the frantic time obsession which hag-rides so many Westerners to this day:

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.

He [the lama] stood in a gigantic stone hall [of Lahore railway station] paved, it seemed, with the sheeted dead third-class passengers who had taken their tickets overnight and were sleeping in the waiting-rooms. All hours of the twenty-four are alike to Orientals, and their passenger traffic is regulated accordingly.

[When Kim tries to run away from the college] Trousers and jacket crippled body and mind alike so he abandoned the project and fell back, Oriental-fashion, on time and chance.

Swiftly – as Orientals understand speed – with long explanations, with abuse and windy talk, carelessly, amid a hundred checks for little things forgotten, the untidy camp broke up and led the half-dozen stiff and fretful horses along the Kalka road in the fresh of the rain-swept dawn.

On the other hand it’s important that this sentiment:

‘My experience is that one can never fathom the Oriental mind. Now, Kimball, I wish you to tell this man what I say word for word.’

Is put into the mouth of the Anglican vicar, Bennett, who is portrayed as narrow-minded and bigoted. Similarly, another generalisation about ‘Orientals’ is put into the mouth of the Russian spy, talking about Mookerjee’s half-educated character:

‘He represents in petto India in transition – the monstrous hybridism of East and West,’ the Russian replied. ‘It is we who can deal with Orientals.’

This is the wrong kind of generalising; or generalising by someone who has not acquired the experience and authority for such a statement. Which is made evident when the Russian makes the scandalous blasphemy of grabbing for the lama’s diagram and then punching him in the face when he resists, resulting in Kim jumping on him, rolling him downhill, smashing his head against a rock and kicking him in the nuts. Plus the spies’ loss of their entire eight months’ worth of reconnaissance work. Quite clearly, the narrative is telling us, only some people are allowed to make these kinds of sweeping generalisations. People in the know. Throughout his life Kipling bridled at the kind of people who made sweeping generalisations about British India or imperialism without ever having stepped outside Britain. Nothing spurred him to anger quicker than ignorant generalisations.

Finally this, the last instance of the word in the book is, surely, admiring.

He [Mukkerjee] stowed the entire trove [the spies’ paperwork] about his body, as only Orientals can.

How cool is that, the ability to stash stuff in the capacious folds of your Indian outfit. How much more interesting than a jacket with pockets.

The East

The most frequent use of ‘the East’ comes attached to the idea, already mentioned, that life is slower, people less time-harried, in the East than the alienated West. Two instances here combine with the three cited above, to make it Kipling’s most frequent generalisation (out of these three keywords, anyway):

Ticket-collecting is a slow business in the East, where people secrete their tickets in all sorts of curious places.

The Oswal, at peace with mankind, carried the message into the darkness behind him, and the easy, uncounted Eastern minutes slid by; for the lama was asleep in his cell, and no priest would wake him.

As to Kipling’s attribution of distinctive behaviours to the East, I’ve no idea whether this is true:

The old man was off his pony in an instant, and they embraced as do father and son in the East.

The old lady had retreated behind her curtains, but mixed most freely in the talk, her servants arguing with and contradicting her as servants do throughout the East.

I personally have come across a love of bartering in India and Pakistan which you don’t find at all in England

‘I sell and – I buy.’ Mahbub took a four-anna piece out of his belt and held it up. ‘Eight!’ said Kim, mechanically following the huckster instinct of the East.

And it seems reasonable to describe the many scents and perfumes found in shops and temples:

Kim was conscious that beyond the circle of light the room was full of things that smelt like all the temples of all the East. A whiff of musk, a puff of sandal-wood, and a breath of sickly jessamine-oil caught his opened nostrils.

Last word. Kim and the lama arrive at a new village, where:

There they told their tale – a new one each evening so far as Kim was concerned – and there were they made welcome, either by priest or headman, after the custom of the kindly East.

Some readers could take this as patronising and racist. But I read it as admiring and complimentary. It is redolent of kindness and the spirit of love – love of people and wonders and life and adventures –which, in my opinion, above everything else, suffuses this marvellous, life-affirming novel.

Credit

Kim was serialised in Cassell’s Magazine from January to November 1901, and first published in book form by Macmillan & Co. Ltd in October 1901. All references are to the 2002 Norton Critical Edition edited by Zohreh T. Sullivan.

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by Simon on September 15, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in India, Literary criticism

Tagged Adventure fiction, adventure stories, Anti-white, Asiatic, Babu, Babu Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, Bible, Bombay, Brahmin, Britain, British hegemony, British rule, Buddhism, Cassell's Magazine, Catholic church, Catholic priest, Chaucer, Christian literature, Christianity, Church of England, Colonel Creighton, coolies, E23, East and West, Edward Said, eighteenth century, Father Victor, fiction, fictional characters, Flaubert, France, genre fiction, Greek tragedies, Henry James, Homer, imperial conquest, imperialism, India, Indiana Jones, Irish, Jats, Kim, Kipling, Leh, Macmillan & Co. Ltd, Madame Bovary, Mahbub Ali, Maupassant, Middle East, morality, nineteenth century, Norton Critical Edition, Oriental, Orientalism, Orientals, Oscar Wilde, Pathan, Pathans, pulp fiction, Rudyard Kipling, Secret Service, Shakespeare, shikari, Sikhs, Star Wars, stereotypes, stereotyping, the Department, the East, the Kalka road, the Orient, The Oswal, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Rishti, trope, Victorian India, Western hegemony, Western imperialism, Western scholars, Wife of Bath, Zohreh T. Sullivan

Posted by Simon on September 15, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/09/15/kim-and-orientalism/

Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901) part 2

‘Alas! It is a great and terrible world.’
(The lama’s catchphrase)

In part one of this review I summarised Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 novel, Kim, chapters 1 to 9, picking out interesting quotes, and commenting. This part picks up the summary half way through the novel i.e at chapter 10. It’s not just half way through, though. Chapter ten introduces four elements which change our view of the narrative.

1. For the first time the narrator refers to all the events of the story as not being in the exciting present, following the day-by-day, hour-by-hour exploits of our daring young hero, but in the historic past. Talking about a report Kim writes for his mentor Mahbub Ali, the narrator says:

The report in its unmistakable St Xavier’s running script, and the brown, yellow, and lake-daubed map, was on hand a few years ago (a careless clerk filed it with the rough notes of E’s second Seistan survey), but by now the pencil characters must be almost illegible. (p.144)

This completely changed my attitude to the story, converting it from a tale of the present to one of the past (regarded from Kipling’s time), and so doubly past: from our time back to the time of writing and publishing (1901) and then, further back, by a distance that allows secret reports to be openly published and its writing to fade i.e. an appreciable period.

2. The second thing is related to the first, which is that the narrative (not quite for the first time but for in the first really sustained way) steps back from describing the breathless present, to take a more lofty overview of events. Previously the narrator had reported virtually every scrap of dialogue between Kim and his interlocutors; now the narrator steps back and uses just a few paragraphs to convey the passage of no fewer than three years of Kim’s life, covering his school career at St Xavier’s College. In term time he learns white boy subjects like reading, writing and ‘rithmetic, along with Latin and cricket. In holiday time he accompanies Agent C25, otherwise known as Mahbub Ali, well-known Pathan horse trader, on his ‘business’ trips to various parts of India, all the time learning spycraft on the job. Or he goes to stay with the supposed jeweller Lurgan Sahib up in Simla, where he is instructed in the arts of disguise and blending in.

In other words, after this brief overview of the passage of time, events from chapter ten onwards occur three years later than the events of the first half. We are told that Kim is now 16 years old (p.149).

3. Part of this change involves a switch from direct speech – the overwhelming majority of the text to date has been direct speech i.e. dialogue – to narrative description. It’s like stepping off a fast-moving tram onto the pavement. Suddenly the text has a completely different feel.

4. Lastly, it’s also at the start of chapter 10 that Mahbub gives Kim a gun. A gun.

A mother-of-pearl, nickel-plated, self-extracting .450 revolver.

Suddenly, at a stroke, a story which had been about a 10 or 11 year old boy having innocent adventures turns into a spy story with guns. Guns and knives had, albeit obliquely, occurred earlier, specifically in the scene where Kim warns Ali that two enemy agents are lying in wait to shoot him outside he and his employees’ campment at Lucknow railway station (chapter 8). But with Ali’s ceremonial presentation to Kim of his own gun, suddenly the story seems to have more in common with Raymond Chandler than the innocent schoolboy adventures of Stevenson or Rider Haggard.

Plot summary from chapter 10

Chapter 10

Head of ‘the Department’ Colonel Creighton and two of his best native operatives, Ali and Lurgan, have a summit conference about Kim’s future. The latter pair think Creighton should have been using Kim on missions years ago. For the first (and only) time the phrase ‘Secret Service’ is used. The phrase ‘Great Game’ had cropped up only twice before in the text (‘the Great Game that never ceases day and night, throughout India’); from now on it occurs 15 times.

In Lucknow, Ali takes Kim to visit Huneefa the blind hoori who uses her stain to colour the now-pale Kim back to a native brown. Turns out she is also a witch or enchantress and, as Kim passes out due to heavy soporifics, she casts spells to keep traditional devils away from him. Also turns out that the obese Babu is out on the balcony observing proceedings (with repugnance). He and Ali are both a bit freaked out by the genuine witch intensity Huneefa.

So Colonel Creighton has agreed that Kim can finally definitively leave St Xavier’s. Ali supervises him being painted brown and then clothed in native dress. The plan is to let him wander the roads with his lama for another 6 months as a probationary period.

Chapter 11

So Kim is told he may travel to Tirthankars’ Temple, Benares for a happy reunion with his master, so he catches a train, with the usual casual encounters with other travellers which make the book feel so rich and full.

When he arrives at the Jain temple, the lama is predictably unemotional, shows Kim his cell, explains his devotions, explaining that he has wandered here and yon but many dreams have told him that he would never find the River of Life until he was reunited with his chela. And so he has patiently waited three years for their reunion.

He treats the fevered child of a desperate father, a Jat from Jullundur, with quinine and beef essence, curing him, but with delicacy and grace awards the credit to the god of the Jains, the lama’s hosts, who are flattered. Kipling repeatedly describes the delicacy and respect of the various native traditions, and generally contrasts them with white people’s blundering clumsiness e.g. Bennett the chaplain.

When Kim rises to ‘bless’ the child we discover that he is now, aged 16, ‘tall and slim’, like all male heroes should be (p.164)

The lama decides they will head north, so Kim arranges a train ticket. The Bankoh with the sick son accompanies them. On the train they meet ‘a mean, lean little person – a Mahratta’, who uses the special rhythm of speech and displays his amulet, to let Kim know he is one of the Secret Service, agent E23. He tells a real espionage story of travelling South with a colleague to collect vital information, they are set upon and his colleague killed, he just has time to bury the vital document ‘under the Queen’s Stone, at Chitor’, then he is chased all over central India by enemy agents, one of whom finally attacks and cuts him, before he makes his getaway onto the current train, cut and bleeding and shaking in terror.

Kim puts all his skills of disguise and uses the paintbox Lurgan gave him, to utterly transform E23.

In place of the tremulous, shrinking trader there lolled against the corner an all but naked, ash-smeared, ochre-barred, dusty-haired Saddhu, his swollen eyes –opium takes quick effect on an empty stomach –luminous with insolence and bestial lust, his legs crossed under him, Kim’s brown rosary round his neck, and a scant yard of worn, flowered chintz on his shoulders. (p.171)

Chapter 12

They arrive at Delhi station where a young British officer is leading a group of native policemen in a search for E23. The thing is, the opposition agents have framed him for a murder down South and his picture and description have been widely circulated, to police and officialdom outside ‘the Department’. That’s why Kim performed his makeup magic on the train.

Now the English officer, searching through the train, comes to their compartment, sees a half-naked Saddhu (E23 in disguise), a lama meditating, his chela yakking, and a big hairy peasant (the man with the sick infant) and – with what this book has to taught us to be characteristic English ignorance – dismisses them:

‘Nothing here but a parcel of holy-bolies,’ said the Englishman aloud, and passed on.’

In the immense crowd of Delhi station, E23 sees a tall British officer and contrives to blunder into him, let fly a stream of abuse at which the officer arrests him. E23 just has time to explain that this is Strickland, ‘one of us’, an authority figure who appears in other Kipling stories.

The narrator intervenes to indicate the web of connections which makes up the Great Game. Soon a telegram is going from Strickland’s office in Delhi to agents in Chitor who dig up the letter, and the information, he tells us, has consequences which ripple as far afield as the Ottoman Sultan.

Meanwhile, Kim and the lama set off on foot heading north from Delhi with the foothills of the Himalayas in the background, in scenes of village life beautifully illustrated by Kipling. They are in the neighbourhood of the matron of Hulu who sends servants to invite them to her house. Here there are comic scenes as this domineering woman bosses her household and the lama, while Kim giggles at his discomfort. I realised she’s a bit like Tintin’s Madame Castafiore, imperious, bossy but loveable.

One evening she introduces them to a worker of charms who has healed her sick grandson, before departing grandly in a servant-held palanquin to tour her villagers. At which point the medicine man reveals he is none other than the obese Hurree Babu.

Three things. Babu first of all reveals that it was he who was sent down to Chitor to retrieve the buried document. He tells Kim how impressed everyone in ‘the Department’ was by his quick thinking on the train, in disguising and thus saving E23.

Then he tells him a new situation. Three years earlier the British Army, including the Mavericks, had marched off to fight, in what I take to have been the Second Afghan War (1878 to 1880). At the peace some of the northern princedoms had undertaken to have roads built. Hurree supervised the building but slowly learned that the princes, and the local coolies, all thought of the roads as being prepared for invading Russians. Now, Hurree tells him, two spies have been sent by Russia, one a Russian and one a Frenchman, under cover of a hunting expedition, to spy out the lie of the land, to make maps of the area, to prepare the way, maybe, for an invading army.

Babu says he would simply poison them and be done but the British government with its ludicrous sense of fair play is allowing them to visit and keep up the front of mere hunters. But:

‘They are Russians, and highly unscrupulous people.’

Nothing changes, then. So Hurree asks Kim to head north with him to deal with these Russkies, but not travelling together. Hurree will go ahead and asks Kim to persuade the lama to head northwards, but at a day’s march behind them, so nobody thinks they’re connected. Which is what they do.

Chapter 13

Lovely descriptions of walking up into the foothills of the Himalayas, the villages, the wildlife, the clean air, the bracingly steep slopes. The lama grows stronger as he scents the mountain air of his Tibetan homeland.

Hurree Babu overtakes them and they discuss plans. He tells them to follow his umbrella, which he will keep open at all times, then hurries past them. A few days later he catches up with the two foreign spies up in the mountains. They had bullied the 11 coolies lent them by an independent Rajah one time too many, after a particularly scary thunderstorm, and the servants had melted into the forest. At this propitious moment the Babu appeared and posed as the ‘agent for His Royal Highness, the Rajah of Rampur.’ The Russian and Frenchman are delighted.

He lets them get him drunk and complains more and more about the perfidious British i.e. lulling them into thinking he can be suborned to their cause.

For the first time we see and hear the two foreign spies. Why is one Russian, one French? Because, according to the notes, the Paranoid party in the British administration saw a threat not only from Russia via the North-West Frontier, but (far more remotely) from France, which was annexing parts of China and, it was feared, might attempt an attack on India through Tibet.

The choice of nationalities is made, then, for Kipling’s propaganda purposes. Their characters and conversation are equally propagandistic. They are made to systematically under-estimate the British, taking their (the British) apparent openness to strange travellers as weakness; and to over-estimate their (the Russian and French) understanding of ‘the Oriental mind’. Says the Russian:

‘It is we who can deal with Orientals.’

This kind of hubris, of unjustified vaunting, doesn’t go unpunished in Kipling. wo days later, they come across the lama sitting with the diagram explaining his religion, expounding it to Kim. The foreigners ask who they are. Babu explains this is a famous local holy man, and he will expound the mysteries of Buddhism. The lama is delighted to do so, while Babu takes Kim aside and tells him the foreigners have all their reports – books and reports and maps – stored in a large kilta with the reddish top.

Suddenly – violence! The Russian wants the lama’s diagram, offers money, the lama inevitably refuses, the Russian seizes it and it tears. The lama goes for his metal pencase, the Russian punches him full in the face. All the coolies recoil in superstitious horror. While the lama reels back from the blow, Kim throws himself at the Russian’s throat, rolling down the hill a little, till he can bash the Russian’s head against a boulder. The Frenchman ran towards the lama, fumbling with his revolver as if to take him hostage, but is driven off by a barrage of stones from the coolies, who scoop up the wounded lama and all disappear into the forest, as dusk falls suddenly.

The Babu runs down to Kim, tells him to lay off the Russian, tells him to run and join the coolies in the forest, where they have taken the foreigners’ bags, get possession of the bag of maps. Kim stops bashing, turns and runs. The Frenchman fires and just misses him. For the first time Kim takes out his gun and fires it in anger, missing the Frenchman, then running on into the trees.

Now the Babu takes charge, begging the Frenchman to stop shooting, assisting the injured Russian to his feet.

Cut to the coolies in the fir trees. They are outraged by the act of sacrilege they’ve just seen; one of them points out they have the foreigners’ four rifles and could simply go down and shoot them dead. But the lama, after a moment’s hesitation, rises above the situation and his own injuries and preaches true Buddhist forbearance. No. NO, he commands the coolies who quickly back down. The foreigners’ anger and impiety will bring its own reward. They will be reincarnated as worms. Kim cheerfully chips in that he kicked the Russian in the groin as they tumbled down the hillside together.

No, the coolies will take the lama and Kim back to their village, Shamlegh-under-the-Snow. Kim realises that, despite his brave front, the lama is more badly shaken than he admits. His heart is racing. He feels dizzy. The coolies then discuss how they are going to divide the spoils because they have carried off the foreigners’ entire baggage. Here Kim is canny and doesn’t so much claim the big kilta, the basket containing eight month’s work by the foreigner’s, maps and notes etc, as plants the idea that it is full of bad juju and only he knows how to defuse and turn it away.

Cut to Hurree, a mile away, on the main track with the furious foreigners, alternately shouting at each other or berating him. So he play-acts the stupid native, submits to abuse and blows, the better to stick with them. And hugs himself with glee for he knows how he will guide the losers through scores of mountain villages where they will become a byword for humiliation and ineptitude.

Chapter 14

Arriving at their village the coolies divide their loot. The lama regrets giving way to anger and meditates all night. Next morning Kim meets the Woman of Shamlegh, bold and commanding. The men have gone and left her with the kilta. In her hut Kim spills it on the floor and discovers all the foreign spies’ equipment:

Survey-instruments, books, diaries, letters, maps, and queerly scented native correspondence. At the very bottom was an embroidered bag covering a sealed, gilded, and illuminated document such as one King sends to another.

The woman of Shamlegh flirts with Kim. He is now a tall handsome young man (of 16). She appears to offer Kim her ‘hand’ and headship of the village. Kim has to tactfully decline (p.214) and again on page 218. She is really smitten by his handsomeness. Love interest very unusual in Kipling.

He asks her to take a message to the Babu. Village children are monitoring their process along the forest road. Later she returns with a reply from the Babu that all is well, that Kim and the lama should retrace their steps, and he will overtake them, once he has escorted the foreigners as far as Simla.

The lama comes to sit with the other villagers, dangling their feet over the vertiginous edges of the mountain village, laughing and smoking. He confesses to Kim that he is very sad. It was a mistake to abandon his quest for the River of the Arrow and return to the hills. He comes of the hills and loves the hills but that is precisely why it was giving in to his desires and affections to return up here. And the blow he received was a sign from the Wheel that he was slipping back into the world of emotions. No, they must return down to the plains.

The woman of Shamlegh now reveals that she had an affair with a Sahib who fell sick, who took her to the nearest mission station, taught her the piano, taught her Christianity, left promising to come back but never did. Bitter, she returned to lord it over this shabby little village and its poor menfolk. She was beguiled by Kim because he reminded her of her Sahib, but Kim persists in saying he must return to the plains with his lama till she becomes angry and bitter. She mocks the lama’s weakness, he can barely support himself against the doorpost, and so whistles up some of her men who bring out a dooli, ‘the rude native litter of the Hills’, and carefully lift the ailing lama into it.

She and Kim squabble up to the departure but then he surprises her by dropping his disguise of assistant priest to a lama, taking her round the waist and kissing her, Sahib style, while saying ‘Good-bye, my dear.’ As the litter is carried down the hill by the grunting village men, Kim looks back and sees her, a small figure waving from the door of her hut.

Chapter 15

The final chapter, tying up loose ends. We are told how Hurree Babu continued his pose of obseqious guide till he had led the foreigners all the way to Simla, where he grovellingly begged a testimonial then disappeared. Reappeared in Shamlegh where the Woman told him about Kim and the lama’s departure in the litter, and he sets off to overtake them, having lost quite a lot of weight in all these peregrinations.

Now the lama is becoming ill. When the littermen leave them at the plain Kim becomes his staff, leaned on, carrying the foodbag, the bag with the foreigners’ secrets, begging in the morning, setting up the lama’s blanket, caring for the old man who is visibly dying.

The lama is full of gratitude. Kim says he loves him and has failed him and hasn’t done enough and bursts into tears. The lama raises him up and says he is the best of disciples.

Kim had sent message ahead to the widow of Kulu, the chatterbox who hosted them before. Now she sends a litter to collect the holy man and falls into long middle-aged flirtation which the lama takes in good part. Kim is so tired he’s ill. The widow vows to nurse him back to health.

She gives him a lockable strongbox for the treasures, brews him reviving potions and force them down him, then she and another old woman give him a truly Indian massage, after which Kim sleeps for 36 hours.

When he wakes, refreshed, it’s to discover the Babu has caught up with them and the lady of Kulu, the Sahiba, has been feeding him up, too. He has appeared in his long-running disguise as a ‘humble Dacca quack.’. Now Kim formally hands over the foreigners’ treasure trove to the Babu and it is a great weight off his mind. The responsibility has been stressing him.

We learn that it is clear proof of the treason of some of the northern princes, sucking up to the Tsar, so the British will replace them. And the Babu tells how he delivered them to Simla where they tried to establish their identity at the nearest bank, having made Russia a laughing stock among peasants along the entire route.

(It’s a slight puzzle in the plot that nothing further seems to happen to the two foreign spies. They are allowed to continue on their way.)

The Babu, in his comic way, announces that Mahbub Ali has come to the house too. He has to go now, to make report, but soon they will all rendezvous up at Lurgan Sahib’s in Simla, tell all their stories and have a party. This is all very convivial and happy.

Very interestingly, Kim is portrayed as being so shattered that he feels quite alienated from the world, almost as if he’s had a nervous breakdown. Nothing will focus, nothing makes sense. Then. Click. It all slots into place.

He looked upon the trees and the broad fields, with the thatched huts hidden among crops – looked with strange eyes unable to take up the size and proportion and use of things – stared for a still half-hour. All that while he felt, though he could not put it into words, that his soul was out of gear with its surroundings – a cog-wheel unconnected with any machinery, just like the idle cog-wheel of a cheap Beheea sugar-crusher laid by in a corner. The breezes fanned over him, the parrots shrieked at him, the noises of the populated house behind – squabbles, orders, and reproofs – hit on dead ears.

‘I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?’ His soul repeated it again and again.

He did not want to cry – had never felt less like crying in his life – but of a sudden easy, stupid tears trickled down his nose, and with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up anew on the world without. Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper proportion. Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and true.

It’s a rare bit of psychology, for Kipling. Kim goes outside for the first time in days and lies on the good earth and feels it healing him.

Cut to Mahbub and the lama returning from a walk. Turns out the lama stumbled into a nearby book a few days earlier, and Mahbub leapt in and stopped him from drowning. But the lama insists that this little brook was the River of the Arrow and that he has finally achieved enlightenment. Mahbub mocks, and makes sarcastic asides in his own language, but is impressed by the lama’s utter certainty. He even sees the funny side when the lama asks him to take up Buddhism and follow The Way.

Mahbub the Muslim Pathan stomps off about his business. The lama calmly sits down beside sleeping Kim and wakes him. He sits:

cross-legged figure, outlined jet-black against the lemon-coloured drift of light. So does the stone Bodhisat sit who looks down upon the patent self-registering turnstiles of the Lahore Museum. (p.239)

Neatly tying the scene back to the very opening outside the Lahore Museum. The lama proceeds to tell Kim in all seriousness how, while he (Kim) was recovering, he (the lama) went and sat under a tree, taking no food or water for two days and two nights. And then:

‘Upon the second night – so great was my reward – the wise Soul loosed itself from the silly Body and went free. This I have never before attained, though I have stood on the threshold of it. Consider, for it is a marvel!’

Freedom from the silly body and its illusions and devilries. Enlightenment. Kipling indulges in a powerfully persuasive vision of the lama’s soul flying completely free of his body, free of the constraints of time and place, and uniting with the Great Soul where everything is always now.

But he felt compelled to return to the body of this poor mortal, Teshoo Lama, in order to show his disciple the way. And the last spoken words of the story are his imprecation to Kim to follow him on the road to salvation:

‘Son of my Soul, I have wrenched my Soul back from the Threshold of Freedom to free thee from all sin – as I am free, and sinless! Just is the Wheel! Certain is our deliverance! Come!’

This is a very moving and persuasive end to this long rambling tale. It deliberately leaves completely up in the air the question whether Kim will follow the way and become a seeker for wisdom, or will at some point be reunited with Babu, Mahbub and Lurgan and graduate into a fully-fledged operative in the Great Game.

My money would be the mystical route, for right at the end he is hugely relieved to be shot of the box of foreigners’ correspondence and says the Great Game can go hang. Whereas his reverence for the lama is deep and unashamed.

But the point is Kipling leaves it as a sort of cliff-hanger. A Rorschach test. What you think happens next says more about you than about the story.

Scenes and descriptions

Odd and clotted though Kipling’s prose often is, he strews the book with beautiful word paintings.

In the Jain temple

Kim watched the last dusty sunshine fade out of the court, and played with his ghost-dagger and rosary. The clamour of Benares, oldest of all earth’s cities awake before the Gods, day and night, beat round the walls as the sea’s roar round a breakwater. Now and again, a Jain priest crossed the court, with some small offering to the images, and swept the path about him lest by chance he should take the life of a living thing. A lamp twinkled, and there followed the sound of a prayer. Kim watched the stars as they rose one after another in the still, sticky dark, till he fell asleep at the foot of the altar.

Climbing the foothills

They crossed a snowy pass in cold moonlight, when the lama, mildly chaffing Kim, went through up to his knees, like a Bactrian camel – the snow-bred, shag-haired sort that came into the Kashmir Serai. They dipped across beds of light snow and snow-powdered shale, where they took refuge from a gale in a camp of Tibetans hurrying down tiny sheep, each laden with a bag of borax. They came out upon grassy shoulders still snow-speckled, and through forest, to grass anew.

The shikarris who save Kim and the lama

They sat down a little apart from the lama, and, after listening awhile, passed round a water-pipe whose receiver was an old Day and Martin blacking-bottle. The glow of the red charcoal as it went from hand to hand lit up the narrow, blinking eyes, the high Chinese cheek-bones, and the bull-throats that melted away into the dark duffle folds round the shoulders. They looked like kobolds from some magic mine – gnomes of the hills in conclave. And while they talked, the voices of the snow-waters round them diminished one by one as the night-frost choked and clogged the runnels.

There’s story, there’s a plot of sorts, there’s characters. But you could argue that Kim is worth reading, and treasuring, for these descriptions alone.

Secondary characters

Quite apart from the main, recurring characters, Kim has a large cast of walk-on parts, especially when Kim is on the road or on a train with his lama.

Huneefa, the blind witch or mistress of dawat
A long-haired Hindu bairagi (holy man), who had just bought a ticket, halted before him at that moment and stared intently (p.156)
a chance-met Punjabi farmer—a Kafmboh from Jullundur-way who had appealed in vain to every God of his homestead to cure his small son (p.157)
A white-clad Oswal banker from Ajmir, his sins of usury new wiped out (p.158)
a mean, lean little person—a Mahratta, so far as Kim could judge by the cock of the tight turban (p.167)
A hot and perspiring young Englishman (p.173)
A tallish, sallowish District Superintendent of Police – belt, helmet, polished spurs and all – strutting and twirling his dark moustache (p.174); this turns out to be Inspector Strickland, an authority figure who appears in other Kipling stories
the Russian spy
the French spy
the man from Ao-chung who emerges as the leader of the rebellious coolies
the Woman of Shamlegh

Kim’s identity crises

Modern literary and art criticism is obsessed the idea of identity and the umpteen different crises it is prey to – gender identity, sexual identity, national identity, ethnic identity, religious identity. Kipling was there 120 years earlier with this story of a boy with an excess of identities: is he the orphan of a British soldier? Or a canny street kid from Lahore? Or a budding young spy for the Raj?

[Ali] ‘Therefore, in one situate as thou art, it particularly behoves thee to remember this with both kinds of faces. Among Sahibs, never forgetting thou art a Sahib; among the folk of Hind, always remembering thou art – He paused, with a puzzled smile.
[Kim] ‘What am I? Mussalman, Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist? That is a hard knot.’

And:

[Kim] ‘Hai mai! I go from one place to another as it might be a kickball. It is my Kismet. No man can escape his Kismet. But I am to pray to Bibi Miriam, and I am a Sahib.’ He looked at his boots ruefully. ‘No; I am Kim. This is the great world, and I am only Kim. Who is Kim?’ He considered his own identity, a thing he had never done before, till his head swam. He was one insignificant person in all this roaring whirl of India, going southward to he knew not what fate. (p.101)

Who is Kim, indeed?

A very few white people, but many Asiatics, can throw themselves into a mazement as it were by repeating their own names over and over again to themselves, letting the mind go free upon speculation as to what is called personal identity. When one grows older, the power, usually, departs, but while it lasts it may descend upon a man at any moment.

‘Who is Kim – Kim –Kim?’

He squatted in a corner of the clanging waiting-room, rapt from all other thoughts; hands folded in lap, and pupils contracted to pin-points. In a minute – in another half-second – he felt he would arrive at the solution of the tremendous puzzle; but here, as always happens, his mind dropped away from those heights with a rush of a wounded bird, and passing his hand before his eyes, he shook his head.

When the Russian punches the lama, Kim retaliates like a hot-blooded Irishman (his father was Irish and his Irish ‘blood’ is made much of throughout the text). Then he kneels over the lama, cradling his head and speaking like a native.

Then he remembered that he was a white man, with a white man’s camp-fittings at his service.

Lachrymose literary critics, keen to make everything a crisis, lament Kim’s ‘split’ identity and are all-too-quick to make it a symbol of India itself, with some tragic divide between coloniser and colonised. But there are two other, less hysterical ways to think about the issue.

One is the obvious one that is front and centre of the story itself, which is that the depth of the white boy’s knowledge of Indian street life makes him wonderful choice of operative for Creighton and the Department: an entirely positive, good thing.

The other is even simpler, which is that it’s fun and it’s cool. It’s cool being Kim, king of the streets in Lahore, skilled manipulator of railway carriages, of resting places on the Great Trunk Road, teller of tales to big households. Street urchin, loyal disciple, schoolboy, trainee spy. Dressing up and having adventures is what Sherlock Holmes and loads of other protagonists of 1890s adventure stories love to do, and which boys of all ages who read them, wish they could do.

Kipling’s crabbed prose and plotless stories

As discussed in the first of these two Kim reviews, Kipling’s prose is crabbed, abbreviated, littered with Biblical or official or archaic vocabulary, allusive, telegraphic. He uses almost any device in order to prevent it being smooth and flowing and easily comprehensible. It’s the textual embodiment of his barely fierceness, his energy, his sarcasm, his facetiousness. Some sentences just require a double take.

Lurgan Sahib did not use as direct speech, but his advice tallied with Mahbub’s

Meaning that Lurgan didn’t say it so directly as Mahbub did. Odd locution, though, isn’t it? Examples abound. Here’s the start of chapter 11. After being handed his disguise, a small gun, and news from Ali that he’s allowed to go see his lama, Ali then leaves him alone at Lucknow train station, and:

Followed a sudden natural reaction.

Think of all the ways you’d rewrite that to make it smoother, more readable, more enjoyable. No, Kipling prefers the clipped, telegraphese.

The man who couldn’t write plots

I’d like to link this tendency with another major tendency of Kipling’s fiction, which is his struggle to come up with plots, with actual storylines. Many of his short stories do, indeed, have plots, but it’s also quite common to come across ones which are more like anecdotes which have been stretched, or sometimes just like clever ideas which have been padded out. I’m thinking of the ‘story’ of a new-built ship where he gives all the parts voices and shows how they learn to work together. Or the one about the animal inhabitants of an old mill who react to it being hooked up to electric power by its owner. These are good ideas but they don’t quite build up to be actual stories. Ditto, for example, the Just So stories. It’s a brilliant idea, but quite a few of the actual stories don’t quite live up to the original conception.

The Norton edition contains excerpts from letters and relevant writers. In particular it has several short excerpts from the autobiography Kipling wrote right at the end of his life, ‘Something of Myself’. And in these it’s interesting to read not once but twice, he himself conceding that thinking out plots was his chief shortcoming as a writer. He describes the way he chewed over a revised version of Kim with his father, chatting over their time in India over many a pipe of tobacco. It was in this process that many of the very specific details with bejewel the final narrative, its ‘opulence of detail’, were remembered and added. At which point he goes on to write:

As to its form there was but one possibility to the author, who said that what was good enough for Cervantes was good enough for him. To whom the Mother: ‘Don’t you stand in your wool-boots hiding behind Cervantes with me! You know you couldn’t make a plot to save your soul.’ (p.275)

Several things. One, it displays Kipling’s enduring bond with his parents. He was clearly very attached to his mother and father till the end of his life, and this is sweet. Two, this is a typically contorted way of making his point, hiding it behind dialogue with his mother. Three, and this may be because he’s embarrassed to admit such a cardinal failing in a writer, that he had great ideas, brilliant ideas, but struggled to work them up into plots and narratives.

You turn the page and there’s another excerpt from Something of Myself which really rams it home.

Kim, of course, was nakedly picaresque and plotless – a thing imposed from without. (p.277)

Not just this, he then goes on to write a colourful paragraph describing how he ‘dreamed for many years’ of turning the story into a good, solid, three-volume Victorian novel, with a compelling storyline, psychologically rich characters, carefully worked out symbolism etc etc. But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.

Not being able to do this, I dismissed the ambition as ‘beneath the thinking mind’. So does a half-blind man dismiss shooting and golf.

I think he’s being hard on himself. Tens of thousands of novels are coming-of-age stories which hang a sequence of sometimes pretty random incidents on the notion that they all occurred to the central protagonist and marked his or her ‘development’ and growth from childhood, through adolescence into adulthood. Kim is no more random than many of these. In fact I think he does a good job of establishing the main characters – the lama at the start, Mahbub Ali growing in importance, Lurgan Sahib appearing half way through to add colour and variety, then Hurree Babu adding strangeness.

But clearly Kipling himself saw the novel as deficient in plot, and plot-planning as a major weakness in his abilities as a writer.

Is Kipling’s crabbed style a compensation for lack of plot?

My suggestion is that, after reading lots of Kipling, I began to wonder whether his odd, crabbed, cryptic, archaicising, Biblicising prose style was what he twisted up and contorted and worked on instead of plots. He knew he couldn’t make an impact with dramatic stories – so he developed, or jazzed up his already eccentric way of writing, instead.

I imagined him getting more and more frustrated with himself and, in his stress and anxiety, strangulating the English language into ever weirder shapes and locutions, as if the baroque overwroughtness of his prose would somehow compensate for what he himself was very conscious was an embarrassing absence of fully worked-out story.

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by Simon on September 13, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, imperialism, India, Literary criticism, Novel

Tagged 1901, adventure story, Agent C25, Ajmir, Ao-chung, Asiatics, Babu, bairagi, Benares, Bible style, Bildungsroman, Bodhisat, British Army, British government, British imperialism, Buddhism, Buddhist, Cassell's Magazine, Cervantes, chela, Chitor, Christianity, Colonel Creighton, coming-of-age story, coolies, Dacca quack, Delhi, dooli, Enlightenment, espionage, fiction, Great Game, Hindu, Hinduism, holy man, hoori, Hulu, Huneefa, Hurree Babu, identity, identity crisis, imperialism, India, Inspector Strickland, Irish, Islam, Jain, Jain temple, Jainism, Jat, Jullundur, Kafmboh, kilta, Kim, kismet, Kulu, Lahore Museum, lama, Lucknow, Lurgan Sahib, Madame Castafiore, Mahbub Ali, Mahratta, Mr Bennett, Mussalman, narrative, North-West Frontier, Norton Critical Edition, novel, opium, Orientalism, Orientals, Ottoman Empire, Pathan, picaresque, plot, Punjab, quinine, race, Raymond Chandler, Rider Haggard, River of Life, Rudyard Kipling, Russia, Russian Empire, sacrilege, Saddhu, Sahiba, Second Afghan War, Secret Service, Shamlegh-under-the-Snow, Sherlock Holmes, shikarris, Simla, Something of Myself, Spy novel, Spy Story, St Xavier's College, Stevenson, Strickland, Teshoo Lama, The Bankoh, the Department, the Himalayas, the Kashmir Serai, the Mavericks, the Rajah of Rampur, the River of the Arrow, the Sultan, the Woman of Shamlegh, Tibet, Tintin, Tirthankars’ Temple, Victorian novel, woman of Shamlegh, Zohreh T. Sullivan

Posted by Simon on September 13, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/09/13/kim-rudyard-kipling-part-2/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged coolies

Typhoon by Joseph Conrad (1902)

Cast

Imagination, the enemy

Incommunication

Mumbling

MacWhirr’s few words

Carried over into letters

Mother and curate, deaf and confused

Foreign

The language of facts

Language shredded by the typhoon

The speaking-tube

The violent sea

The typhoon as intensification of normal levels of incommunication

Plot summary

The storm descriptions

Science fiction

The great ellipsis and part 2

UnEnglish phrasing

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Kim and Orientalism

1. All language is stereotyped

2. All fictions are stereotyped

3. Adventure fiction depends on stereotypes

4. Kim is surprisingly unstereotypical

Indian profusion i.e. not a simple binary

Anti-white passages

Babu Hurree Chunder Mookerjee unexpectedly complex

Indian piety easily trumps Western religion

In praise of Buddhism

The cure

In fictions, characters stereotype each other

The Irish

Asiatic, Oriental and the East

Asiatic

Oriental

The East

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Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901) part 2

Plot summary from chapter 10

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Scenes and descriptions

In the Jain temple

Climbing the foothills

The shikarris who save Kim and the lama

Secondary characters

Kim’s identity crises

Kipling’s crabbed prose and plotless stories

The man who couldn’t write plots

Is Kipling’s crabbed style a compensation for lack of plot?

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