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.
Books & Boots 