Kipling was one of the first novelists to portray the logical alliance between Western science and political power at work in the colonies.
(Norton Critical Edition, p.340)
Literary critic, author of the landmark study, Orientalism, and godfather of the modern disciplines of post-colonial and subaltern studies, Edward Said wrote an introduction for the 1987 Penguin paperback edition of Rudyard Kipling’s classic novel, Kim. Parts of it (pages 30 to 46, to be precise) are excerpted in the 2002 Norton Critical Edition of Kim, edited by Zohreh T. Sullivan.
Kipling’s vulgarity
Surprisingly, maybe, Said begins by repeating George Orwell’s criticism of Kipling’s work as being characterised by ‘vulgarity’. I wonder if he’s getting mixed up with Oscar Wilde, who wrote of Kipling, in his long essay The Critic as Artist, that:
As one turns over the pages of his Plain Tales from the Hills, one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity.
It’s not just a snappy one-liner. Wilde goes on to consider the rolee of vulgarity in literature at some length.
Orientalism
Anyway, as you would expect, within a few sentences Said climbs onto his hobby horse, his central theme, which is that:
- all of Kipling’s work relied on the accumulated storehouse of ‘Orientalist’ stereotypes (the ‘Oriental’ is backward, unreliable, poor, badly educated etc etc)
- which itself rested on the basic premise that Orientals are inferior to white men, and
- the East has fixed, unchanging essence
Orientalism is an essentialist point of view, denying the reality of historical change and complexity, and if there’s one thing Said hates it’s essentialism.
Said then mentions his central work, Orientalism, and summarises its core findings, namely that 1) every single Western thinker and writer of note in the nineteenth century took for granted the fixed, unalterable inequality of the races and 2) this universally held ‘truth’ underpinned and justified European imperialism around the world.
Said shows how these partial, biased and made-up Orientalist opinions underpinned and permeated so-called ‘scholarly’ and ‘objective’ academic disciplines such as economics, anthropology, history, sociology, linguistics, philology, geography and many more.
In Said’s view, pretty much all European society, society and culture,throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, were flooded at every level with the basic presumption that the European white male was the pinnacle of human evolution and had the right and duty to take every other nation, race and creed (and gender) in hand in order to bring them up to his own high standards of ‘civilisation’. If this meant invading and conquering these ‘barbarous’ countries, killing lots of their citizens along with warriors, destroying native cultures, religions and practices, imposing utterly alien sets of laws, exploiting those countries and their inhabitants economically, well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
Colonel Creighton as white alpha male
Said points out that the representative of The Ruling White Man in Kim is Colonel Creighton, head of the secretive ‘Department’ i.e. the British Secret Service in India. He points out (just as I did in my review) that Creighton doesn’t appear very often, and is not drawn in anything like the detail of actual Indians like Mahbub Ali or the Babu – but then, he doesn’t have to be.
The capableness of Creighton, the sense that he is a source of utterly correct decisions and judgements, in a sense underpins the entire narrative because we know that, whatever happens, at some level Creighton a) knows about it, b) has ordered it and c) will make it right. He is a God figure who makes all problems disappear and grants our wishes (i.e. Kim’s wish to become a spy). So he’s pretty easily taken as a symbol of the rightness of British rule over India.
(Western) knowledge is power
But Said is particularly interested in the notion of knowledge. The whole point of his epochal book of cultural criticism, Orientalism, is that he is above all interested in the way certain structures (tropes, stereotypes, clichés, assumptions) became embedded in academic disciplines and then reproduced themselves in each successive generation. For Said the very notions of ‘knowledge’ and ‘science’ and ‘reason’ and ‘competence’ are deeply Orientalist in that they were constructed and defined in opposition to the opposite series of attributes – lack of knowledge, lack of scientific detachment, the fact that Islam hadn’t had a Reformation to separate science from religion, incompetence, irrationality and so on – which generations of scholars attributed to ‘the Orient’, ‘the Arab mind, ‘Islam’ and so on.
Imperial knowledgeableness and Sherlock Holmes
Said, maybe a bit predictably, links Kipling’s obsession with a proper deep understanding of ‘India’ and the Indian mind, with the super omni-competence of a figure like Sherlock Holmes, creation of Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle had himself travelled widely in the British Empire (Australia and New Zealand, West Africa, South Africa).
The way so many of the Holmes stories turn out to derive from events which took place in faraway lands demonstrates the global reach of Holmes’s mind and this, for Said, is intimately linked with the explosion of so many academic specialisms in the last few decades of the nineteenth century.
Many of these new ‘sciences’, the ones Holmes is so often shown brushing up on and deploying in his detective work, such as ballistics, forensics, fingerprinting, knowledge of exotic poisons, theories of the criminal mind or of racial ‘types’ and so on, had their origins in the colonies, where they were developed in response to the problems of managing huge populations of natives.
Ethnology and studying the natives
Thus, for Said, it is more than a handy coincidence that Creighton uses as a cover for his espionage activities in India the official title of head of the British Ethnological Survey. ‘Ethnology’ means the study of different races and peoples, their languages, religions, customs and so on, so Creighton’s position perfectly epitomises the fundamental premise of Said’s book, which is that ‘knowledge’ is never pure and disinterested, but is created by human agents to further the deployment of power. Knowledge of a country and its people derives from, and in turn reinforces, power over that country and its people, especially if you are using advanced techniques which the peoples in question don’t even have access to. Then you can end up in the position of knowing more about a people and their country than they do. Which leads Said to summarise, that:
Kipling was one of the first novelists to portray the logical alliance between Western science and political power at work in the colonies. (p.340)
Hurree Chunder as a comic antitype of Creighton
Said then points out how, looked at in this perspective, the Indian Babu, Hurree Chunder, is consistently portrayed as a Creighton manqué. He is educated, he name-drops Western thinkers (especially Herbert Spencer), he has written some papers and he dreams of being taken seriously by the Royal Society. And yet he is played for laughs and the comedy is based on the Orientalist premise that a native can never rise to the level of a white man. the Babu’s aspirations are portrayed as comedic because he himself hasn’t grasped the principle, which Kipling makes the reader complicit in every time he laughs, which is that a coloured man can never reach the height of education and civilisation as a white man. There is an unalterable racial divide between them, almost as if they are two species. This is the core of what Said calls Orientalism, the European belief in the hopeless, unalterable inferiority of brown and black and yellow to that pinnacle of evolution, The White Man.
Annan and sociology
Said cites Noel Annan’s famous (apparently) 1959 essay which associated Kipling with the new (in late-Victorian times) schools of sociology (Durkheim, Weber, Pareto). This new interpretation of society moved away from considering society using dusty old notions like class or national traditions and instead used the notion of groups of people with common interests. The point is that knowledge of these groups gives the knower the ability to move and manipulate them. Said’s core premise that knowledge is power.
This sheds deeper light on Colonel Creighton’s character. He is the model of a modern imperial administrator in that he deals equally with Muslims, Bengalis, Pathans and so on, with perfect frankness, never once pulling rank or belittling their views, never tampering with ‘the hierarchies, the priorities and privileges of caste, religion, ethnicity and race’ (p.342). He is not a vulgar jingoist or rapacious exploiter like earlier administrators; he is more like a social scientist.
From this perspective, the text of Kim can be seen as precisely the kind of jostling of different, self- contained, self-defined socials groups theorised by the new sociology – and the way they’re each treated by Creighton and his creator with fascinated, sympathetic detachment, as embodying the new sociological approach.
Late Victorian miserabilism
Said then carries out a detailed comparison between the character Kim and Jude Fawley, the protagonist of Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure (1896). The point of the comparison is to show how Jude, along with the protagonists of other serous fiction of the day, in Flaubert or James or Meredith or Gissing, was a miserable failure. Life, in so many of these late-Victorian novels, is presented as one disillusionment after another, as small, and petty, and disappointing, either in the tragic mode of these realist novels, or sometimes played for laughs as in the drab suburbia of The Diary of a Nobody (1889).
The novel as a disenchanted genre
In fact Said cites the opinion of the Hungarian Marxist critic György Lukács that the novel itself as a genre is condemned to incompleteness because its commitment to realism cuts it off from the heroic fullness of life expressed in the epic. The first European novel, Don Quixote, is about a pathetic old man who in his deluded way tries to live up to the high tone and heroic achievements of chivalric epic, condemned to continual failure.
For some reason this atmosphere of defeat, the collapse of our deepest dreams, was commonplace in serious late-Victorian literature (Henry James, George Meredith, George Gissing, George Moore, Samuel Butler). Worst of all are the depressive protagonists of Joseph Conrad’s stories, many of whose lives have led to such utter failure and disillusion that they commit suicide.
Kim’s optimism
Anyway, the obvious point is that Kim is the opposite. He is Puck, he is the spirit of energy and enthusiasm, and goes from success to success to success. He succeeds in stymying the foreign spies, he helps the lama fulfil his life’s dream, above all he grows into the image of his boyhood ambitions.
Why? At least in part because he has what you could call imperial freedom. He is an image of fulfilment and success because he enjoys an imperial privilege which all the Indians he meets never can. They are fixed in their roles (as merchant, bureaucrat etc) in a way Kim isn’t.
In fact Kim enjoys a level of freedom not only vis-a-vis the subjects of the Raj but also compared to the white officials of the Raj. Creighton has to play up to the role of senior British official but Kim can put on native clothes and disappear into the teeming alleys of Lahore or Lucknow. It’s as if he puts on a cloak of invisibility, disappears off the radar, goes ‘off grid’ as modern thrillers put it.
So he is free of both sets of constraints: those which bind the native people of India (who he can rise above due to his white privilege and imperial role as spy) and those which bind the white rulers who have to ‘keep up appearances’ because Kim slip off those white responsibilities whenever he likes.
Kim is twice free, free twice times over, enjoys a double measure of freedom. Hence the exuberance of the text and the wonderful sense of freedom and escape it gives its readers.
Identity
This sheds light on the modern academic’s favourite subject of identity. It’s true that on a handful of occasions Kipling describes Kim’s momentary confusion about his multiple identities (white boy, Indian street urchin, disciple of a wandering lama) but these don’t hold back Kim for long because, far from having an identity crisis, from experiencing his multiple identities as an oppression undermining his sense of self, he experiences them as freedom.
Indeed the novel is all about showing him growing into his multiple identities. The protagonists of the late-Victorian realistic novels Said mentions generally lose their sense of personal identity, certainly the Conrad ones do, or, like Jude, their identity becomes identical with failure and so, in the end, unbearable.
Whereas Kim becomes the master of his multiple identities. Like Creighton, he observes himself, studies his different roles and voices, traditions and languages – observes them in order to master and control them.
Kim the character has often been taken as a kind of epitome of India’s jostling identities – but he also embodies within himself White imperial rule over those many identities. Kim rules over the Raj of himself.
Optimism central to boys adventure stories
Said says the optimistic tone and can-do attitude of his hero comes from an earlier phase in the history of the novel, and compares him to protagonists of the French novelist, Stendhal. But surely he’s missing a more obvious point which is that…this is an adventure story for boys; and a pretty basic attribute of this kind of story is precisely the depiction of a resourceful, resilient young lad triumphing in a world of morally ambivalent adults. See boy heroes from Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island to Tintin. They win. They triumph.
Freedom of movement
Said goes on to observe that Kim’s exuberant joie de vivre is closely connected with his freedom of movement around (mostly north) India. Kim is constantly on the move, from Lahore, to Lucknow, Benares and Simla, from Bombay to Karachi to Umballa, with keynote descriptions of the Grand Trunk Road which traversed northern India thrown in.
Said makes the point that this wonderful freedom of movement is like a holiday. Reading the book gives the reader the same sense of the ability to move freely around a fantastically interesting colourful country, at will. Little or money required, no passport, no border police or paperwork, the book breathes freedom, in both time and space and the reader responds very positively.
You won’t be surprised to learn that Said thinks this freedom is the freedom granted to the imperial class. Although there’s enjoyable ambivalence about Kim’s identity, there’s no doubting that all of these colourful travels are paid for by Creighton, the embodiment of the White imperial ruling class. Kim’s wonderfully invigorating freedom is paid for by the existence of the British Empire and white dominion.
P.S.
1) Most of this is an attempt to accurately summarise the points Said makes in his introduction, but quite often I use these as starting ideas of my own. For example, it is Said who makes the point about Jude the Obscure, but it is my development of it to come to the conclusion that Kim ends up ruling the Raj of himself. I added in the (minor) point about there being a comedic side to late-Victorian miserabilism, as embodied inworks like Diary of a Nobody. I added the fairly obvious point that Kim is an adventure story for boys and that, therefore, of course the hero is brave and resourceful, possibly the fundamental premise of the entire genre. I expanded the idea of Sherlock Holmes’s knowledgeableness to be more explicit about the imperial basis for that knowledge.
2) Some of my points overlap, expand or possibly contradict points I’ve made in my other reviews of a) Kim and b) Orientalism. I’m relaxed about that. This isn’t philosophy or physics. There is no right answer. And the whole point of literature, for me, is that a ‘good’ literary work is complex and rich enough for the reader to take something different from it every time they read it – or even think about it.
I tell anybody who’ll listen, that the correct approach to literature (as to art in the broadest sense) is to be able to hold multiple opinions about it, some of which might even be polar opposites, with equal conviction. In this sense I’m about openness and multiplicity and diversity. As Walt Whitman says:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I don’t think I contain multitudes. That would be preposterously grandiose. I think good literature contains multitudes, multitudinous complexities of language, theme, plot, imagery and character that make repeated readings worthwhile and new.
The only method is to enjoy.
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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