"carry these pictures in thine eyes till a suitable time comes"

March 10, 2017 2:23 PM

Kipling and Kim, Rasoul Sorkhabi, The Himalayan Journal

So were the sights, sounds and personages just figments in Kipling's India - and his home?

St. Xavier's :: La Martiniere, Lucknow

Wonder House :: The Lahore Museum, curated by John Kipling, which itself has a long and venerable history.

Lurgan Sahib :: A.M. Jacobs, who 'died in obscurity and poverty and was buried in the "Sewree Christian Cemetery" in Mumbai - or maybe not him after all.

Hurree Chunder Mookerjee (MA, Calcutta) :: a 'composite', and a reused name(?)

Mahbub Ali :: an Afghan horse dealer of the same name

Colonel Creighton :: Lieut.-Col. Alexander Herbert Mason, and picture

and Kim himself; Playing detective in search of Kipling's inspiration, we find one story or another. Who is Kim's 'father'?[PDF]

Edward Said's Introduction to Kim [PDF]

Thus, as I have been saying, Kim is a master work of imperialism: I mean this as an interpretation of a rich and absolutely fascinating, but nevertheless profoundly embarrassing novel. The device invented by Kipling, by which British control over India (the Great Game) coincides in detail with Kim's disguise fantasy to be at one with India, is a remarkable one precisely because it would not have occurred without British imperialism. As such, then, we must read the novel as the realization of a great cumulative process, which in the closing years of the nineteenth century is reaching its last major moment before Indian independence. On the one hand, surveillance and control over India; on the other, love for and fascinated attention to its every detail. What Kipling also saw is what makes possible the overlap between the political hold of the one and the aesthetic and psychological pleasure of the other, British imperialism itself; yet many of his later readers have refused to see his implicit recognition of this troubling and embarrassing truth. And not just Kipling's recognition of British imperialism in general, but imperialism at that specific moment in its history when it had almost completely lost sight of the unfolding dynamics of its own human and secular truth: the truth that India was once independent, that control over it was seized by a European power, and that, over time, Indian resistance to that power had grown so much as inevitably to struggle out from under British subjugation

Rudyard Kipling, India and Edward Said
‘Arguing with the Himalayas’? Edward Said on Rudyard Kipling
Kiping Sahib
Reading beyond Rudyard Kipling's imperial crimes: the complexities of Kim

posted by the man of twists and turns (5 comments total)

You magnificent bastard, I was supposed to be productive today!
posted by corb at 2:45 PM on March 10, 2017 [5 favorites]

To me the saving grace of Kim is that Kipling sees his non-British characters as people, individuals with their own variable worths and stories. It's undoubtedly written from the embrace of empire, and I can't fault anyone who finds that that makes it unreadable, given the British history of atrocities in India during the Raj. But it's not simply propaganda.
posted by tavella at 4:40 PM on March 10, 2017 [5 favorites]

Nice post. A lot to dig into here. Thanks for giving me something to look forward to on Sunday.

Also, a previously, that I shared last year that was about Rudyard Kipling as well. Cheers.
posted by Fizz at 5:57 PM on March 10, 2017 [2 favorites]

> It's undoubtedly written from the embrace of empire, and I can't fault anyone who finds that that makes it unreadable

I can, but I won't beat my "art shouldn't be treated as politics" drum here. Thanks for the post!
posted by languagehat at 11:20 AM on March 11, 2017 [3 favorites]

There's an excellent exhibition on Kipling's father currently on show at the V&A Museum, Lockwood Kipling: Arts and Crafts in the Punjab and London. The collection of Gandharan Buddhist sculptures that the elder Kipling assembled for the Lahore Museum is described in the opening chapter of Kim:

In the entrance hall stood the larger figures of the Greco-Buddhist sculptures done, savants knew how long since, by forgotten workmen whose hands were feeling, not unskilfully, for the mysteriously transmitted Grecian touch. There were hundreds of pieces, friezes of figures in relief, fragments of statues and slabs crowded with figures that had encrusted the brick walls of the Buddhist stupas and viharas of the North Country and now, dug up and labelled, made the pride of the Museum.

John Lockwood Kipling was also fascinated by Indian popular art, and filled an album with 'the cheapest and most popular form of native lithograph pictures as sold at the local bazaars and fairs of upper India and Bengal', which his son later donated to the V&A. The influence on Kim hardly needs spelling out.
posted by verstegan at 10:17 AM on March 13, 2017