Kim Study Guide

Joseph Rudyard Kipling, born December 30, 1865, was a prominent English novelist, poet, journalist, and writer of short stories. In his prime, he stood as one of Britain’s most celebrated writers, winning the Nobel Prize in 1907—the youngest recipient of the prize to date. He is best known for his children’s book duology, The Jungle Book, a story of an Indian boy raised by wolves, and the novel Kim, a coming-of-age story about a young Irish Indian boy and his travels with a Buddhist lama. Both works draw extensively on Kipling’s personal experiences in India, with Kim often regarded as a fictionalized autobiography of Rudyard’s own early life growing up in India under British rule. Born in Bombay in 1865 to Alice and John Kipling, Rudyard spent his formative years on of the J. J School of Art, where his father served as a Professor of Architectural Sculpture. Though the habit would fade upon being sent to study in England at age five, Rudyard recalls thinking and dreaming in Hindu as a young child. At 16, Kipling finally returned India, which he considered a transformative experience. While writing for a series of newspapers, Kipling gradually gained notoriety for his short stories, and by the time he moved to London in 1889, he was already a celebrity. Though Kipling remained in England for the rest of his life, his time in India had a lasting impact on his legacy. Many of his works, including the Jungle Book and Kim, are set in India and feature protagonists struggling with the complexities of mixed identity—a sentiment that resonated with Kipling. His fictional depictions of British India, while rich in detail and scope, are not without bias, however, and Kipling has faced criticism in more recent years for his overly sympathetic portrayals of British colonialism. His controversial poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” which espouses the moral imperative that Europeans nations “civilize” the rest of the world, is perhaps the most blatant example of this. Still, Kipling’s work remains widely popularly and influential today, if as much for its controversy as its literary merit. Kipling died in 1936 in London and is buried in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. 

As a pseudo-autobiographical novel, Kim is based on real-world events. The story takes place during Great Britain’s colonial occupation of India at the peak of the Great Game, a nineteenth-century rivalry between the British and Russian empires over colonial influence in Asia. This tension resulted in a protracted war of espionage, diplomacy, and minor military skirmishes, mirroring missions like Kim and Hurree Babu’s in the northern mountains of India and resulting in a vast network of spies and informants. Contrary to the amicable relationships depicted in Kim, however, dynamics between Indian agents and their British superiors were likely less congenial in historical reality, as were relationships between colonial subjects and their colonizers more broadly. A clear example of this is the old soldier’s account of the Revolt of 1857-58, a bloody mutiny by the Bengal army which the soldier, a staunch British loyalist, attributes to madness. In reality, the revolt was a direct response to Britain's exploitative colonial practices, considered by many to be the first Indian War of Independence. Such revisionist history is common across Kim. Though critiques of British colonial rule occasionally surface, the novel typically portrays British occupation in positive (or at least neutral) terms. The novel frequently celebrates British cultural and technological achievements like the railroad system, the Lahore Museum, and the Grand Trunk Road, while it downplays incidents of colonial violence, exploitation, and injustice. Such wishful visions of colonialism were common in Victorian England, however, with many Europeans adopting Kipling’s now-infamous notion of the “White Man’s Burden”— the idea that civilized nations (i.e., white nations) have a duty to civilize less advanced nations.

Within Kipling’s literary repertoire, Kim stands out as an exceptional, though not atypical, piece of writing. Its themes of identity, civilization, colonialism, personal freedom, and cross-cultural kinship, feature prominently in many of his other works, many of which also draw on Kipling’s own experiences in India. The Jungle Book stands out in this regard, being both set in India and featuring a young boy, Mowgli, who, like Kim, struggles with the complexities of identity. The Man Who Would Be King, a short story penned by Kipling in 1888, also bears likeness to Kim, telling the story of two British officers stationed in India who travel to the country of Kafiristan to become “native” kings. When their deception is exposed, however, the local people are outraged, and only one man escapes with his life; as such, the story serves as a warning of the perils of colonialism for both colonized and colonizers alike, highlighting the gulf between western and eastern cultures. These themes also appear in many of Kipling’s most famous, if most controversial, poems, notably “The White Man’s Burden,” the “Ballad of East and West,” and “Gunga-Din.” Outside of Kipling’s own canon, Kim bears resemblance to many novels of its time. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), a novella that exposes the dark side of colonialism in the Congo, is a common comparison, as is E. M. Forester’s A Passage to India (1924), a pseudo-autobiographical novel that explores the racial tension between Indian people and the British during the British Raj. Though less directly concerned with questions of colonialism, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn also draws parallels to Kim, being both a bildungsroman and picaresque and featuring the unlikely, cross-racial friendship between white Huckleberry Finn and the Black enslaved man Jim.