The Man Who Adores Rudyard Kipling's Kim, by Stephen Pallas

     Written by a British author at the turn of the twentieth century (the novel was published in 1901), Rudyard Kipling's Kim, does not directly deal in terms of African American race relations in the United States.  However, many of the questions of ethnic authenticity have emerged during the British Modernist period of literature, perhaps most densely with Kim.  For a brief overview, the boy Kim (birth name, Kimball O'Hara) was born to two Irish parents.  His father served in the British military in the Indian subcontinent.  After his parents died, Kim was adopted and mostly raised by a Hindu woman.  Later on, Kim meets a Tibetan lama, in search of a river and the Great Soul through which he may escape the cycle of death and rebirth.  After taking up the journey with the lama, Kim is caught sneaking around a British camp and questioned by an Anglican minister and an Irish Catholic priest.  They find papers on him that betray his identity as the son of a British soldier.  They take Kim, train him, and make him a spy for the British Secret Service.  All the while, for Kim's part, he insists throughout the novel that he is "not a Sahib," a respectful name given by Indians to the British, wanting instead to be with his lama--although he fluctuates between the two roles.  Ultimately, the answer to the question, "Who is Kim?" is never fully resolved.  Kipling deals with what becomes a modernist tradition: when systems of order breakdown and reveal the true chaos of the world, individuals deal with what becomes a global identity.  The problem with the modernist global identity leads into the absolute horror of the two World Wars, the rise of capitalist-communist hatred, the emergence of nuclear weapons, and modern terrorism.  Throughout all this chaos, individuals and individual cultures attempt to hold on to those entities which define them, perhaps even too categorically and systematically.  Toward the end of his project, Patrick Mullen suggests that "self-representation by African Americans is necessary to correct the past mistakes of white folklorists" (177), the larger picture being, self-representation by any group or individual is necessary to prevent mistakes by "other" folklorists, historians, academics, and writers.  Kipling's Kim attempts to represent a multicultural landscape macronomically and individually with dense aesthetic, linguistic, and cultural appreciation.

     Much of Kipling's novel is a work of translation, which reminds me of Patrick Mullen's observations on Roger Abrahams work, who, "along with Dell Hymes, Richard Bauman, Dan Ben-Amos, and others, formulated the performance approach based on the ethnography of speaking from sociolinguistics" (132).  Kipling recreates the sociolinguistics of India by translating at points, and retaining the verbiage at other points, the language of natives, Europeans, and other foreigners.  He also emphasizes the recreation of cultural tropes, such as the Buddhist notion of the Wheel of Life, the Hindu caste system, and the relationship between Catholic and non-Catholic Christians.  Like the movements in the bazaars of India, Kipling's instillation of Modernism into the literary canon is cosmopolitan, transcending parochial classification systems (such as nation, religion and ethnicity).  As a product of modernism, the human trajectory incorporates an international style, which is supranational, and transcends other taxonomic systems, such as race and religion.  Kim is associated with that project--yet still maintains an imperialist mindset (in not imagining a space beyond)--providing a presentation of hybridity, for to inhabit this subcontinental Indian space cannot be anything but hybrid.  And since there are so many ways of being hybridized in Kim, the novel allows us to accrete the information of modernism through an entirely new lens.