Rudyard Kipling's Kim
Kim gives a vivid picture of the complexities in India under British rule. It shows the life of the bazaar mystics, of the natives, of the British military. There is a great deal of action and movement, for Kipling's vast canvas painted in full detail. The dialogue in the novel makes use of Indian phrases translated by the author, they give the flavor of native speech in India. They are also touches of the native behavior and shrewdness.
Setting:
The time the novel took place was around the late nineteenth century. The story takes place in a hot and dry location of British India. Most of the scenes either take place in the wilderness or the streets of India.
Plot:
Kim grew up on the streets of Lahore. His Irish mother had died when he was born. His father, a former colorsergeant of an Irish regiment called the Mavericks, died eventually from doing drugs and having too much to drink, and left his son in care of a half-caste woman. So young Kimball O'hara became Kim, and under the hot Indian sun his skin grew so dark that one good not tell that he was of the Caucasian race.
One day a Tibetan lama, in search of the Holy River of the Arrow that would wash away all sin, came to Lahore. Struck by all possibility for an exciting adventure, Kim attached himself to the lama as his chela. His adventures began almost at once. That night, at the edge of Lahore, Mahubub Ali, a horse trader, gave Kim a cryptic message to deliver to a British author in Umballa. What Kim did not know was that Mahbub was a member of the British Secret Service. He delivered the message as directed, and then lay in the grass and watched and listened until he learned that his message meant that eight thousand men would go to war.
Out on the big road the lama and Kim encountered many people of all sorts. Conversation was easy. One group in particular interested Kim, an old lady traveling in a family bullcock cart attended by a retinue of eight men. Kim and the Lama attached themselves to her party. Towards the evening they saw a group of soldiers making camp. It was the Maverick regiment. Kim, whose horoscope said that his life would be changed at the sign of a red bull in a field of green, was fascinated by the regimental flag, which was just that red bull against a background of bright green.
Caught by a chaplain, the Revere...
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distinguishes himself as a member of the British Secret Service.
2. A Tibetan Lama- Becomes Kim's instructor and whose ambition is to find the holy River
of the Arrow which would wash away all sin. After Kim's education is complete he
accompanies the lama on his wanderings, though he is really a member of the secret
service. In the end he finds the river he is looking or, it ends up being a brook
attached to an old woman's house.
3. Mahbub Ali- A horse trader who is really a member of the secret service. He is
largely responsible for Kim's becoming a member of the British secret service.
4. Colonel Creighton- The director of the British Secret Service, who permits Kim to
resume the dress of a street boy and do secret service work.
5. Hurre Chunder Mookerjee- A babu, and also a member of the Secret Service. He is
Kim's confederate in securing some valuable documents brought into by spies for the
Russians.
Personal Evaluation and Conclusion:
I personally liked the novel "Kim". The reason I liked the novel is because I love adventure stories. The story line of "Kim" was very exciting and kept me in suspense.
1 Geoff Childs Tibetan Diary From Birth to Death and Beyond in a Himalayan Valley of Nepal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) 41.
Tung, R. J. (1980). A portrait of lost Tibet. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Almost after these two months were up Chang told Conway that the High Lama wanted to see him and that this was an honor because he had never seen anyone that quickly after arriving there. When Conway was talking with the High Lama, he told him the story of the place and about the person who founded it. He also told him about the legend that this guy had never died and that when someone came to this place that there was a drug that they took that made them live longer than a normal person would.
The story is set in the summer in England. It is the time in which conflict in Europe
Lama, Dalai, XIV. Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the World's Religions Can Come
In November of 1893, India welcomed the children’s book Rikki-Tikki-Tavi by Rudyard Kipling, a native-born Indian who lived his life as an English journalist and short story writer. Rikki Tikki Tavi is a brave mongoose who finds a new home with a family of colonists and must fight against the snakes in the garden who threaten his new way of life. Though the subtle references to imperial India and the ideologies of the time are often overlooked because of the genre as a children’s story, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is ripe with analytical potential beyond the triumph of good versus evil. Within the first few pages, the English family in the bungalow takes a nearly drowned mongoose into their care.
Rudyard Kipling's Kim exemplifies this in a variety of ways. Kim reveals a genuine love and sympathy for India but remains a jingoistic product of its time and place. Benita Parry points out that the history of Kipling criticism mirrors the history of attitudes to the imperial encounter itself (Delusions And Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination. London: Penguin, 1972. p205). Several of the characters in Kim illustrate the underlying links between imperialism and anthropology, even as Kipling himself seems to be engaging on a similar project. The encounter between the lama and the museum curator at Lahore is the first instance of this type of relationship in Kim. It is surely anomalous for the white curator to have the authority of knowledge in this meeting . The lama is meant to be a venerated Tibetan sage, and yet the curator presumes to educate him through "the labours of European scholars, who...have identified the Holy places of Buddhism"(p7). By cataloguing, labelling, and classifying Indian ritual and practice the curator has somehow acquired a body of knowledge which renders the lama helpless "as a child" (p7). Time and again in Kim it will be seen how Western knowledge is used to appropriate autonomy and agency from the Indian people.
The main function of oracles in Tibet is to answer tough questions about internal and external affairs both religious and political. They way that this is most effectively performed and acted upon is through possession or trance induction. Trance induction in the Tibetan State Oracle is a complex process involving certain physical deprivations and stimuli from various sources of anything from music to hyperventilation. Symbolic elements as well as visualizations induce possession and trance in the oracle. (Ellingson 58)
Rinpoche, Samdhong. Uncompromising Truth for a Compromised World: Tibetan Buddhism in Today’s World; forward by 14th Dalai Lama. (Tibet: World Wisdom, 2006), 264.
[10] Trimondi, Victor and Victoria, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama, part I, section 2.
Examining the karmic convergence between the lama and Kim shows how simply the intervention could be and the multitude of events to occur for these two to interact. Such as when Kim first meets the lama in Lahore (Kipling 10), we find that these two bond quickly. The word Karma means
Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Twice Born Fiction :Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English. London : Heinemann, 1971.
Desai has added a new dimension to Indian fiction in English. Desai is known for shifting the emphasis from the external to the internal world in her wittings. A...
He feels that in A Passage to India there exist a dialectical pattern, strong and subtle, by which the author attempts to bind social, psychological and philosophical levels into a harmony and to relate the characters and events of the novel to each other and to the informing idea of the whole. Nevertheless, its plot, style, character drawing, particular ideas and attitudes have been exhaustively discussed, evaluated, and related to a body of Forster’s work and to modern literature in general. Its author has been hailed as ‘the last survivor of a cultured liberal tradition’ (Rex Warner, E. M. Forster, 1950) and ‘the only living novelist who can be read again and again’ (Lionel Trilling, E. M. Forster, 1943).Even those who have written on him with most appreciation,however, have apparently failed to grasp fully the meaning and importance of the novel’s theme, and thus have given only partial account of it.
The novel is very unpredictable to be abridged as it arrangements with numerous parts of India before freedom providing for us an impression of the then overarching conditions with a thicker plot and a brilliant and nitty gritty portrayal of every viewpoint making the book lovers long for more.