Social, Cultural, And Political History In Rudyard Kipling's The Great Game

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It combines social, cultural, and political history with the hardships and goal of a travel book. With Kim, a young white boy, sahib, at its center and his friend and mentor the Lama, we see the world of India in the nineteenth century as it is ruled by Great Britain. The story unfolds against the backdrop of The Great Game, the political conflict between Russia and Britain in Central Asia. It is set after the Second Afghan War which ended in 1881, but before the Third. The novel is notable for its detailed portrait of the people, culture, and varied religions of India.

So Kim is all about the adventures of a young Irish boy, Kimball O'Hara, in British colonial India. One day he encounters an elderly Tibetan Lama

We figure out on the first page that, underneath Kim's darkly tanned burned black skin as any native, Kim is still white. The reason for this attention to race is historical and important. Rudyard Kipling is writing about India during the era of British colonial domination at the turn of the twentieth century. The people are mixed up from different nationalities, ethnic groups, and religions. But even though people of many cultures appear in Kim, the different characters have different economic and social mobility.

Undeniably, Kipling is a pro-imperial, and racist worldview. So even though Kim is very poor and lives in destitute, he has the chance to make a great position for himself partly because he is white. Indian characters are powerless and get inflexible because of their race. Kipling has a lot of discriminations going into his portrayal of India, as well as, he strongly criticizes white racism and he portrays all of his characters, irrespective to their background, with deep compassion. Kim involves a lot of mysterious contradictions and paradoxes in its representations of

Madness, is how one the characters, an old soldier, describes an uprising by the locals against their colonial masters, demonstrating the author’s blindness to the possibility that there is any injustice in the relationship. One of the novel’s central plots has Kim becoming a secret agent for British interests, quelling rebellion against the Raj and ensuring the Russians do not gain a toehold in the country. Yet apart from power and intrigue, Kipling’s portrays many aspects of the Empire as dull, lifeless and cruel compared with Indian culture. Kim’s first encounter with the British is characterized by the callous way in which a Protestant priest treats the lama, and his ignorance and disrespect towards native custom. Kim’s three years at boarding school are oppressive and the author only deigns to recount the boy’s holidays, when he takes to the road or learns practical skills from his mentors. All his schoolmates seem to do is administer beatings, boast, or look down on the