Why I wish I were Rudyard Kipling

It's hard these days to defend an unqualified love for Kipling, as he has become something of an anathema due to his time period, and the language he uses to discuss Asian people. That being said, he was a brilliant author in his day, and the book Kim was his masterpiece.

Kim starts out as the story of a young Irish boy orphaned in India in the latter half of the 19th century. He is raised by his dead father's mistress until he meets a Tibetan Llama, and follows him as his apprentice. The Llama is searching for the River of the Arrow, a holy site in Buddhism, and decided Kim was given to him as a a guide to his quest. At the same time, Kim is recruited by Mahbub Ali, an Afghan horse trader, into the "Great Game" or the world of intrigue between Britain and Russia around the control of India.

In the world of Kipling, loyalty to the Raj supersedes all other virtues, at least as far as those around Kim are concerned. The Llama lives in his own world where "there is neither black nor white, Hind nor Bhotiyal, but only souls seeking escape." Ranged against the Llama are the forces of the Afghan horse dealer, a massive red bearded man who runs the length of India selling horses and gathering information for the Raj. He and the enigmatic Creighton Sahib, the head of the British secret service, watch over Kim and his secular life, as the Llama takes care of him spiritually. The crisis comes at the end of the book, as the Llama becomes ill, and in the course of his illness finds the fulfillment of his quest. Kim gives all he has physically to sustain the Llama, and at the end he finds himself unconscious from illness.

The Llama and Mahbub Ali decide together the fate that Kim will have, and he will continue to spy for the Raj, but has already achieved enlightenment through his work for the Llama. Kim is Kipling's book of second chances, mostly for himself, but for Kim, Mahbub Ali and Creighton Sahib as well. Kipling even gives Lispeth, from "Plain Tales from the Hills," an Afghan woman forsaken by her English lover, a second chance, when she appears in Kim as the proud chief of a small village. It is one of his only books that has a genuinely happy ending.

This book contains the best of everything else that Kipling has ever written, a much more sophisticated version of the Jungle Book, and perhaps his own long denied wish to stay in India, instead of being sent back to England as a miserable 6 year old child. In it, Kim is allowed to adventure, free of the restrictions of the life of the English child in India, but always with the protection of belonging to the dominant ethnic group.

Kipling put more of himself into this novel than into any of his other writing. He put the wish for acceptance that he felt, caught between his Indian life and his British life, a conflict he was never able to completely reconcile, into Kim, who fits perfectly into the Indian way of life, yet maintains his connections to the English. Kipling also describes what a spy is, and exposes more of himself than he might have thought, as the description fits the journalist that Kipling became, "From time to time, God causes men to be born--and thou art one of them--who have a lust to go abroad at the risk of their lives and discover news--today it may be of far-off things, tomorrow of some hidden mountain, and the next day of some near-by men who have done a foolishness against the State. These souls are very few; and of these few, not more than ten are of the best." In Kim he created a world of possible adventure, of his life as it might have been, as he might have wished it could be.