These are wonderful questions and very hard to answer - both in the sense of what Kipling's intentions were in writing Kim and the even more difficult question of how people read it, what they took in from it. Kipling, as a journalist and not part of the 'establishment' of the Raj, was a bit of an outsider even if he was part of the European community (apparently he got a lot of flak for some of his early tales of life among the sahibs and memsahibs of the ruling group), although it's also clear that he was deeply imbued with the romance of Empire. But he seems to me a very long way away (in his attitude towards the native populations) from the kind of remote, hostile and depersonalising attitude that E M Forster depicts in A Passage to India as so prevalent among the British (and which Kipling himself satirises in the chaplain and soldiers).
As for coming out of a 'sick culture', this unfortunately describes 99.9999% of most cultural productions.
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Date: 2004-04-04 09:05 pm (UTC)These are wonderful questions and very hard to answer - both in the sense of what Kipling's intentions were in writing Kim and the even more difficult question of how people read it, what they took in from it. Kipling, as a journalist and not part of the 'establishment' of the Raj, was a bit of an outsider even if he was part of the European community (apparently he got a lot of flak for some of his early tales of life among the sahibs and memsahibs of the ruling group), although it's also clear that he was deeply imbued with the romance of Empire. But he seems to me a very long way away (in his attitude towards the native populations) from the kind of remote, hostile and depersonalising attitude that E M Forster depicts in A Passage to India as so prevalent among the British (and which Kipling himself satirises in the chaplain and soldiers).
As for coming out of a 'sick culture', this unfortunately describes 99.9999% of most cultural productions.