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Spoilers in what follows, if there's anyone else in the world who hasn't already read this.
Of course I totally enjoyed Kim, and definitely, if you're a Laurie King fan and read The Game, you'll want to read or re-read (as the case may be) Kipling's book. I had never read it before. There are strange gaps in my education, and Kipling is one.
On the positive side, Kipling's a fine story-teller, of course, and the characters are all immensely appealing. The bad guys are indeed smarmy, overconfident Europeans, for the most part (but with an occasional bad-guy Asian thrown in). Also, I did not expect to find a Buddhist in such a central role, and expected even less that Kipling would understand Buddhism as much as he did. I know less about the other cultures and religions, but will assume factual accuracy. And for the most part, he credits culture over "blood" by making Kim so Asian in almost all ways. You have to imagine Kim, when he does so well at "passing," as wish-fulfillment (Mary Sue?) for some colonials.
On the negative side, there were a few outright racist statements (we always have a hint that the reason for Kim's excellence at everything is his white blood, many stereotypes about punctuality, etc.), and certainly the great powers, the reason for the existence of the "Great Game," were the European powers. Like all the Hollywood movies purporting to be about Africa (like Cry Freedom, supposedly about Stephen Biko) but really about the white people involved with them, perhaps Kipling too deals with true Asians only as supporting cast for his white hero.
On the questioning side, I remember Edward Said, probably inaccurately, and his descriptions of European writers involved in "Orientalism." I doubt that he dealt with anyone as pop as Kipling, but I recall his negative views on other Europeans (Flaubert, T.E. Lawrence, etc), who "represent[ed] Asia, because she c[ould] not represent herself" and thus appropriated Asian as something for Europeans and Americans to use, not as existing in its own right--cultural colonialism. That last part is hardly the case in our day, with all the brilliant South Asians writing in English (Seth, Ghosh, Roy, Mistry, Mukerji, Desai, to name a few--not to mention controversial figures like Rushdie and Ondaatje). Definitely Asians now represent themselves in world literature.
Certainly reading Kipling in the present context is a good bit different from what it was in his time. So one question is exactly what I'm reading. I think I'm reading how Kipling represents his own kind, really. I'm looking at the book, not for what it shows me of Asia, but for what it shows me of British colonialist mentality before the twentieth century.
Also, I'm wondering if there is a need in the world, though, for cultural "translators." I know my own progress, as much as I've made it (knowing we can't totally erase the culture that produced us), from living in a racist, segregated society, to seeing everyone as fully human, was aided to some extent not only by my immediate personal experience, but also by writers like Julia Peterkin(a local white novelist who sympathetically wrote about the lives of black people in Black April and even by Dubose Heyward, though I'm sure that now the story of Porgy and Bess (perhaps not the music, though) seems more racist than anything Kipling wrote. But I'm not sure I would have been able to understand James Baldwin and the other African American writers I first encountered if I hadn't had those stepping stones that gave me a little more insight into the lives of people my culture didn't recognize as people. At the time, those writers were pulling back a curtain. Now that the curtain is gone, they seem very limited in vision.
So did Kipling in any way create a bridge between cultures, or did he just make the crossing more difficult? (hmm, too many metaphors, but hope you know what I mean.)
Or maybe I'm just trying to justify something that shouldn't be justified. Maybe I should leave it where we started--it's a great yarn, but it comes out of a sick culture.
Of course I totally enjoyed Kim, and definitely, if you're a Laurie King fan and read The Game, you'll want to read or re-read (as the case may be) Kipling's book. I had never read it before. There are strange gaps in my education, and Kipling is one.
On the positive side, Kipling's a fine story-teller, of course, and the characters are all immensely appealing. The bad guys are indeed smarmy, overconfident Europeans, for the most part (but with an occasional bad-guy Asian thrown in). Also, I did not expect to find a Buddhist in such a central role, and expected even less that Kipling would understand Buddhism as much as he did. I know less about the other cultures and religions, but will assume factual accuracy. And for the most part, he credits culture over "blood" by making Kim so Asian in almost all ways. You have to imagine Kim, when he does so well at "passing," as wish-fulfillment (Mary Sue?) for some colonials.
On the negative side, there were a few outright racist statements (we always have a hint that the reason for Kim's excellence at everything is his white blood, many stereotypes about punctuality, etc.), and certainly the great powers, the reason for the existence of the "Great Game," were the European powers. Like all the Hollywood movies purporting to be about Africa (like Cry Freedom, supposedly about Stephen Biko) but really about the white people involved with them, perhaps Kipling too deals with true Asians only as supporting cast for his white hero.
On the questioning side, I remember Edward Said, probably inaccurately, and his descriptions of European writers involved in "Orientalism." I doubt that he dealt with anyone as pop as Kipling, but I recall his negative views on other Europeans (Flaubert, T.E. Lawrence, etc), who "represent[ed] Asia, because she c[ould] not represent herself" and thus appropriated Asian as something for Europeans and Americans to use, not as existing in its own right--cultural colonialism. That last part is hardly the case in our day, with all the brilliant South Asians writing in English (Seth, Ghosh, Roy, Mistry, Mukerji, Desai, to name a few--not to mention controversial figures like Rushdie and Ondaatje). Definitely Asians now represent themselves in world literature.
Certainly reading Kipling in the present context is a good bit different from what it was in his time. So one question is exactly what I'm reading. I think I'm reading how Kipling represents his own kind, really. I'm looking at the book, not for what it shows me of Asia, but for what it shows me of British colonialist mentality before the twentieth century.
Also, I'm wondering if there is a need in the world, though, for cultural "translators." I know my own progress, as much as I've made it (knowing we can't totally erase the culture that produced us), from living in a racist, segregated society, to seeing everyone as fully human, was aided to some extent not only by my immediate personal experience, but also by writers like Julia Peterkin(a local white novelist who sympathetically wrote about the lives of black people in Black April and even by Dubose Heyward, though I'm sure that now the story of Porgy and Bess (perhaps not the music, though) seems more racist than anything Kipling wrote. But I'm not sure I would have been able to understand James Baldwin and the other African American writers I first encountered if I hadn't had those stepping stones that gave me a little more insight into the lives of people my culture didn't recognize as people. At the time, those writers were pulling back a curtain. Now that the curtain is gone, they seem very limited in vision.
So did Kipling in any way create a bridge between cultures, or did he just make the crossing more difficult? (hmm, too many metaphors, but hope you know what I mean.)
Or maybe I'm just trying to justify something that shouldn't be justified. Maybe I should leave it where we started--it's a great yarn, but it comes out of a sick culture.
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From:
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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.
From:
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I don't think we can know, and maybe don't need to know, what Kim meant to the readers of its time. What I'm try to puzzle out is how we read works like this today.
And, yes, can't say the US in the 21st century is any healthier than the British Empire in the 19th.