Kıplıng’s Post-Colonıal Ambıvalence: Who is Kım?

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Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi
44, 2 (2004) 285-295
KIPLING’S POST-COLONIAL AMBIVALENCE:
WHO IS KIM?
Mehmet Ali ÇELİKEL*
Özet
Makale Rudyard Kipling’in Kim romanında yer alan karşılıklı kültürel
önyargılardan yola çıkarak, sömürge sonrası dönemin yazarlarında görülen
kararsızlığa (ambivalans) benzer bir tutumun Kipling’de de görüldüğünü, Kipling’in
dönemin kolonyal yazarlarından farkı bir bakış açısıyla yazdığını, bu nedenle
sömürge dönemi yazarları arasında kategorise edilmesinin güç olduğunu
savunmaktadır. Makale aynı zamanda, romanda Kim’in yalnızca ırksal bir melez
olmadığını, aynı zamanda kültürel bir melezlik taşıdığını, Kim’in kullandığı melez
dilden ve yazarın hem Urduca hem de İngilizce kullanımından örnekler vererek
tartışmaktadır.
Anahtar sözcükler: Melezlik, sömürgecilik, emperyalizm, kararsızlık
(ambivalans), bağımsızlık, sömürge sonrası yazın, kimlik.
Abstract
The article argues that the mutual prejudices in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim are
also observed in the post-colonial writers’ novels, and exhibits the same
ambivalence as the post-colonial writers do. Therefore, it is argued that Kipling
wrote with a different perspective and, therefore, can hardly be categorised among
the colonial writers of his age. The article argues, at the same time, that Kim is not
only racially hybrid, but also culturally hybrid, by examples of the use of hybrid
language and the use of both Urdu and English in the narrative.
* Doç.Dr.,Van Yüzüncü Yıl Üniversitesi, İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Anabilim Dalı.

Mehmet Ali Çelikel 286
Key words: Hybridity, colonialism, imperialism, ambivalence, independence,
post-colonial literature, identity.
Rudyard Kipling’s Kim is one of the most renowned British novels
about India. Written by a British imperialist author, it traces the story of a
hybrid boy called Kim, the orphan son of an Irish colonial officer who dies
before leaving India. Kim, functioning both as a native boy and as a sahib in
the novel, is brought up by a native Indian woman. This premise of Kim
immediately invites a consideration of the novel on the grounds of
intercultural and interracial relationships. Kim’s ambiguity and Kipling’s
ambivalence about the issues of Indian independence are the most important
key points of this book that allow for a widespread debate.
Here, the purpose is to analyse Kipling’s ambivalence in colonial
writing by taking into consideration various identities suggested for Kim,
and by contrasting his affection for India to his objection to independence.
Another purpose here is also to highlight the question of “otherness” in Kim.
Unlike the traditional approach of the mainstream writers of adventure
fiction such as Rider Haggard and to some extend Daniel Defoe in Robinson
Crusoe, the concept of otherness is not only attributed to the native Indians,
but also to the British colonisers. In that sense, Kipling foreshadows and
shares the presentation of mutual prejudices and ambivalence of the
contemporary post-colonial authors like Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi,
whose post-colonial characters strongly recall Kim. In both Rushdie and
Kureishi’s novels, the protagonists suffer from the same problems of identity
as Kim, with their problems of multiple mother and father figures and with
their hybridity. Kim also focuses on the identity problems of its protagonist
in the same way as the post-colonial writers in question. By reading it from
both colonial and postcolonial perspectives, the present study also aims to
argue that this novel could well have been written in the post-colonial era as
Kim’s identity problems are caused by imperialism.
Rudyard Kipling was an Imperial intellectual and was pro-imperialism.
However, he did not write from the metropolitan centre, because he lived in
India and had affection for the place. Despite that, his fiction was still Euro-
centric, because his use of the vernacular within the English text contributes
to the alienation of the natives in the European perspective, since that
language stands out as incomprehensible by an English-speaking reader.
Native words are used in such a way that they frequently make one question
the meaning. Hence, Penguin’s edited edition with Edward Said’s
‘Introduction’ and explanatory notes (1987) makes the novel’s vernacular
language more comprehensible.

Kipling’s Post-Colonial Ambivalence: Who is Kim? 287
Although Kipling’s use of native words in a straightforward way
functions as an alienation of the native culture, the vernacular also highlights
the author’s affinity for the place and his familiarity with its culture and
language. As a result, Kipling’s competence in Urdu language puts him in a
more ambivalent position than a mono-lingual writer would be, because this
kind of capability enables him to observe both cultures as an outsider. Being
English, Urdu is a foreign language for Kipling, but being fluent in Urdu, he
knows how to represent his mother tongue as a “foreign language” through
eyes of the natives by adding mispronunciations and grammatically ill-
formed sentences produced by them.
Kipling never hesitated to proclaim the European right to colonise
because of their civilised status and to write about the colonial experience in
India and his desire for its continuity. He was never in favour of Indian
independence although he admired and loved the subcontinent and the orient
with their lifestyles and philosophies. Edward Said suggests that not only
did Kipling write about India, but he was of it. Born there in 1865, he spoke
Hindustani as his first language, and thus he was very much like Kim: ‘a
sahib in native clothes’ (Said 1987: 8). Clearly, he could see colonialism
from the native perspective, which enabled him to create a character like
Kim. However, his Englishness still overcomes his upbringing in Urdu
culture. Therefore, he defines the Indians as the “other” right at the
beginning of the novel by calling them “natives”: “He sat, … opposite the
old Ajaib-Gher – the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum”
(49, italics added for emphasis).
Despite his affection for India, and his personal ties with the culture,
Kipling clearly foregrounds the superiority of the ruling colonial class and
the inferiority of the natives in Kim. Don Randall clarifies that the
subordinate relation of the East to the West persists in Kipling’s fiction, and
the native’s inferiority is frequently emphasised in particularly Kim. Randall
also traces Kipling’s narrator making generalising and authoritative remarks
about the Orientals and their customs. For example, Kim can ‘lie like an
Oriental’ or Kim can sleep as the train roars because the Oriental is
indifferent to ‘mere noise’ (Randall 79). By making such generalisations,
Kipling remains faithful to the established, conventional Western
understanding of the Eastern image in Kim. Negative characteristics like
“lying”, and uncivilised, nomadic behaviours like sleeping “indifferently” to
noise are all attributed to the Orient.
Such representations above make one categorise Kipling in colonial
writing in the conventional sense, in which all authors depicted the natives as
“others” with a negative image. In the tradition of colonial writing, the
native characters are not treated as individuals. For that reason, it is out of
question to focus on their identity problems or ambivalence, which most

Mehmet Ali Çelikel 288
colonial writers were reluctant to do, but Kipling’s Kim is an individual with
a perspective. His identity is the rejection of both perceptions of inferiority
and superiority. He has an identity of a sahib and a native, and he acts as a
perfect in-between character for both cultures. He speaks English, if with an
accent, in the same manner as a ‘superior’ Englishman and he also speaks a
‘native’ language. Kim is both white and native, and this hybridity gives
him the ability to behave like a native (ability to lie and sleep indifferently to
noise) while he works for the colonial regiment and justifies and protects the
British holdings. Nevertheless, what makes Kim depicted as an individual,
through whom the reader is presented with subcontinent, is his Irish
genealogy, which makes him slightly more privileged in Kipling’s
representation. It is a slight privilege, because his whiteness is not due to
Englishness, but Irishness: another British colony.
Who is Kim? This question gives the novel its ambivalence. As
opposed to the context of colonialist writing, Kim departs from the
stereotypes of that fiction. Teresa Hubel states that despite writing from a
metropolitan perspective and privileging ‘Eastern lifestyles and belief
systems over those of the West’; nowhere in Kipling’s writing ‘do we see
him affirming the legitimacy of the Indian nationalist aspirations’ (Hubel 3).
As aforementioned, the privileged native character is a hybrid boy with an
Irish descent, and, thus, Kipling’s writing cannot avoid being shaped by
imperial and metropolitan ideologies that created the ‘most fundamental
dichotomy of imperialism’ which is ‘superiority and inferiority’. From the
point of view of metropolitan ideologies, imaging of India as female and
Britain as male was not unusual in the colonialist writing as Hubel suggests.
Hubel also finds a similarity between the relations of colonised/colonial and
wife/husband (4). Indian incompetence is frequently declared in Kipling’s
texts, which complies with the fact that the English masculinity is important
in the imperial adventure fiction.
In this sense, as a study of cultural possession and dispossession, as
Sara Suleri claims, Kim distributes ‘cultural surprise’ equally between the
coloniser and the colonised (251). The ambivalence of the narrative leaves
no place for easy resolutions in Kim. The protagonist is English, despite
being ‘burned black as any native’ and being able to speak the vernacular by
preference. Kim is the symbol of Kipling’s indecisiveness between the East
and the West. Kim both possesses the land as a sahib and is possessed by
the British as a native. For Kipling, ‘the reality of India is bigger than the
reality of the West’; therefore, the relationship between India and Britain is
impermanent. In Kipling’s eyes, ‘India will remain long after the British are
gone’. It is, in a sense clear that, Kipling celebrates the permanence of India
(Hubel 5).

Kipling’s Post-Colonial Ambivalence: Who is Kim? 289
Despite all, Kipling remains in favour of imperialism. Since only
unknowable India was compatible with Imperialism, he depicted
unidentifiable reality of the subcontinent. However, in such an
unidentifiable environment, an in-between character is required, and that
character is Kim. He acts as a cultural and lingual translator not only for the
colonisers, but also for the indigenous. Only the unknowable India justifies
the presence of the British, so Kim, who helps the colonisers cross the
boundaries between themselves and the colonised, makes India knowable.
His ability to serve both cultures makes Kim feel comfortable in India
despite being presented as English. Michael Gorra observes that through
Kim’s identity, Kipling suggests that one must not know England to be
comfortable in India, because Kim’s Englishness remains tenuous
throughout the novel, and this very Englishness makes him at home in India
in a way that no Indian can be (632). A character like Kim is much needed
for the British to make India controllable. Although he represents
Englishness in the novel; he is unaware of England and does not belong
anywhere, which makes him more obedient. His identity does not suggest
any certain definition. However, the opening of the novel suggests that
Kipling writes from a ‘dominating viewpoint’ of a white man, and Kim is
white (Said 7). In the opening of the novel, the second paragraph declares
Kim as a “white boy” although he prefers the vernacular, which turns him
into “a poor of white of the very poorest”:
He sat, in defiance of municipal borders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah
on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher - The Wonder House, as
the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-
breathing dragon’, hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is
always first of the conqueror’s loot.
There was justification for Kim - he had kicked Lala Dinanath’s boy off
the trunnions - since the English held Punjab and Kim was English. Though
he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by
preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though
he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar;
Kim was white - a poor white of the very poorest. (49)
The fact that Kim speaks more comfortable in Urdu than in English, and
he is burned black as a native indicates the ambiguity in his character. He is
English, but both the English and the natives seem to be “other” for him.
This representation atrongly recalls the ambivalent approach in Salman
Rushdie’s novels, particularly in Midnight’s Children. Saleem, the
protagonist of the novel remains ambivalent throughout the novel as t
whether denounce or appreciate the British Raj. Then, Rushdie prefers to
satirise both the colonised and the colonisers.

Mehmet Ali Çelikel 290
Although there is no first-person narration in Kim, the narration
particularly in the opening paragraph appears to be from Kim’s point of
view, because Lahore Museum is presented as Ajaib-Gher, and, as explained
by the third person narrator, it is what the natives call Lahore Museum.
Calling the natives’ Ajaib-Gher as Lahore Museum here is an explicit
‘linking of knowledge and power’, because it is the presentation of Indian
culture as a British possession, since the Lahore Museum is also ‘the
Government’s house’ (Randall 82). But it should not be ignored that the
names given by loyal people are particularly used in order to make the text
sound more unidentifiable. Despite that, it also provides a native
perspective.
It is revealed in the second paragraph that he preferably speaks the
vernacular. Therefore, it is clear that the name Ajaib-Gher is preferred in the
first paragraph instead of Lahore Museum. There are two opposing points in
the two paragraphs above. In the first one, Kim is presented more like a
native boy. On the other hand, in the second paragraph his Englishness is
emphasised, despite his equality with the other boys in the bazaar. The
equality with the native boys suggests Kim’s close and intimate relation with
India and its people. This also indicates Kipling’s own ties with the land.
Kim is culturally mobile and has an ability to imitate Indians. Such
mastery of Kim, as Philip Holden states, results in the transparency of India
to him and defends him against the natives. Ajaib-Gher or ‘Wonder House’
explains the novel’s frame upon India (Holden 91). That is, India is not
explainable. It is a ‘wonder’. One can also argue that Kim symbolises India.
His deliberately created hybridity gives the novel more of an unidentifiable
character. Again, in the opening page of the novel, Kipling tells of Kim’s
roots:
... The half-caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and
pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the
cheap cabs wait) told the missionaries that she was Kim’s mother’s sister;
but his mother had been nurse-maid in a colonel’s family and had married
Kimball O’Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an Irish
regiment. He afterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi Railway,
and his Regiment went home without him. The wife died of cholera in
Ferozepore, and O’Hara fell to drink and loafing up and down the line with
the keen -eyed three-year-old baby. (49)
Thus, only by blood, Kim is an English boy. He grew up like a native
boy in native culture. Moreover, Mavericks, the regiment his father worked
for, was an imaginary Irish regiment. That is another problem of identity in
Kim’s roots. Kipling intentionally adds the ambiguous flavour to the content
of the novel. The ambiguity he offers suggests inevitable comparisons with
the postcolonial era. No matter how paradoxical it might seem, it is relevant

Kipling’s Post-Colonial Ambivalence: Who is Kim? 291
to argue that colonial and postcolonial worlds are interdependent in the case
of Rudyard Kipling, because his ambivalence in Kim, and his protagonist’s
dualities may well be read from the perspectives of post-colonial
assumptions.
Don Randall argues that the selection of Kim as the central and
organising character in the novel allows for ‘an imperial ethnography of
British India’. Kim is a part of Kipling’s narrative discourse that reinforces
an ‘Orientalist representation of India as part of a timeless, eternal East’
(Randall 83). Kim remains in his teens throughout the novel. Lama is also
an ageless and timeless character symbolising India’s myths and legends.
Kim’s indefinable character is the otherness of India that the colonial writers
confidently believed justified their rule. Kipling never raises the question of
a political conflict between Kim’s dual identity. He leaves Kim as a boy, so
that the reader’s inevitable expectation that he would grow up to struggle for
independence is turned down. He may shift identities, but he always stays
an in-between character. His abilities may be ‘predicted on his whiteness,
but the novel as a whole remains deliberately abstracted from history’. This
was necessary for Kipling, because to imagine India ‘as home, [he] had to
exclude history’ (Gorra 634). However, when considered in terms of Kim’s
dualities, no matter how alien and mysterious they might be depicted, the
novel can never stay out of historical consideration.
The analysis of Kipling’s text reveals the ‘cultural and subjective
hybridisation’ of Kim. The hybrid Kim’s place in ‘his various cultural
contexts, difference and opposition’ must be understood in cultural terms.
The hybrid boy is ‘an instrument for imperial ethnography’, because he
serves ‘to mediate cross-cultural colonial relations’ occupying a ‘middle
ground’ between the coloniser as male and European; and the colonised as
non-European. He is identified ‘both with the coloniser and with the
colonised’, and he is both of them (Randall 84). He is European by birth,
and represents the imperial authority. On the other hand, his bringing up by
a native woman, whose ethnic origin is not at all certain, represents his
nativeness. Therefore, his identity is not stable. In a sense, his otherness
and his undefinable hybrid character help the imperialist Kipling to present
an unknowable India through a hybrid character that serves both as an
informant for the colonial officers and as a translator.
Kim, on the other hand, is curious about his roots: “‘I am Kim. I am
Kim. And what is Kim?’ His soul repeated again and again.”(331). He
explicitly questions his identity, although he is presented as English and
white. He cannot determine his cultural place. He serves loyally to the
British colonialism, and maintains a sahib’s status while remaining ‘a
graceful child of the bazaars and the rooftops’ (Said 8). His cultural
difference from the British is more obvious than his difference from the

Mehmet Ali Çelikel 292
natives in most cases. One of the sarcastic remarks about him is on his
ability to lie ‘like an Oriental’. Despite that, Kipling clearly aligns him with
British authority, but he is somehow situated on both sides of the power
divide. As an informant, he is an ambivalent figure representing imperial
power as well as, ‘at least potentially’ the resistance to that power (Randall
84).
It is therefore relevant to ask: Is Kim’s hybridity a result of colonialism
solely, or is this kind of hybridity also seen in the postcolonial era? In the
opening paragraphs of the novel, Kipling clearly employs significantly alien
words such as ‘Ajaib-Gher’, or ‘Zam-Zammah’. This language strikingly
clarifies the cultural difference. In Randall’s views, this is more than a
cultural difference. It is a cultural differentiation, not only for Kim, but also
for a ‘we’ that is proposed as the narrative enunciation. However different
this ‘we’ might seem from the natives, it is clear that the proposed ‘we’
shares the native language. Therefore, the language of the novel is
inevitably hybrid. This again recalls the conventional colonial dichotomy:
‘We’ is the colonisers, and ‘they’ is the subordinate natives. Nevertheless, in
the entire universe of the novel, English is ‘very rarely the spoken language’.
Its language, as Randall argues, is more hybrid than it needs to be. The
narrator, without italicising or providing the English translation chooses a
variety of alien terms. This is certainly the narrator’s ‘easy familiarity with
subcontinental languages’ that supports ‘his claim to ethnographic authority’
(Randall 85).
In the course of the novel, the narrator speaks of the English as if
referring to an alien group. The narrator’s point of view changes its
direction from the dominant English to a native’s point of view. In a sense,
the point of view of the colonised becomes the central standpoint of the
narrative, as in post-colonial discourse. Remarks such as ‘I do not
understand the customs of white men.’ (140), ‘the careless, open-spoken
English folk’ (148), ‘the dull fat eyes of . . . Sahibs’ (118) evidently give the
clues of a change of identification. The English, then, find their position as
much as the natives in ‘they’ of narrative enunciation (Randall 85).
In the following paragraph, the hybridity of the colonised land becomes
more outrageous in the same manner as the postcolonial identities that can
become neither English nor Indian particularly after the independence:
Kim looked him over out of the corners of his eyes. He was a Sahib in
that he wore Sahib’s clothes; the accent of his Urdu, the intonation of his
English, showed that he was anything but a Sahib. He seemed to understand
what moved in Kim’s mind ere the boy opened his mouth, and he took no
pains to explain himself as did Father Victor or the Lucknow masters.
Sweetest of all - he treated Kim as an equal on the Asiatic side. (199)

Kipling’s Post-Colonial Ambivalence: Who is Kim? 293
This is one of Kim’s discoveries of the keys to his identity. He starts
questioning his identity more: ‘What am I? Mussalman, Hindu, Jain, or
Buddhist? That is a hard knot.’ (191) As a hard knot, this is the crucial
question of the novel as well as ‘Who is Kim?’. Kim is the symbol of the
cultural hybridisation of the subcontinent. Kim’s mother tongue is
Hindustani in which he thinks whereas he speaks English ‘in a clipped
uncertain sing-song’ as described in the opening page of the novel.
Andre Viola considers Kim as the novel born out of Kipling’s ‘nostalgia
for his infancy and early childhood in India’; therefore, the book adopts an
unusual mellow tone towards the East (160). Unlike the colonial discourse
written from the metropolitan perspective, there is an unmistakable shift and
ambivalence in the narrative standpoint. The English becomes ‘the other’
from the indigenous perspective. Kipling presents an inverted discourse of
the colonial fiction.
Despite being English by birth, Kim’s English is clumsy:
‘There is a River in this country which he wishes to find so verree
much. It was put out by an Arrow which -’ Kim tapped his foot impatiently
as he translated in his own mind from the vernacular to his clumsy English.
(137)
The clumsiness of his English alone makes the English ‘the other’.
Despite being an imperial intellectual who depicts India as alien and
mysterious in many of his stories, Kipling placed India’s beauties in the
centre of Kim, unlike any of his predecessors. Michael Gorra finds a
similarity between Kipling and Rushdie in this sense. The marvels of India,
its people, its ideologies, its belief systems are in the centre, rather than the
colonisers (Gorra 633).
Gorra also links the hybrid identities of Kim and Rushdie’s Saladin
Chamcha in The Satanic Verses. He even sees Chamcha as a postcolonial
version of Kim, because Chamcha is ‘a professional mimic who can do a
thousand voices precisely because no one of them is authentically his own’
(Gorra 634). In both Kim as the representative of the colonial fiction and in
Rushdie’s fiction as the representative of post-colonial, the text is shaped by
descriptions, and all these descriptions are ambivalent. As suggested so far,
colonial and postcolonial fictions are interdependent, because there would
not have been a postcolonial literature had there not been colonialism.
Moreover, Kim’s ambivalence adds more to this interdependence, because
the central standpoint that shifted from the coloniser’s to the native’s in
Kim’s universe could well be observed in postcolonial literature. The shifted
perspectives in postcolonial discourse try to have the power of description.

Mehmet Ali Çelikel 294
However, postcolonial characters try to describe themselves rather than
being described as other, like the ambiguous narrator in the centre of Kim.
In the light of these observations, one might conclude that although Kim
was written during the colonial era by an imperial writer, its style and
narrative perspective is not Anglo-centric. The author significantly
highlights the mutual prejudices and misunderstandings between the two
cultures in the same way as the contemporary post-colonial authors do, by
employing the perspectives of both Kim and the British official. Kim,
depicted as a hybrid boy, is endowed with a double-identity that provides
him with both native perspective and “white English” perspective. Such
representation provides the novel’s strong sense of ambivalence. In a sense,
it foreshadows and influences most protagonists of the Anglo-Indian post-
colonial writers who wrote in the post-independence era. Therefore,
Kipling, though regarded as a pro-imperialist author during colonialism,
presents an ambivalent standpoint similar to that of post-colonial writers in
terms of his ambiguous approach to the ideology of colonisation and the idea
of Indian independence. It is, therefore, hard to read and classify his fiction
among the mainstream colonial British novelists, as his style does not
present a determined approach of the colonisers in the same milieux.
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HUBEL, Teresa. (January 1990). “The Bride of His Country: Love,
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SAID, Edward. (1987). Introduction, in Rudyard Kipling, Kim.
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Kipling’s Post-Colonial Ambivalence: Who is Kim? 295
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