Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  The continuing presence of his parents in the Punjab had helped to sustain Ruddy’s interest in events on the North-West Frontier. Beginning in Chitral in 1895 there had been a series of tribal uprisings along the frontier each more serious than the last, culminating in 1897–8 in a general frontier uprising throughout Malakand and Tirah, where it took a combined British and Indian Army force of 40,000 fighting men more than six months to subdue a dozen of the strongest Pathan tribes. The fear of another frontier uprising to follow, supported by Russia, was very real, and Ruddy had already given voice to it in October 1898 in his poem ‘The Truce of the Bear’, in which he stressed the need for constant vigilance:

  Over and over the story, ending as he began –

  There is no truce with Adam-zad, the Bear that looks like a Man!7

  All these fears Ruddy reflected in Kim by making the defence of British India its central political theme, romanticised into the ‘Great Game’– the hidden struggle between the Great Powers across central Asia with India as the prize, fought out by ‘players’ from both sides: spies seeking to extend Russia’s control by subversion, and counter-spies working to frustrate their aims. In Kim he envisaged an elite force of secret agents dedicated to defending British India from its external enemies and its traitors within, ‘players of the Game’ drawn from every race and religion: Mahbub Ali the Afghan horse-trader; Hurree Chunder Mookerji the Bengali Babu; the lean Maratha identified only as E.23; the Simla curio dealer and ‘healer of sick pearls’ known as Lurgan-Sahib who is patently not a pukka sahib; and their controller, the shadowy Colonel Creighton. All have entered at risk to their lives into ‘the Great Game that never ceases day and night, throughout India’, knowing that ‘the Game is greater than the players of the Game’. The orphan boy Kim is duly recruited into their ranks and with his help India’s enemies in the shape of two bogus explorers, one Russian and one French, are prevented from fomenting a conspiracy among the frontier tribes.

  This is what the imperial, conservative, reasoning side of Kipling’s head envisaged when he sketched out his ideal Kim: a colourful, picaresque Boy’s Own adventure in which the boy Kimball O’Hara, for all his Indianness, learns what it is to be a sahib and understands that his future is to serve both the Indian people and British India as long as the Great Game continues to be played.

  That may well have been Ruddy’s intention, but in the writing a combination of circumstances caused the practical, sensible side of Kipling to gave way to the other side of his head: the intuitive, dark, elemental side which harked to his Daemon and within which his child nature resided, his real self undimmed, the good Kipling. The change had begun with Ruddy’s rediscovery of his child self with the birth of his first-born, followed by his seeking refuge in that same childhood after her death six years later. But scarcely less significant was the return of the father Ruddy had lost at the age of six, in the role of guru.

  The only letter from son to father known to have survived the bonfires was written in 1888 when Ruddy learned that he would not be returning to the family home in Lahore. Written in blank verse, it purports to be from ‘Halim the Potter to Yusuf His Father and Master Craftsman in the walled city of Lahore’, and is a tribute to the father he acknowledges as his mentor and guide, expressed in potter’s terms:

  Thy hint, thy council and thy touch …

  My workmanship thou saidst – and I believed.

  It was so small a touch, so slight a word.

  I threw the wet clay – marred it. Now I see!

  The hand went and the clay thereafter fell

  Uncouthly. These two months have shown the truth.

  More than a decade later the Pater returned to stand at his son’s shoulder, again offering hint, council and touch, and placing at his son’s disposal his encyclopaedic knowledge of India. Lockwood Kipling was on hand at almost every stage in the writing of Kim. Even as the final proofs were being checked he was there, modelling terracotta plaques in low bas-relief of the ten most important characters in the story, to be inserted as sepia plates in the first editions of Kim. ‘He would take no sort of credit,’ wrote his son of his contribution. ‘There was a good deal of beauty in it [Kim], and not a little wisdom; the best in both sorts being owed to my Father.’ In Something of Myself Kipling implies that Lockwood was at his side when painful cuts had to be made, including ‘a half-chapter of the Lama sitting down in the blue-green shadows at the foot of a glacier, telling Kim stories out of the Jatakas, which was truly beautiful but, as my old Classics master would have said, “otiose”, and it was removed almost with tears’.8 The removal of this scene at a very late stage shows how the role of the Lama had grown in the writing – and all the signs are that this was Lockwood Kipling’s doing; that the Lama and his Buddhist philosophy were the greatest of the many gifts which Lockwood brought back from India for his son.

  Lockwood makes his presence felt in Kim from the start – as the white-bearded, pipe-puffing curator of the building in Lahore known locally as the Ajaib Gher or Wonder House. He is on hand to welcome the Tibetan Lama to his museum and to guide him through the Buddhist exhibits, revealing a detailed knowledge of Buddhist history and iconography that amazes the Lama. Under his curatorship the Punjab Museum had grown into one of the world’s most important repositories of early Buddhist art from the Gandhara civilisation, largely thanks to archaeologists like Lockwood’s colleague Aurel Stein. In 1898 in the wake of the Malakand Campaign Stein had excavated Buddhist monastic sites in the hitherto forbidden tribal areas of Swat, and in January of that same year the uncovering of inscribed Buddha relics in a stupa close to India’s border with Nepal had completed a cycle of remarkable discoveries in that region which had begun with the finding of the Buddha’s long-lost birthplace at Lumbini – an event of huge significance to Buddhists since it was one of the four great pilgrimage sites associated with the life of the Buddha. It had not gone unnoticed by Lockwood Kipling that a few miles west of Lumbini had also been discovered the ruins of Kapilavastu, the city where the Buddha had been raised as Prince Siddhartha, and from which he had fired the arrow which gave rise to the Spring of the Arrow – which now became the ultimate goal of the Lama’s quest in Kim.

  It was Lockwood Kipling, too, who had kept up with the latest developments in Tibetan Buddhist studies, which owed a great deal to the work of two enthusiasts: Dr Austine Waddell of the Indian Medical Service and a Bengali boarding-school headmaster, Sarat Chandra Das. In Darjeeling both men had studied under Tibetan religious teachers as well as learning from an earlier generation of explorer-spies known as the ‘Pundits’, hill-men recruited and trained by the Survey of India at its headquarters in Dehra Dun, a place well known to the Kiplings since it was where Jack Fleming had his base.9 Although never secret agents in the modern sense, the Pundits had mapped Tibet and central Asia at risk of their lives, and included among their number was Sarat Chandra Das – who provided the model for Babu Hurree Chunder, the ‘oily, effusive and nervous’ secret agent who proceeds to turn the Kipling stereotype of the effete, subversive babu on its head by revealing himself as a man of courage and action.

  Dr Waddell’s The Buddhism of Tibet or Lamaism was published in 1897 and Sarat Chandra Das’s account of his illicit travels in Tibet in 1899. Both works came as a shock to those who knew Buddhism through the writings of Rhys Davids, Monier Williams and the Theosophists, in that they portrayed Tibetan Buddhism as a perversion of Buddhism and Tibetan lamas as anything but masters of higher consciousness. These conflicting perceptions explain the only false note in Kim – when the gentle Lama declares to the museum’s curator that he has come to India from his Tibetan lamasery alone because ‘it was in my mind that the Old Law was not well followed; being overlaid, as thou knowest, with devildom, charms and idolatry’. Lockwood Kipling was steeped in the early Buddhism portrayed in the Gandharan sculptures and basalt reliefs which he had cared for in his museum, and it was this purer philosophy, drawing on the verses of Arnold’s Light of Asia
and Max Müller’s translation of the Dhammapada10 scriptures, which he passed on to his son in Tisbury and Rottingdean.

  In the early chapters of Kim the boy’s surrogate parent is Mahbub Ali, the manliest of father-figures, who provides him with hot meals and money. Devout Muslim Sufi though he is, Mahbub Ali refuses to give alms to ‘cursed unbelievers’ and he has none of the instinctive tolerance of Kim, who alone among the children playing on the great gun Zam-zammah shows charity towards the strange Tibetan Lama and so seals his own fate. As ‘Little Friend of All the World’ Kim is strictly neutral and takes no more interest in the Lama’s religion than in the ‘few score’ other religions he has encountered, but like the Elephant’s Child in the Just So Stories he has ‘’satiable curtiosity’ which leads him to follow the Lama: ‘The lama was his trove, and he purported to take possession.’ The feminine unassertiveness of the Lama is unlike anything he has experienced but he accepts the role of the Lama’s chela or disciple with equanimity, using it as his cover while continuing to work closely with Mahbub Ali. Despite his Afghan background the horse-trader is portrayed as a devoted loyalist of the British Raj, as are Lurgan Sahib and Babu Hurree Chunder. In Kim these three major players of the Game fill the same roles as Baloo, Baghera and Kaa in the Jungle Books as they teach Kim the Law.

  But as the novel unfolds and Kim journeys deeper into the Indian interior, we find him rejecting the Law, or at least that version of the Law taught at St Xavier’s boarding school and practised by his fellow players of the Game. The masculine element, so dominant in the first half, now begins to give way to the feminine, exemplified by the increasing importance Kipling accords to two maternal figures: the wealthy widow known as the Sahiba who mothers Kim through a fever, and the hill-woman known as the Woman of Shamlegh. The significance of these two characters is almost always downplayed by the mostly male critics and commentators who have passed literary judgement on Kim: the Woman of Shamlegh turns out to be the same woman so cruelly let down by her white lover in ‘Lispeth’, written fourteen years earlier. The younger Ruddy had predicted for her a miserable fate as a ‘bleared, wrinkled creature, exactly like a wisp of charred rag’, but the older and wiser man has transformed her into a proud and commanding matriarch with two husbands in tow. It is no accident that at the point in the book where Kim and his Lama leave the plains Kipling opens the chapter with an unacknowledged Hindu saying: ‘Who goes to the Hills goes to his mother.’ Kim is entering feminine territory and from now on these two quintessentially Indian ayah or surrogate mother-figures dominate the story, supported by the gentle Lama and the effeminate plump Babu. And it is no accident that from this point onwards British India and the British, represented throughout by male authority figures, pale into the background, never to reappear. When finally Babu Hurree Chunder comes to sit at the feet of the Lama, he reveals his Westernisation to be no more than skin-deep:

  He himself had been taught by the Sahibs, who do not consider expense, in the lordly halls of Calcutta; but, as he was ever first to acknowledge, there lay a wisdom behind earthly wisdom – the high and lonely lore of meditation. Kim looked on with envy. The Hurree Babu of his knowledge – oily, effusive, and nervous – was gone… There remained – polished, polite, attentive – a sober, learned son of experience and adversity, gathering wisdom from the lama’s lips.

  Kim himself has no time for higher thoughts until, with his duty to Creighton-Sahib and the Great Game done, he and the Lama begin the final stage of their journey, which is to allow the Lama to find the object of his spiritual pilgrimage: ‘The River of the Arrow’. Kim now realises that he has deceived the Lama by pretending to be what he was not. Overcome by ‘strain, fatigue, and the weight beyond his years’, he breaks down in a fever. He is taken in a litter to the Sahiba’s house, where she first gives him an opiate that makes him sleep for thirty-six hours and then nurses him back to health. But when Kim struggles to get back into the world again he experiences what can only be described as his moment of enlightenment:

  He looked upon the trees and the broad fields, with the thatched huts hidden among crops – looked with strange eyes unable to take up the size and proportion and use of things – stared for quite half an hour. All that while he felt, though he could not put it into words, that his soul was out of gear with his surroundings – a cog-wheel unconnected with any machinery … The breezes fanned over him, the parrots shrieked at him, the noises of the populated house behind – squabbles, orders, and reproofs – hit on dead ears.

  ‘I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?’ His soul repeated it again and again.

  He did not want to cry – had never felt less like crying in his life – but of a sudden easy, stupid tears trickled down his nose, and with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up anew on the world without. Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper proportion … They were all real and true – solidly planted upon the feet – perfectly comprehensible – clay of his clay, neither more nor less. He shook himself like a dog with a flea in his ear, and rambled out of the gate. Said the Sahiba: ‘Let him go. I have done my share. Mother Earth must do the rest.’

  Kim lies down under a banyan tree, where he feels the ‘good, clean dust’ between his toes and pats it between his hands – ‘the hopeful dust that holds the seeds of all life’. Then he sleeps: ‘And Mother Earth was as faithful as the Sahiba … His head lay powerless upon her breast, and his opened hands surrendered to her strength. The many-rooted tree above him, and even the dead man-handled wood beside, knew what he sought, as he himself did not know.’

  Now Mahbub Ali reappears to reclaim the boy for the Great Game, and as Kim sleeps he and the Lama dispute over who shall have him. ‘It is his right to be cleansed from sin – with me,’ argues the Lama, and he suggests that Mahbub Ali might like to join them. Amused by the Tibetan’s insolence Mahbub Ali backs off. The Lama then wakes Kim and tells him that his search for the River of the Arrow is over. On account of the merit acquired in his search, the river has come to him. Finally, in what is the novel’s penultimate paragraph, the Lama tells Kim that, like a true Bodhisattva who having broken free of the wheel of existence nevertheless returns to help others achieve enlightenment, he has come back for him: ‘Son of my Soul, I have wrenched my Soul back from the Threshold of Freedom to free thee from sin – as I am free, and sinless! Just is the Wheel! Certain is our deliverance! Come!’ The novel closes with the Lama smiling, ‘as a man may who has won salvation for himself and his beloved’.

  There is no ambiguity here. What few commentators and critics have been unable to accept is that the novel ends not with Kim torn between duty and faith, British India and Indian India, West and East, action and contemplation, but with Kim a committed disciple of a Tibetan Buddhist Lama. He has found himself and he has made his choice. The struggle between the two sides of Kim’s head ends with a clear victory for the better side. A book that began as a political allegory about the defence of British India and, by implication, of Western values, has become the vehicle for a very different Law, that of the Buddhist Dharma.

  What most commentators do agree on is that as a novel Kim finds a perfect balance between seemingly irreconcilable opposites, that its protagonists are as fully realised as its portrayals of urban Lahore and of rural India up and down the Grand Trunk Road, and that the India brought to life is suffused with warmth, the work of a man who loved India deeply. The novelist Kingsley Amis described Kim as ‘one of the greatest novels in the language’, the critic Angus Wilson as ‘the culmination and essence of all the transcendence that Kipling gained from his Indian experience’. The no less distinguished Bengali man of letters Nirad Chaudhuri thought Kim ‘great by any standards that ever obtained in any age of English literature’, going on to speak of ‘Kipling’s vision of a much bigger India, a vision whose profundity we Indians would be hard put to it to match even in an Indian language, not to speak of English. He had arrived at a true and moving sense
of that India which is almost timeless, and had come to love it.’ Even Edward Said, the scourge of Orientalists and Orientalism, went so far as to declare Kim to be of ‘great aesthetic merit’, albeit a ‘masterwork of imperialism’.11

  In December 1900 the first chapter of Kim was published in McClure’s Magazine in America, and on the thirtieth of that month Rudyard Kipling celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday. Half his life was over. He had always appeared older than his age but he now looked and acted like a man in his late forties, his eyes sunk and overhung by bushy eyebrows, his mouth lost behind a walrus moustache, to all intents a dry old stick, animated only when he could forget himself among children or in the company of people he felt he could trust. When Kim first appeared in book form in October 1901 it produced an enthusiastic response from Kipling’s former admirer Henry James, who rejoiced at his return to his art and urged him to abandon his political verses, ‘by which I mean chuck public affairs, which are an ignoble scene, and stick to your canvas and your paintbox. There are as good colours in the tubes as ever were laid on, and there is the truth. The rest is humbug. Ask the Lama.’12

  But Kipling chose not to ask the Lama. Kim was the last real victory of the intuitive, Indian side of his head. It was also Kipling’s farewell to India, to his childhood, perhaps even to his Daemon – although he himself believed that it returned to him once more when he wrote Puck of Pook’s Hill for his two surviving children at their new home, Bateman’s, in East Sussex, in 1904. India had been the paradise garden of his childhood, his land of lost delight. He had returned at sixteen but with his Bombay childhood locked and hidden away, finding his parents’ India to be a land of darkness filled with night terrors and lurking death. But by degrees he had rediscovered the art of moving between worlds as he had as a child – and in doing so had learned to love India again, despite himself; discovered also the delights of risk-taking and shock-making and how to exploit his fears by turning them to his advantage. He learned also to listen to both sides of his head, one of which told him that all was chaos without the Law while the other said let go and let your instincts be your guide, drawing strength from both sides.