Reading Between the Lines: Geography and Hybridity in Rudyard Kipling's Kim

Author(s): Sailaja Krishnamurth and Sailaja Krishnamurti

Source: Victorian Review, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2002), pp. 47-65
Published by: Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27793482 .
Accessed: 27/09/2013 02:51
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Victorian Review.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Reading
Between the Lines:
Geography
and
Hybridity
in
Rudyard Kipling's
Kim
Saihja
KHshnamurth
What the
map
cuts
up,
the
story
cuts across.
(Michel
de
Certeau1)
You cannot
occupy
two
places
in
space simultaneously.
That is axiomatic.
(Hurree
Chunder
Mookerjee
in
Rudyard Kipling's Kim2)
Britain's
occupation
of India was not
predominandy
driven
by
mili
tary
force3 From its
origins
in the British East India
Company,
the
empire's
activities in India tended towards administrative and
bureaucratic forms of
power.
It was a
colonization which
operated
through
the
collection, archive,
and administration of
information,
for which
geography
was the
key.
In order for the British to establish
India as a
colony,
it
was
essential to
gather knowledge
of the
territory.
Through
the India
Survey,
a
project
which
was
intended to
provide
ethnographical
and
cartographical knowledge
in minute
detail,
the
British
Empire
established borders which enclosed the colonial sub
ject
and could be defended.
Through
the
Survey,
the
empire system
atically catalogued
the
identity
of colonial India.
Rudyard Kipling's
Kim is
a
novel which tells
a
story
of the India
Survey.
In
it, many
of the main characters are
engaged
with the
process
of
mapping
India for the
purposes
of the
imperial
archive.
Kipling,
an
Englishman,
marks out the Indian
landscape through
his
Victorian Review
(2002)
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
S. Krishnamurth
writing just
as his
map-making
Hurree Chunder
Mookerjee
and Kim
himself do
as
they
travel across his
landscape.4 Through geography,
the
processes
of
mapping territory
and
mapping identity,
Kim comes
into his
identity
as a
sahib.
But
something
else
happens
in Kim. It does not
operate only
as a
story
about the
greatness
and
utility
of the
mapping project
and the
power
of the British in India. It is a narrative which chronicles
a
pilgrimage,
and which records details about the contours of the
landscape,
the
people
who
populate
it,
the
many languages
and events which take
place
in its course. It
performs
the
project
of
an
itinerary,
the
story
of
a
journey,
as
much
as
it describes the archival
project
of the
survey.
Bruce
Avery's essay
"The
Subject
of
Imperial Geography" explores
the
European history
of the visual
map,
its
incorporation
into the
Victorian archive
project,
and the
way
in which it is
employed
to
form the colonial
subject.
In his
analysis,
he touches
on the
trope
of the narrative
itinerary,
but does not
fully
articulate its role in
this
subject-formation.
The narrative
itinerary project
which Kim
as
a
novel is
engaged
in,
and which it
explores, exposes slippages
in
the
positioning
of
subject-identities,
and creates an in-between
space
in which the
hybrid
identities
produced by
such
slippages
mediate
and
transgress
the boundaries
imposed by
the visual
map.
With the
concept
of
hybridity
in
mind,
reading
the novel as a narrative
itinerary
opens up
other
questions
of the
project
of colonialism which
expose
the
inability
of the
mapping project
to
adequately perform
the task
of
fixing ethnicity
and
identity
in
space.
In this narrative of
hybridity,
the
uncanny ability
of the characters to move back and forth between
borders,
languages,
and identities
suggests
that even those
engaged
with
mapping
cannot be fixed
through
it. Such
hybrids
become the
machines of the
mapping project,
and
yet transgress
the boundaries
of the
map.
I want to
explore
these issues via a route which
passes
first
through
the
history
of the
relationship
between narrative
itinerary
and the
visual
map
in the
production
of
knowledge
in
pre-colonial
India,
and
in the Victorian Era. I will then move to the
concepts
of in-between
volume 28 number 1
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Reading
Between the Lines
space
and
hybridity,
and the roles that narrative
itinerary
and visual
mapping play
in the construction of these
concepts. Finally,
I want to
revisit the
landscape
of Kim to
explore
the
possibilities opened by
a
topographical reading
which
strategically employs
these
concepts.
Avery suggests
that
through knowledge
of the colonial
other,
the
British
Empire recognizes
its
self (Avery 59).
This
reading,
which
employs
a
Lacanian
approach,
is useful to
understanding
the
empire's
geographical imperative
as an
attempt
to define itself in relation to its
subjects. Avery's analysis exposes
mapping
as a
process
which allows
a
privileging
of British
knowledge, casting
the native as a
'primitive'
comparison
to which Britain could understand itself
as a
rational,
enlightened,
and
powerful
nation. This
process attempts
to
provide
a
clear and incontrovertible delineation of
ethnicity:
a
strict
separation
between the British cus' and the colonized 'them.' The
process
of
mapping
also allows
a
sterilization of the
other,
a
removal of
agency,
by fixing
it within lines and
by removing
the sense of time and
diversity
of
experience,
the
fluidity
and
polyvalence
of
landscape.
The
other becomes reducible to the archive of the other.
Avery's reading
of Kim
points
to two kinds of
signifying gaze
which
for him
exemplify
the difference between the
map
and the narrative
itinerary.
The
gaze
of the narrative
itinerary
works where "Narrative
space
is
organized by
the
passage
of
agents through
it... in this
passage agency
takes
precedence
because it creates the visual field.
The
gazing subject
is
present
in the
grammar,
and the
objects
of
the
gaze
do not sit
passively awaiting
that
gaze" (Avery 68).
The
mapping
gaze,
in which
agency
of both the
gazing subject
and the
object
of the
gaze
is removed from the visual
field,
is
"precisely
the
kind of vision
engendered by geography
and
imperialism" (Avery
67)
.The distinction between the
rendering
of
agency
in each kind
of vision is
useful,
and fits
Avery's
Lacanian
approach.
However,
my
concern here is with
Avery's positioning
of narrative
itinerary
in
relation to the
development
of the visual
map
as
being
an
originary
construction of
geographical
vision from which the visual
map
emerges.
Victorian Review
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
S. Krishnamurth
This
positioning reproduces
some of the constructions inherent to
the colonial
project:
the
primitive, underdeveloped
nature of the
colonized
subject,
and the
ability
of the colonizer to
improve
upon
the colonized other's
knowledge
of itself. It is
important
to note here
the role of narrative
itinerary
within the
history
of
geography
both
as it
developed
in western
Europe,
and
as
it
developed
in the Indian
subcontinent.
The main
corpus
of
geographical
accounts and
maps
that existed in
the
pre-colonial
Indian sub-continent comes from
religious
texts in
the Hindu tradition and from writers of the
Moghul Empire
and
Chinese, Tibetan, Persian,
and Middle Eastern
regions.5
While
some
geographers
have
suggested
that the relative lack of evidence of visual
maps
indicates that the
indigenous peoples
were
simply
uninterested
in
any
geographical project,
this is not the
case. There is
growing
evidence to
suggest
that Indians and other South Asians did indeed
chart the
landscape,
and there is a
variety
of
possible
reasons
why
this
evidence has taken
long
to discover.6 One
key
reason is that these
geographical
accounts often did not
employ
visual
mapping
in the
manner of western
cartography.
There is
a
great
deal of
evidence,
for
example,
of the
cosmographical maps
that
were
generated by
indigenous
Hindus in South Asia.7 It is clear that narrative
was an
important
mode of
geographical representation.
Canonical Hindu
religious
texts,
like the
Puranas,
the
Ramayana
and the
Mahabharata,
contain a
breadth of such
geographical
information that has since
been
proven
to be
fairly
accurate.8
Although
the Arabs
were
among
the first to draw
maps
of the
area,
much evidence from that medieval
period
too
appears
in the form of narrative.9 It is well documented
historically
that the former
kingdoms
of the Indian
peninsula
were
myriad.
Borders
were
constandy
in
dispute
and
changing:
"Obvi
ously, territory
in South Asia was
politically partitioned among
differ
ent states as
well as between administrative units within
states,
but
clearly
delimited
(not
to mention
demarcated)
boundaries
scarcely
existed until
they
were
imposed by
the British"
(Harley
and Wood
ward
508)
.Textual evidence
suggests
that local
people
knew their
surroundings,
and the lack of a
clear visual
representation
of the
volume 28 number 1
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Reading
Between the Lines
region
did not
impede
the
governance
of the various
kingdoms:
in
fact the two Hindu
epics,
the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana,
are
stories about conflicts between such
kingdoms.
This
history
elucidates
some
key
issues.
First,
it
points
to a
genealogy
of
geography
which is not
exclusively
western.
Second,
it confirms
geographical knowledge
of the
region
in
pre-colonial
times.
Though
India
as
it is marked out now did not exist in that fashion before
British
colonization,
the colonial
production
of
knowledge implicidy
suggests
that such
knowledge
could not have existed. This historical
evidence makes clear both that a
great
deal of
knowledge
about
the area existed there before the British archive
project began;
and
that the
indigenous people
of the
region
were also aware of their
landscape.
This
supports
the
reading
of the visual
map
as a tool
of
colonization,
but refutes the
conception
of the narrative
itinerary
as a
primitive
version of the
map.
As Mohammed Azhar Ansati
points
out,
medieval Arabic
geographical
narrative accounts allow for
detail,
and
a sense of historical
time,
and therefore have
extraordinary
contemporary utility (14).
Each
process
clearly
evolves out of neces
sity;
each can occur
simultaneously.
This
brings
me to
my
next
point:
that the coextensive nature of the
map
and the narrative
itinerary
in both South Asian and British
geography,
as
well as the British
employment
of narrative as a means
of
Meshing
out'
knowledge
of
the colonized
subject, suggests
that each form must be understood
as
coexistent,
albeit with different
consequences
for the formation
of the
subject.
The
development
and
employment
of the narrative
itinerary
and
the visual
map
in the
development
of
European geography
has
been studied
by many
historians of
cartography. Ptolemy's maps
of the South Asian sub-continent were constructed from narrative
information that came from
many
sources,
including
mariners who
were
engaged
in trade with the area. One of his
primary
references
was the work of
geographers
who traveled with the Greek
King
Alexander in his
conquest
of India in the fourth
century
B.C.: "The
work of these
geographers
was
simplified
when
they
found that the
Indians
already
had
precise
and accurate
knowledge
of their
own
Victorian Review
51
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
S. Krishnamurth
country" (Gole 21).
Britain's India
Survey,
which reached its
apex
in the Victorian
era,
was to some
degree
reliant on information that
was absorbed from
already
extant narrative
geographical
accounts of
the area.
While much of it came from the
journals
and
descriptions
of
early Company
men
and sea
navigators,
some were the works of
indigenous people
of the
sub-continent,
now
identified
as
Indians,
and were
either
pre-existing
historical accounts or the results of native
employees
of the
Company.10
In the Victorian
era,
the
production
of
knowledge
of India took
a
variety
of forms.
Geography
is often referred to as the
reigning
science of the
period,
since it was fundamental to
maintaining
knowledge
of the
growing empire.11 Avery suggests
that the narrative
itinerary
kind of vision is "insufficient for the
imperial enterprise",
and his examination of
agency
makes the reasons for this clear
(68).
But neither
can the visual
map,
on its
own,
be sufficient for
the archive
project. Many
other archival
projects
were
occurring
simultaneously: ethnographical
and
anthropological
surveys,
and
the
archiving
and restoration of works of art. These
projects
provided
what Thomas Richards refers to as
the 'thick'
description,
supplementing
the information contained in the visual
map.
Richards
points
out that the
mapping project
was
necessarily
coexistent
with the
ethnographical project,
and that in tandem the Victorian
colonizers believed that these could create a
comprehensive
archive
of information about the colonized
subject (21).This suggests
that
rather than
simply being
the
origin
of the visual
map,
the narrative
itinerary
is also coextensive with the visual
map
in Victorian
information
culture,
and in Indian
history.
The narrative is both an
elaboration
on,
and a foundation
to,
the visual
map.
Avery
argues
that the narrative
itinerary
allows both the
gazing
subject
and
subject
of the
descriptive
gaze agency.
However,
the
colonizer
can use the narrative form to
strategically grant
and
remove
agency
from the
subject according
to its
own
criteria.
Victorian
production
of narratives of the
mapped
space
was
carefully
constructed to
limit,
to draw borders
around,
this movement and
agency.
For the
Victorians,
the visual
map
allowed for the
corralling
volume 28 number 1
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Reading
Between the Lines
within borders of the
unruly
native
subject,
a
strict definition of
ownership,
and
a
territory
defensible
against
attack. Indians are
given
agency
in this narrative when their actions
support
the idea of
the uncivilized
subject.
The narrative
itinerary
allowed the Victorian
Empire
to cast itself as a
benevolent
power, protecting
the native
from
itself,
preserving
the
knowledge
and
history
that the native
could not have
respect
for. The
gazing subject
thus maintains its
control over the
object
of the
gaze.
It is the
questioning
of the
agency
of the
gazing subject
in the
narrative
itinerary
that
provides
a
different
perspective
for
reading
Kim. In the
narrative,
the
object
of the
gaze,
in this case the colonized
subject,
also has
agency.
What
happens
when the
position
of the
gazing subject
is
shifted,
when the
object
returns or reflects that
gaze?
I would like here to revisit Michel de Certeau in
a
different
light
than
the one in which
Avery
reads him.
Avery's positioning
of the narrative
itinerary
in relation to the visual
map
seems to be built around de Certeau's statement that the visual
map
"has
slowly disengaged
itself from the itineraries that were the
conditions of its
possibility" (120).
De Certeau does in fact
go
on to
revisit the
possibilities
of the narrative
itinerary
when it describes the
same
spaces
as
the visual
map. Maps produce places;
the narrative
itinerary
constitutes the
production
of
space
as a
place
in which
subjects
have
agency (de
Certeau
117).
This,
I
think,
is the
crux of
de Certeau's
argument.
The evolution of the
map
has in some
ways
necessitated the
relegation
of the narrative
itinerary
into the
past,
in order to
produces places
which
are
sterile,
and
can be owned
and
occupied according
to the needs of colonialism. The narrative
itinerary,
which has been
pushed
into the
past
in the
genealogy
of
the
map,
still exists in
spaces,
but
performs
within the
space
in a
particularized
way through
the
position
of the
gazing subject.
De
Certeau offers several roles that the narrative
itinerary
can
play
when
the
position
of the
subject
shifts. The function of the narrative is to
authorise
the
establishment,
displacement,
or transcendence of
limits,
and as a
consequence,
to set in
opposition,
within
the closed field of
discourse,
two movements that intersect
Victorian Review
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
S. Krishnamurth
(setting
and
transgressing limits)
in such
a
way
as to make
the
story
a sort of "crossword"
decoding
stencil
(a dynamic
partitioning
of
space)
whose essential narrative
figures
seem
to be the
frontier'and
the
bridge (de
Certeau
123).
The Victorian archive
project employed
narrative
itinerary
in the
figure
of the frontier. The narrative established borders which
would corroborate the lines of the visual
map:
it could rationalize
colonization,
homogenize
the colonized
subject,
turn the native into
a
manageable, discursively
and
taxonomically
identifiable
object
of the
mapping
gaze.
It could exoticize
otherness,
and
shape
colonization
into
a
rhetoric of benevolent
exploration,
for the
'good
of the
native.' The narrative
itinerary
is
strategically employed
to tell such
a
story.
It comes before the visual
map
and can tell of information
that is
necessary
to the visual
representation;
it also tells the
story
of the
map;
describes its
locations,
circumscribes its
territory,
and
establishes the
authority
of the colonizer. The narrative
itinerary
is
therefore foundational and
integral
to the
process
of
defining
borders
and frontiers.
The narrative
itinerary,
or
"the
story"
in de Certeau's
words,
marks
out,
as
the visual
map
does,
the inside and the
outside;
it defines
the
space
of
places.
But the frontier exists because of the tension
between the inside and the
outside;
it is an
"interlocutory" process.
This is the
figure
of the
bridge:
the frontier that is not a
border,
but
a
passage
between
spaces.
The frontier is
a
boundary
when the
subject
who defines the frontier can own it and mediate its
transgression.
When the
position
of the
subject
shifts,
the frontier can become
not a
boundary
but
a
passage,
a
bridge.
The
bridge
"liberates from
enclosure and
destroys autonomy" (de
Certeau
128).
The
meaning
of the
bridge
is
dependent
on the
gazing subject,
the
subject
who
mediates the frontier. To return to Lacanian
terms,
the
bridge
can
destroy autonomy,
or
the narrative can be the foundation of the
frontier,
when the colonizer is the master of the discourse of the
narrative. But
through Avery's
discussion of
agency
we see
that
the narrative
itinerary
allows
something
that the visual
map
does
not: the
agency
of the
subject
who is the
subject
of the
gaze.
The
volume 28 number 1
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Reading
Between the Lines
narrative allows for the tension which arises from the mediation
and contestation of the frontier which
can become
a
bridge.
The
interiority
and
exteriority
of the frontier is
formed by
the narrative
which is foundational to the
frontier,
and is
transgressed'by
the
narrative which in the
figure
of the
bridge
both offers
passage
and
mediates it.
The
position
of the
gazing subject
is therefore
integral
to the forma
tion of the
boundary
as frontier
or
bridge.
Who is interior and
exterior? I have been
speaking
of the visual
map
as
the Victorian
tool for the
marking
out of
space,
and the
corralling
of the colonized
subject
into that marked
space.
Within the borders of the visual
map,
and the constraints and definitions
provided by
colonialism,
the
colonized
subject
exists inside the limits defined
by geography.
In the
narrative of the
frontier,
it is the colonizer who is
on the inside of
the marked
space, pushing
the limits of its
space
further
out,
and
each
move of the frontier becomes
a
site of tension
as the frontier
is
negotiated.
The former
description
of
space
fits the
figure
of the
other
as
integral
to formation of the self. The latter describes the
absorption
of
territory,
and the alienation of the colonized
subject
from its
self-formation;
it is the
process
which necessitates the steril
ity
and silence of the visual
map.
The colonized
subject,
then,
through
these simultaneous
configurations,
exists both inside and outside of
the frontier. The narrative
bridge
is the mediation between
positions
which
are
constandy shifting,
which
are
dependent
on the
mastery
of
discourse,
the
configuration
of
spaces
and
places,
and the delinea
tion of borders which
are
constandy
in flux. The narrative
itinerary
provides
what the visual
map
cannot: a
diagrammatic
vision in which
both the
gazing subject
and
subject
of the
gaze
have
agency.
How
each
moves within the narrative describes the
relationship
of exterior
ity
and
interiority,
the
mastery
of
discourse,
the
ownership
of
space:
those
dynamics
which cannot be
represented
in the visual
map
are
articulated
through
the narrative
itinerary.
Where the visual
map
exists for the
purpose
of
fixing
borders,
marking
and
delineating places,
then,
the narrative
itinerary
exists as
a
strategic possibility
for both the establishment of those borders
Victorian Review
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
S. Krishnamurth
and their
transgression.
Even when it is
employed
for these
uses
by
the
gazing subject,
the narrative
itinerary
describes the
ambiguity
and
fluidity
of the
border,
the tension of the
frontier,
the movement
of
subject positions,
and is able to contain
multiple possibilities
of
agency.
Through
the narrative
itinerary, says
de
Certeau,
the
frontier becomes
a
third
element,
an
in-between
space (127).
The
space
described
by
the narrative is
practiced
as a
hybrid space,
which
is determined
by
the
fluidity
of
subject-position
and the
interior/
exterior tension of the border.
Homi
.
Bhabha,
in The Dislocation
of
Culture,
describes this
space
as a
"liminal
space," through
which
hybridity emerges.
The liminal
space
of colonialism is created
through
the
fluidity
of
subject posi
tions and the movement of discourse. For the
purposes
of this
exploration
his notion of "double-time" is
particularly
useful. The
visual
map attempts
to create
places
without time in which events
occur
simultaneously;
in which it is
possible
for the
Empire
to
envision itself in a
single
moment. The narrative that is
deployed
as a
foundation to the colonial
map
produces
a
history
that is a
singular, homogeneous story
of
being.
We
see
this in the
absorption
of
geographical
texts in the
production
of the India
Survey,
and in
the
production
of colonial textual histories. The
present
in such
a
history
is not
narrated;
it is an
articulation of the
past
which intends
to
produce
the
present.
The narrative that
bridges
the frontier is the
story
of the
subjects
of the
gaze,
in which the tension of the frontier
is articulated. It is a
narrative of the
present,
of
subjects
in motion
in the
landscape.
How does this
produce hybridity?
The
ambivalent,
ambiguous space
occupied by
the narrative in the formation of the
colonial
subject
is
a
site of tension because its
deployment
is uncer
tain:
subjects
that have
agency
are
unpredictable.
The discourse of
mastery,
of
ownership
of the
frontier,
shifts between
subject posi
tions. What the
map
makes
clear,
the narrative obfuscates. The nar
rative
produces
the
hybrid,
whose
position
is
always moving:
the
subject
of the
gaze
at one
moment,
the
gazing subject
the next.
The
subject
exists both inside and outside the lines of the
map.
The
narrative as
bridge
becomes
a
site of
fluidity
between the colonizer
volume 28 number 1
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Reading
Between the Lines
who
produces
the colonized as
other,
and the
uncanny experience
of
the
subject
who resists location. In the narrative
itinerary,
the
hybrid
subject
is the
transgressor
of
boundaries,
the
questioner
of
power,
the
subject
who does not fit
neady
into the
subject position
of colonizer
or
colonized,
but becomes
something
else which has been
produced
by
colonial
mapping:
Hybridity
is the revaluation of the
assumption
of colonial
identity through
the
repetition
of
c?scriminatory identity
effects. It
displays
the
necessary
deformation and
displace
ment of all sites of discrimination and domination. It unsetdes
the mimetic
or
narcissistic demands of colonial
power
but
reimplicates
its identifications in
strategies
of subversion that
turn the
gaze
of the discriminated back
upon
the
eye
of
power
(Bhabha 112).
The
potential fluidity
of the
agency
of
subjects
in the
nar
rative
itinerary
allows for the
gaze
to turn in
multiple
direc
tions: when the self of the colonizer looks in the
mirror,
it
is the colonized other who returns the
gaze.
The narrative
itinerary
acts as a
bridge
over which discourse
passes
and
returns. Within this
movement,
the
hybrid
voice
appears
as
de Certeau's
delinquent story
which
upsets
the authoritarian
narrative of colonial
geography (129).
It is with these
concepts
in mind that I would like to return to the
question
of Kim. The narrative of Kim
speaks through hybrid
voices.
Kipling
himself
was
born and lived his childhood in
India,
like Kim.
He was
not,
as he seems to be
remembered,
just
a white
Englishman.
He was an
Anglo-Indian,
one of those second class citizens who were
considered
no
longer quite English,
but
separated
themselves from
the natives. He is himself as much of a
'hybrid' product
of colonial
ism as
Kim,
who is
a
young
Irish
boy brought up
and immersed in
Indian cultures and
languages.
At the
age
of
17,
Kipling
returned
to India and
stayed
for another
seven
years. During
this
period,
he
was
the editor of The Civil and
Military
Gazette,
while his father
was
the curator of the Lahore
Museum,
Kim's "Wonder House". Both
men were
Anglo-Indians engaged
in the
archiving
of information
Victorian Review
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
S. Krishnamurth
in the
colony. Kipling
didn't 'enter' the
literary
world until his
return to
England,
but his
writing
for
many years
was
shaped by
his
experiences
in India. All of this
speaks
to
something
elusive about
the
literary figure
of
Kipling.
In the context of
postcolonial study,
it
seems
straightforward
to
identify
him as a
British
man
part
and
parcel
with the machinations of
Empire,
but the role he
played
in
it,
and the
way
that he himself was formed
by
the
passage
between India and
England,
makes him a
site of ambivalence.
What
happens
to the novel when
we
read it
through Kipling's
com
plex
and
hybrid relationship
to the
Empire?
Kim is
a
novel about
this
ambivalence,
through
which Kim's confusion about his
identity
speaks
to
many
other issues of
hybridity.
I would like here to look
at some of the characters that
populate
Kim's
landscape,
and their
relationships
to the liminal colonial
space.
Kim
strategically transgresses
the boundaries of the visual
map
that
is constructed in the course of the narrative. None of the
major
characters are native to
India;
at some
level,
all
are outside of the
simple
dominant
relationship
of colonizer and
colonized,
self and
other. To
begin
with,
there is Teshoo
Lama,
a
Tibetan
Buddhist,
who
in the
grand
tradition of the
pilgrimage
is
exploring
India to trace the
history
of the
Buddha,
whose
story
takes
place
in India. The
opening
passages
of Kim
express
the
strangeness
of the Lama's
appearance,
his
incongruity,
and
expose
him
as an 'exotic'
figure.
He becomes
dependent
on
Kim's
knowledge
of India and its
landscape
in order
to fulfill his
quest, though
Kim himself is not a
'native'. Neither is
the curator of the "Wonder
House,"
based on
Kipling's
father,
who
is a
wise and
sympathetic
Sahib,
and for the Lama is
something
of a
kindred
priest.
Mahbub
Ali,
the horse
trader,
is
Afghani.
He
speaks
Pashtu,
and
clearly
demarcates his
identity
in relation to
India,
but has the
capacity
to move back and forth between natives and
the British
colonizers;
he too is able to
transgress
the
physical
and
political
borders of
geography,
and the social boundaries which are
associated with them.
Of
particular
relevance in
light
of the
'Anglo-Indian'
context is the
way
that
Kipling
draws the characters of the
Sahibs,
the white men
volume 28 number 1
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Reading
Between the Lines
who
play
the "Great Game." Colonel
Creighton,
the
putative
leader
of the
'game',
is not a
military
man
per
se but
an
ethnographer,
a
scholar whose aim is to build the
archive,
and who
speaks
Urdu,
the
language
which has been ensconced
as the
language
of
poetry
and art:
"No man
could be
a
fool who knew the
language
so
intimately,
who
moved so
gendy
and
silendy,
and whose
eyes
were so different from
the dull fat
eyes
of other Sahibs"
(Kipling 118). Lurgan
Sahib,
the
healer of
pearls,
has become
quite
absorbed in the
mystic
exoticism
of the east. Kim is
mystified
that
Lurgan
treats him
as "an
equal
on the Asiatic side"
(Kipling 151).
Their
relationship
to each other
as
Sahibs is mediated
by
their
knowledge
of
India,
and their
ability
to move within the culture. All of these are white men who have
achieved success in the "Great Game"
by
virtue of their
ability
not
just
to
compile knowledge
of the colonized
subject,
but to absorb
that
knowledge
and move
through
the
landscape
with
fluidity.
Kim
is,
like
Creighton
and
Lurgan,
a
Sahib,
but of a different brand.
He is
an
Irish
boy,
and therefore
occupies
a
peculiar position
in the
relations of
Empire.
His
place
of birth is also
a
colony;
he is
white,
but his
poor
Irish
background
has made him
a
'second-class' citizen
even before he is born in India. His Irish
identity
in
England might
disallow his
appropriation
of British
identity,
but in British India he
is
white,
and therefore still
may
receive the
privileges
of
a
Sahib in
a
qualified way.
This also
complicates
the
reading
of Kim: he is
a
twice
hybrid
character,
twice
colonized,
and
yet
able to
slip
into the
identity
of the colonizer.
Simultaneously,
he is outside India because
he is not
Indian,
and because he is not British.
Kipling clearly
uses
this
strategically.
In the scene in which Kim comes across the
camp
of the
regiment
whose
flag
is "a red bull on a
green
field,"
he declares
that he
only
knows that he is "Kim Rishti ke"
-
Kim of the Irish
(Kipling 86).
It is
only
in its translation into Hindi that his
hybridity
is
given
a
name,
which is an
impossibility
in the colonial discourse.
Kipling
elaborates on
the
hybridity
of his
identity by making
him a
site of
dispute
between
a
Protestant minister and a
Catholic Priest:
the colonial
occupation
of Ireland is
signified
in this
altercation,
and
it
speaks
to
Kipling's
ambivalence about the colonial machine that it
Victorian Review
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
S. Krishnamurth
is the
priest
who becomes Kim's
patron,
rather than the Church of
England
minister who is of the "creed that
lumps
nine-tenths of the
world under the tide of 'heathen'"
(Kipling 88).
Avery
draws
a
parallel
between the
figure
of Kim and Hurree Chun
der
Mookerjee,
who both
seem to be involved in
a
negotiation
of
identity
within the colonial machine.
Mookerjee,
the
Babu,
is
a
key
illustration of
hybridity
in the novel. The Russian
agent says
of him:
"He
represents
in
petto
India in transition
?
the monstrous
hybridism
of East and West"
(239).
The Babu is torn between his
identity
as a
Bengali
and his desire to
occupy
the
space
of the colonizer.
The
position
of the Sahib is unreachable
by
virtue of the Babu's
brown
skin;
and
yet,
a
dedicated
Spenserian,
he
actively
works to
de-Indianize
himself,
to
speak English fluendy,
to
disengage
himself
from the
mystic
and
superstitious:
"'How am I to fear the
absolutely
non-existent?' said Hurree
Babu,
talking English
to reassure himself.
It is an awful
thing
still to dread the
magic
that
you contemptuously
investigate
?
to collect folk-lore for the
Royal Society
with
a
lively
belief in all Powers of Darkness"
(Kipling 180).
The Babu is not
only actively
involved in the
mapping project
of the
Survey,
but is
systematically archiving
his own
identity
for the British. He is what
Bhabha calls the "mimic"
man,
the native who
so
completely adopts
the colonizer's discourse that he becomes
a monstrous reflection of
the colonizer.
Says
Bhabha: "The effect of
mimicry
on
the
authority
of colonial discourse is
profound
and
disturbing.
For in
'normalizing'
the colonial state or
subject,
the dream of
post-Enlightenment civility
alienates its
own
language
of
liberty
and
produces
another
knowledge
of its norms"
(Bhabha 86). Through
the
Babu,
Kipling
makes
a
profound
comment on the machine of
colonialism,
and the effective
ness
of the
mapping project.
Where does such
a
character fit within
the boundaries of the
rnap?
He is neither colonizer
nor native in
a
space
which is
ostensibly
defined
by
the delineation of these identi
ties. His
participation
in the Great Game is
dependent
on his
mastery
of movement from one
identity
to another. He is at once the mimic
man
who is
a
caricature of colonial
power,
a
carnivalesque figure
of humour and
discomfort,
and the machine
by
which the archive
volume 28 number 1
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Reading
Between the Lines
project produces knowledge.
The novel
exposes, through
the
employment
of these
hybrid
characters in the 'Great
Game,'
the
complexity
of the
system
of
archive. The
project
of the
map
exists
along
with the
project
of
the mediated narrative
itinerary,
the narrative of the
frontier,
which
produces hybrid
identities in its ambivalent
space.
Yet it is these
hybrids
who constitute the
workings
of the
mapping
machine. The
British colonizers
are
dependent
on the
ability
of Kim and the Babu
to move between
identities,
to take on
disguises, speak multiple
languages,
to
produce knowledge
for the
map,
and for the archive.
When Kim leaves
school,
his first
assignment
is intended to
"de-Englishise"
him
(Kipling 184).
While Kim searches for
comprehension
of his own
identity,
the
powers
of the Great
Game seek to maintain his
hybridity,
which is the source of his
greatest utility.
Mahbub
Ali,
himself
a
hybrid,
becomes
something
of a
translator between the colonizers and their
hybrid
machines,
mediating
Kim's
relationship
with Colonel
Creighton,
and Kim's
indoctrination into the
mapping project.
In the
mapping project,
then,
the narrative
itinerary produces hybrids
which work in two
ways:
as
the mediator of the
frontier,
the machine of the
map,
and
as
the
transgressor
of
boundaries,
the
figure
who
can
pass through
and
is not contained
by
the boundaries of the
map.
I want to
step
back here to see the
landscape
of the novel itself
as
a narrative
itinerary.
It seems to contain two
stories,
the
story
of the
Lama and his
pilgrimage,
and the
story
of Kim's search for
identity
and his recruitment into the 'Great Game'. In the latter third of
the
novel,
these narratives take on a
particular
resonance for each
other,
as
the Lama's
pilgrimage
becomes the 'cover' under which Kim
participates
in surveillance and
espionage.
As
they
travel
through
the
plains
and
hills,
events take on
double
meanings,
characters
appear
in
disguise.
The lama seems oblivious to these
political
and scientific
activities:
as a
Buddhist,
such
things
are the
superficial
illusions of
the wheel of
life,
and are of no
consequence.
Kim is
mystified by
his
own
potential power
as a
Sahib,
and
struggles
to come to terms with
it. But as the narrative
progresses,
and these stories become
more
Victorian Review
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
S. Krishnamurth
conflated,
it becomes
a
single
and
polyvalent
story
about the
strange
and
uncanny
relationships
of
hybrid subjects
to
mapped
terrain.
The novel
performs
the
project
of
a
narrative
itinerary
in that it
describes
a
journey, provides
the 'thick
description'
of
people,
culture,
and
language,
turns
places
into
spaces.
But it also
ambivalendy
and
simultaneously performs
the tasks of the frontier and the
bridge,
and
brilliandy
articulates the tension in these formations. The narrative
moves with the
passage
of
hybrid subjects through
the
landscape.
Through
this
movement,
it traces the
mapping project,
and
critiques
the limitations of its borders. As
a
Victorian and colonial
novel,
Kim
is
an
archive of information about the colonial
subject,
and
yet
within
the folds of its narrative it
exposes
the
complexities
of
hybridity
and
the liminal
space
of the frontier. In Richards's
words,
it illustrates
the "mediated
instrumentality
of information"
(Richards 23).
It is a
narrative which both installs the Victorian
mapping project
as
the
key
to
colonialism,
and
presents
difficult
questions
about the formation
of
subjects
in the colonial machine. The
reading depends
on which
way
the
eye
turns to the
landscape:
to read the novel
through
the
gazing subject,
or
through
the
subject
of the
gaze.
Notes
1. From Michel de
Certeau,
The Practice
of Everyday Ufe, p.
129.
2.
Rudyard Kipling,
Kim
p.
250
3. The British
Army
in India had
many
native
soldiers;
it did
not
per
se
exisr
as a
force
to
discipline
natives until the
uprising
of
1857,
when Muslim and Hindu soldiers in the
army
revolted
against
their
British officers. Until this time India
was
occupied by
the British East
India
Company,
and
was not
directly
a
subject
of the
Empire.
It
was
an economic colonization before it
was a
political
and
military
one.
Stanley Wolpert,
239.
4. Leo
Bagrow,
in his
History
of
Cartography
first
published
in
1944,
makes
a
somewhat
misguided
reference to this
aspect
of
Kim,
which
he
says,
"describes with
insight
how
a
little Indian
boy
is
taught
to be
always
observant and
to memorize his
surroundings
in
detail,
and how
62 volume 28 number 1
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Reading
Between the Lines
this
prepared
him for
a career as a
native
pundit,
sent
by
the
English
to
explore
and
map regions
where
Europeans
could
not
go" (p.
25).
While
this is an
incorrect
summary
of the novel which misses some
of its most
central
features,
it does
point
to the
way
in which
even
map-makers
themselves look
to
the novel
as
story
about
mapping.
5. It is worth
noting
that the division of
territory
is
historically
different
from what
we
understand
today;
as
Joseph
E.
Schwartzberg points
out
in
Harley
and Woodwards
History of Cartography
vol. 2 book
1,
cultural
dissemination and the
migration
of
peoples
in the
region
necessitate
studying
the
region
as
the Indie or
South Asian
peninsula
rather than
as
what
we
know understand
strictly
as
India
(Harley
and Woodward
295).
6. Leo
Bagrow
was one of those eminent
geographers
who
suggested
that "no one
India
seems to have been interested in
cartography"
(Bagrow
207).
Schwartzberg
refutes this line of
thinking by providing
several reasons
for both the lack of evidence and the lack of
pursuit
of
geographical study,
among
which
are
the
decay
and destruction
of
artifacts,
and
a
general
lack of
scholarly
interest.
(Harley
and
Woodward
504).
7.
Harley
and Woodwards
text
devotes
a
substantial section to
the devel
opment
of
cosmographical maps
and models
(332-387).
8.
According
to
Maya
Prasad
Tripathi,
the Mahabharata "knew well about
at
least Eastern
Europe,
[the]
eastern coast of
Africa,
southern
parts
of Siberia and South East Asia.
Besides,
the concurrent
study
of
contemporary
texts evinces that
by
the time of the
composition
of the
Mahabharata
(400
B.C. to 400
A.D.)
Indians had
come to know the six
continents of modern times."
(Tripathi
167).
9. Mohammed Anzhar Ansari details these in
Geographical Glimpses of
India.
10. Susan Gole
notes that Charles
Reynolds, Surveyor
General in
1796,
routinely employed
natives to
gather
information and draw
maps (82).
11.
Avery
refers
to
Lord
Curzon,
once
Viceroy
of the Indian
Empire,
who
calls
geography
"the first and foremost of the
sciences,"
and
"necessary
for
a
proper
conception
of
citizenship" (Avery
58).
12.
Kipling
himself refers
to
this
process
in the
opening
pages
of
Kim,
in the
description
of the "Wonder
House,"
the
museum at Lahore.
13. De Certeau describes this in the
figure
of the crocodile in the river that
Victorian Review 63
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
S. Krishnamurth
says
"stop."
The river is
a
passage
between
spaces,
a
crossable
terrain,
until it is mediated
by
the discourse of the crocodile
(127).
14.
Kipling
and the Critics contain some
marvelous
examples
of this.
Andrew
Lang
refers
to
"slangy
and unrefined
Anglo-Indian society"
(4).
Oscar Wilde
famously
commented
on
Kiplings "jaded,
second-rate
Anglo-Indians"
(7).
15. Edward
Said,
Culture and
Imperalism,
133.
Works Cited
Ansari,
Mohammed Azhar.
Geographical Glimpses of
Medieval India vol 1. Delhi:
Idarah-I
Adabiyat-I
Delli,
1989.
Avery,
Bruce. "The
Subject
of
Imperial Geography."
Prosthetic Territories:
Politics and
Hypertechnologies.
Eds. Gabriel Brahm
Jr.
and Mark Driscoll.
Boulder:
Westview,
1995.
Bagrow,
Leo.
History of Cartography.
2nd
edition,
rev.
R.A. Skelton.
Chicago:
Precedent
Publishing,
1985.
Bhabha,
Homi
.
The Location
of
Culture. London:
Routledge,
1994.
De
Certeau,
Michel. The Practice
of Everyday Life,
tr. Steven E Rendali.
Berkeley: University
of California
Press,
1984.
Gilbert,
Elliot L. ed.
Kipling
and the Critics. New York: New York
University
Press, 1965.
Gole,
Susan.
Early Maps of
India. New Delhi:
Sanskriti,
1976.
Harley, J.B.
and David
Woodward,
et
al,
eds. The
History of Cartography
vol.
2 Book 1:
Cartography
in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies.
Chicago:University
of
Chicago
Press,
1992.
Kipling, Rudyard.
Kim. Oxford: Oxford
University
Press,
1987.
Richards,
Thomas. "Archive and
Utopia."
The
Imperial
Archive. London:
Verso,
1993.
Said,
Edward. "Pleasure and
Imperialism."
Culture and
Imperialism.
New
York:
Knopf,
1993.
Sircar,
D.C. Studies in the
Geography of
Ancient and Medieval India. Delhi:
Motilal
Banarsidass,
1971.
64
volume 28 number 1
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Reading
Between the Lines
Tripathi, Maya
Prasad.
Development of Geographical Knowledge
in An?ent India.
Varanasi:
Bharatiya Vidya
Prakashan, 1969.
Wolpert, Stanley.
A New
History of
India. 4th ed. New York: Oxford
University
Press,
1993.
Victorian Review 65
This content downloaded from 121.52.147.12 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:51:04 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions