Kim

Few modern English readers could enjoy Rudyard Kiplings Kim [1] in the way Kipling (1865-1936) intended it to be enjoyed. Kipling was an Imperialist, and Kim embodies attitudes towards British rule in India which these days are wholly unacceptable and unpalatable. Kipling believed it was right and proper for Britain to own India and rule its people, and the possibility that this position might be questionable never seems to have crossed his mind. At the time he was writing there was a considerable ferment of revolt among Indians against British rule, and yet, as Said [2] has shown, at points in Kim when he could have acknowledged this Kipling dismisses it. This is particularly apparent when in Chapter 3 he has an old soldier comment on the Great Mutiny of 1857, dismissing it as madness.