Rudyard Kipling’s Kim is a beautifully written book about India during the Raj. The story is nominally about the coming of age of Kim and his transformation from an Indian to an Englishman. The story really is about India.

I spent two months in India two years ago. The experience was amazing. I stayed in Bangalore which is South India. The intensity of the life, not just human but animal and vegetable and insect and reptile can be overwhelming to a westerner accustomed to his sterile world. The biomass of the world around you in India can overwhelm your ability to process information.

Reading Kim and especially his descriptions of the roads and the multi-coloured and textured individuals reminds of me of my time in India as well. The chaos, the claustrophobia of people on top of each other, the pagentry of the open road has not changed very much. And Kipling captures that in his prose.

Kipling is also able to use the written word to contrast the Indian and English word. When he describes India the prose becomes more flowery, more filled, when he describes English scenes the prose becomes dryer, stiffer. Almost as if to be Engish is to be functional not magical.

Having said that, the book can be irritating to readers accustomed to the short clipped sentences of our post-hemingway literature. Kipling writes in long luxurious sentences with multiple clauses and references. Many times his words are not meant to be descriptive but evocative somewhere between poetry and prose. And that can be frustratingly difficult to read. In addition,o the book is full of references to Indian terms that require an appendix. The first read of the book can be very disruptive as you jump between a sentence and the appendix.
The tale itself has all of the elemens of a early 20th century tale with all of the normal and natural prejudices of its time.

I wonder if Kim serves as a metaphor for Indian progress as well? While in India, I watched how the old India world was being slowly and systematically obliterated by a more modern, cleaner western world. People’s lives improved, but at the same time something was being lost.

I have read the book twice already. I will read it a third.