3. Anglo/Indians and Others

The Ins and Outs of the Nation

The subject of identities and traffic in Kim is best approached through indirection. One approach is through Policeman Strickland (who makes his initial appearance in “Miss Youghal’s Sais ”), Kipling’s first experiment in casting the impersonator par excellence. Strickland, though, is a curious figure, a not quite/not right disguise artist who exists in an oblique and complex relationship, not just to official wisdom but also to the extraofficial masters of impersonation. He recalls Sherlock Holmes’s extraordinary capacity for being all things to all people; like that preeminent detective, he operates in the implicit belief that all knowledge is knowledge of criminality. He recalls Burton, too, in his often contentious relationship with official power and in the psychosexual nature of his investment in “going Fantee.” Like these illustrious fictional kin, he “[holds] the extraordinary theory that a Policeman in India should try to know as much about the natives as the natives themselves,” ^[1] though, curiously, his own simulation of nativeness appears to be itself a simulation of a simulation of nativeness: “Now, in the whole of Upper India, there is only one man who can pass for Hindu or Mahommedan, hide-dresser or priest, as he pleases. He is feared and respected by the natives from the Ghor Kathri to the Jamma Masjid.…Strickland was foolish enough to take that man for his model” (“Miss Youghal’s Sais,” 51).

What kind of Englishman is Strickland, and what is the nature of the knowledge that he relentlessly seeks and obsessively embodies? How, indeed, is he himself known? Consider, for instance, the lines that introduce him:

He was perpetually “going Fantee” among natives, which, of course, no man with any sense believes in. He was initiated into the Sat Bhai at Allahabad once, when he was on leave. He knew the Lizard-Song of the Sansis, and the Halli-Hukk dance, which is a religious can-can of a startling kind. When a man knows who dance the Halli-Hukk, and how, and when, and where, he knows something to be proud of. He has gone deeper than the skin. But Strickland was not proud, though he had helped once, at Jagadhri, at the painting of the Death Bull, which no Englishman must even look upon; had mastered the thieves’-patter of the changars; had taken a Yusufzai horse-thief alone near Attock; and had stood under the sounding-board of a Border mosque and conducted service in the manner of a Sunni Mullah. (“Miss Youghal’s Sais,” 51–52)

The knowing tone of the narrator of Plain Tales from the Hills seems to be of a piece with Strickland’s own knowingness. But what effects might be generated by this catalogue of Strickland’s accomplishments? It is not always easy, in these early tales, to gauge the kinds of irony (or the contrary) that might be at work in such representation. One can read the cognitive surfeit elaborated in the sketch above as the sort of Orientalist construction (by a metropolitan “globetrotter”) that Kipling (along with other, like-minded Anglo-Indians) was fond of caricaturing.^[2] The stories in this volume were in fact produced for the largely Anglo-Indian readership of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and later revised for a metropolitan audience at “home.” On the other hand, the list of Strickland’s esoteric accomplishments may be no more than a characteristic gesture designed to conserve the mysteriousness of India.^[3]

In any event, in this story Strickland is a curiously vacant figure, with little autonomy or effectivity, and the narrative details not so much the triumph as the undoing of the policeman. He falls in love with a Miss Youghal—who, we are told, “could not understand him”—but is forbidden her company by her disapproving parents. Thereupon he assumes the disguise of a sais (coachman) and takes employment with her parents, thus partially circumventing their prohibition. He is not so much a representative sais as a “paragon among saises,” performing his duties more like a London coachman than his shiftless Indian counterpart. In this capacity, he pays court to Miss Youghal, but he is driven to abandon his disguise one day when he overhears an elderly general flirting with her. This betrayal of himself, however, wins him the respect of the general, who then proceeds to intercede for him with the senior Youghals. He is accepted as a son-in-law, but only on the condition that he repudiate decisively all identities but his English one. This he concedes, though at considerable emotional and intellectual cost to himself: “It was a sore trial to him; for the streets and the bazars, and the sounds in them, were full of meaning to Strickland, and these called to him to come back and take up his wanderings and his discoveries” (“Miss Youghal’s Sais,” 56).

But the story seems deliberately to fudge the question of why he assumes this disguise, or any disguise, in the first place, except to be with and learn about saises; his assumption of a native persona in this case at least seems insistently gratuitous in an erotic plot, which seems to resolve itself without his assistance. What the story may illustrate instead are the ways in which cross-racial traffic provides a range of erotic excitements unknown to the respectable and domesticated English self (as a sais he becomes a fully eroticized figure for the first time, an object of desire for an Indian woman, even though he dutifully ignores her overtures). The story also demonstrates that the (hetero)sexual satisfactions of Anglo-India are not only impossible without the homosocial bonds generated by “going native” but that the marriage plot may itself have been engineered to allow Strickland an excuse to play the sais. Here as elsewhere, the policeman’s fungibility seems to represent the always incomplete and profoundly narcissistic character of impersonation.

In later stories, particularly the gothic ones, Strickland’s status as the figure of (extra)legal rationality becomes even more inflected with ambivalence. As Gail Low reminds us, “Gothic narratives cultivate uncertainty and offer a ‘double-take’ on a realist and mimetic enumeration of names and things.” ^[4] In “The Return of Imray” (in Life’s Handicap) he belongs very uneasily in the terrain of realism, accompanied as he is by a clairvoyant dog. In this as in other narratives, impersonation is coded quite explicitly as a deeply anxious activity, an activity that generates and multiplies anxiety even as it seeks ostensibly to relieve it.^[5] A tale like “The Mark of the Beast” (also in Life’s Handicap) confirms not only that the depths of the Indian psyche are unspeakably horrific but also that India always defers a full accounting of itself, holding its worst horrors in reserve: “Strickland hates being mystified by natives, because his business in life is to overmatch them with their own weapons. He has not yet succeeded in doing this, but in fifteen or twenty years he will have made some small progress” (LH, 198).

A refusal of such abominable knowledge, however, is a refusal of the cunning that is necessary to colonial existence; the ingenuous and kindly Imray (“The Return of Imray”) is murdered by his servant of four years for having casually remarked on the beauty of the latter’s little son, who dies soon after; this apparently perfunctory remark identifies him in the servant’s regard as the bearer of the evil eye. In India, good intentions guarantee nothing. What counts is knowledge of natives; and not knowing natives can kill you. And yet knowledge, for the narrator, cannot dispel fear. The tragedy of Imray becomes not a mystery solved but a warning about the peculiar proliferation and reproducibility of Indian crime, especially against the British. He discovers, too, that what has been mysterious to Strickland and himself until the end has always been transparent to the Indian servants who understand the communications of Imray’s ghost but who repeat the obfuscatory fictions of Imray’s voyage to Europe for their masters’ benefit. And while it is the narrator who registers confusion, and shock, and nervousness, this could be seen as a displacement of the uneasiness about the limits of Strickland’s power and knowledge. Certainly the misgivings of this story resonate in some of the other fiction as well as with a letter that Kipling wrote to his cousin Margaret Burne-Jones when he was nineteen: “Immediately outside of our own English life, is the dark and crooked and fantastic, and wicked: and awe-inspiring life of the ‘native.’ Our rule, so long as no one steals too flagrantly or murders too openly, affects it in no way whatever—only fences it around and prevents it from being disturbed.” ^[6]

If the all-seeing and all-knowing Englishman is diminished in “The Return of Imray,” “To Be Filed for Reference” (Plain Tales from the Hills) further complicates the will to knowledge that is also the will to power. This story takes the form of a prelude to McIntosh Jellaludin’s Great Indian Novel, and is orchestrated at least partially as a contest between two (English) native informants. The protagonist is a figure both like and unlike Strickland. Unlike Strickland, Jellaludin is an Englishman gone native rather than the impersonator who crosses cultural formations at will, and one of the most important indices of his distance from Englishness is miscegenation, an option always available, but always disavowed by Strickland as Indian. Sexual and emotional involvement of English men with Indian women usually carries a price, as is evident from “Lispeth,” “Beyond the Pale” (both in Plain Tales from the Hills), “Without Benefit of Clergy” (Life’s Handicap), and “The Man Who Would Be King” (The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories), though it is by no means the case that the chief sufferer in such encounters is invariably the Englishman. Like the policeman, though, Jellaludin does lay claim—despite his marriage to an Indian woman and his descent into a rather sordid Indian life—to Englishness, and Englishness of a particularly class-marked sort, which is undergirded by memories of a classical education at Oxford. Like him, too, Jellaludin is possessed of an archival ambition: “What Mirza Murad Ali Beg’s book is to all other books on native life, will my work be to Mirza Murad Ali Beg’s!” (PTH, 276). However, he dismisses Strickland as “an ignorant man—‘ignorant West and East’” (PTH, 275). But Jellaludin is not quite permitted to replace Strickland as the colonial figure of omniscience; for Strickland in his turn dismisses Jellaludin’s account of the an Indian underworld (though he does not find it easy to claim certitude): “[Strickland] said that the writer was either an extreme liar or a most wonderful person. He thought the former. One of these days you may be able to judge for yourselves” (PTH, 277). Moreover, Zohreh Sullivan adumbrates, Jellaludin is a figure who, even if he can believed to be speaking the truth, has been damaged by that excess of knowledge which always has the potential to injure the knower: “The price of such knowledge is complete alienation from colonial society, marriage to a native woman, and alcoholism.…Too much knowledge about India tests the boundaries of the social system, victimizes both the knower and the known, the fictional and the real author, and ironically looks ahead to the powerlessness of Kipling himself to author his ultimate epic about India.” ^[7]

Imagined Communities and Resident Aliens

Jellaludin’s magnum opus remains unpublished in “To Be Filed for Reference,” as did Mother Maturin, Kipling’s own Great Indian Novel about the dark underbelly of Anglo-Indian sexual traffic in the subcontinent (apparently on the advice of his parents).^[8] The Great Indian Novel that Kipling actually published turned out to be a radically different narrative from the one projected in the earlier tales, even as it redeployed the familiar tropes of disguise and racial-cultural exchange.^[9] It has been remarked of Kim by Irving Howe that it “is unsubdued by the malignity at the heart of things”;^[10] Mark Kinkead-Weekes even goes so far as to say that “the Game is given less than justice because there is no powerful enough experience of evil.” ^[11] Similarly, J. M. S. Tompkins says of Kim and his world that he is “a casteless waif, curious, flexible, resilient, accustomed to blows, but quite free from tyranny, and fed by the charitable gifts of the people who are always called gentle and kindly. Intrigue and murder are part of his world, but, since he is wary and spirited, they excite without oppressing his imagination.” ^[12] The novel has also been credited with having re-created the “light and colour and golden and purple fruits” that for the adult Kipling made up his early life in Bombay,^[13] as well as the sense of intuitive intimacy (uncomplicatedly combined with a sense of one’s own superiority) with Indians that the young English child is said to have enjoyed.^[14] (As James Harrison puts it, “a child of four or five whose merest whim is law to the adult servants around him is already a fully-fledged Anglo-Indian.”)^[15] While Howe’s and Tompkins’s assertions seem to me to be a simplification of the novel’s psychic investments, it is nonetheless true that the anxiety, aggression, and general grotesquerie that attend the earlier narratives of mimicry seem to assume less obviously somber and more ambivalent inflections in Kim.^[16] Nonetheless, Strickland has a place in the world of this novel, even if a marginal one. It is, however, Strickland in a gentler incarnation; the Strickland who had willingly tortured a leper with white-hot irons in “The Mark of the Beast” has assumed the guise of a genial Anglo-Indian who can flirt lightheartedly with the Sahiba and who is less anxious to terrify natives into submission through the reports of his superior—indeed, preternatural—shrewdness and knowledge than to be persuasive in the role of the inept and vacuous colonial official. In other words, he has graduated from the performance of nativeness to the performance of Englishness. Kim, which is regarded as unique in Kipling’s corpus and perhaps in colonial discourse as a whole, must, like Strickland, detach itself from all the narratives of mimicry that have preceded it in order to name India and to (un)name Britain’s relationship to it. As Homi Bhabha says, paraphrasing Ernest Renan on the problematic of the nation, nationness can only be generated and reproduced by “forgetting to remember” or, perhaps even more strongly, remembering to forget.^[17] This willful forgetting that induces a sense of nationness is, as I hope to demonstrate, central to Kipling’s novel.

What, however, must the novel remember to remember, and what must it remind itself to forget? In a novel about the everyday vigilance necessary to sustain India as British,^[18] how must it remember the dismemberment of the (Sepoy) Mutiny, for instance? For one thing, it must remember by invoking the proper name India as a totalizable phenomenon; in no other novel about the subcontinent does the name have such talismanic value. What Kim offers is a world governed less by oppositions (as most of Kipling’s other fictions are) than by paradoxes and differences that are nonetheless articulated within a system that is loosely congruent with “national space.” The Indian theater offers—within this totality—an infinite multiplication of possibilities and positionalities. And India—in this novel about the putative threat to empire—remains on the whole an unproblematic landscape. It is a luminous and salubrious terrain that encouragingly mirrors self-aggrandizing aspirations. Despite its size and apparent variety of languages, religions, castes, and other differences, it remains transparent and knowable; its knowability, moreover, is not here of the kind described (however ironically) in “The Phantom Rickshaw,” in which knowing India is knowing Anglo-India:

One of the great advantages that India has over England is a great Knowability. After five years’ service a man is directly or indirectly acquainted with the two or three hundred Civilians in his Province, all the messes of ten or twelve Regiments and Batteries, and some fifteen hundred other people of the non-official caste. In ten years his knowledge should be doubled, and at the end of twenty he knows, or knows something about, every Englishman in the Empire, and may travel anywhere and everywhere without paying hotel-bills.^[19]

Kim’s India encompasses the natives as well, but this by no means compounds the problem of knowability. In India, everyone who is not part of the Great Game can be assigned an unchanging identity, and everyone’s mark of identity is visible, even conspicuous. Not unsurprisingly, caste becomes the trope for knowability in the novel; indeed, it becomes one of the tropes for—to use Ronald Inden’s evocative phrase—“imagining India.” ^[20]

In the midst of all this, Kim is (even before his formal induction into the Great Game) a figure who embodies some of the paradoxes of identity that the novel seeks to stage. He is the only one who cannot be pinned down, who is always addressed in ecumenical, nonsectarian terms as “Little Friend of all the World” or “Friend of the Stars,” while he is also always attended by a prophecy of his sahib’s patrimony: “‘There will come for you a great Red Bull on a green field, and the Colonel riding on his tall horse,…and…nine hundred devils.’” ^[21] It comes as no surprise to learn that Kim, even as a boy on the streets of Lahore, is acutely conscious of his difference from and superiority to the Hindu and Muslim lads who are his daily companions: especially in his games on the Zam-zammah cannon (“first of the conqueror’s loot”) with the other boys, he registers a very precise sense of being the representative of an imperial race:

“Off! Off! Let me up!” cried Abdullah, climbing up Zam-Zammah’s wheel.

“Thy father was a pastry-cook, Thy mother stole the ghi,” sang Kim. “All Mussulmans fell off Zam-Zammah long ago!”

“Let me up!” shrilled little Chota Lal in his gilt-embroidered cap. His father was worth perhaps half a million sterling, but India is the only democratic land in the world.

“The Hindus fell off Zam-Zammah too. The Mussulmans pushed them off.” (Kim, 52)

Furthermore, he alone can read the scene around himself properly and make discriminations, even as he delights in its heterogeneity; no one else shares either his discriminating eye or his pleasure in the spectacle by which he is surrounded. He alone seems to be self-conscious about the fact that the social world is structured by categories of knowledge that are complex but eminently manageable. The teeming life of the Grand Trunk Road is also, in Kim’s classifying imagination, a highly ordered world:^[22]

The lama, as usual, was deep in meditation, but Kim’s bright eyes were open wide. This broad, smiling river of life, he considered, was a vast improvement on the cramped and crowded Lahore streets. There were new people and new sights at every stride—castes he knew and castes that were altogether out of his experience.

They met a troop of long-haired, strong-scented Sansis with baskets of lizards and other unclean food on their backs, their lean dogs sniffing at their heels. These people kept their own side of the road, moving at a quick, furtive jog-trot, and all other castes gave them ample room; for the Sansi is deep pollution. Behind them, walking wide and stiffly across the strong shadows, the memory of his leg-irons still on him, strode one newly released from the jail;…Kim knew that walk well.…

The lama never raised his eyes. He did not note the money-lender on his goose-rumped pony, hastening along to collect the cruel interest; or the long-shouting, deep-voiced little mob—still in military formation—of native soldiers on leave, rejoicing to be rid of their breeches and puttees, and saying the most outrageous things to the most respectable women in sight.…But Kim was in the seventh heaven of joy. (Kim, 109–11)

One of the necessary paradoxes of this multiplicity is that only the English, or their agents, can fully understand, delight in, and indulge in the variety of roles and subject positions (the two are the same thing in many respects here) that are offered. As Patrick Williams points out, this is the very reverse of what might be expected to be the colonial norm. Where the white man in the colonial theater was often conspicuous because of his racial and linguistic difference and cultural ignorance,^[23] here it is the Indian who stands out, who has nowhere to hide. And while Indians remain, in good Orientalist tradition, ontological liars, in contrast to the British, who always tell the truth except when it is necessary to lie, it is Englishmen who are more wily than the Indians and who are involved in spying on Indians. It is of such a scenario that Spivak remarks with considerable perspicacity (though she is speaking not so much the discourse of colonialism as that of a benevolent radicalism which is eager to hear the subaltern speak), that “the person who knows has all the problems of selfhood. The person who is known, somehow seems not to have a problematic self.” ^[24]

In a world where understanding identity—which is the same as fixing it—apparently involves little more than using a semiotic key to clothing, identities for players in the Great Game are continually in flux. Kim can apparently pass as anything, from a Muslim boy of the streets to a chela (religious novice) of a Tibetan Buddhist lama to a scullion boy to a young sahib, and so on ad infinitum. But Kim is not the only one to possess such a gift—though he alone can mimic across a racial divide. Hurree Babu is another, particularly complex, instance of identity formation through mimicry. He is the classic mimic man interpellated by an English literary education, a process superbly analyzed by Gauri Viswanathan;^[25] it is a process that Spivak describes (speaking of postcolonial India, but with an obvious glance backward at its colonial incarnation), as effecting “the subtlest kind of cultural and epistemic transformation, a kind of upward race-mobility, an entry, however remote, into a geopolitical rather than merely national ‘Indian’-ness.” ^[26]

[Hurree], an MA of Calcutta University, would explain the advantages of education. There were marks to be gained by due attention to Latin and Wordsworth’s Excursion…French, too, was vital,…Also, a man might go far, as he himself had done, by strict attention to plays called Lear and Julius Caesar;…Still more important than Wordsworth, or the eminent authors, Burke and Hare, was the art and science of mensuration. A boy who had passed his examination in these branches—for which, by the way, there were no cram-books—could, by merely marching over a country with a compass and a level and a straight eye, carry away a picture of that country which might be sold for large sums in coined silver. (Kim, 210–11)

But Hurree Chunder Mookerjee is also an extraordinarily able student of another kind of text. He is the mimic man, but he can also mimic the mimic man: he can assume the persona of the “fearful” Bengali, the Bengali babu showing off his learning, or the Bengali nationalist fulminating against the inequities of colonial rule, though it is not always clear in his case where Bengali identity begins and its mimicry ends. He is, nonetheless, an able man; he can even take in Kim and can advise him on the consistency of a role. But he, of course cannot be the Englishman. Much of what he does is admirable and arouses the profound respect of Kim, who even, at one point, acknowledges him as a superior. But few things that he does are completely right. His ambition to be a Fellow of the Royal Society, while shared by Creighton, can only produce the repetition of a knowledge that Englishmen have already; what Hurree seeks to learn from the lama, for instance, is familiar and not very exciting knowledge to Lurgan.

Like Kim and Hurree Babu, E23, who exists only as a number and only in disguise, produces and discards identities in his flight from his pursuers; the point, and the pleasure, of disguise is its ceaseless repetition—though it should be noted that E23 keeps being unmasked until his disguise is stabilized for him by Kim and Strickland. Strickland himself plays at Englishness far more convincingly than he has been able to do in the other tales; Colonel Creighton, too, delights in playing the bumbling English fool, speaking a koi hai variety of the Urdu he knows in all its idiomatic complexity and affecting an inane and uninformed, because typically colonial, passion for horseflesh.

This mimicry underwrites the primary discursive object of the novel, which it seems to me is to produce the idea of the nation and of the citizen. This may seem like an extraordinary claim to make for a novel of which it has been said that “no one is seen who challenges British rule, and no one articulates any of the local Indian challenges that must have been greatly in evidence—even for someone as obdurate as Kipling—in the late nineteenth century.” ^[27] It is undoubtedly true that the novel ostensibly speaks the absence of conflict rather than conflict and that the figure of the anticolonial insurgent or the nationalist is unrepresented—or, rather, unrepresentable—in the novel.^[28] Opposition to British rule must be expressed through the comic pathos of the two Russians, abandoned by their attendants and led by the resourceful Hurree Babu from village to village in order to be mocked; anticolonial activity, in other words, must be represented through the most unlikely and liminal figures, figures, moreover, in whom there is the least psychic investment.

This absence cannot but invoke its opposite, and nationalism returns through the interstices of the text—through the figures of the Mutiny and of the Bengali babu (who represents bourgeois nationalism), to cite two of the most obvious instances. The Indian Mutiny, so called, of 1857 was a defining moment in British imperial history, and its hold on the public imagination in both England and India was to remain powerful for decades. Patrick Brantlinger states that at least fifty novels about the mutiny were written before 1900; at least another thirty were written before 1939.^[29] There were also innumerable eyewitness accounts, journal articles, histories, poems, and plays (including George Trevelyan’s famous Cawnpore) [1865]) that dealt with the events of 1857–1858. The Mutiny offered, to colonial officials through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the classic paradigm of Indian ingratitude and brutality; it served as an ur-text of insurgency and miscegenation that threatened to repeat itself endlessly in colonial history. Jenny Sharpe writes that, in the 1890s, a reviewer for Blackwood’s anticipated—despite the countless representations of the events of 1857—that Kipling would be the one to write the as-yet-unwritten “great Mutiny novel.” ^[30]

Kim is everything that a Mutiny novel cannot be. Yet in the novel memories of the event serve as a lurid subtext to the boy hero’s indomitable cheerfulness in playing the Great Game; it serves as a reminder that policing can never be too radically isolated from playfulness. Here the Mutiny, which demands a disavowal of the possibility of nationalism or insurgency (it can only be narrated as dementia) also demands a debt of remembrance—the old Rissaldar must ceaselessly repeat his tale to his neighbors and, more importantly, to English officials: “A madness ate into all the Army, and they turned against their officers. That was the first evil, but not past remedy if they had then held their hands. But they chose to kill the Sahibs’ wives and children. Then came the Sahibs from over the sea and called them to most strict account” (Kim, 100).

By the time of the writing of Kipling’s great novel, though, there was a pluralization of anticolonial initiatives in India. The formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 marked an important reconfiguration in the energies of nationalism; it signaled the beginning of bourgeois dominance in nationalist politics and the corresponding elision (both in colonialist and bourgeois nationalist narratives) of armed insurgency (which often took the form of peasant uprisings) in favor of demands for constitutional reforms.^[31] This context is made available to us, though in a decidedly oblique fashion, through the figure of the Bengali Hurree Babu. The Bengali babu has a particularly suggestive colonial history; he is the quintessential mimic man of colonial discourse, the English-educated, confused, epicene, and pathetically mutinous figure who can achieve neither the rationality and poise of the Englishman nor the simplicity and purity of the unanglicized, unhyphenated native.^[32] Bengal was, it should be remembered, the site in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of a broad spectrum of anticolonial and nationalist activities. Terrorist acts (committed by women and men) aimed against colonial officials emanated from here; in the judicial discourse of the place and time, this violence was located within a nexus of religious and sexual “abominations.” ^[33] Bengal was also notable for its involvement in the politics of bourgeois nationalism; the Indian National Congress convened in Calcutta for its first meeting. The Bengali babu, then, was a figure who existed in a profoundly conflictual relationship with the colonial polity. In many of Kipling’s stories, of which “The Head of the District” is symptomatic, the Bengali is despised by Englishmen and other Indians alike, as “a kala admi—a black man—unfit to run at the tail of a potter’s donkey.” ^[34]

The novel, then, both invokes and rejects two apparently indigenous modes—the violence of the Mutiny and the civility of Congress demands—of conceiving nationalism and nationness. But what Kim does, above and beyond this uneasy and furtively represented engagement with available nationalisms, is to make the subject of nationalism its own; it seeks to generate a myth of the nation and of the national subject.

Let us consider for a moment the paradoxes that constitute the idea of nationness. In the classic essay, “What Is a Nation?” (1882), Renan identifies the nation as the most compelling and pervasive formation of modern western politics while systematically eliminating any “rational” or “natural” basis for national identity. Language, religion, race, geography, dynastic continuity, even a commonality of material interests—none of these can generate nationness or account for the sentimental charge of national identity. Renan delights, in fact, in the contradictions that not only inhere in the national idea but provide its very grounds of possibility. Thus nations originate in violence, conquest, and oppression, and a national memory and national unity in the nation’s present can only be achieved if the citizen makes it a point to forget much of the past: “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.” ^[35] A nation nonetheless transcends its immanent contradictions in a collective will-to-nationness which is also a will-to-homogenization; it exists on a democratic, voluntaristic basis, being the result of a “daily plebiscite.” Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1991) plays upon some of the ambivalences in the idea of the nation, but his objective is explicitly not to supply or invent a principle of nationness. For him, the nation is not a principle of transcendence or reconciliation but the supreme fiction of modern politics.^[36] There can be no objective definition of a nation, no authentic and inauthentic nations; a nation is an “imagined community” that can mean whatever its members want it to mean. The word imagined is key, because Anderson argues that the nation as political principle was conceived, historically, through certain forms of representation, most notably narrative fiction and print journalism. Anderson’s study is salutary among other things for its refusal to dismiss nationalism as simply a pathology of contemporary political life. It aligns the nation with questions of religion, faith, kinship, and emotional allegiance; unlike others, it seeks to understand the affect of the nation through its splits, repressions, and ambivalences. It refuses to assume a true-false judgmentality and positivism in understanding the nation; the concept of imagination, of nation as representation, is at the heart of this analysis. The nation is never automatically there, even as a geographical, physical entity; as a place of mobility, migrancy, movement, it has to be literalized through pilgrimages and the travels of the indigenized bureaucracy of the colonial state. Nations must be seen as well as read as novels or newspapers.^[37] In several ways, however, Anderson reproduces the affect he seeks to analyze and duplicates the homogenizing tendency of nationalisms in his conception of a “homogeneous empty time” of the nation that produces the normative citizen.

The essays in Nation and Narration offer implicit and explicit critiques of this, pointing to the internal contradictions of the nation, to its dialectical logic, to its status as a differential principle, and to the repressions that are necessary to produce the people as one. Geoff Bennington points to the ways in which the nation must necessarily be constructed from the outside in:

It is tempting to try to approach the question of nation directly, by aiming for its centre or its origin.…[But] such access is in general illusory: the approach to the nation implies borders, policing, suspicion, and crossing (or refusal of entry)—try to enter a country at the centre (by flying in, say), and the border is still there to be crossed, the frontier shifted from periphery to centre.…The frontier does not merely close the nation in on itself, but also, immediately, opens it to an outside, to other nations.^[38]

While Renan had insisted on the nation’s resolution or transcendence of its contradictions, tensions, and fissiparous tendencies through a gigantic act of collective will, Bennington argues that it is these very differences that make the idea of the nation fragmentary, contentious, and discontinuous. A nation therefore has to be narrated in order to exist; it requires a foundational fiction—which is always necessarily a fiction—to mark its legitimation and continuity.^[39]

The instance of Kim provides a most productive illustration of and commentary upon the construction of nationness and nationness as construct. Though the action of the novel is set in the 1880s (Kim encounters the old Rissaldar after the Golden Jubilee of Victoria’s coronation in 1887) it was conceived in Vermont in the mid-1890s and finished in Sussex about six years later.^[40] Kipling, as we might know, was born in India (in 1865) and spent his first six years there, years that were, in his recall, idyllic to a degree. Raised by Indian servants, he claims to have been familiar with the bazaars and temples and Indian neighborhoods of Bombay and to have thought in Hindustani. When he was sent to school in England at the age of six, he was apparently traumatized in ways he never forgot. This was a common enough experience for Anglo-Indian children as young inhabitants of an “invaded colony” rather than a “settler colony.” ^[41] Angus Wilson points to the numerous reasons that made such a separation of the English child from India seem necessary:

Ostensibly the reason that parents sent their children at an early age back to England was the care of their health, the avoidance of the Indian climate which, particularly given the limitations of nineteenth-century medicine, was perilous, especially in the hot seasons.…The children of English people in the lower echelons of the Anglo-Indian hierarchy stayed there and went to boarding schools like Kim’s at Lucknow or up in the hill stations,…Those children who went there, however, would share their lives with boys of “dubious” social origin and with those Portuguese names that so sprinkle Kipling’s stories of half-caste life. To health, then, were added social and racial reasons. Anyone who was anyone would send his children home. Children speaking an Indian tongue more easily than English, or recounting Hindu fables, or mouthing the names of outlandish gods and goddesses, were charming up to, at the most, six years.…Ayahs, native servants of all kinds were “wonderful with children”, but they spoiled them.…Then the standards of all natives were not ours—in matters of truth-telling, of hard work, of hygiene, and…in sexual life where, as the terrible child marriages showed, they were notoriously precocious.^[42]

Kipling returned to India when he was sixteen, to resume residence with his parents in Lahore, and he served on the staff of the Pioneer and the Civil and Military Gazette for a few years. This was also the period when he established his fame (more fully perhaps in England than in Anglo-India) as the writer of Plain Tales from the Hills as well as other fictions of Anglo-Indian life. In his midtwenties he left for an extended tour of the world that took him to England (which, once again, he hated) and then to the United States, to the home of his new bride, Carrie. Kipling was then writing his great novel about India after his permanent departure from the country of his birth and early childhood (he was to return only once, for a brief visit); he was writing it from the outside, as an exile (exiled at one point from both India and England). It is precisely this placement, I will argue, that allows him to conceive of a national horizon for the geographical space designated doubly as “India” and as “colony.” It is this distance, too, and the sense of India as a totality that this distance enables, that gives the novel its distinctly monumental, if not epic, flavor.

If liminality is central to the construction of the nation, then Kipling’s India is certainly produced and reproduced at its borders. Who, after all, are the primary Indian characters of the nation that names itself India? The central Indian character is of course the Buddhist lama from Tibet; indeed, Kipling has been sometimes criticized (by patriotic Indian critics) for making Buddhism, which was exported out of India in the third and fourth centuries B.C. and which in any event has been a minor presence in the country for centuries, representative of Indian spirituality.^[43]

The Pathan Mahbub Ali, who is at home in Kabul and border towns like Peshawar, is another player on the Indian scene, and he too is exorbitant to colonial space and to Indian national space. In the 1840s and once again in the 1880s, the colonial government in India had fought two bloody and humiliating wars over the control of Afghanistan, which marked the point at which British and Russian colonialisms encountered each other. Despite the energetic execution of a British “Forward Policy,” Afghanistan remained unassimilable into the British Empire, and the North-West Frontier Province (from which Mahbub Ali apparently hails) remained in a stormy and contested relationship with the government in Delhi.^[44] The third Indian, Hurree Babu, evokes not geographical but—as we have seen—political and ideological liminality (as well as centrality) in colonial discourse. He is thus a character in whom very specific cultural meanings are vested. He himself is well aware of them, and even as he is the typical Bengali, verbose, cowardly, superstitious, he also knows how to play the boastful Bengali babu or the malcontent babu to perfection.

If India in this novel is represented best by liminal figures, much of its action also occurs in the margins of the nation. Its narrative takes place not in central or southern India, though Kim travels widely, as far south as Bombay, and so apparently does the lama. Much of what happens happens in northern India, in Lahore, Ambala, and the hills that mark the point of contact between India and its northern neighbors—and other imperial powers. This of course was the India most familiar and beloved to Kipling. He spent most of his adult years in India in Lahore and Allahabad; he saw southern India only through the window of a train, and he seems to have had little physical contact with the country’s eastern reaches, despite “The City of Dreadful Night” (1888) which is one of the most famous literary indictments of Calcutta.^[45] English officials in his stories (“William the Conqueror” is but one example) pride themselves on being “Punjabis.” ^[46] But, more importantly, for India to be invoked as a totality, as a nation, it must be constructed at its borders; a boundary has to be invoked in order to construct a center. As Bhabha points out in “DissemiNation,” liminality is at the very heart of the national idea.^[47]

In a very real sense, the nation in the novel is also created quite literally out of the very fact of travel. Benedict Anderson speaks of the ways in which travel by administrators literalized the imagined community, as did the travel undertaken by ordinary people on the new railway systems.^[48] In late-nineteenth-century India the civil service, which had been partially indigenized, may also have produced the nation as an effect of travels, territorializations, and contextualizations. The trope of pilgrimage in Kim, pilgrimage without a specific local object—the River of the Arrow is, like the idea of the nation, mythical and internal and therefore necessitates travel to all places—serves to concretize and make visible the form of the nation. What this evokes is the spectacle of Gandhi’s endless peregrinations (in Richard Attenborough’s film), both on foot and by train, through a geographical space that assumes the lineaments of a nation through this very process. (To this end Indian political leaders practice padayatras [an elevated term for “traveling on foot” that does not translate easily—yatra for instance is not simply travel, it is also pilgrimage] for political ends. In the last decade the Bharatiya Janata Party has undertaken numerous yatras in a bid to assert “national unity,” a fairly transparent code for the expression of anti-Muslim sentiment.

If the nation has always to be coaxed into existence, if the idea of the nation is not native, is always imported, then who or what constitutes the national subject? This is a critical question for Kim. It is in its engagement with this question that we see Kipling’s implicit dialectic with the idea of (Indian) nationalism. If nationalism’s project is to locate and name a native self and an alien self, then Kipling too must make such discriminations. It has been said by John McClure that the project of this novel is to naturalize the Englishman in India, or at least to naturalize British control of India.^[49] How is rule presented as something else? How does one belong and not belong? I would argue that this emphasis is quite literally relocated in Kim; it is far more ambitious in its reach than other novels about India. The Anglo-Indian for Kipling becomes the site of the dissolution and reconfiguration of the native-alien opposition. Kim distinguishes between Indian Englishness and English Englishness; it incorporates and co-opts the anticolonial argument about foreign rule by making the Anglo-Indian (almost) an unhyphenated Indian. Kipling knew very well that the best defense of colonialism was to argue its self-reflexive and self-monitoring capacity, as well as its faculty for internal reform, and it is his privileging of the Anglo-Indian as the true insider that allows him both to criticize British India and to ensure its permanence. Thus the Sahiba can say, of Strickland and his ilk: “‘These be the sort to oversee justice. They know the land and the customs of the land. The others, all new from Europe, suckled by white women and learning our tongues from books, are worse than the pestilence. They do harm to Kings’” (Kim, 124). Kim, too, gives his assent to the Anglo-Indian boys who are his compatriots at St. Xavier’s:

The mere story of their adventures, which to them were no adventures, on their road to and from school would have crisped a western boy’s hair.…And every tale was told in the even, passionless voice of the native-born, mixed with quaint reflections, borrowed unconsciously from native foster-mothers, and turns of speech that showed they had been that instant translated from the vernacular. Kim watched, listened, and approved. This was not the insipid, single-word talk of drummer-boys. (Kim, 172)

Kipling must have been well aware that his target audience for such a philosophy was not just the Indian (who might require persuasion of the Anglo-Indian’s indigeneity) but also Anglo-Indians themselves. As Angus Wilson puts it,

The English remained, throughout their rule in India, as transient in their final image of themselves, despite all the home-making of the memsahibs, as they had been in the East India Company days of “make your lakhs of rupees and come home”. It was to be Kipling’s chief difficulty, when he later dreamed of an Anglo-Saxon Empire, of fitting India, his beloved, into the sisterhood of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. However miserable, however made impotent by retirement to Bognor or Torquay or Eastbourne, “home” was not just a name for the mother country for Anglo-Indians, as it continued to be for Australians or New Zealanders or English South Africans until the Second War; England was their real home.…The English as a whole were dug into India to stay as long as the mind could imagine, and yet individual English men and women, although their families might have served India for generations, were there not to settle but to serve their time.^[50]

It is Kipling’s task, then, to make the Anglo-Indian perform as first citizen of a country named India. The Strickland of the stories may have been caught up in trying to solve the problem of how one can be inside and outside at the same time. The issues are not extraneous to Kim, but what this novel takes on is the figuring of the colony as nation. If Anderson had spoken of the nation as an imagined community, Kipling speaks of the colony in the same terms. He in fact collapses the oppositions between colony and nation. In such an arrangement, it is not the “Indian” Indian who features as the primary national subject but the Anglo-Indian, who is carefully distinguished from the Englishman and who in a sense may be said to “choose” India in a manner not available to the native.^[51] B. J. Moore-Gilbert, however uncritically he might read Anglo-India’s representation of itself, nonetheless usefully reminds us that “the growing community of foreigners in India was to produce its own quite distinctive contributions to…[Orientalist] discourse.…It would be a mistake to assume that Anglo-Indians were simply the British abroad.” ^[52] He points to a distinctively Anglo-Indian literary and journalistic tradition going as far back as the 1830s, a tradition that generates and reflects the community’s sense of its specific audience and its unique locational and experiential identity.^[53] Anglo-Indians like Kim and Strickland and presumably Creighton and Lurgan (and, of course, Kipling himself), who have been born and raised in India and who have what is certainly represented as a native’s access to indigenous language and culture, are an entirely different breed from the despised and alien English, whose awkwardness, intolerance, and ignorance justifies Kim’s contempt for them. These Anglo-Indians are also different, and better educated in citizenship and nationness, than are the teeming but transparent masses that populate the pages of the novel, the masses that have no capacity to transcend their differences in order to imagine the nation. They are superior above all to the Eurasians, those disturbingly visible rem(a)inders of the illegitimate, because (hetero)sexual traffic across the racial divide, a traffic that can only produce hyphenated Indians. Kipling is particularly revulsed by the “half-caste,” the Eurasian (known in postcolonial India as Anglo-Indian!) who is neither flesh nor fowl. The Anglo-Indian (that is, the India-raised white man), because he is an (almost) unhyphenated Indian, becomes the native of the Indian nation.

And yet Kim’s own whiteness is never something that can be taken as given; it must also be learned, demonstrated, and defended. His whiteness is never a fully secure inheritance; his racial identity is always interstitial and contested. He is, after all, Irish, an ethnic-national category often conflated with the Indian and in many instances affiliated with Indian nationalism;^[54] it is surely of some interest to remember Kipling’s own Scottish, Irish, and Welsh ancestry on his mother’s side.^[55] He is, besides, the son of an alcoholic and degraded private, and is “a poor white of the very poorest” (Kim, 49). He is only tenuously connected with the whiteness of Colonel Creighton and Lurgan Sahib, and the novel oscillates between defining sahibness as a property that is biological and as something that must be carefully cultivated. Gyan Prakash is surely right to point to the doubleness that marks the production of Kim’s whiteness (and he also notes that it may be possible to see Kim’s mother as ethnically unmarked):

Obvious and easy though it is to see how Kim asserts racial polarities, it is equally significant to observe that these oppositions are rendered profoundly enigmatic in the process of their formulation. Thus Kim’s whiteness does not stand separate from his blackness but is bleached from his “burned as black” skin. So immersed is the formation of Kim’s racial identity and authority in difference—whiteness formed on the borderlines of black and white, fact and fable, English and the vernacular—that liminality marks the emergence of a powerful colonizer-colonized hierarchy.^[56]

When “discovered” by Father Victor and the Reverend Arthur Bennett, he speaks very much in the accents of the Eurasian from whom he is careful, later, to distinguish himself in caste terms: “Their eyes are blued and their nails are blackened with low-caste blood, many of them. Sons of mehteranees—brothers-in-law to the bhungi [sweeper]” (Kim, 192). When Kim contemplates his racial identity, it is often, significantly, in terms of what must be learned—“I must needs go to a madrissah [school] and be turned into a Sahib” (Kim, 138)—and what must be remembered: “One must never forget that one is a Sahib, and that some day, when examinations are passed, one will command natives” (Kim, 173).

The (Anglo-Indian) nation thus conceived also has its other citizens, and certainly Mahbub Ali and Hurree Babu are among them by virtue of their training for and participation in the Great Game. Indeed, the Great Game, which employs the most liminal subjects, which conceives of India as a unified field upon which actions, travels, and exchanges must occur ceaselessly, becomes the institution that tropes the nation. And if Anglo-Indians are the founding fathers and representative citizens of the Indian nation, how do they guarantee, consolidate, and reproduce this Indianness? What ensures that their Indianness will be persuasive and uncontested? How do the “Indian” Indians signify national identity? What are the rituals of nationness that the national institution of the Great Game demands?

Mimicry and exchange are key to the Great Game: the exchange of messages and information, the exchange of clothing, and the mimicry of “Indian” identities (and “English”/“Anglo-Indian” ones). These exchanges must be continually performed; paradoxically, this continual movement between identities is necessary to fix identity/Indianness. Hence the extraordinary gratuitousness that often seems to attend the rituals of impersonation and nationness. There is no point at which Kim’s identity becomes stabilized; making him Indian, and keeping him Indian, is an ongoing process. The signs of national life must always kept visible through miming the various modalities of national identity. What can or must be represented is not the insurgent subject, who is always outside the circuits of exchange mandated by the Great Game. Instead the players must mimic themselves and each other as “Indians”; what results in this continuous representation of the nation is a mirroring dynamic in which all players are implicated in a circuit of (reciprocally constitutive) desire.

Note that the various encounters between the members of the Game are organized around a semiotic of dressing and undressing. It is not surprising that perhaps the proudest moment for Kim in the novel is when he transforms the Maratha agent into a sadhu: “Kim had been trained by Lurgan Sahib; E23, by virtue of his business, was no bad actor. In place of the tremulous, shrinking trader there lolled against the corner an all but naked, ash-smeared, ochre-barred, dusty-haired Saddhu, his swollen eyes…luminous with insolence and bestial lust” (Kim, 252). This is Kim’s masterpiece, a performance/production that produces two mimic subjects in the same process: himself as chela with magical powers, E23 as half-naked sadhu. This process of ceaseless mimicry is obviously not without its (homo)erotic charge. What Kim receives as a gift from Mahbub Ali at the end of his apprenticeship is, first, a gift of clothing which not only (re)produces Kim as Indian but quite specifically names him as an eroticized body (“Oh, the hearts to be broken! Oh, the eyes under the eyelashes, looking sideways!” [Kim, 219]). What this chain of impersonations does is (re)produce the bond that exists within the members of the fraternity. The national polity, as numerous scholars have noted, is typically constituted through the marginalization of women as symbolic figures; it is troped as a passionate brotherhood or as, in Jonathan Goldberg’s words, an “ideal of union between men.” ^[57] Citizenship and nationness are generated and consolidated in this endless circuit of exchange and impersonation between Anglo-Indian and other Indian men.

Does the nation have a gender? Does the national subject? The motherland model of nationness is familiar from Indian and other nationalisms: woman becomes that which represents the nation, the culture, and her purity, integrity, and seclusion are the concepts that are foregrounded in the struggle for possession. Many nationalist movements have bought into this masculinism and have conceived of themselves in virilized terms, a situation that of course requires enactment at the expense of women. The ideology of cultural restoration assumes the guise of radical nationalism; women are the revered objects of the collective act of national deliverance and the role model for the new nationalist collective which was analogous to the patriarchal family. Women as the carriers of culture have represented the nation, which must be saved and restored; at the same time they have existed in an oppositional relation to the nation, because in order to conceive of itself as one, the nation has to suppress internal difference.

If citizenship is only available for and between men, then what is the relation of woman to men in these personifications of the nation? The marginalization of women in Kim has been noted by more than one reader. Edward Said says of it:

It is an overwhelmingly male novel.…The women in the novel are remarkably few in number by comparison, and all are somehow debased or unsuitable for male attention:…to be always pestered by women, Kim believes, is to be hindered in playing the Great Game, which is best played by men alone. So not only are we in a masculine world dominated by travel, trade, adventure and intrigue, we are in a celibate world, in which the common romance of fiction and the enduring institution of marriage have been circumvented, avoided, all but ignored.^[58]

In this novel, women seem precluded even from a symbolic role in the (re)production of the nation. In the various nationalist discourses that circulated in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India, the nation had to be imagined as the great mother—Mother India—as a prelude to any conceptualization of the national subject.^[59] This (re)production of the (male) citizen by the symbolic mother is marvelously literalized in a novel like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981); though this Mother India is (misogynistically) transformed into a monstrous figure by the end of the novel, becoming the widow Indira Gandhi (about whom the sycophantic slogan—“India is Indira and Indira is India”—is generated), who devours her children.

Some of this sense of the monstrosity of the mother—or of the female—is certainly anticipated in Kim, which seeks rather desperately to erase the motherland model of nationness. Kim himself betrays no interest either in his dead mother or in the Eurasian woman who apparently stands in loco parentis to him until his adolescence; the latter represents the repulsive fact of interracial sexual relations that Kim must scrupulously forego and, further, may in fact be held (partially) responsible for the death of the Father. He spends his energies attaching himself to actual and symbolic fathers throughout the novel: the lama, Mahbub Ali, Creighton, Lurgan, Hurree Babu, all of whom compete rather jealously for his time and loyalty. Is Mother India then abolished from the Anglo-Indian national imaginary? I would argue that the maternal model is displaced in a number of ways. If there is a positive maternal figure at all in the novel, and one who may be said to provide a partial representation of a good Mother India, it is the lama.^[60] In interesting ways he anticipates the epicene figure of Gandhi, who also occupied a space of ambivalent gendering, especially in relation to the discourse of nationalism.^[61]

Though Kim attempts to excise women from the performance of nationness, it is at the same time curiously dependent upon women—often prostitutes—for innumerable services, particularly the mechanics of the impersonation that induces nationness. It is through prostitutes like the Flower of Delight that the enemies of the colonial state attempt to obtain information from Mahbub Ali; it is a generous prostitute from Amritsar who pays for Kim’s and the lama’s train tickets; and it is to the courtesans of Lucknow that Kim goes when he wishes to convert from whiteness to Indianness for his travels through India. When Kim is finally initiated into the Great Game by Mahbub Ali, the initiation involves a visit to the prostitute Huneefa, who produces spiritual protection and a disguise for Kim simultaneously. Significantly, his visit to a prostitute upon reaching symbolic manhood does not involve any form of (hetero)sexual initiation. Kim is of course a figure of significant sexual attractiveness to women, and his sexual attentions are continually solicited by women through the novel. These must repeatedly be disavowed: “How can a man follow the Way or the Great Game when he is so-always pestered by women?” thinks Kim. “There was that girl at Akrola of the Ford; and there was the scullion’s wife behind the dovecot—not counting the others.…When I was a child it was well enough, but now I am a man and they will not regard me as a man” (Kim, 306). This disavowal is most explicit in the instance of the Woman of Shamlegh, where Kipling will not permit a cross-racial heterosexual union despite the ethical claim the Woman is said to have on Kim’s sexual regard.

The prostitute is, obviously, the most literal figure of exchange in a sexual economy which is also intimately linked to an economy of disguise and mimicry. She becomes one of the primary counters in the circulation of information, identity, and homosocial power. It is her presence—that of the carnal and completely embodied female figure—that facilitates the overt disavowal of all femininity in national space, including the maternal model of femininity and nationness (the mother, of course, signifying a disembodied but nonetheless gendered subject). Thus, through the prostitute, the domain of heterosexuality is also invoked and repudiated.

It is, of course, noteworthy that no Anglo-Indian or English women—whether as mothers, prostitutes or (potential) citizens—feature in this performative model of the nation; in fact, they find no place in the narrative at all.^[62] What novel inflections are accumulated in this new definition of nationness? Women (including mothers) are, as we have seen, both necessary and superfluous to the staging of citizenship; they are the source of a certain unease in the novel’s conception of an alternative national polity. The reproductive paradigm of nationness, which is embodied in the maternal model, is (dis)embodied in Kim through the mimicry of identities—rather than the duplication of bodies—the mimicry that (re)produces the nation. In the absence of Mother India, the men who would be Indian must always keep performing.

Notes

Now what the reader tends to expect is that Kim will come eventually to realize that he is delivering into bondage to the British invaders those whom he has considered his own people, and that a struggle between allegiances will result.…But…the alternating attractions felt by Kim never give rise to a genuine struggle.…Nor does Kipling allow himself to doubt that his hero has chosen the better part. Kim must now exploit his knowledge of native life for the purpose of preventing and putting down any native resistance to the British; but it never seems to occur to his creator that this constitutes a betrayal of the lama. A sympathy with the weaker party in a relationship based on force has again given way without a qualm to the glorification of the stronger.