1. Rudyard Kipling, “Miss Youghal’s Sais,” in Plain Tales from the Hills, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen, with an introduction and notes by David Trotter (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), 51. All subsequent references will be incorporated parenthetically into the text as PTH.

2. See, for instance, Rudyard Kipling, Letters of Marque (New York and Boston: H. M. Caldwell, 1899).

3. Stephen Arata describes Kipling’s penchant for the “unglossed allusion, the unapologetic gesture towards structures of feeling and experience which had no counterpart outside the enclosed world of Anglo-India” (“A Universal Foreignness: Kipling in the Fin-de-Siècle,” English Literature in Transition 36, no. 1 [1993]: 12).

4. Gail Ching-Liang Low, White Skins/Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 191.

5. Rudyard Kipling, Life’s Handicap, Being Stories of My Own People, ed. P. N. Furbank (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987). All further references will be incorporated parenthetically into the text as LH.

6. Quoted in Zohreh T. Sullivan, Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 93.

7. Ibid., 112. The story does affirm the mutual love of Jellaludin and his wife, but it is, of course, impossible to separate the fact of his marriage from the scenario of his (damnable but glorious) degradation.

8. Charles Carrington, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970 [1959]), 103.

9. Benita Parry asserts that “[if] ‘To be Filed for Reference’ both intimates and averts a challenge to British knowledge, then Kim (1901) confidently reaffirms its validity” (“The Content and Discontents of Kipling’s Imperialism,” New Formations, no. 6 [Winter 1988]: 54).

10. Irving Howe, “The Pleasures of Kim,” in Rudyard Kipling: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 35.

11. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, “Vision in Kipling’s Novels,” in Kipling’s Mind and Art: Selected Critical Essays, ed. Andrew Rutherford (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964), 232.

12. J. M. S. Tompkins, The Art of Rudyard Kipling (London: Methuen, 1959), 21–22.

13. Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings, ed. Thomas Pinney (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3.

14. For instances of Kipling’s representation of the uncomplicated love between Anglo-Indian children and their adult Indian caretakers and companions, see his “Tod’s Amendment,” in Plain Tales from the Hills; and “Wee Willie Winkie” and “His Majesty the King,” in Wee Willie Winkie, ed. Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin Books, 1988). See, too, “Simla Notes,” Civil and Military Gazette, 29 July 1885 (reprinted in Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches 1884–88, ed. Thomas Pinney [Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1986], 112–18).

15. James Harrison, Rudyard Kipling (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), 2.

16. It is precisely this lack of a tragic dimension that Edmund Wilson, “The Kipling That Nobody Read,” Atlantic Monthly 167 (1941): 201–14 [reprinted in Kipling’s Mind and Art: Selected Critical Essays, ed. Andrew Rutherford (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964), 30–31] has famously seen as the novel’s most damning flaw:

17. Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 310.

18. Thomas Richards (“Archive and Utopia,” 119–20) describes the ethos of Creighton’s world thus: “Though everything in the novel takes place ‘under the sign of War’ (p. 128), it is the sign of war that is not yet war, the sign of a permanent state of emergency, the sign of a state apparatus maintaining political equilibrium, the sign of what Virilio has called ‘the passage from wartime to the war of peacetime.’”

19. Rudyard Kipling, “The Phantom Rickshaw,” in The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories, ed. Louis Cornell (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 26.

20. I am indebted in a general way to Ronald Inden’s Imagining India (Oxford, England, and Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), which does for Indological studies (with its fixation on caste) what Said has done for knowledge about the Arab world in Orientalism. Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchus: The Caste System and Its Implications, trans. Mark Sainsbury and others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 [1966]) is of course the principal twentieth-century Orientalist text in the figuration of caste as the key to knowing India.

21. Rudyard Kipling, Kim, ed. Edward Said (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), 50. All subsequent references to the novel will be incorporated parenthetically into the text.

22. See Joseph Bristow’s statement that “India remains, so to speak, a realm of difference without difference” (Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World [London: HarperCollins Academic, 1991], 202). For more on the classifying imagination of British colonialism, see Bernard S. Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,” in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 224–54; and Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 314–39.

23. Patrick Williams, “ Kim and Orientalism,” in Kipling Reconsidered, ed. Phillip Mallett (London: Macmillan, 1989).

24. Spivak, “Questions of Multi-culturalism,” in Post-Colonial Critic, 66.

25. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

26. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Burden of English Studies,” The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India, ed. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 276.

27. Edward W. Said, “Introduction,” in Kim, 27.

28. Philip E. Wegner notes briefly that “Kipling does not deny the existence of an anti-imperial presence, but rather engages in a careful negation of it” (“‘Life as He Would Have It’: The Invention of India in Kipling’s Kim,” Cultural Critique 26 [Winter 1993–1994]: 140).

29. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 199. On the Mutiny and its aftereffects, see Thomas R. Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: India 1857–1870 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964); Eric Stokes, The Peasant Armed (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986); Gautam Bhadra, “Four Rebels of Eighteen-Fifty-Seven,” in Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 229–75.

30. Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 85. Sharpe provides an excellent account of the ways in which the narrative of the Mutiny directed its attention to the institution of the “English Lady.”

31. The Subaltern Studies group has of course been pivotal for a reconsideration of colonial and bourgeois nationalist historiography, but the work of scholars not a part of this collective—scholars like Anand Yang, Bernard Cohn, Barbara Metcalf, Faisal Devji, Kamala Visveswaran, and Terence Ranger—has also been important in this endeavor.

32. For a nuanced and thorough account of the imperial theater in which Bengali masculinity was produced, see Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995). John Rosselli notes that “the Bengali elite…seems peculiar in its markedly physical sense of collective degradation. In the work of Iqbal and…other Indian writers…, the collective grievance was subjection, decline from a high estate, enslavement to western culture: though Iqbal was prepared to deride the brainy but physically flabby graduate there was no hint that entire Indian groups (Tamils, say, or Muslims) were constitutionally weak.…The one group that had to wrestle with a notion of its own constitutional weakness was the Bengali elite” (“The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal,” Past and Present 86 [February 1980]: 133–34). In this essay, he also provides a useful and succinct definition of the Bengali Hindu elite: “the land- and service-based groups which by the 1850s and 1860s were benefiting from English education and moving in increasing numbers into administrative and clerical posts, chiefly in government service, and into the legal profession” (p.121). On the Bengali Hindu elite (also known as bhadralok, respectable people) as a sociopolitical group, see John McGuire, The Making of a Colonial Mind: A Quantitative Study of the Bhadralok in Calcutta, 1857–1885 (Canberra: Australian National University, 1983).

33. See MacMunn, Religions and Hidden Cults of India, for a fairly representative reading of terrorist activity as a product of combined religious and sexual pathologies.

34. Rudyard Kipling, “The Head of the District,” in Life’s Handicap, 120.

35. Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” in Nation and Narration, 13.

36. Anderson’s characterization of the nation as imagined community needs to be supplemented by Arjun Appadurai’s caution in his “Patriotism and Its Futures,” Public Culture 5 (Spring 1993): 414: “The modern nation-state, in this view, grows less out of natural facts—such as language, blood, soil, and race—but is a quintessential cultural product, a product of the collective imagination.…In many of these theories of the nation as imagined, there is always a suggestion that blood, kinship, race, and soil are somehow less imagined, more natural than the imagination of collective interest or solidarity.”

37. Anderson, Imagined Communities, passim.

38. Bennington, “Postal Politics,” 121.

39. For a useful elaboration of this idea, see Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

40. Tompkins, Art of Rudyard Kipling, 21.

41. The terms to mark this distinction—a common enough one—are borrowed from Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Empire Writes Back.

42. Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 20–21.

43. Cited in ibid., 132.

44. R. C. Majumdar, H. C. Raychaudhuri, and Kalikinkar Dutta, An Advanced History of India (London and Delhi: Macmillan, 1967), 2: 823–32. We might recall that in the Sherlock Holmes stories, Dr. Watson’s wound (acquired at the battle of Miani) is always painfully present.

45. Rudyard Kipling, “The City of Dreadful Night,” in From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906 [1899]), 2: 287–363.

46. See Lewis Wurgraft, The Imperial Imagination: Magic and Myth in Kipling’s India (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), for British psychic investment in the frontier and in the myth of the “Punjabi” as the architect of British greatness in India.

47. Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 305.

48. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 55–56.

49. This is the thrust of John McClure’s argument in Kipling and Conrad: The Colonial Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). I am indebted to this insight, though the trajectory of my argument is obviously different from McClure’s.

50. A. Wilson, Strange Ride, 22. Ali Behdad uses the term self-exoticization to describe the situation of the Anglo-Indian: “The British colonizers spent long periods, sometimes their entire lives, in India, and so they often felt alienated from ‘home’ (and in that sense inclined to identify themselves as ‘Indians’) while simultaneously remaining alienated (as ‘English’) with respect to the Indians as ‘natives’” (Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution [Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1994], 77–78).

51. Sara Suleri astutely remarks about Kim’s putative freedom that “[despite] his ostensible mobility and cultural dexterity,…Kim is an imperial casualty of more tragic proportions than he is usually granted. It is not as though Kim stands outside the colonial system called the Great Game and—as Edmund Wilson implies—has the luxury of choosing whether or not to play it: instead, Kim is the game, and finally is unable to separate it from the parameters of his own history. Kim’s collaboration is therefore emblematic of not so much an absence of conflict as the terrifying absence of choice in the operations of colonialism” (The Rhetoric of English India [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992], 116). Thomas Richards describes the use of the Great Game’s agents in similar terms: “the state constitutes a kind of infra-individual implant detached from the active consciousness of its subjects yet, at the same time, an activating part of them” (“Archive and Utopia,” 113).

52. B. J. Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and “Orientalism” (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1986), 5–6.

53. It is difficult, however, to sympathize with his fetishization of residence in India in “Introduction: Writing India, Reorienting Colonial Discourse Analysis,” in Writing India, 1757–1990: The Literature of British India, ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 1–29; in this essay he insists that the fact of Indian residence placed Anglo-Indian writers outside the circuit of Orientalist racism.

54. It is striking to observe how many of the non-Indian figures most sympathetic to India and to Indian nationalist demands have been Irish. Radha Kumar mentions the Freedom for India and Ireland group in the United States in the early twentieth century, in The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990 (New Delhi: Kali for Women; London and New York: Verso, 1993), 66. See also V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Humankind (London: Century Hutchinson, 1969). Abdul JanMohamed describes quite persuasively Kim’s “ personal and emotional allegiance to the Indians…and, on the other, his impersonal and rational relation to the Englishmen” (“The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986], 99). I am not in disagreement with this reading of Kim’s alignments, though I will point to the ways in which the emotional charge of the “Indian” relationships is not outside the calculus of the Great Game, which uses everything that is at hand.

55. Carrington, Rudyard Kipling, 34.

56. Prakash, “Science ‘Gone Native,’” 154. Joseph Bristow also remarks that the “slippage between his ‘Englishness’ and ‘Irishness’ indicates how Kim variously represents white superiority and white subordination” (Empire Boys, 198). Finally, see Christopher Lane: “If the meaning of race is disputable in Kim, the text also designates a split between racial identity and political identification that leads it into potential crisis even as it insists that each is finally commensurate” (The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire [Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1995], 42).

57. Jonathan Goldberg, “Bradford’s ‘Ancient Members’ and ‘A Case of Buggery…amongst Them,’” in Nationalisms & Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker et al. (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 63.

58. Said, “Introduction,” 12.

59. Ashis Nandy speaks of “the mythography of India as a powerful mother” in The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism ( Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 92. For more on this subject, see chapters 4–6.

60. Many readers have seen him, not surprisingly, as a “feminized” figure.

61. My thanks to Sandhya Shetty for suggesting this to me.

62. Williams (“ Kim and Orientalism,” 45–49) speaks of their absence as

function[ing] as a potential escape clause by allowing, within the terms of the text, the unspoken displacement of the condemnation of women from women in general to Indian women in particular, since the latter are the only ones we see.…Racial superiority was, by the end of the century, one of the few remaining justifications for British rule, and the perceived threat from uncontrolled female sexuality (here rendered as uncontrolled Indian female sexuality, the truth [of white women’s desire for Indian males] being literally unspeakable), was a grave one indeed.