Kim (novel)

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Kim is a novel by British writer Rudyard Kipling from 1901. The title character Kim (Kimball O'Hara) is a shrewd Irish orphan who in the slum of Lahore at the time of British rule grows and India as a student with a Tibetan Lama by pulls the north of India. After discovering his origins, he will first be trained at a British school in Lucknow , India, and then, at the will of his mentors, will join the British secret service. On the side, Kim helps his beloved lama achieve enlightenment.

The historical background of the story is the colonial times in British India around 1900 and the conflict between Russia and Great Britain in Central Asia , the so-called The Great Game between Great Britain and Russia.

Today the novel is especially popular as a book for young people and is the origin of the Kim game .

content

action

Orphan boy Kim (actually Kimball O'Hara) lived in the slum of Lahore during British rule over India . The shrewd boy earns his living by begging and small messenger services, including occasionally for Mahbub Ali, whom Kim knows as a horse dealer in the Lahore market, but who actually works for the British secret service.

Although Irish by birth, Kim is so integrated into Indian culture that he speaks Hindustani better than English and often forgets his origins. Kim is from an Irish couple who died impoverished in India. Before their wedding, his mother worked as a nanny in the household of a colonel. The father, Kimball O'Hara sr., Was in an Irish-British regiment Color Sergeant (literally "flag sergeant ", but actually company sergeant ) and then switched to an Indian railway company as an employee. However, after the death of his wife, he became addicted to opium. However, his son knows little about his own origins. Kim's birth certificate is in his neck amulet without the child being aware of its meaning. But the boy firmly believes that one day his fate will turn out for the better, with the help of a mysterious red bull on a green meadow. At least that is what his father prophesied to him in the opium intoxication.

Kim's life changes fundamentally when he meets a traveling Tibetan lama in front of the Lahore Museum, who is in search of a legendary river whose waters purify people and free them from the wheel of life . Kim joins the lama as his chela (disciple) and walks with him. Before the two leave Lahore, Kim takes on an errand for Mahbub Ali, the delivery of a letter to a British officer in Umballa. Officially, it is a pedigree of a horse, but Kim suspects that it is an important message.

The Lama and Kim then walk on the Grand Trunk Road and develop a close relationship of trust. On their way they eventually come across an Irish regiment. Kim notices their flag, a red bull on a green background, and sneaks into the camp. When he is caught there, his origins are revealed: two priests of the regiment find his birth certificate and a paper in Kim's amulet that proves his father's membership in the regiment. The regiment decides to take Kim with them and send him to an English school. The lama can negotiate with the priests that Kim is sent to a very good Catholic school in Lucknow , which the lama wants to finance.

During Kim's three-year training, the lama continues to search for his river on his own, but he keeps coming back to visit Kim. Kim not only learns to write and arithmetic at school, but also the basics of surveying. Officially, he is supposed to be a surveyor in the National Survey after his training , but it becomes clear that Kim should actually be trained for a job in the British secret service. Kim spends his school holidays partly for his amusement as a vagabond on the street, partly with the Lurgan jeweler in Simla. This brings him some techniques such as B. Disguise that will be useful for some intelligence work. Among other things, Kim also plays a memory game at Lurgan, in which he has to remember the size and color of gemstones (still known today as Kim's game ).

After three years, Kim is allowed to leave school to start working for the secret service. But before that he can still spend a vacation with his beloved lama. His future supervisor in the secret service, Hurree Babu, has already given him an assignment: he should look for two Russian spies with him in the Himalayan mountains and, if possible, take their papers away from them. Kim and Hurree Babu actually manage to direct the Lama towards the Himalayas and carry out their secret service mission. Kim can take the papers, while Hurree Babu leads the Russian spies astray. However, during this action the lama is injured and sick. He also realizes that he has lost his way because he would have to look for the river in the plains, not in the mountains, even if he loves the Himalayas very much.

With the help of villagers in the Himalayas, Kim succeeds in transporting the lama back to the plains of India, where they relax in the house of one of the llama's patrons. Hurree Babu and Mahbub Ali also arrive there to inquire about Kim and the lama and to pick up the papers. Kim has thus mastered his first secret service assignment with flying colors.

The book ends with the lama finding his sacred flow and enlightenment near her abode. However, he returns to the living in order to lead his disciple Kim on the path of enlightenment.

people

  • Kimball "Kim" O'Hara - main character of the novel, orphan in the streets of Lahore, son of an Irish soldier in India
  • Teshoo Lama - Tibetan Lama from the Such-zen Monastery in the Himalayas, currently on a spiritual search for the source of a river that originated from a Buddha's arrow
  • Mahbub Ali - Pashtun horse dealer in Punjab and spy for the British secret service
  • Colonel Creighton - British officer, spy and hobby ethnologist
  • Lurgan Sahib - Simla jeweler and British spy
  • Hurree Babu - Bengali spy for British intelligence and Kim's direct line manager
  • Sahiba - old noble lady from the Rajput dynasties with property near Saharanpur , patroness and follower of the lama
  • Lispeth - old woman in Shamlegh in the Himalayas who helps Kim and his lama to escape the Russian spies and to leave the Himalayas again
  • Reverend Arthur Bennett - Church of England priest , chaplain of the Mavericks, the Irish regiment of which Kim's father was a member
  • Father Victor - the Roman Catholic chaplain of the Mavericks, who sends Kim for training at St. Xavier Catholic School in Lucknow

worldview

The way in which Indian people are portrayed or even caricatured in the novel was associated with Kipling's basic imperialist attitude and is therefore controversial today. The literary theorist and post-colonialism expert Edward Said , who wrote a foreword to Kim , described the novel as a “masterpiece of imperialism ”. On the one hand, Said expresses his appreciation of the literary qualities of the work, but also formulates criticism of the underlying position of Kipling: Like other colonialist writers of his time, Kipling insists on the superior position of the British Empire - which corresponds to the inferiority of other peoples - and wants to know the empire's claim to power secured.

shape

The novel describes the growing up of the protagonist Kim and follows his life path from a child at the age of 14 to a young adult at the age of 16. The book is therefore often classified as a book for young people , but many literary critics regard Kim as much more than a book for young people . In addition to elements of a coming-of-age novel, Kim also features aspects of the picaresque novel and the exotic travel and adventure novel . Some critics regard Kim as a curious, but all the more successful, mixture of the genres adventure, educational novel , hero's journey and spy thriller .

The eponymous hero Kim and his companion, the Lama, have also been compared to other famous couples in literary history, such as Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa or Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn .

The novel is divided into three parts of five chapters each. The first five chapters describe Kim's experiences in the company of his lama on Grand Trunk Road, followed by five chapters in which Kim's training in a British school in Lucknow and through the secret service during the school holidays is described. The last five chapters deal with Kim's pilgrimage at the side of his lama in the Himalayas, where Kim also carries out his first secret service assignment. In particular, the chapters in the first third are more episodes than a continuous plot, and they serve to elaborate on various characters of Indian society against the backdrop of an exotic landscape.

The question Kim repeatedly asks himself, "Who is Kim?" Is central to the story. The question here is what constitutes identity. Is it place of birth, religion, customs? Do genes or upbringing play a role? Is it appearance or mindset? As an Anglo-Indian, Kim is a hybrid character formed by multiple cultures. How much Kim moves back and forth between cultures is also clear from his change of clothes: When setting out with his lama, for example, he changes into the clothes of a Hindu, then has to change into European clothes and wear them when entering the Catholic school of St. Xavier finally, on the pilgrimage with his lama in northern India, the clothes of a local again.

Position in literary history

Classification in the work of the author

Kim is considered one of the finest works by Rudyard Kipling. Before Kim , Kipling had written a number of short stories and poetry, and was well known in Great Britain with his Plain Tales from the Hills (1888). Before the novel Kim , Kipling had already published the volume Jungle Book (1894), which also played in India, with short stories and poems. In both his short stories and Kim , Kipling draws on memories of his childhood in British India at the end of the 19th century.

Position in literary history

At the time of Kim's publication , adventure stories were en vogue , the authors of which brought with them the imperialist attitude towards the superiority of the British, in particular, over colonized peoples. Examples of such rather stereotypical colonial literature include: a. Rider Haggards called King Solomons Mines (1886). Kipling's novels are seen as the culmination of this development, with Kim going beyond simple propaganda for British imperialism. Kipling's portrayal of colonial life in India, including his anecdotes, local color and use of dialect, has been particularly praised. Kipling's Kim , along with novels such as A Passage to India by EM Forster, is part of what is known as Anglo-Indian literature. H. on the literature of British writers in India, and Kipling as its founder.

reception

Reception upon arrival

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Kipling was a popular English writer, and Kim was a successful novel. After the First World War, Kipling's popularity and literary success fell sharply. Kipling was considered a bard of British imperialism , among other things because of his poem The White Man's Burden .

Impact history

Kipling's reputation as a serious writer was restored through TS Eliot's essay on Kipling's lyric work, but not all critics shared Eliot's appreciation for Kipling's work. The tendency in literary studies to deal with the works of Anglo-Indian authors such as Kipling in the context of post-colonial studies has also led to a new interest in Kipling's Kim , such as B. Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism .

The novel Kim is now considered a classic of British and Indian literature due to its detailed, multi-faceted account of the geography and society of (Northern) India. The novel belongs to the canon of English literary history. The critic Nirad C. Chaudhuri describes Kim as "the best novel in the English language with an Indian theme, but also one of the greatest English novels despite its subject matter".

The imperialist view of society in British India is on the one hand deepened in Kim by various motifs, on the other hand also partially broken: disguise, appearance and reality, magic and illusion as well as the search for identity. In particular, the motif of the search for identity was further developed by subsequent Indian authors and became one of the central themes of Indian literature, from GV Desanis All About H. Hatterr (1948) to Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children (1982). It was also noted that Kipling was one of the first English-language authors in India to attempt to fuse Indian words and phrases into a linguistic whole that fits the characters, plot, and locality. This style of English with a generous amount of Indianisms was later used by some of the most important English-speaking authors of Indian literature, such as: B. by Mulk Raj Anand , GV Desani or Salman Rushdie.

Film adaptations

Kim was made into a film in 1950 under the title Kim - Secret Service in India . Directed by Victor Saville , actors were Dean Stockwell (Kim), Errol Flynn (Mahbub Ali). In addition, the material was filmed again for television in 1984, with Ravi Sheth as Kim, Peter O'Toole as Lama, Bryan Brown as Mahbub Ali and John Rhys-Davies as Babu.

See also

literature

Text output

Original English editions

  • Rudyard Kipling: Kim . Macmillan, London 1901. (first edition)
  • Rudyard Kipling: Kim . With an introduction and comments by Edward Said . Penguin, Harmondsworth 1987, ISBN 0-14-018352-3 .
  • Rudyard Kipling: Kim . WW Norton & Company, New York 2002, ISBN 0-393-96650-X . (Modern edition with detailed notes, essays, maps and references)

Translations

Secondary literature

  • Maria Couto: Rudyard Kipling . In: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Ed.): A History of Indian Literature in English . Columbia University Press, New York 2003, ISBN 0-231-12810-X , pp. 70-81.
  • Sayyed Rahim Moosavinia: Untold Stories about India: Rudyard Kipling and EM Forster . Sarup Book Publishers, New Delhi 2009, ISBN 978-81-7625-909-5 .
  • Robert F. Moss: Rudyard Kipling and the Fiction of Adolescence . Macmillan, London / Basingstoke 1982, ISBN 0-333-30087-4 .
  • MK Naik: Studies in Anglo-Indian Fiction. Imperial Embrace . Abhinav Publications, New Delhi 2008, ISBN 8170174813 .
  • Edward Said: Culture and Imperialism . Chatto & Windus, London 1993, ISBN 0-679-75054-1 .
  • Rudolf Sühnel: Rudyard Kipling: Kim . In: Rudolf Sühnel: Quintessence. Essays on English and American Literature , ed. by Hiltrud and Erwin Poell. Mattes Verlag, Heidelberg 2013, ISBN 978-3-86809-078-9 , pp. 233-244.
  • Zohreh T. Sullivan: Narratives of Empire. The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993, ISBN 978-0-521-06313-5 .

Web links

Commons : Kim  - album with pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Kim  - English text version

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901) Penguin edition with introduction and notes by Edward Said (1989) ( Memento from April 20, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ Richard Bernstein: Edward W. Said, Polymath Scholar, Dies at 67 (obituary). In: The New York Times , September 26, 2003.
  3. ^ Rudolf Sühnel: Rudyard Kipling: Kim . In: Rudolf Sühnel: Quintessence. Essays on English and American Literature , ed. by Hiltrud and Erwin Poell. Mattes Verlag, Heidelberg 2013, ISBN 978-3-86809-078-9 , pp. 234, 239.
  4. ↑ Zohreh T. Sullivan: Narratives of Empire. The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993, ISBN 978-0-521-06313-5 , p. 148.
  5. ^ Rudolf Sühnel: Rudyard Kipling: Kim . In: Rudolf Sühnel: Quintessence. Essays on English and American Literature , ed. by Hiltrud and Erwin Poell. Mattes Verlag, Heidelberg 2013, ISBN 978-3-86809-078-9 , p. 235.
  6. ^ Rudolf Sühnel: Rudyard Kipling: Kim . In: Rudolf Sühnel: Quintessence. Essays on English and American Literature , ed. by Hiltrud and Erwin Poell. Mattes Verlag, Heidelberg 2013, ISBN 978-3-86809-078-9 , pp. 239, 240.
  7. ↑ Kim, by Rudyard Kipling , Ian Mackean, Literature Study Online, November 2001
  8. ↑ Sayyed Rahim Moosavinia: Untold Stories about India: Rudyard Kipling and EM Forster . Sarup Book Publishers, New Delhi 2009, ISBN 978-81-7625-909-5 , p. 13.
  9. ↑ Sayyed Rahim Moosavinia: Untold Stories about India: Rudyard Kipling and EM Forster . Sarup Book Publishers, New Delhi 2009, ISBN 978-81-7625-909-5 , p. 11.
  10. ^ Maria Couto: Rudyard Kipling . In: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Ed.): A History of Indian Literature in English . Columbia University Press, New York 2003, ISBN 0-231-12810-X , p. 73.
  11. ↑ Zohreh T. Sullivan: Narratives of Empire. The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993, ISBN 978-0-521-06313-5 , p. 148.
  12. ↑ Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): Englische Literaturgeschichte , 5th edition. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02421-3 , pp. 332–333.
  13. ^ Edward Said: Culture and Imperialism. Chatto & Windus, London 1993, ISBN 0-679-75054-1 , p. 196.
  14. ^ George Orwell: Rudyard Kipling - Essay.
  15. ↑ TS Eliot (Ed.): A Choice of Kipling's Verse . Faber and Faber, London 1975.
  16. ^ Edward Said: Culture and Imperialism . Knopf, New York 1993, ISBN 0-394-58738-3 .
  17. ↑ Chaudhuri quoted in: Maria Couto: Rudyard Kipling . In: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Ed.): A History of Indian Literature in English . Columbia University Press, New York 2003, ISBN 0-231-12810-X , p. 79.
  18. ^ Maria Couto: Rudyard Kipling . In: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Ed.): A History of Indian Literature in English . Columbia University Press, New York 2003, ISBN 0-231-12810-X , p. 80.
  19. ^ MK Naik: Studies in Anglo-Indian Fiction. Imperial Embrace . Abhinav Publications, New Delhi 2008, ISBN 8170174813 , pp. 89-91.