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The Quest for a Home: Identity, Agency, and the Interstitial Space in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim

Ironically, in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), the jovial protagonist Kim (who readily becomes friends with all those around him) notes his own alienation. After Kim begins an active role in the British secret service, he feels his isolation keenly; Kim states: “Now am I alone—all alone... In all India is no one so alone as I! If I die to-day, who shall bring the news—and to whom?” (181). This isolation, however, paradoxically gives Kim his ability to be “Friend of all the World.” Kim, an orphaned Irish boy living in British India not only has no familial ties, but Kipling also removes cultural ties. With skin so darkened that he can be mistaken as a native, Kim has a cultural dexterity that arises from his lack of cultural roots and ethnic ties. Neither quite Irish nor quite Indian, Kim has a certain racial neutrality which gives him more freedom than any one ethnic group would have with others. Kim is not only seen as not-white by the natives around him, but also as not-Hindu, not-Muslim, not-Jat; consequently, Kim does not provoke the response a Hindu may have to a Muslim or Jat. Because Kim belongs to no particular community or space, he can enter all with ease. This cultural mobility provides Kim with tremendous agency in the novel, but Kipling shows this agency has a price. The rootless, hybrid Kim has no home, and at key points in the text, he feels the anguish of this absence. By using Kim’s rapid shifts in entering and leaving communities, belonging to a group and then not belonging, Kipling successfully questions the fixed nature of cultural identity. Kipling turns to the interior borders of subject formation in his protagonist and offers a new possibility—the subject who resides between cultural borders, the subject who can move into various ethnic spaces but whose home remains in this nebulous interstitial space. While Kipling endows this interstitial subject with great agency, he also posits haunting questions of the implications of living in-between cultures. Traditionally critics have seen Kim as a rich postcolonial text, even if Kim’s hybridity seems puzzling. Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, argues that Kipling resolves Kim’s hybridity at the novel’s end. Said interprets the scene where Kim awakens under the banyan tree healed from an illness as signifying his acceptance of his imperial role (142) and answering the question of his cultural identity. John McBratney understands Kim as Kipling’s “new cosmopolitan British citizen” and the model of the “Briton as multiethnic” (105). Like Said, McBratney sees Kim happily taking up his imperial role at the narrative’s end. Don Randall offers Kim’s boyhood as key to understanding his hybridity and his agency as he contends that Kim’s coming of age signifies both the vision of empire and the “passing of the Raj” (159). Radhika Mohanram, on the other hand, discusses the implications of Kim’s hybridity by examining the issue of skin color in the novel and does not see such a tidy resolution as Said’s, arguing that Kim’s “chameleon skin” represents racial and colonial history and puts the character beyond race and class (263–67). Mohanram states: “Kim’s indeterminate skin is porous to its own histories; skin signifies the histories of racism, violence, and indifference... . Under the skin of colonialism lie stories of how whites try to make their land their own” (268). With this assessment, Mohanram concludes that the character of Kim encapsulates the different processes that happen in globalization.