Kim by Rudyard Kipling

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1937): Nobel Prize winner Poet, short-story writer, journalist and imperialist, Rudyard Kipling’s work remains one of the best account of the British colonial experience in India.

Kim was written twelve years after Kipling had left India, and was first published in 1901. Set in India at the time British Raj, it contrasts, through the relationship between Kim and Lama the exotic Indian land- scape and its colourful people with the colonial experience.

Considered by many to be Kipling’s masterpiece, opinion appears varied about its consideration as children’s literature, concludes “Kim is the apotheosis of the Victorian cult of childhood, but it shines now as bright as ever, long after the Empire’s collapse...” (Wikipedia)

In a reissue of the novel in 1959 by Macmillan, the reviewer opines “Kim is a book worked at three levels. It is a tale of adventure... It is the drama of a boy having entirely his boyhood in his own way... and it is the mystical exegesis of this pattern of behaviour...” This reviewer concludes “Kim will endure because it is a beginning like all masterly ends...” (Wikipedia)