This essay explores literary representations of mobility in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and examines how they problematize the current understanding of the novel as well as the history of British imperialism. Recent scholars focus on Kim’s hybridity and...
This essay explores literary representations of mobility in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and examines how they problematize the current understanding of the novel as well as the history of British imperialism. Recent scholars focus on Kim’s hybridity and tend toward interpreting it as discursively inherent to colonial culture. In this paper, I argue that Kim’s hybridized identity, unsettling as it is, derives from his historically situated position as low-class Irish as well as that of the migratory masses in colonial India. My primary analysis focuses on how Kim’s mobility is harnessed to serve the British Empire but also results in interpersonal intimacies. In particular, Kim’s intimacy with the lama marks out a contested site in which the homogenizing force of the British Empire facilitates other experiences that cannot be predicted, much less controlled. The individual character’s mobility and his corporeal and emotive experiences that follow serve to highlight limits of British imperial agenda.