Kim and The Children's Empire

          Rudyard Kipling’s Kim is a wonderful book about a young boy and his adventures throughout India.  The novel takes place during the nineteenth century.  Being that this was the time period chosen, there is a lot of hidden and underline references to the colonization of India by Great Britain.  Much of the novel involves Britain’s attempt to mold Kim into a perfect spy.  His first set of training begins with his friend, Mahbub, who is a horse trader.  He began testing Kim when he was young, unknown to Kim, as a telegraph boy.  Kim meets a lama and begins traveling India with him; they are in search of a river that washes away all your sins.        

          On this quest, the two run into the British army and Kim is taken in because, he is “one of them,” despite his orphan past and the upbringing he received by a local Indian woman.  Britain takes advantage of this and sends Kim to school.  He escapes and runs to Mahbub.  Betraying him, he returns him to the British.  Throughout the novel Kim is taught by many experts on how to act, speak, and behave in any situation, he also learns the art of disguise.  

          Lerer brought up an interesting point in Children’s Literature: a Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter, “The key to institutional success is how one “cuts up”: behaves, cuts a figure, acts and speaks (the idiom seems to have emerged from school and sporting slang in the mid-nineteenth century).”  Throughout the book Kim is being taught these lessons and actually putting them to use.  He quickly learns the rhetoric needed when he comes in contact with another “charmed one,” and his quick thinking enables his to disguise a man using curry powder.  Although this is thought of as an adventure novel for boys I think it could also be considered a bildungsroman.