Some of his most memorable works include The Jungle Book and Just So Stories. Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist who was the first English language author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kim has a difficult choice to make: his companion or his country?Ī rich and colourful depiction of India's exotic landscape and culture in the imperialistic world of the late 19th century, this audiobook celebrates their friendship and explores a young man's quest for identity. While Kim wishes to take part in the imperialistic Great Game, learning espionage from the British secret service, he feels spiritually bound to the lama. The pilgrimage will take them across the vast continent, across rivers, and up the Himalayas. When he befriends an aged Tibetan lama his life is transformed as he is requested to accompany him on a mysterious quest to find the legendary River of the Arrow and achieve Enlightenment. It explores the life of Kimball O'Hara, an Irish orphan who spends his childhood as a vagrant in Lahore. For me, this was easy because I got this book freely from the public domain and nowadays that takes like a century or something.Kipling's masterpiece Kim is his final and most famous work and one of the first and greatest espionage stories ever written. Hence I am inclined to give the benefit of the doubt and attribute such things to the context of the times. Though there were were some problematic remarks about certain groups, they were never the dominant theme.
Of course, I did not read it particularly critically and not being fully aware of Kipling's racial views (apparently it was him who coined the 'White man's burden' phrase?) I can't analyse the book in this fashion. The second thing this book has sparked an interest of is British Intelligence services, both within the context of the Great Game and later conflicts. I've never experienced that from a novel before.
Coming from a South Asian background myself, it was a genuine pleasure to have understood the myriad of cultural and linguistic references.
This book has motivated me to check out more literature of the subcontinent, as it really does portray British India in such a fascinating light - a flurry of religious, racial, linguistic and cultural diversity.
Overall a nice read, moves at a slow pace but two things in particular kept me interested: the immense cultural and linguistic references, and the wider backdrop of the geopolitical 'great game' played in espionage between Great Britain and Russia.
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