I am so late to this party that I am more of an anthropologist than a reporter. I finally understand why Kipling won the Nobel Prize for literature. I was put off my his use of the word "native" for many years. Post-colonial theory only exacerbated my revulsion, especially in light of his poem "The White Man's Burden," (which does not really say what it seems to say, but that is not necessarily relevant for this review).
Julian Barnes, who is succinctly right about so many things, remarked, "What a curious vanity it is of the present to expect the past to suck up to it." I have winced my way through more than one nineteenth century author's misogyny and racism, so when I was stuck for a paperback in English while traveling in Sofia, I bought this at the marvelous Elephant Book Store. As I read, I saw two aspects of the novel to which I had been blind when I first picked it up. First is that critical race theory is more useful here than po-co, because it posits the social construction of race as the foundation for understanding, and Kipling's creation of Kim as both "white" by his Irish heritage and "Oriental" by upbringing problematizes easy categorizations of the central character. Since the plot arc concerns espionage, the slippage between the perceived and actual person is more than clever. Again and again, colonial hubris entraps British and Russian operatives, as the supposedly ignorant local people exercise their wills. I do not think the stereotype of the "wily Oriental" is being so much relied upon as questioned, because there are ignorant characters among all races and castes in the novel, and a British white man and a Hindu Indian man both share a secret, common desire to be published in scientific journals.
In fact, that is the second aspect of this novel that I had been oblivious to, namely the vast array of religions in this novel. Kim is agnostic, another sympathetic character Catholic (though he shies away from appending the label "Roman" to his faith), and other major influences are Hindu and Muslim. Kipling represents not only the named religions in India interacting tolerantly with each other, but he also overlays them all with both superstition and wisdom, depending on the penetration of the character in question. Thus the Muslim horse trader says, "Thou art beyond question an unbeliever, and therefore thou wilt be damned. So says my Law -- or I think it does. But thou art also my Little Friend of all the World, and I love thee. So says my heart ... Therefore I say this matter of creeds is like the horses. Each has merit in his own country."
The most moving aspect of this is the exactitude with which Kipling recounts the Buddhist rituals of the "Red Lama" Kim follows. He accurately quotes the chants, something we still get wrong a hundred years later in the West, and he draws the old monk with humor, respect, and love. The exchange between this seeker and British museum curator is a model of humility. "We be craftsmen together, you and I," says the monk as he exchanges his own heavy, scratched spectacles for the curator's newer pair. The monk accepts them "as a sign of friendship between priest and priest" and in return, gives him his pen case. Kipling observes, "The curator would have detained him: they are few in the world who still have the secret of the conventional brush-pen Buddhist pictures" -- and there are few people outside Buddhism who know that.
Finally, the story is adventurous and the writing beautiful. "The diamond-bright dawn woke men and crows and bullocks together. Kim sat up and yawned, shook himself, and thrilled with delight. This was seeing the world in real truth; this was life as he would have it -- bustling and shouting, the buckling of belts, and beating of bullocks and creaking of wheels, lighting of fires and cooking of food, and new sights at every turn of the approving eye. The morning mist swept off in a whorl of silver, the parrots shot away to some distant river in shrieking green hosts: all the well-wheels within earshot went to work. India was awake ..."
I loved this book, but I was not ready to read it before now. I had to see the world as a traveler before I could understand Kim, and Kipling.