by Rudyard Kipling · 1901
Historical Fiction · Classics
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Kim, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, grows up on the streets of Lahore. He becomes the disciple of a Tibetan lama searching for a sacred river, and is drawn into the secret service of the Raj.
Content note: Written in 1901, the novel reflects British colonial attitudes and uses terms for people that are outdated today.
O ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day,
Be gentle when the heathen pray
To Buddha at Kamakura!
Buddha at Kamakura
He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that “fire-breathing dragon,” hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot.
There was some justification for Kim—he had kicked Lala Dinanath’s boy off the trunnions—since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English. Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain singsong; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazaar; Kim was white—a poor white of the very poorest. The half-caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and pretended to keep a secondhand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait) told the missionaries that she was Kim’s mother’s sister; but his mother had been nursemaid in a Colonel’s family and had married Kimball O’Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an Irish regiment.
