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Reading Between the Lines: Geography and Hybridity in Rudyard Kipling's KimAuthor(s): Sailaja Krishnamurth and Sailaja KrishnamurtiSource: Victorian Review, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2002), pp. 47-65Published by: Victorian Studies Association of Western CanadaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27793482 .Accessed: 27/09/2013 02:51

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Reading Between the Lines: Geography and Hybridity in

Rudyard Kipling's Kim

Saihja KHshnamurth

What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.

(Michel de Certeau1)

You cannot occupy two places in space simultaneously. That is axiomatic.

(Hurree Chunder Mookerjee in Rudyard Kipling's Kim2)

Britain's occupation of India was not predominandy driven by mili

tary force3 From its origins in the British East India Company, the empire's activities in India tended towards administrative and

bureaucratic forms of power. It was a colonization which operated

through the collection, archive, and administration of information, for which geography was the key. In order for the British to establish India as a colony, it was essential to gather knowledge of the territory.

Through the India Survey, a project which was intended to provide ethnographical and cartographical knowledge in minute detail, the

British Empire established borders which enclosed the colonial sub

ject and could be defended. Through the Survey, the empire system

atically catalogued the identity of colonial India.

Rudyard Kipling's Kim is a novel which tells a story of the India

Survey. In it, many of the main characters are engaged with the

process of mapping India for the purposes of the imperial archive.

Kipling, an Englishman, marks out the Indian landscape through his

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S. Krishnamurth

writing just as his map-making Hurree Chunder Mookerjee and Kim himself do as they travel across his landscape.4 Through geography, the processes of mapping territory and mapping identity, Kim comes

into his identity as a sahib.

But something else happens in Kim. It does not operate only as a story about the greatness and utility of the mapping project and the power of the British in India. It is a narrative which chronicles a pilgrimage, and which records details about the contours of the landscape, the

people who populate it, the many languages and events which take

place in its course. It performs the project of an itinerary, the story of

a journey, as much as it describes the archival project of the survey.

Bruce Avery's essay "The Subject of Imperial Geography" explores the European history of the visual map, its incorporation into the

Victorian archive project, and the way in which it is employed to

form the colonial subject. In his analysis, he touches on the trope of the narrative itinerary, but does not fully articulate its role in

this subject-formation. The narrative itinerary project which Kim as

a novel is engaged in, and which it explores, exposes slippages in the positioning of subject-identities, and creates an in-between space in which the hybrid identities produced by such slippages mediate and transgress the boundaries imposed by the visual map. With the

concept of hybridity in mind, reading the novel as a narrative itinerary

opens up other questions of the project of colonialism which expose the inability of the mapping project to adequately perform the task of fixing ethnicity and identity in space. In this narrative of hybridity, the uncanny ability of the characters to move back and forth between

borders, languages, and identities suggests that even those engaged with mapping cannot be fixed through it. Such hybrids become the machines of the mapping project, and yet transgress the boundaries

of the map.

I want to explore these issues via a route which passes first through the history of the relationship between narrative itinerary and the

visual map in the production of knowledge in pre-colonial India, and

in the Victorian Era. I will then move to the concepts of in-between

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Reading Between the Lines

space and hybridity, and the roles that narrative itinerary and visual

mapping play in the construction of these concepts. Finally, I want to

revisit the landscape of Kim to explore the possibilities opened by a

topographical reading which strategically employs these concepts.

Avery suggests that through knowledge of the colonial other, the

British Empire recognizes its self (Avery 59). This reading, which

employs a Lacanian approach, is useful to understanding the empire's

geographical imperative as an attempt to define itself in relation to its

subjects. Avery's analysis exposes mapping as a process which allows a privileging of British knowledge, casting the native as a 'primitive'

comparison to which Britain could understand itself as a rational,

enlightened, and powerful nation. This process attempts to provide a

clear and incontrovertible delineation of ethnicity: a strict separation between the British cus' and the colonized 'them.' The process of

mapping also allows a sterilization of the other, a removal of agency,

by fixing it within lines and by removing the sense of time and

diversity of experience, the fluidity and polyvalence of landscape. The

other becomes reducible to the archive of the other.

Avery's reading of Kim points to two kinds of signifying gaze which for him exemplify the difference between the map and the narrative

itinerary. The gaze of the narrative itinerary works where "Narrative

space is organized by the passage of agents through it... in this

passage agency takes precedence because it creates the visual field.

The gazing subject is present in the grammar, and the objects of the gaze do not sit passively awaiting that gaze" (Avery 68). The

mapping gaze, in which agency of both the gazing subject and the

object of the gaze is removed from the visual field, is "precisely the

kind of vision engendered by geography and imperialism" (Avery 67) .The distinction between the rendering of agency in each kind

of vision is useful, and fits Avery's Lacanian approach. However,

my concern here is with Avery's positioning of narrative itinerary in

relation to the development of the visual map as being an originary construction of geographical vision from which the visual map

emerges.

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S. Krishnamurth

This positioning reproduces some of the constructions inherent to

the colonial project: the primitive, underdeveloped nature of the colonized subject, and the ability of the colonizer to improve upon the colonized other's knowledge of itself. It is important to note here

the role of narrative itinerary within the history of geography both as it developed in western Europe, and as it developed in the Indian

subcontinent.

The main corpus of geographical accounts and maps that existed in

the pre-colonial Indian sub-continent comes from religious texts in

the Hindu tradition and from writers of the Moghul Empire and Chinese, Tibetan, Persian, and Middle Eastern regions.5 While some

geographers have suggested that the relative lack of evidence of visual

maps indicates that the indigenous peoples were simply uninterested

in any geographical project, this is not the case. There is growing evidence to suggest that Indians and other South Asians did indeed

chart the landscape, and there is a variety of possible reasons why this

evidence has taken long to discover.6 One key reason is that these

geographical accounts often did not employ visual mapping in the manner of western cartography. There is a great deal of evidence, for example, of the cosmographical maps that were generated by

indigenous Hindus in South Asia.7 It is clear that narrative was an

important mode of geographical representation. Canonical Hindu

religious texts, like the Puranas, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, contain a breadth of such geographical information that has since

been proven to be fairly accurate.8 Although the Arabs were among the first to draw maps of the area, much evidence from that medieval

period too appears in the form of narrative.9 It is well documented

historically that the former kingdoms of the Indian peninsula were

myriad. Borders were constandy in dispute and changing: "Obvi

ously, territory in South Asia was politically partitioned among differ ent states as well as between administrative units within states, but

clearly delimited (not to mention demarcated) boundaries scarcely existed until they were imposed by the British" (Harley and Wood

ward 508) .Textual evidence suggests that local people knew their

surroundings, and the lack of a clear visual representation of the

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region did not impede the governance of the various kingdoms: in

fact the two Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, are

stories about conflicts between such kingdoms.

This history elucidates some key issues. First, it points to a genealogy of geography which is not exclusively western. Second, it confirms

geographical knowledge of the region in pre-colonial times. Though India as it is marked out now did not exist in that fashion before British colonization, the colonial production of knowledge implicidy suggests that such knowledge could not have existed. This historical

evidence makes clear both that a great deal of knowledge about

the area existed there before the British archive project began; and

that the indigenous people of the region were also aware of their

landscape. This supports the reading of the visual map as a tool

of colonization, but refutes the conception of the narrative itinerary as a primitive version of the map. As Mohammed Azhar Ansati

points out, medieval Arabic geographical narrative accounts allow for

detail, and a sense of historical time, and therefore have extraordinary

contemporary utility (14). Each process clearly evolves out of neces

sity; each can occur simultaneously. This brings me to my next point: that the coextensive nature of the map and the narrative itinerary in both South Asian and British geography, as well as the British

employment of narrative as a means of Meshing out' knowledge of

the colonized subject, suggests that each form must be understood as coexistent, albeit with different consequences for the formation

of the subject.

The development and employment of the narrative itinerary and the visual map in the development of European geography has

been studied by many historians of cartography. Ptolemy's maps of the South Asian sub-continent were constructed from narrative

information that came from many sources, including mariners who were engaged in trade with the area. One of his primary references was the work of geographers who traveled with the Greek King Alexander in his conquest of India in the fourth century B.C.: "The

work of these geographers was simplified when they found that the Indians already had precise and accurate knowledge of their own

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S. Krishnamurth

country" (Gole 21). Britain's India Survey, which reached its apex in the Victorian era, was to some degree reliant on information that

was absorbed from already extant narrative geographical accounts of

the area. While much of it came from the journals and descriptions of early Company men and sea navigators, some were the works of

indigenous people of the sub-continent, now identified as Indians, and were either pre-existing historical accounts or the results of native

employees of the Company.10 In the Victorian era, the production of knowledge of India took

a variety of forms. Geography is often referred to as the reigning science of the period, since it was fundamental to maintaining

knowledge of the growing empire.11 Avery suggests that the narrative

itinerary kind of vision is "insufficient for the imperial enterprise", and his examination of agency makes the reasons for this clear

(68). But neither can the visual map, on its own, be sufficient for

the archive project. Many other archival projects were occurring

simultaneously: ethnographical and anthropological surveys, and

the archiving and restoration of works of art. These projects

provided what Thomas Richards refers to as the 'thick' description,

supplementing the information contained in the visual map. Richards

points out that the mapping project was necessarily coexistent

with the ethnographical project, and that in tandem the Victorian

colonizers believed that these could create a comprehensive archive

of information about the colonized subject (21).This suggests that rather than simply being the origin of the visual map, the narrative

itinerary is also coextensive with the visual map in Victorian

information culture, and in Indian history. The narrative is both an

elaboration on, and a foundation to, the visual map.

Avery argues that the narrative itinerary allows both the gazing

subject and subject of the descriptive gaze agency. However, the

colonizer can use the narrative form to strategically grant and

remove agency from the subject according to its own criteria.

Victorian production of narratives of the mapped space was carefully constructed to limit, to draw borders around, this movement and

agency. For the Victorians, the visual map allowed for the corralling

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within borders of the unruly native subject, a strict definition of

ownership, and a territory defensible against attack. Indians are given

agency in this narrative when their actions support the idea of

the uncivilized subject. The narrative itinerary allowed the Victorian

Empire to cast itself as a benevolent power, protecting the native

from itself, preserving the knowledge and history that the native

could not have respect for. The gazing subject thus maintains its

control over the object of the gaze.

It is the questioning of the agency of the gazing subject in the narrative itinerary that provides a different perspective for reading Kim. In the narrative, the object of the gaze, in this case the colonized

subject, also has agency. What happens when the position of the

gazing subject is shifted, when the object returns or reflects that gaze? I would like here to revisit Michel de Certeau in a different light than the one in which Avery reads him.

Avery's positioning of the narrative itinerary in relation to the visual

map seems to be built around de Certeau's statement that the visual

map "has slowly disengaged itself from the itineraries that were the conditions of its possibility" (120). De Certeau does in fact go on to revisit the possibilities of the narrative itinerary when it describes the

same spaces as the visual map. Maps produce places; the narrative

itinerary constitutes the production of space as a place in which

subjects have agency (de Certeau 117). This, I think, is the crux of de Certeau's argument. The evolution of the map has in some ways necessitated the relegation of the narrative itinerary into the past, in order to produces places which are sterile, and can be owned

and occupied according to the needs of colonialism. The narrative

itinerary, which has been pushed into the past in the genealogy of

the map, still exists in spaces, but performs within the space in a

particularized way through the position of the gazing subject. De Certeau offers several roles that the narrative itinerary can play when

the position of the subject shifts. The function of the narrative is to

authorise the establishment, displacement, or transcendence of

limits, and as a consequence, to set in opposition, within

the closed field of discourse, two movements that intersect

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S. Krishnamurth

(setting and transgressing limits) in such a way as to make the story a sort of "crossword" decoding stencil (a dynamic partitioning of space) whose essential narrative figures seem

to be the frontier'and the bridge (de Certeau 123).

The Victorian archive project employed narrative itinerary in the

figure of the frontier. The narrative established borders which

would corroborate the lines of the visual map: it could rationalize

colonization, homogenize the colonized subject, turn the native into a

manageable, discursively and taxonomically identifiable object of the

mapping gaze. It could exoticize otherness, and shape colonization

into a rhetoric of benevolent exploration, for the 'good of the

native.' The narrative itinerary is strategically employed to tell such a story. It comes before the visual map and can tell of information

that is necessary to the visual representation; it also tells the story of the map; describes its locations, circumscribes its territory, and

establishes the authority of the colonizer. The narrative itinerary is

therefore foundational and integral to the process of defining borders

and frontiers.

The narrative itinerary, or "the story" in de Certeau's words, marks

out, as the visual map does, the inside and the outside; it defines

the space of places. But the frontier exists because of the tension

between the inside and the outside; it is an "interlocutory" process. This is the figure of the bridge: the frontier that is not a border, but a passage between spaces. The frontier is a boundary when the subject who defines the frontier can own it and mediate its transgression. When the position of the subject shifts, the frontier can become not a boundary but a passage, a bridge. The bridge "liberates from

enclosure and destroys autonomy" (de Certeau 128). The meaning of the bridge is dependent on the gazing subject, the subject who

mediates the frontier. To return to Lacanian terms, the bridge can

destroy autonomy, or the narrative can be the foundation of the

frontier, when the colonizer is the master of the discourse of the

narrative. But through Avery's discussion of agency we see that

the narrative itinerary allows something that the visual map does not: the agency of the subject who is the subject of the gaze. The

volume 28 number 1



narrative allows for the tension which arises from the mediation

and contestation of the frontier which can become a bridge. The

interiority and exteriority of the frontier is formed by the narrative which is foundational to the frontier, and is transgressed'by the

narrative which in the figure of the bridge both offers passage and mediates it.

The position of the gazing subject is therefore integral to the forma tion of the boundary as frontier or bridge. Who is interior and

exterior? I have been speaking of the visual map as the Victorian

tool for the marking out of space, and the corralling of the colonized

subject into that marked space. Within the borders of the visual

map, and the constraints and definitions provided by colonialism, the

colonized subject exists inside the limits defined by geography. In the narrative of the frontier, it is the colonizer who is on the inside of

the marked space, pushing the limits of its space further out, and each move of the frontier becomes a site of tension as the frontier

is negotiated. The former description of space fits the figure of the

other as integral to formation of the self. The latter describes the

absorption of territory, and the alienation of the colonized subject from its self-formation; it is the process which necessitates the steril

ity and silence of the visual map. The colonized subject, then, through these simultaneous configurations, exists both inside and outside of

the frontier. The narrative bridge is the mediation between positions which are constandy shifting, which are dependent on the mastery of discourse, the configuration of spaces and places, and the delinea

tion of borders which are constandy in flux. The narrative itinerary

provides what the visual map cannot: a diagrammatic vision in which

both the gazing subject and subject of the gaze have agency. How

each moves within the narrative describes the relationship of exterior

ity and interiority, the mastery of discourse, the ownership of space: those dynamics which cannot be represented in the visual map

are

articulated through the narrative itinerary.

Where the visual map exists for the purpose of fixing borders,

marking and delineating places, then, the narrative itinerary exists as

a strategic possibility for both the establishment of those borders

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S. Krishnamurth

and their transgression. Even when it is employed for these uses

by the gazing subject, the narrative itinerary describes the ambiguity and fluidity of the border, the tension of the frontier, the movement of subject positions, and is able to contain multiple possibilities of agency. Through the narrative itinerary, says de Certeau, the frontier becomes a third element, an in-between space (127). The

space described by the narrative is practiced as a hybrid space, which is determined by the fluidity of subject-position and the interior/ exterior tension of the border.

Homi . Bhabha, in The Dislocation of Culture, describes this space as a "liminal space," through which hybridity emerges. The liminal

space of colonialism is created through the fluidity of subject posi tions and the movement of discourse. For the purposes of this

exploration his notion of "double-time" is particularly useful. The visual map attempts to create places without time in which events occur simultaneously; in which it is possible for the Empire to envision itself in a single moment. The narrative that is deployed as a foundation to the colonial map produces a history that is a

singular, homogeneous story of being. We see this in the absorption of geographical texts in the production of the India Survey, and in the production of colonial textual histories. The present in such a

history is not narrated; it is an articulation of the past which intends to produce the present. The narrative that bridges the frontier is the

story of the subjects of the gaze, in which the tension of the frontier is articulated. It is a narrative of the present, of subjects in motion in the landscape. How does this produce hybridity? The ambivalent, ambiguous space occupied by the narrative in the formation of the colonial subject is a site of tension because its deployment is uncer tain: subjects that have agency are unpredictable. The discourse of

mastery, of ownership of the frontier, shifts between subject posi tions. What the map makes clear, the narrative obfuscates. The nar rative produces the hybrid, whose position is always moving: the

subject of the gaze at one moment, the gazing subject the next. The subject exists both inside and outside the lines of the map. The narrative as bridge becomes a site of fluidity between the colonizer

volume 28 number 1



who produces the colonized as other, and the uncanny experience of

the subject who resists location. In the narrative itinerary, the hybrid

subject is the transgressor of boundaries, the questioner of power, the

subject who does not fit neady into the subject position of colonizer or colonized, but becomes something else which has been produced

by colonial mapping: Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial

identity through the repetition of c?scriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displace

ment of all sites of discrimination and domination. It unsetdes

the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but

reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power

(Bhabha 112). The potential fluidity of the agency of subjects in the nar

rative itinerary allows for the gaze to turn in multiple direc tions: when the self of the colonizer looks in the mirror, it

is the colonized other who returns the gaze. The narrative

itinerary acts as a bridge over which discourse passes and returns. Within this movement, the hybrid voice appears as

de Certeau's delinquent story which upsets the authoritarian

narrative of colonial geography (129).

It is with these concepts in mind that I would like to return to the

question of Kim. The narrative of Kim speaks through hybrid voices.

Kipling himself was born and lived his childhood in India, like Kim. He was not, as he seems to be remembered, just a white Englishman. He was an Anglo-Indian, one of those second class citizens who were

considered no longer quite English, but separated themselves from

the natives. He is himself as much of a 'hybrid' product of colonial

ism as Kim, who is a young Irish boy brought up and immersed in Indian cultures and languages. At the age of 17, Kipling returned

to India and stayed for another seven years. During this period, he

was the editor of The Civil and Military Gazette, while his father was the curator of the Lahore Museum, Kim's "Wonder House". Both

men were Anglo-Indians engaged in the archiving of information

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S. Krishnamurth

in the colony. Kipling didn't 'enter' the literary world until his return to England, but his writing for many years was shaped by his

experiences in India. All of this speaks to something elusive about

the literary figure of Kipling. In the context of postcolonial study, it seems straightforward to identify him as a British man part and parcel

with the machinations of Empire, but the role he played in it, and the

way that he himself was formed by the passage between India and

England, makes him a site of ambivalence.

What happens to the novel when we read it through Kipling's com

plex and hybrid relationship to the Empire? Kim is a novel about this ambivalence, through which Kim's confusion about his identity

speaks to many other issues of hybridity. I would like here to look at some of the characters that populate Kim's landscape, and their

relationships to the liminal colonial space.

Kim strategically transgresses the boundaries of the visual map that

is constructed in the course of the narrative. None of the major characters are native to India; at some level, all are outside of the

simple dominant relationship of colonizer and colonized, self and

other. To begin with, there is Teshoo Lama, a Tibetan Buddhist, who

in the grand tradition of the pilgrimage is exploring India to trace the

history of the Buddha, whose story takes place in India. The opening

passages of Kim express the strangeness of the Lama's appearance, his incongruity, and expose him as an 'exotic' figure. He becomes

dependent on Kim's knowledge of India and its landscape in order

to fulfill his quest, though Kim himself is not a 'native'. Neither is the curator of the "Wonder House," based on Kipling's father, who

is a wise and sympathetic Sahib, and for the Lama is something of a kindred priest. Mahbub Ali, the horse trader, is Afghani. He

speaks Pashtu, and clearly demarcates his identity in relation to India, but has the capacity to move back and forth between natives and

the British colonizers; he too is able to transgress the physical and

political borders of geography, and the social boundaries which are

associated with them.

Of particular relevance in light of the 'Anglo-Indian' context is the

way that Kipling draws the characters of the Sahibs, the white men

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who play the "Great Game." Colonel Creighton, the putative leader

of the 'game', is not a military man per se but an ethnographer, a

scholar whose aim is to build the archive, and who speaks Urdu, the

language which has been ensconced as the language of poetry and art:

"No man could be a fool who knew the language so intimately, who

moved so gendy and silendy, and whose eyes were so different from

the dull fat eyes of other Sahibs" (Kipling 118). Lurgan Sahib, the healer of pearls, has become quite absorbed in the mystic exoticism

of the east. Kim is mystified that Lurgan treats him as "an equal on the Asiatic side" (Kipling 151). Their relationship to each other as Sahibs is mediated by their knowledge of India, and their ability to move within the culture. All of these are white men who have

achieved success in the "Great Game" by virtue of their ability not

just to compile knowledge of the colonized subject, but to absorb that knowledge and move through the landscape with fluidity.

Kim is, like Creighton and Lurgan, a Sahib, but of a different brand. He is an Irish boy, and therefore occupies a peculiar position in the relations of Empire. His place of birth is also a colony; he is white, but his poor Irish background has made him a 'second-class' citizen

even before he is born in India. His Irish identity in England might disallow his appropriation of British identity, but in British India he is white, and therefore still may receive the privileges of a Sahib in a qualified way. This also complicates the reading of Kim: he is a twice hybrid character, twice colonized, and yet able to slip into the

identity of the colonizer. Simultaneously, he is outside India because

he is not Indian, and because he is not British. Kipling clearly uses this strategically. In the scene in which Kim comes across the camp of the regiment whose flag is "a red bull on a green field," he declares

that he only knows that he is "Kim Rishti ke" - Kim of the Irish

(Kipling 86). It is only in its translation into Hindi that his hybridity is given a name, which is an impossibility in the colonial discourse.

Kipling elaborates on the hybridity of his identity by making him a site of dispute between a Protestant minister and a Catholic Priest:

the colonial occupation of Ireland is signified in this altercation, and

it speaks to Kipling's ambivalence about the colonial machine that it

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S. Krishnamurth

is the priest who becomes Kim's patron, rather than the Church of

England minister who is of the "creed that lumps nine-tenths of the

world under the tide of 'heathen'" (Kipling 88).

Avery draws a parallel between the figure of Kim and Hurree Chun

der Mookerjee, who both seem to be involved in a negotiation of

identity within the colonial machine. Mookerjee, the Babu, is a key illustration of hybridity in the novel. The Russian agent says of him: "He represents in petto India in transition

? the monstrous hybridism of East and West" (239). The Babu is torn between his identity as a Bengali and his desire to occupy the space of the colonizer.

The position of the Sahib is unreachable by virtue of the Babu's brown skin; and yet, a dedicated Spenserian, he actively works to

de-Indianize himself, to speak English fluendy, to disengage himself from the mystic and superstitious: "'How am I to fear the absolutely non-existent?' said Hurree Babu, talking English to reassure himself.

It is an awful thing still to dread the magic that you contemptuously investigate

? to collect folk-lore for the Royal Society with a lively belief in all Powers of Darkness" (Kipling 180). The Babu is not

only actively involved in the mapping project of the Survey, but is

systematically archiving his own identity for the British. He is what Bhabha calls the "mimic" man, the native who so completely adopts the colonizer's discourse that he becomes a monstrous reflection of

the colonizer. Says Bhabha: "The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing. For in 'normalizing' the colonial state or subject, the dream of post-Enlightenment civility alienates its own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms" (Bhabha 86). Through the Babu, Kipling makes a

profound comment on the machine of colonialism, and the effective ness of the mapping project. Where does such a character fit within

the boundaries of the rnap? He is neither colonizer nor native in a

space which is ostensibly defined by the delineation of these identi ties. His participation in the Great Game is dependent on his mastery of movement from one identity to another. He is at once the mimic man who is a caricature of colonial power, a carnivalesque figure of humour and discomfort, and the machine by which the archive

volume 28 number 1



project produces knowledge.

The novel exposes, through the employment of these hybrid characters in the 'Great Game,' the complexity of the system of

archive. The project of the map exists along with the project of

the mediated narrative itinerary, the narrative of the frontier, which

produces hybrid identities in its ambivalent space. Yet it is these

hybrids who constitute the workings of the mapping machine. The

British colonizers are dependent on the ability of Kim and the Babu to move between identities, to take on disguises, speak multiple

languages, to produce knowledge for the map, and for the archive.

When Kim leaves school, his first assignment is intended to

"de-Englishise" him (Kipling 184). While Kim searches for

comprehension of his own identity, the powers of the Great

Game seek to maintain his hybridity, which is the source of his

greatest utility. Mahbub Ali, himself a hybrid, becomes something of a translator between the colonizers and their hybrid machines,

mediating Kim's relationship with Colonel Creighton, and Kim's

indoctrination into the mapping project. In the mapping project, then, the narrative itinerary produces hybrids which work in two

ways: as the mediator of the frontier, the machine of the map, and as

the transgressor of boundaries, the figure who can pass through and

is not contained by the boundaries of the map.

I want to step back here to see the landscape of the novel itself as

a narrative itinerary. It seems to contain two stories, the story of the

Lama and his pilgrimage, and the story of Kim's search for identity and his recruitment into the 'Great Game'. In the latter third of the novel, these narratives take on a particular resonance for each

other, as the Lama's pilgrimage becomes the 'cover' under which Kim

participates in surveillance and espionage. As they travel through the

plains and hills, events take on double meanings, characters appear in disguise. The lama seems oblivious to these political and scientific

activities: as a Buddhist, such things are the superficial illusions of

the wheel of life, and are of no consequence. Kim is mystified by his own potential power as a Sahib, and struggles to come to terms with

it. But as the narrative progresses, and these stories become more

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S. Krishnamurth

conflated, it becomes a single and polyvalent story about the strange and uncanny relationships of hybrid subjects to mapped terrain.

The novel performs the project of a narrative itinerary in that it

describes a journey, provides the 'thick description' of people, culture, and language, turns places into spaces. But it also ambivalendy and

simultaneously performs the tasks of the frontier and the bridge, and

brilliandy articulates the tension in these formations. The narrative

moves with the passage of hybrid subjects through the landscape.

Through this movement, it traces the mapping project, and critiques the limitations of its borders. As a Victorian and colonial novel, Kim

is an archive of information about the colonial subject, and yet within

the folds of its narrative it exposes the complexities of hybridity and the liminal space of the frontier. In Richards's words, it illustrates

the "mediated instrumentality of information" (Richards 23). It is a narrative which both installs the Victorian mapping project as the key to colonialism, and presents difficult questions about the formation

of subjects in the colonial machine. The reading depends on which

way the eye turns to the landscape: to read the novel through the

gazing subject, or through the subject of the gaze.

Notes

1. From Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Ufe, p. 129.

2. Rudyard Kipling, Kim p. 250 3. The British Army in India had many native soldiers; it did not per

se exisr as a force to discipline natives until the uprising of 1857, when Muslim and Hindu soldiers in the army revolted against their British officers. Until this time India was occupied by the British East

India Company, and was not directly a subject of the Empire. It was an economic colonization before it was a political and military one.

Stanley Wolpert, 239.

4. Leo Bagrow, in his History of Cartography first published in 1944, makes a somewhat misguided reference to this aspect of Kim, which he says, "describes with insight how a little Indian boy is taught to be

always observant and to memorize his surroundings in detail, and how

62 volume 28 number 1



this prepared him for a career as a native pundit, sent by the English to

explore and map regions where Europeans could not go" (p. 25). While this is an incorrect summary of the novel which misses some of its most

central features, it does point to the way in which even map-makers themselves look to the novel as story about mapping.

5. It is worth noting that the division of territory is historically different from what we understand today; as Joseph E. Schwartzberg points out in Harley and Woodwards History of Cartography vol. 2 book 1, cultural dissemination and the migration of peoples in the region necessitate

studying the region as the Indie or South Asian peninsula rather than as what we know understand strictly as India (Harley and Woodward

295). 6. Leo Bagrow was one of those eminent geographers who suggested

that "no one India seems to have been interested in cartography" (Bagrow 207). Schwartzberg refutes this line of thinking by providing several reasons for both the lack of evidence and the lack of pursuit of geographical study, among which are the decay and destruction of artifacts, and a general lack of scholarly interest. (Harley and

Woodward 504).

7. Harley and Woodwards text devotes a substantial section to the devel

opment of cosmographical maps and models (332-387).

8. According to Maya Prasad Tripathi, the Mahabharata "knew well about at least Eastern Europe, [the] eastern coast of Africa, southern parts of Siberia and South East Asia. Besides, the concurrent study of

contemporary texts evinces that by the time of the composition of the Mahabharata (400 B.C. to 400 A.D.) Indians had come to know the six continents of modern times." (Tripathi 167).

9. Mohammed Anzhar Ansari details these in Geographical Glimpses of India.

10. Susan Gole notes that Charles Reynolds, Surveyor General in 1796,

routinely employed natives to gather information and draw maps (82).

11. Avery refers to Lord Curzon, once Viceroy of the Indian Empire, who calls geography "the first and foremost of the sciences," and "necessary for a proper conception of citizenship" (Avery 58).

12. Kipling himself refers to this process in the opening pages of Kim, in the

description of the "Wonder House," the museum at Lahore.

13. De Certeau describes this in the figure of the crocodile in the river that

Victorian Review 63


S. Krishnamurth

says "stop." The river is a passage between spaces, a crossable terrain, until it is mediated by the discourse of the crocodile (127).

14. Kipling and the Critics contain some marvelous examples of this. Andrew Lang refers to "slangy and unrefined Anglo-Indian society" (4). Oscar Wilde famously commented on Kiplings "jaded, second-rate

Anglo-Indians" (7).

15. Edward Said, Culture and Imperalism, 133.

Works Cited

Ansari, Mohammed Azhar. Geographical Glimpses of Medieval India vol 1. Delhi: Idarah-I Adabiyat-I Delli, 1989.

Avery, Bruce. "The Subject of Imperial Geography." Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Hypertechnologies. Eds. Gabriel Brahm Jr. and Mark Driscoll. Boulder: Westview, 1995.

Bagrow, Leo. History of Cartography. 2nd edition, rev. R.A. Skelton. Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985.

Bhabha, Homi . The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven E Rendali.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Gilbert, Elliot L. ed. Kipling and the Critics. New York: New York University Press, 1965.

Gole, Susan. Early Maps of India. New Delhi: Sanskriti, 1976.

Harley, J.B. and David Woodward, et al, eds. The History of Cartography vol. 2 Book 1: Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies.

Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Richards, Thomas. "Archive and Utopia." The Imperial Archive. London:

Verso, 1993.

Said, Edward. "Pleasure and Imperialism." Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.

Sircar, D.C. Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1971.

64 volume 28 number 1



Tripathi, Maya Prasad. Development of Geographical Knowledge in An?ent India. Varanasi: Bharatiya Vidya Prakashan, 1969.

Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. 4th ed. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1993.

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Article Contentsp. 47p. 48p. 49p. 50p. 51p. 52p. 53p. 54p. 55p. 56p. 57p. 58p. 59p. 60p. 61p. 62p. 63p. 64p. 65

Issue Table of ContentsVictorian Review, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2002), pp. 1-107Front MatterExpert Witnesses: Women and Publicity in Mary Barton and Felix Holt [pp. 1-24]"Tristram and Iseult": Arnold's Ekphrastic Experiment [pp. 25-46]Reading Between the Lines: Geography and Hybridity in Rudyard Kipling's Kim [pp. 47-65]Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone and the Problem of Pain in Life [pp. 66-79]ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 80-83]Review: untitled [pp. 84-87]Review: untitled [pp. 88-90]Review: untitled [pp. 91-94]Review: untitled [pp. 95-104]

Back Matter

27793482

Documents

india survey

jstor archive

process of mapping india

identity of colonial

jstor terms

british east india company

mapping identity

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