Rudyard Kipling's Kim : A Novel of Networks

abstract: This analysis explores Rudyard Kipling's view of the limitations of Western universalist philosophy through three train scenes in Kim (1901). Each scene develops Kim's Bildung in relation to the culturally hybrid spaces of colonized India, and each contrasts the experience of hybridity against European Enlightenment concepts of the material world. There are two distinct types of enlightenment involved: Kim's western education is associated with scientific objectivity, instrumental rationality, and progressive conceptions of civilization; his eastern education involves spiritual clarity, the interdependence of all entities, and transcendence of materialism and its related suffering. Such concepts are challenged by the novel's modernization of Bildungsroman , which emphasizes networks of relations, rather than independence and autonomy. A comparative reading of two panoramic views—from the Grand Trunk Road and from the lama's enlightened perspective—illustrates Kipling's rejection of a unified theory of enlightenment, further complicating the implications of Western Enlightenment for unreconciled hybridity.