Double Visions

This article examines Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India from the point of view of the religious elements, deriving from Buddhism and Hinduism respectively, contained within them. What is entailed by the clash of cultures depicted in both works is a confrontation between different conceptions of the world, and more especially of the value of action within that world. If the story of the Buddha, and more particularly of the Bodhisattva, provides Kipling with a metaphor for the complementary quests of Kim and the lama in Kim, it is I suggest one of the cardinal religious texts of Vedantic Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita, that provides the metaphorical underpinnings of A Passage to India.