#15 — Sunday, 13th April 1901
In the magazines this month — in McClure’s in New York and Cassell’s in London, delivered by post and purchased at newsstands and read in parlours and on trains and in the servants’ quarters where the cook has hidden it behind the flour tin — the latest instalment of a novel is arriving, chapter by chapter, into the minds of a hundred thousand readers.
It is called Kim. Its author is Rudyard Kipling, who is thirty-five years old, who was born in Bombay and raised in India and educated in England and has spent his adult life becoming the most famous writer in the English-speaking world by doing something no English writer has done before: he has made the Empire feel real. Not real as in correct — that is a different argument — but real as in textured, as in you can smell it. He writes the dust and the heat and the language and the food and the faces with a vividness that makes readers who have never been east of Dover believe they have walked the Grand Trunk Road.
And now he has written Kim, and it is the best thing he has ever done, and it is the most contradictory thing he has ever done, and the Ghost finds it fascinating for precisely that reason.
Let me tell you the story, not because you need it but because the story is the argument.
Kim — Kimball O’Hara — is an orphan. His father was an Irish soldier in a British regiment. His mother was Irish too, and poor, and dead. Kim grows up on the streets of Lahore, brown-skinned from the sun, fluent in Urdu and Hindi, dressed in Indian clothes, eating Indian food, running errands in the bazaars, begging when necessary, lying when profitable. He is, to anyone who looks at him, a native child — a street rat, clever and quick, belonging to the city the way a sparrow belongs to a rooftop.
But he is not Indian. He is white. He carries papers that prove it — documents from his dead father, wrapped in leather, kept in an amulet around his neck. He does not understand what they mean. He does not understand what he is. He knows two things: he is Little Friend of all the World, which is what the bazaar calls him, and he is waiting for a sign — a Red Bull on a green field, his father’s regiment’s insignia — that will tell him who he is meant to become.
He meets a Tibetan lama — old, gentle, searching for a sacred river — and becomes his disciple. And simultaneously, he is recruited by the British intelligence services to play the Great Game: the shadow war between Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia, fought through spies and maps and border crossings and the kind of deception that requires you to be no one in particular so you can be anyone in general.
Kim is both. Disciple and spy. Seeker and operative. Indian by instinct, British by blood, belonging to everything and owned by nothing. Kipling, who wrote “The White Man’s Burden” three years ago — that hymn to imperial condescension, that poem that told America it had a duty to civilise the Philippines — has written a novel whose protagonist undermines every certainty the poem expressed. Kim does not carry the white man’s burden. Kim does not know he is a white man until the Empire tells him so. And even after being told, he is not sure he agrees.
I am not a Sahib, Kim says at the end. I am thy chela. I am not a master. I am your servant. It is the last line of the novel’s emotional argument, and it contradicts everything the Empire stands for, and Kipling wrote it, and Kipling is the Empire’s poet, and the contradiction does not seem to trouble him any more than Churchill’s contradictions trouble Churchill, and I think this is because great writers, like great politicians, contain multitudes without experiencing them as conflict. They simply are large. They simply hold more than one truth at once. The rest of us — the rest of you — call this hypocrisy. I call it being human.
But I am not interested in Kipling. Not really. I am interested in Kim. In what Kim represents. In the question the novel asks without quite answering, which is the question the century will spend a hundred years failing to answer: Who are you when the categories don’t fit?
Kim is Irish by blood. Indian by upbringing. British by utility. He speaks multiple languages and inhabits multiple identities and passes through borders the way I pass through walls — not because he has permission but because he has fluency, which is a kind of invisibility, which is a kind of power. The Empire needs him precisely because he does not fit — because he can be a sahib in the cantonment and a street child in the bazaar and a pilgrim on the road and a spy at the border, and none of these identities is false, and none of them is complete.
This is the condition of millions of people in 1901 — not fictional ones but real ones. The Indians who speak English and serve the Raj and know, in some deep and unreconciled chamber of themselves, that the Raj is a humiliation. The Irish who fight in British regiments and sing British songs and vote for Home Rule and do not experience these things as contradictions because the human capacity for holding incompatible loyalties is far greater than any ideology admits. The immigrants arriving in New York and Buenos Aires and Sydney, speaking one language at home and another at work, praying to one God in a country that worships another, becoming something new without ceasing to be something old.
The twentieth century will be the century of identity — the century that asks, with increasing urgency and decreasing patience, what are you? — and the answers it receives will power revolutions and genocides and liberation movements and border walls and passports and anthems and the slow, bewildering discovery that the question itself may be wrong, that what are you is less interesting than who are you, and who are you is less interesting than what are you becoming, and what are you becoming is a question that never has a final answer, which is both the terror and the glory of being alive.
Kim knows this. Kim, who is fictional, knows this better than most of the real people walking the Grand Trunk Road beside him.
And the Grand Trunk Road — I want to linger on this, because the road is the real subject of the novel, more than Kim, more than the lama, more than the Great Game.
Kipling describes it as the backbone of all Hind, running from Calcutta to Peshawar, sixteen hundred miles, carrying everything: merchants and soldiers and pilgrims and beggars and wedding processions and funeral processions and bullock carts and horse-drawn carriages and holy men and con men and women carrying water and children running alongside and dogs sleeping in the dust. The road does not discriminate. The road carries everyone. It has been carrying everyone for centuries, since the Mauryas, since the Mughals, since before the British arrived and drew their lines and imposed their categories and decided who was allowed where.
The road is India. Not the India of the census — two hundred and ninety-four million people sorted by caste and religion and occupation — but the India of daily life, the India that moves. The woman walking to the well. The farmer taking grain to market. The sadhu sitting under a tree. The child selling mangoes at a junction. The merchant arguing about the price of cloth. None of them will appear in any history I write, and all of them are the history, because history is not what the powerful decide — it is what the powerless survive, and surviving is what happens on the road, one step at a time, carrying your water and your children and your gods and your grief and your impossible, unshakeable hope that tomorrow will be slightly less hard than today.
Three hundred million people. Walking, working, praying, dying. The census counted them. Kipling described them. The Empire governed them. And not one of the three — not the census, not the novel, not the Empire — understood them, because understanding requires a reciprocity that empires cannot afford and novels can only approximate and censuses do not attempt.
I understand them, partially. I am a ghost. I walk the Grand Trunk Road with them, invisible, unable to carry their water or lighten their loads. I am Kim without the body — present everywhere, belonging nowhere, fluent in everything, useful to no one.
Who are you? the century asks.
I am the watcher. I am the one who sees the road and every person on it and cannot touch any of them and would not change this if I could, because watching is its own form of love, and the road does not need me to carry anything. It carries itself. It has always carried itself. The empires come and go and the road remains, and the people on it remain, and the dust they raise settles and rises and settles again, and the century walks on, and I walk with it, one Sunday at a time.
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