national literatures of Australia or Nigeria or South Africa. Yet nowhere was the British literary encounter with imperialism so complex, or of so sustained a quality, as in India, the oldest and most important of Britain's conquered territories; hence this chapter's emphasis. But the British novel of Africa is also important, and its terms differ in interesting ways from those in which the British saw India. Before turning to Naipaul and Rushdie, we will therefore pause to examine some of its major motifs.
What are some of the tropes on which the rhetoric of English India depends? Forster's Dr. Aziz thinks that the tourist's 'pose of 'seeing' India… was only a form of ruling India.' His words suggest a close relation between knowledge and power that anticipates the New Historicist assumption that they are secret sharers; that knowledge-liter-636- ature-is often tainted by its association with power. But for Kipling there was nothing secret about it. He openly allied himself with power, and saw knowledge as its servant: his work was intended, at least in part, to inculcate the virtues he thought an imperial servant needed. More interesting, however, is the role of knowledge within his fiction itself. The Indian Survey Department in Kim uses its ethnographic and geographical records in the service of military intelligence. The policeman Strickland, who figures in half a dozen stories, believes he 'should try to know as much about the natives as the natives themselves.' He does so, crucially, by learning to pass for a native, knowing the other by becoming that other. His work is all the more efficient for it, yet in the end that «passing» merely underlines his Englishness, as it does in 'Miss Youghal's Sais,' where posing as an Indian servant allows him to stay close to the English girl he loves.
The famous ending of A Passage to India suggests another of this rhetoric's dominant figures-the half-kiss, the affectionate embrace of Fielding and Aziz, who know that despite their own wishes they cannot yet be friends. It is surely too easy to read this as a simple allegory for the frustration of homosexual desire. But homoeroticism also plays a significant role in Scott's work, in Ronald Merrick's pursuit of the Indian Englishman Hari Kumar; and one can argue its importance for Kipling too, in the relation between Kim and his lama, and in the intensity with which he depicts close friendships between men. Yet because that homoeroticism most often takes the form of a fascination with a racial other, it is inevitably linked, like Strickland's attempts to 'pass for Hindu or Mohammedan, hide-dresser or priest,' to the central trope of all colonial encounters: the attempt to find a language that will allow one to know and to describe the other, the alien, the strange.
And this is Kipling's subject even in what seem the slightest stories in his earliest books. The eponymous, mission-trained Lispeth in the first story of Plain Tales from the Hills falls in love with an Englishman, who of course abandons her and returns to England. Lispeth has seen maps and knows where England is, but because 'she had no conception of the nature of the sea… no ideas of distance or steamboats, her notions were somewhat wild.' And Kipling's English characters are in much the same position with regard to India. 'The Phantom Rickshaw' opens with the assertion that India's great virtue is its 'Knowability.' But that knowability doesn't extend to the way his dead mistress's rickshaw follows Jack Pansay around Simla. India becomes mys-637- terious, unknowable, uncontrollable, and so Kipling's characters constantly search for analogies between the subcontinent and the world elsewhere that they accept as normal. 'Allowing for the difference between race and race, it's the story of Francesca da Rimini,' says a policeman, contemplating the conclusion to a village adultery in 'Through the Fire.' Except the analogies never quite fit. There's always that allowance to make for 'the difference between race and race,' a difference such analogies both deny and yet affirm.
For these characters «home» is always elsewhere, never in India, where the heat and the isolation can so easily make a life go off the rails. But in Kipling's best tale he did find in India a home and a language in which to describe it, not as strange or as «other» but simply in terms of its variety and the endless interest that variety creates. That story is of course Kim, his only major novel. Kimball O'Hara is a soldier's orphan, born in India, 'a poor white of the very poorest' whose tongue is more comfortable in Urdu than English, and whose nickname throughout the bazaars of Lahore is 'Little Friend of All the World.' He is nimble, and 'burned black as any native'; he's often employed in executing the nighttime commissions of 'sleek and shiny young men of fashion… the stealthy prowl through the dark gullies and lanes, the crawl up a waterpipe, the sights and sounds of the women's world.' Yet though Kim has 'known all evil since he could speak,' he has remained untouched by it, for he plays 'the game for its own sake' and not for hopes of reward. Kipling sets the boy between two men. The first is a Tibetan lama, come to India in search of a sacred river. Kim has never seen anyone like him, though he 'thought he knew all castes,' and so decides to accompany the lama to Benares as his chela or disciple; at first for the novelty, then because the lama seems so unworldly and helpless, and finally out of a deep affection. The second is the Afghan horse trader Mahbub Ali, who sometimes asks Kim 'to follow a man for one whole day and report every soul with whom he talked.' For Mahbub's stock-in-trade includes far more than horses. Kim doesn't know it yet, but he is also a government spy. When he learns that Kim plans to go to Benares, Mahbub asks Kim to carry a message along-a little message, for a British officer, about the pedigree of a horse; a message that will set an army in motion.
All that is in the first chapter, and for the rest of the novel Kim moves between the poles of behavior that the two men suggest. He delivers the message and wanders on with the lama, striding down the Grand Trunk -638- Road, exchanging insults with a rich widow, visiting an old soldier who is proud that he 'stood fast to [his] salt' in 1857. He stumbles into the camp of his dead father's regiment, whose members send him to school, for as he tells the lama, the white men believe that 'once a sahib always a sahib… But remember, I can change swiftly.' He decides to stay at school, however, after Mahbub Ali interests the government in him, and so he is brought up to play 'the Great Game'-to use the skills he learned on the Lahore housetops in the service of the empire. Yet he never forgets his lama, and when he leaves school at last they meet again, to walk into the high hills, the Himalayas, the abode of the gods, where 'each long perfect day rose behind Kim for a barrier to cut him off from his race and his mother-tongue.' But the Raj follows him even there, and in the novel's climactic chapters Kim is ordered to help stop two map-drawing 'emissaries of the dread Power of the North.'
Early in the novel Kim appears before both Mahbub and the lama dressed in the clothes of a 'Hindu urchin.' Neither man recognizes him, and the issue of identity that shape-shifting raises is one of the book's central concerns. Kim's Englishness remains tenuous throughout, and indeed through him Kipling suggests that an Englishman who would be completely comfortable in India must not know England. Yet that very Englishness makes Kim at home throughout the subcontinent in a way that no Indian can be. His fascinated acceptance of all India paradoxically grows out of his detachment from it; because he doesn't belong to any one part of it, he can shuck one self for another, as if India were a show in which he has many roles to play. When the government's other spies have to play a role, they choose one that fits the type of person they already are; the Bengali Hurree Babu is always a Bengali, whose disguises are merely caricatures of himself. But Kim, who has no particular regional or religious or linguistic identity-all India is open to him.
One is tempted to say, in fact, that Kim can blend in everywhere precisely because, as an Englishman, he doesn't belong anywhere. He has no interest in being a sahib, but his ability to change his identity inevitably reminds us of the policeman Strickland. Kim may begin by «passing» for fun, but that ability is soon turned to the business of imperial control. For there is never any doubt that Kim will work on behalf of the government. At several points he pauses to ask 'Who is Kim… What is Kim?' Those questions help resolve the tension between Mahbub's life of action and the lama's way of contemplation, but they also -639- point to the split between India and England. Yet they carry none of the emotional charge that they will in later novels of colonial identity. The novel leaves Kim as a boy, and its readers have often wondered about him as a man-wondered if, as an adult in the growing struggle for independence, he would be forced to choose between the Raj and the people with whom he lives; if he would feel what Scott identified as the conflict between those two great duties. That, certainly, would make the boy's questions resonate. But Kim merely realizes that he is Kim; he may be able to shift identities, but the novel never raises the question of a political conflict between those identifies.
For the India Kipling presents is essentially static. Kim's abilities may be predicated on his whiteness, but the novel as a whole remains deliberately abstracted from history. The events of 1857 are represented as a time out of legend. (Nowhere in his work, in fact, does Kipling treat them in any detail.) The enormous exacerbation of racial tension after 1857 plays no role in the novel. And though the book is nominally set in the 1880s, a time when in his newspaper articles Kipling often criticized the fledgling Indian National Congress, neither Congress nor the issues it addresses are even hinted at. The Raj may be threatened from without; within lie peace and harmony. For like all idylls, Kim depends on a rigorous exclusion. To open himself completely to India, to imagine it as home, Kipling had to exclude history. He fashioned in Kim an image of eternity that corresponds to the illusion of permanence surrounding British rule. And the images one remembers are, appropriately, those of an India that does not change: the mountains, the great road cutting across the Gangetic plain, the bewildering variety of people, laughter and the fellowship of the cookfire. It is a world without anguish, in which the main character remains
