Repo-Men ή οι Δωσίλογοι (I)

A gloss which recuperates Kipling’s intended meanings in ontological terms could appear calculated to drain the writings of historical specificity; […] it attests to the authenticity of [Kipling’s] ‘portraits’ […] through extrapolating the ‘historical realities’ from the do-it-yourself hagiography of the Raj, among which [his] fabrications were pre-eminent. The outcome is a criticism which projects the authorized representations [of the ‘master culture’] as truths.

BENITA PARRY¹

[In Kim, the ‘terror’ of the] colonial encounter becomes domesticated into the familiarity of every day facticity. […] ‘Imperial time’ [is thereby rendered as a ‘wistful’] montage of autonomous moments […] engender[ing] a discourse that lacks any direction in which to go.

SARA SULERI²

I. The two epigraphs placed at head of this note are intended to suggest the bewildering array of conflicting responses occasioned by Kipling’s novel Kim (1901),³ ranging from readings which express undiminished admiration, if not for the uncharacteristically ‘unpolitical’ treatment of the narrative subject-matter, at least for the novel’s ‘aesthetic merit’ or for a (purportedly) genuine attempt on Kipling’s part to negotiate the colonial divide and portray Indian culture(s) and ‘spirituality’ in a sympathetic light, to more sceptical accounts which foreground the text’s socio-political context so as to diagnose the author’s continuing concern with the security and survival of the Empire.⁴ Indeed, if one accepts Ann Parry’s argument regarding the ‘time-location’ of the narrated events as roughly contemporaneous with that of the novel’s composition (1894–1900),⁵ a period which saw a series of colonial campaigns culminating in the BoerWar (1899–1902) and was also marked by strained diplomatic relations with Britain’s old and new imperial rivals,⁶ those readings which dwell on the text’s affirmation of a ‘world of infinite concrete potentiality’⁷—its endorsement of ‘a new vision, […] more inclusive, humanized and mature than that of any other [of Kipling’s] works’⁸—appear less convincing.