ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 offers a reading of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim that addresses geographical discourses pertaining to medical topography and ethnology in British India, in order to analyze episodes of eventful healing reciprocally performed between Kim and native subjects that violate caste taboos. The reading traces the political trajectory of Kim’s encounters with spaces of health and disease, and argues that acts of reciprocal healing in the novel forge alliances between the British Empire and native subalterns with the aim of dismantling Brahmanical hegemony and remapping Hindustan as casteless imperial utopia.
