ABSTRACT
It should come as no surprise that the title character of Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901) is one of the first Boy Scouts. Of all social-imperialist organizations, the Scouts is the most irrepressibly optimistic about the ability to remake working-class young people into servants of the British Empire, and few characters in imperialist literature are more given to such metamorphoses than Kim. Thus, Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship, the international bestseller with which the Boer War hero Robert Baden-Powell founded the Scouts in 1908, recommends that Scouts read Kim (among many other works now established in the canon of juvenile literature) because a “good example of what a Boy Scout can do is to be found in Rudyard Kipling's story.” 1 Of course, Kim exemplifies primarily the spy's capacity for shifting between presumably essential and instantly recognizable identities. In the novel, Kim's tremendous usefulness to the imperial enterprise (his ability to thwart the attempts of Russian spies to undermine British rule in India) has everything to do with the fact that, although Kimball O'Hara is the son of an Irish soldier, “Kim was English,” as well as the fact that, although “he was burned black as any native … Kim was white—a poor white of the very poorest.” 2 Kipling's novel goes to great lengths to maintain that the ambiguities surrounding Kim's national and racial identity are valuable: he is “a white boy … who is not a white boy” 3 when it suits his superiors in the secret service to have him infiltrate native communities; similarly, while “thinking hard in English” about his duty to those superiors, the violent “Irish devil in the boy's blood” brings about the “fall of his enemy.” 4 However, the one aspect of his identity that never plays a role in Kim's success as a spy is his being “a poor white.” Significantly, the only other member of the English working classes to appear in the novel is also one of Kim's few enemies, and one of the few characters to whose information the ever-studious Kim refuses to listen: “Kim of course disbelieved every word the drummer-boy spoke about the Liverpool suburb which was his England.” 5 Kim's association with both Sahibs and Indians, his identification with both English and Irish, and his ability to turn his capacity for transformation to the benefit of the British Empire all demand that, in English class terms, he identify only with elite metropolitans like Colonel Creighton. Indeed, Baden-Powell's handbook elides the unambiguously class-specific term “poor white” and euphemisti-cally describes Kim as a boy “who lived in a humble way in India” (SB 7).
