ABSTRACT
In Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), the eponymous Kim categorically declares that he is not a Sahib while he is trying to know who he is. Of Irish parentage, Kim grows up in the bazaars of Lahore until he is taken under the wing of the imperial machinery, which draws him into the ‘Great Game’. The playful metaphor works towards alienating Kim from the people he identifies with.
Kim is not the only child in Kipling’s gallery of child characters to resist the roles earmarked for them. Growing up is a pyrrhic victory for most child characters in Kipling’s work. The author of Stalky & Co (1899), a boarding school story depicting the engendering of British boys into gentlemen, a genre of juvenilia started by Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), is also the creator of a baffling array of child characters like Kim, Mowgli, Tobrah, and Dick who are displaying serious resistance to growing up into their roles as British boys or as young subjects of the British Empire. In a departure from many postcolonial readings of Kipling, as a writer with unquestioning faith in the imperial agenda, this paper will posit the argument that through these child characters, Kipling not only shows these characters’ resistance to growing up but also showcases the trauma of growing into the nineteenth-century British masculinity rather than creating exemplary British boys or subjects for his child readers.
