ABSTRACT
Rudyard Kipling has created a galaxy of child characters in his short stories and novels, and most such stories are set in India. The child protagonists or child characters usually play an important role in bringing the story to its logical end. Some of these children are British children growing up in India while others are Indian children whose tale is recounted by a narrator who is a “Sahib”. This chapter explores that the child characters in Kipling are the key to understanding his complex relationship with India. The child character’s “berangement” with the Indians in the stories renders India differently than the reportage of the journalist Kipling. Kipling is attempting to understand the country of his childhood through his fiction. With each of these child characters, Kipling is approaching India through the lens of childhood with the ostensible purpose of remarking upon Indian ways which were seemingly incomprehensible to the British.
