Kipling’s Kim, Lamas, and Epiphanies

Abstract

either a study of Tibetan religion nor another Tibetan travel account, Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim, published in 1901, tells the story of an orphan of Irish descent on the loose in India and follows the travels of young Kim and his sidekick, a Tibetan lama; the travel motif that shapes the novel culminates in the dual, though diverging, epiphanies of both wayfarers. In this fictional coming-of-age story, Kipling draws on available knowledge on Tibet for his portrayal of the lama. In creating the character of the “Teshoo Lama,” for example, Kipling uses for his modest monk the title of the second highest incarnation of the Gelukpa sect, described by Bogle and Turner and cited by Blavatsky. His portrayal of the lama seems to draw specifically on the Markham’s edition of Bogle’s writings, but because Kipling does not cite sources (naturally enough for a work of this sort), it is as if the novel has swallowed Bogle whole.¹ Kipling’s book also accepts the textual attitude portrayed in the works of Hodgson and Waddell. Further, the novel significantly uses the trope of epiphany to solve a question of colonial identity. In this way, once epiphany has come into close proximity to a Tibetan character, it will then travel along when the figure of the lama transfers yet again into Younghusband’s account.