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Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling's Great Game
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Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling's Great Game Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥
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The best companion book to Kipling's "Kim"
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Among Kiplingiana available for the 21th Century Kipling fan,. Hopkirk's "Quest for Kim" holds a well conquered place. Written in 1996 after many excellent books on British exploration, adventure and espionage in Asia, this small gem that stands between travelogue, literary commentary and pure act of loving memory toward one's own childhood dreams and expectations has become a classic.
Rudyard Kipling's "formation" novel "Kim" is one of the most loved books of English literature (I personally read it over 10 times) and many of its readers have asked themselves if the plot and characters are true or imaginary. Well, Peter Hopkirk went further and actually explored the possibility that every single aspect of the novel was inspired by real people and happenings.
After a brief introduction that updates on early and modern critical appraisal of RK's novel (colonialism? Racism? Orientalism?) we are introduced to the principal characters and a plot synopsis of the book. Kim would be half RK himself and half a mysterious Anglo-Tibetan "Doola" (from Doolan) a half-caste born from a British soldier that had eloped with a Sikkim girl and had gained some newspaper fame during the period RK was working in Lahore. Teshoo Lama really existed and had visited Kipling's father Lockwood, the Curator of the Lahore Museum, when Kipling was a child. Mahbub Ali as well was a real person, a horse dealer in the Sultan Sarai that used to visit Kipling when in Lahore. The Te-rain still runs today even if interrupted at the Pakistanian-Indian frontier, and the whole line has witnessed atrocious bloodshed during the Separation in 1947. The Colonel's Bungalow in Umballa is almost impossible to trace but some similar still stand in memory of colonial England. Colonel Creighton was definitely inspired by Colonel Thomas Montgomerie of the Survey of India a great spy master whose few selected pundits made the story of the Great Game. Huree Chunder Mookerjee Babu among these was probably a Bengali graduate from the University of Calcutta named Babu Sarot Chandra Das towards whom Kipling had an ambiguous feeling describing him as physically repulsive but extremely intelligent. The real Babu was one of the major experts on Tibet and wrote a Tibetan-English Dictionary. St. Xavier, Kim's school, was modelled on La Martiniere as recognized by many of those that had attended this prestigious institution. Lurgan Sahib, and here comes the surprise, was the mysterious A.M.Jacob, a jewel dealer, occultist and hypnotist of Madame Blavatsky stature and owner of the famous Victoria diamond later known as Jacob's diamond. Jacobs appears also in other Nineteenth Century novels such as "Mr. Isaacs" by F.Marion Crawford and in Newnham Davies' "Jadoo".
Of the Russian and French spies Hopkirk surely identifies the Frenchman as a certain Bovalot that penetrated into India from the North and maybe the Russian as the famous Captain Gromchevsky who went out to meet Younghusband on the Himalaya.
The Great Game was in full progress in the years 1865-1875, when the novel is set and greater information is present in the book. But what captures the reader most is the feeling of living anew Kim's adventure for the second (or the hundredth if you prefer) time in an exponential form.
Truly a great companion book to RY's chef d'oeuvre "Kim".
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