Plot Synopsis and Critical Commentary

Abstract

Kim opens in Lahore, the capital city of the Punjab, then a province in Northern India and now in Pakistan. Kimball O’Hara, a boy of 13, sits outside the Lahore Museum, astride a Mohammedan gun, Zam-Zammah. The boy’s parents are dead: his mother, a former nursemaid, died when he was 3, his Irish father, a soldier turned railway-worker, seven years later. His father’s only legacy to Kim is the amulet with Masonic papers which hangs round the boy’s neck. Kim lives with an Indian woman, and passes his time in the streets of Lahore. Dressed sometimes in European, sometimes in Hindu or Mohammedan clothes, the boy, known as ‘Little Friend of all the World’, mixes freely with all castes and races.