‘Arguing with the Himalayas’? Edward Said on Rudyard Kipling

Abstract

Rudyard Kipling has not exactly lacked for eminent commentators on his works: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, Lionel Trilling and Randall Jarrell, to name only a half-dozen. But when Penguin asked Edward Said to write an introduction and notes to their edition of Kipling’s masterpiece Kim (1901; Penguin Classics edition 1987), it was as if they had sponsored and won exclusive broadcasting rights to a world heavyweight boxing championship match between the arch-colonial of all times and the arch-postcolonial of our times. In the contemporary critical climate, the frisson could not have been more palpable, and it turned out to be quite a bout, with a highly unpredictable outcome. In this essay, I seek to revisit that grand encounter with a view mainly to figuring out what happens to our current theoretical formulations and categorical discriminations, such as the colonial and the postcolonial, when two strong men stand face to face though they come, ideologically speaking, from the ends of the earth.