Little Friend of all the World
Juliet Townsend QUEST FOR KIM: IN SEARCH OF KIPLING'S GREAT GAME by Peter Hopldrk John Murray, f15.99, pp. 274 Peter Hopkirk opens his Quest for Kim with the story of a young French officer in the first world war whose life was saved when a German bullet lodged in the copy of Kim which he was carrying in his breast- pocket. To him, as to M. M. Kaye, Kim must have seemed 'strong magic'. It has certainly woven a potent spell over many thousands of readers from T. S. Eliot to Tariq Ali, and over none more completely than the 13-year-old Peter Hopkirk, whose life and career were directly shaped by the experience. It led to his becoming a soldier, a journalist and a writer on the Byzantine struggle between the two great imperial powers, Britain and Russia, in the danger- ous uncharted lands of Central Asia which lay beyond the Khyber Pass.
The phrase 'great game' was coined by its brave but luckless exponent Captain Conolly, who was beheaded in Bokhara in 1842; it was popularised and dignified with capital letters by Kipling in Kim. Quest for Kim bears the subtitle In Search of Kipling's Great Game. Of course Peter Hopkirk, the acknowledged master of this exotic byway of history, is uniquely well placed to answer his own questions when they relate to the struggle for India's northern approaches. He explains how Kipling drew on the expe- riences of the 'Pundits', highly trained native employees of that legendary institu- tion the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, who were sent on clandestine mis- sions across the border into countries like Afghanistan and Tibet which were thought too dangerous for English cartographers. Some of their skills — how to map an area without telltale instruments by accurate pacing of distances, for instance — find their way into Kim, together with their mastery of disguise and their use of code names and numbers, C25, R17, E23.
Peter Hopkirk has succeeded in two respects in this well produced book with its evocative line drawings. He has obviously given himself enormous pleasure, interest and fun in his research and his travels. At the same time he has made the reader long to hurry back to Kim, ideally to start on the same journey in Lahore, where a little boy sits drumming his heels astride the great gun Zam-Zammah and a lama in his dingy robe, with his yellow and wrinkled face and his eyes 'like little slits of onyx', shuffles round the corner from the Motec Bazaar.
In real life the Pundits were very few in number and their activities were confined to charting India and the surrounding terri- tories. As so often in his work, Kipling used this as a starting-point from which he built up a whole network of secret agents under the direction of the omniscient Colonel Creighton, an organisation which had no true equivalent in the India of his day. Kipling had shown a precocious interest in the Russian threat in a schoolboy debate, successfully proposing the motion 'The advance of the Russians in Central Asia is hostile to British power'. As a 19-year-old reporter on the Civil and Military Gazette he was sent to Peshawar to cover the meet- ing of the Viceroy and the Emir of Afghanistan. The Emir was delayed for a month, during which time the young reporter had to write 13 articles on the sit- uation on the North-West Frontier and beyond. It was in Peshawar, 'at the mouth of that narrow swordcut in the hills that men call the Khyber Pass', that he set one of his most powerful stories, The Man Who Was, in which the feline Russian, Dirkovitch, is entertained to dinner by the White Hussars on the night when one of their officers, missing since the Crimea, returns from the dead.
Peter Hopkirk is not content to relate the events in Kim to historical reality; he is in hot pursuit of the principal characters, all of whom, he claims, were 'inspired, in whole or in part, by living individuals, known to or known of by Kipling'. Some of his identifications are entirely convincing: the prototypes of Lurgan Sahib and the Babu, Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, seem eminently believable. Others, Kim himself and the Lama for instance, were probably suggested by people Kipling had heard of and were then transformed by his imagina- tion. Just as Mowgli must have been inspired by the rumours of wolf-children, so Kim may have been suggested to Kipling's mind by several stories current at the • time of mysterious, fair-haired boys appearing from across the Frontier speak- ing little English and bearing such relics as a brass crucifix or a British army breast- plate with its regimental number.
Peter Hopkirk tells us that Kim has been described as Kipling's 'love letter to India'; perhaps this book is his own love letter to Kim. His method is to travel in person in the footsteps of Kim and the Lama, reminding us of the story as we go and try- ing to find as many of the actual locations as is now possible. He is constantly thwart- ed in this quest by the vagaries of the Indi- an railway system and the difficulties posed by crossing and recrossing the Pakistan border which later events have so inconsid-
erately drawn across Kim's India. The lust of the chase is upon him. He relishes with gusto his discovery that the Lahore Muse- um, Kim's Wonder House whose curator was Kipling's father, was not housed in the present-day building as is generally assumed but much further down the Mall. He spends months of fruitless research in India and England in the attempt to estab- lish the exact whereabouts of Lurgan Sahib's jewel shop in Simla. He describes this ruefully as 'almost an obsession' — no 'almost' about it, but thoroughly under- standable. This method of following Kim on his travels and pausing en route to iden- tify places and people is quite complicated but makes it possible for the book to be enjoyed by the reader who has half forgot- ten or even never read Kim itself. The author is scrupulously restrained in his use of Kipling's own prose, hinting at rather than quoting those unforgettably brilliant descriptive passages: Lahore railway station at dawn, the Grand Trunk Road, the ecstatic journey to the cool air of the Hills. He wants us to read the book itself, not a few selected passages.
The story of Kim, as well as being an exciting adventure and a brilliant evocation of India, is the account of a profoundly touching relationship between an old man and a boy. The irony is that, in this instance, the streetwise child is the man and the saintly and unworldly man is the child. Kipling, inhibited as he was in expressing his own feelings, was capable of real tenderness, and nowhere is this better depicted than in Kim.
To order a copy of this book at the special discount price of f11.99, call The Spectator Bookshop on 0181 324 5500.
Previous page
