I. Kim and Victorian Theories of Race, Hybridity, and Whiteness

Kipling's imperial novel describes the travels of the orphaned boy Kim and an elderly Tibetan Buddhist lama, for whom Kim comes to act as a chela, or helper-disciple. The lama seeks Kim's aid in his quest for a mystical holy river, and mixed in with his holy quest is Kim's growing involvement in British espionage – referred to by its common name, The Great Game, or The Game, throughout the text. The novel thus oscillates between the Eastern mystical quest and the Western politicized Game such that, properly speaking, one narrative cannot be definitively subsumed under the other. Later in the text, the lama agrees to pay for the boy's colonial education, once he “knew the boy was white” (112; ch. 6), further binding his own spiritual trajectory with that of Kim and the Game. Given this context of the Game, Kipling's imperially-themed text must be read within the cultural and historical setting of the late-nineteenth century, when Britain retained its hold, if tenuously, on its international interests, despite threats of incursion from other European nations. During this formative epoch that was characterised by conflicts between colonial powers and overseas imperialism – a time period that Benedict Anderson notes for the dramatic “rise of European nationalist movements” which “created increasing cultural and . . . political, difficulties” (83) – Kipling's novel exposes the extent to which the exigencies of the international empire had become connected inseparably to an emergent idea of national identity. Kim is one of the most significant literary works to materialise within the late-nineteenth century because of the clear, noted extent of the relationship between the national subject and the imperial project; this collusion is literally embodied in the “English,” yet “burned black,” titular character. Kim's “burned black” skin constitutes more than cosmetic damage to the idea of an immanent state of whiteness. This literary representation of “burned” blackness denotes a profound physical branding that has irrevocably shaped Kim's psychic, ontological development as he is powerfully moulded by the landscape and the people of the Indian colonial empire.

Kim's racial status in the novel reflects not only Britain's imperial engagement, but also the nineteenth century's involved and complicated theorisations of racial identity. In Kim, Kipling turns earlier and esteemed ideals of British whiteness on their collective heads. In the 1840s and 1850s, for instance, the racial science of ethnography – the discourse that attempted to define and rank human racial and ethnic groups empirically – began to flourish. Race became such an entrenched aspect of thought by the mid-century that Robert Knox, the famous (and infamous) ethnologist,Footnote ¹ could declare confidently that “Race is everything: literature, science, art, in a word, civilization, depend on it” (7). In a sense, Knox was entirely correct, as ideas of race permeated the entwined cultural domains of literature, science, and art, which were influenced by the newly emerging discourse of race science and ethnology at this moment. While Knox analyzed many racial groups within his seminal work of 1850, The Races of Men, he was particularly concerned with enshrining an ideal of the white, racially pure Saxon, whom he argued was the ascendant (if, admittedly, not the only) racial group living in England. Of the fair-haired, light-skinned Saxon, Knox says: “[n]o race interests us as much . . . [The Saxon] is about to be the dominant race of the earth; a section of the race . . . has been all-powerful on the ocean . . . the British” (15). While others, such as Daniel Mackintosh in the 1860s, and later, John Beddoe, would spend years cataloguing, typing, and comparing the different so-called racial types indigenous to Britain and Europe after Knox, Robert Knox remained an influential figure in ethnographical and anthropological circles until late in the century. His ideals of the powerful, Saxon, English race were dominant throughout the 1800s, when such racial ideals increasingly become justifications for white, British imperial conquest.Footnote ² Kipling himself was certainly aware of the tenets of racial science, and in his travel narrative of 1889–1900, From Sea To Sea, he provides ethnological read-ings of nearly every ethnic group he encounters, including the Chinese, American blacks, European Jews, Italians, and even the white Americans, whom he describes as a patchwork “Anglo-American-German-Jew” with “English instinct[s]” (2: 246).

This idea that whiteness could be patchwork, defined by its internal heterogeneity, remained with Kipling as he wrote Kim. Indeed, though Kipling was certainly cognisant of the leading theories of racial science, in the novel, his idea of the ideal English subject is considerably distanced from more popular fantasies of the fair, racially undiluted, Saxon. Kipling presents a British subject whose whiteness is deeply complicated, even setting aside Kim's tenuous command of the English tongue and his blackened skin. This is largely because of Kim's Irishness. That the titular character of Kipling's novel is, in fact, Irish, and not English, distances Kim considerably from racial ideals of the Saxon, for whom the Irish Celt was an anathema for racial scientists like Robert Knox.Footnote ³ In fact, Kim's Irishness would have, in itself, signaled a kind of racial indeterminacy; as Amy Martin notes, in the Victorian period, “the Irish stood at the intersection of two contemporaneous racial formations – one relying on an epidermal logic of whiteness . . . and the other founded on a more fluid understanding of racial hierarchy that justified the British Empire” (52). That is, for many, the Irish were at once white, but not-quite-white, as many patently racist caricatures dominated nineteenth-century print; behind these defamatory depictions of the Irish was the sentiment that they were not seen as “fit to self-govern” (Martin 52). For Kipling, however, Kim's not-quite-white Irishness is part of the racial indeterminacy that makes the boy especially fit to be an active agent, and not a passive subject, of Empire.Footnote ⁴ Moreover, Kipling confuses further the idea of white Englishness, as he uses the term “English” virtually synonymously with “British,” and Màire ni Fhlathúin notes the “obvious paradox of Kim's apparent Indianness and asserted Englishness,” to which another incongruity is added, as “he appears to be simultaneously English and Irish” (19). Thus, where Kipling's language is ostensibly reductive of national and ethnic nuance in Kim, the conflations made in his writing are, in fact, politicized enunciations of identity. That is, the “white subjects of Queen Victoria represent Englishness, in Kipling's eyes, even if they are not English, a locution which reflects the . . . English dominance of the uneasy ‘British’ conglomerate” (ni Fhlathúin 20). In this way, Kipling uses Kim to expand what is included within this “uneasy ‘British’ conglomerate,” such that Englishness is racialized to unprecedented degrees in the novel.

Kipling's text also was formed in conjunction with certain fin-de-siècle ideas of race that were in flux at this historical moment. Specifically, Kim was published within the context of fairly widespread anxieties in Britain, Europe, and North America, which associated racial mixing with the threat of cultural degeneration and racial decay. Kipling, however, links Englishness to heterogeneity with a fervency that intervenes against the racial paranoia of the late 1800s. One of the most prominent voices articulating this late-Victorian racialist anxiety was Arthur de Gobineau. His highly influential text on racial hybridity and nationalism, The Inequality of Human Races, was circulated initially within scientific and anthropological circles between 1853–1855, but became widely read in the late-nineteenth century. This fear of racial mixture and cultural decline, articulated by Gobineau and others, grew to permeate several realms of writing during the fin de siècle. Fictional prose was particularly affected, and as Stephen Arata argues, “[l]ate-Victorian fiction . . . is saturated with the sense that the entire nation – as a race of people, as a political and imperial force, as a social and cultural power – was in irretrievable decline” (622). Exemplifying this sentiment, Gobineau asserted that he was “gradually penetrated by the conviction that the racial question over-shadows all other problems in history . . . it holds the key to them all and . . . the inequality of races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its destiny” (xii). Given this larger context of racial angst permeating the late-nineteenth century, and considering Kim’s emphasis on the main character's “black” skin, and his “poor white” (1; ch. 1) Irish origins, it is all the more remarkable that Kipling largely suppresses anxiety linking racial mixture to national degeneration in Kim.Footnote ⁵ The text's enthusiastic avowal of Kim's imperial hybridity can partially be read as the author's response against the pervasive sense of degeneration, since mixture is claimed as a key to retaining imperial strength, rather than a sign of degenerative weakness. But even acknowledging the imperial thrust of Kim's heterogeneity, as one must with Kipling, what I want to underline is that the author shows a singular construction of the whiteness that emerges in this late-Victorian context. This whiteness is not degenerated by, but is, rather, generated from the physical and psychical presence of racial Others, and is utterly contiguous with these racialized bodies. Thus, this idealized whiteness for Kipling must, paradoxically, divest itself of any fixedness or “durable senses of the self” (Christensen 25).

II. “You would not know me at all unless I choose. . . . Some day I will prove it”: Kim, Hurree Babu, and Racial Malleability

The novel begins to stage the collapsing of the boundaries between colonial subjects and white identity in a psychological sense through the text's dynamic between Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, a Bengali “babu” agent of the Great Game, and Kim, himself. The text closely examines an intellectual and psychical allegiance between these two, and their dynamic informs directly Kim's protean models of whiteness. In this way, the psychological dynamic between Kim and Hurree intimately forges aspects of Kim's own fluid British identity. Hurree himself straddles the line between English and Indian, East and West, and he is integral to showing the interstices between ideas of racial and cultural mixture in the text. Kim and Hurree are thus best understood in connection with one another, as their psychical relationship illustrates a more complete picture of the author's articulation of national mixture and white imperial identity. In many ways, Hurree acts as Kim's darker mirror, as the former's identity is more thoroughly marked with the visual signs of race. The narrator, who, on occasion, haphazardly insists upon Kim's latent “white blood” (46; ch. 3), ostensibly distances some of the external racial markers from Kim through Hurree. Yet Hurree is also a tremendously significant character in the novel as he, in conjunction with Kim, demonstrates the novel's overlapping, proliferating forms of mixture.

Hurree develops the text's broader ideal of hybridized being. His existence as a racialized entity cannot be separated from his cultural mixture, as he comes to enact a link between cultural fluidity and racial alterity. Also, Hurree's textual construction as a “babu” is significant in that Kipling's particular iteration of the babu figure further elucidates our understanding of hybridity in the text. Hurree, a British-educated colonial, is, like Kim, a textual emblem of the in-between subjectivities that emerge in the colonial context, where British character is linked to both English and “native” identities. Moreover, Hurree and Kim, who embody directly the mixed states that the novel privileges, are both described in terms of relative equity, as Hurree is Kim's “fellow agent and fellow master of multiple tongues and multiple disguises” (Knoepflmacher 924; emphasis mine). The pair is also linked by mutual admiration and, at times, what is, in Robert Young's words, tantamount to a covetous desire “for the cultural other” (3). Indeed, Kipling manifests their affinity through a deep psychological connection, which steadily increases as the novel progresses, as Kim feels admiration, and even “envy” (Kipling, Kim 226; ch. 12), for Hurree.

Hurree Babu is first mentioned in a conversation between Kim and Colonel Lurgan, in which Lurgan muses, “God causes men to be born – and thou art one of them – who have a lust to go abroad at the risk of their lives and discover news. . . . These souls are very few; and of these few, not more than ten are of the best. Among these ten I count the Babu” (161; ch. 9). Lurgan likens the essential natures of Kim and Hurree in this sentence, counting them both among an elite and psychologically similar “few.” Shortly after this declaration, Kim meets the babu:

While this Bengali, whom Kim can scarcely believe is “one of us,” initially is rendered a comical sight with a “fringe shawl” that drapes his “whale-like” frame, Hurree does not long remain an object of farcical wonder. Rather, Hurree, known for his powers of transformation, swiftly develops into a figure of admiration for Kim, with whom the former develops a telling sympathy. Later that same day, for instance, “after a huge meal at Kalka, [Hurree] spoke uninterruptedly. Was Kim going to school? Then he, an M A of Calcutta University, would explain the advantages of education” (162; ch. 9). The babu then goes on at some length regarding the virtues of Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and Burke, before he imparts to Kim the kind of knowledge that the boy finds the most intriguing:

It is noteworthy that Hurree, not Kim, demonstrates knowledge of canonical English literature and fluency in the English language, which Kim only catches in “volleying drifts.” And as the immediate source of knowledge that Kim can “tuck away in his head,” Hurree directly influences Kim's psychic formation. While some critics have read the babu's position in this scene and elsewhere as an example of Kipling's “dismissing Hurree Chunder Mookerjee . . . as an antic figure [. . . who] can practice but not perfect” the “cultural meetings and minglings that occur on the colonial scene” (Ellis 321), Hurree's informed and competent grip of the knowledge of colonial mapping is immediately recognized for its importance by Kim. Indeed, Britain's enemies in The Game, who have placed a price upon the babu's head, also acknowledge Hurree's important skills.

Kim's respect for the babu's ability to metamorphize into new forms and to dissemble reveals an affinity between the two, but it also evidences the racialized origins of Kim's own shifting subjectivities, which are perfected after his close dealings with Hurree. The babu, who has hinted at his skill at transmogrification, demonstrates it as he parts with Kim. Hurree states: “‘I have urgent private business here by the roadside.’ He slipped out noiselessly as a cat, on the Umballa road, hailed a passing cart and jingled away, while Kim, tongue-tied, twiddled the brass betel-box in his hands” (Kipling, Kim 164; ch. 9). That the ponderous man initially described as “whale-like” could depart this meeting with the agility and quiet of a cat, not surprisingly, leaves Kim “tongue-tied.” The novel here signals its qualification of Hurree as more than a simple “antic” (Ellis 321) figure who can be summarily dismissed by the reader, as his transformative power is immediately revered by Kim. Moreover, Hurree's skill of donning and doffing various identities is one that he enacts almost exclusively within the presence of an appreciative, and often jealous, Kim. When Kim and the babu do meet again, it is when the former has undergone a blessing ritual, during which the boy has briefly been rendered unconscious due to narcotics. When he regains consciousness, Kim is greeted by the “oily voice” (180; ch. 10) of Hurree Babu at his elbow. While the adjective “oily” denotes an unattractive unctuousness, it also connotes a slipperiness that evades easy circumscription in this scene. Here, as elsewhere, the adjectives used to describe the babu reveal his ambivalent description in the novel, and frequently, he is advantageously positioned in this text that foregrounds heavily in-between subjectivities. Significantly, in this same blessing ritual scene, it is Hurree who tells Kim the code words that will signal his affiliation with a secret organization of The Game:

Hurree repeatedly draws attention to Kim's vision, as the words “look” and “see” are reiterated a number of times in this fairly short exchange. This insistent attention to sight underscores the real and figurative alignment of perception that is taking place between Kim and Hurree. That this mirroring between the two is staged in optical terms suggests a confluence between somatic and psychical states of mirroring, as sight and vision are at once aligned with the physical body, and with the metaphorical mind's eye. Accordingly, a tangible alliance between Hurree and Kim is formed as Kim successfully repeats and understands the test sentence told to him by Hurree. This scene is significant to the plot, in that it shows Kim's initiation into a private brotherhood of “The Game,” but Hurree's personal initiation of the boy also ceremonializes the multifaceted alliances between the racialized babu and the white Kim.

The bond between Kim and Hurree reveals the novel's links between cultural hybridity and explicitly racialized forms of identity. However, this alliance between the two is also contingent upon Kipling's revising how the parameters of race itself are construed. That is to say, while Kipling does employ conventional racial stereotypes in Kim, the text pushes against the perceived fixity of these ideas in its exploration of hybridized subject positions. Kim thus resists making concrete pronouncements about the permanence of racial characteristics, as the text, to a degree, reverses assumptions about racial fixity, and it links many racial subjectivities to a state of polyvalence. As such, when Hurree accurately boasts to Kim that he could “come . . . dressed quite different. You would not know me at all unless I choose, I bet you. . . . I [could] come as . . . oh, anything,” this statement also informs the text's descriptions of Kim, himself, who is the most protean when he is like the dark colonial bodies in the novel. Non-white subjectivities, which are often construed for their lack of obvious agency in the colonial context, are, at times, the most fluid of identities in Kim. For example, Hurree's status as a racialized subject in an imperial context allows him to obfuscate his motivations, and even his true identity, from others, such as a group of Russian agents, who are enemies of Britain. Hurree plays upon their expectations of him as a discontented Indian subject to gain information, which contrasts from his lived reality as an important agent of The Great Game. In this way, race becomes a kind of useful camouflage in the novel, when it is treated as a construction open to interpretation and not as a fixed or immutable category of identity. However, Kipling's ideas of race are also somewhat antithetical in that race is a simultaneously “real,” or at least a recognisable, category of identity. Thus, one's performance of a racial role may be interrupted by another, overlapping, performance that disrupts the coherence of either of these roles. Hence, Kim can become, among other things in the text, a Hindu urchin, and then a “boy in the dress of white men” – even though the latter is arguably his least comfortable performance, as he is forever “forgetting his white blood” (189; ch. 11). Of course, ultimately, Hurree does not, and cannot, assume whiteness in the way that Kim can embody blackness in this text that privileges the fashioning of Kim's transgressive white, English identity. But Kipling also reminds us that Kim, whom others must try to “make” a “white man” (117; ch. 7), is, too, performing a kind of whiteness that lacks internal coherence in the text.

Kim's relationship with Hurree also reveals the deep-seated links between the English boy and the dark and hybridized figures of the novel. Kim's character cannot exist without Hurree's racialized alterity, as the two form a kind of symbiotic hybridity. In other words, Hurree's overtly raced iteration of hybridity helps to somatically and psychically forge Kim. Indeed, this intimate relationship between Kim and the racial Other, and its lingering physical manifestations on the “burned black” boy, were noted by Kipling's contemporaries. One early reviewer observed that the Kim's “[English] racial traits . . . seem to have been almost wholly submerged” (Payne 368). Similarly, another contemporary critic more bluntly described Kim as a “brown-skinned, vernacular-speaking little Oriental” (Maurice 147). These reviews concretize the fact that Kim does not simply play casually at racial alterity, so to speak, for Kipling. Rather, Kim incorporates his encounters with racial difference into his unstably white identity. In this way, Kim's indoctrination into The Great Game by Hurree underlines the fact that the cultural and racial boundaries that might be erected around the idea of white Englishness are unstable in the imperial setting, and largely ineffective. Whiteness ceases to become visually recognisable as whiteness in such an environment. Thus, as a result of his intimate and formative psychic suffusion with racial difference, Kim comes to reflect the apposite description given to him by a street sweeper in the novel, as he is the paradoxical “white boy . . . who is not a white boy” (100; ch. 6).

III. Kim and the “People of India”

To understand properly the complex racial genealogies of Kim, we must also understand the novel's ideological connections to Kipling's slightly earlier writings about India with which Kim is in conversation. Much of Kipling's previous fictional and journalistic writing concerning India directly examines interracial desire, the mixed-race subject, and how the two help to construct a broader idea of hybridized nationality. This context is needed to understand comprehensively Kim’s particular model of English nationality, as conceptual links remain between these writings and his later novel. In Kipling's publications just before Kim, miscegenated desire and mixed-race subjects are a sometimes problematic, but often ingrained, part of the white subject's formation in the imperial context. While the boy Kim refers to the shameful “hatred . . . of the half-caste for his [dark] brother-in-law” (119; ch. 7), elsewhere, specifically in his journalistic writing about India, Kipling gives a more complicated emotional history of miscegenation.Footnote ⁶

In Kim, Kipling arguably comes closer to bringing into fruition that which, earlier, in From Sea to Sea, he had described as that state of personal and national life “which touches so intimately the White on the one hand and the Black on the other” (2: 262). In From Sea to Sea, a younger Kipling lamented that nobody had accurately depicted the life of the Eurasians, the racial in-betweens whom he deemed the true “People of India.” His reflections regarding these examples of racial and cultural mixture are telling with regard to their perceived national importance:

Kipling clearly describes a mixed-race people who represent the idealised blending of the Englishman and the native. Furthermore, he expresses the desire that something be set in writing that accurately depicts these subjects, whom he calls unequivocally the “People of India”; they have a special claim to that title for him as they “have been made” by the land. While Kipling's apparent reasoning for excluding the native from this national honour remains abstruse, what is most remarkable about this passage is his explicit identification of the racial in-between as having special purchase upon the national character. As the products of both “Black” and “White,” they are to Kipling a newer – but truer – reflection of the nation. The Eurasian is best suited to represent a colonial India, and she speaks a “curious dialect” that literally enunciates the mixture of European and Indian influences. Kipling, who aestheticizes the mixed-race “young women with . . . beautiful eyes,” and the proud Eurasian men who “smoke bad cigars” (2: 262) conceives of an intimate, symbiotic relationship between their physical persons and the nation, as they help to mould one another conceptually. That is to say that the “People of India” are formed directly by the racially diverse environment of colonial India, but they, in turn, also come to create a more enriched expression of the imperial nation – one that is “intimately” comprised of “the White on the one hand and the Black on the other.” The author laments that existing writings have not adequately described the “olive-cheeked, sharp-eyed little boys, and leggy maidens wearing white” (2: 262), whom he particularly admires. And in his own fashion, Kipling later redresses this omission, though the “burned black” Kim, a representative of imperial whiteness, whose appearance and “clipped . . . sing-song” (Kim 1; ch. 1). English are indebted conceptually to these earlier, mixed-race imperial identities.

Kim is linked to Kipling's previously described miscegenated figures, such as the “People of India,” in that Kim enacts a kind of whitened hybridity within the novel, in which he is only nominally differentiated from literal half-caste bodies in the final version of the text. While it has been argued by U. C. Knoepflmacher, John McBratney, Don Randall and others that Kipling definitively precludes the idea of miscegenation within his examination of hybridity in Kim, these dismissals of mixture do not pay sufficient attention to the intensely ambiguous racial identities created within the novel – and within Kim, himself. In Kim, nationality and its racial constitution are hyphenated, contested – and contestable – loci of identity, and the text's Englishness is conceptually reliant upon antecedent descriptions of racial mixing. In this way, the quick-witted Kim is linked to the “olive-cheeked, sharp-eyed little [Eurasian] boys” (From Sea to Sea 2: 262) whom Kipling earlier described. Moreover, if Kim is a “white boy . . . who is not a white boy,” then he also functions a Eurasian who is not a Eurasian. That is to say that Kim, like the mixed-race people Kipling earlier describes, is composed affectively of the white on the one hand and the black on the other, and both of these sides mix to form an ineluctably hybridized being. These raced elements are unalienable and irreversible parts of him, even if they are not, strictly speaking, biological. White racial identity becomes reconfigured as a sustained affective reality in this way; imperial whiteness has an emotive link to antecedent descriptions of mixture. Even so, existing critiques of the novel place the character Kim at an arm's length from the idea of racial hybridity. McBratney, for instance, differentiates between what he sees as two opposed modes of hybridity operating within Kipling's writing, namely, “mingling” and “mixture.” “Mingling,” McBratney defines as a “combination of elements that preserves the integrity of the original components and permits them to separate without change” (63). However, mixture “suggests the creation of a single, new entity that alters the integrity of the constituent elements” (63). He distances Kim from raced mixture, and he states that the young Kim will “soon lack the ethnic flexibility to be . . . the superagent of the Raj” (131). McBratney's claims echo similar pronouncements that the novel “attempts to uphold [Kim's] white race” (Ellis 319). In contrast, however, I am arguing that Kipling's text does not, and cannot, faithfully maintain the distinction between the two opposed states of hybridity: cultural mingling and racial mixing. Kim's body problematizes this binary between racial and cultural mixture in ways that directly align him with Kipling's earlier textual intersections between racial mixing and national identity. For instance, Kim's initiation into the racialized Sat Bhai brotherhood of The Game by Hurree Babu attests to the fact that the boy's metamorphoses go far beyond the act of superficial identity costuming. Instead, Kim is transforming into his various identities at a profoundly psychic level. And while it has been suggested that Kim's is a gradually ossifying form of whiteness, since he will “find it increasingly hard to balance the separate sides of his ethnic being” (McBratney 111) in the events that proceed the novel's ambivalent ending, I would argue that Kipling's choice to conclude the text at a point where Kim has not yet firmly chosen his path is a deliberate one. Indeed, Kim “can have his cake and eat it, too,” as Patrick Bratlinger puts it, as “he is left in a still-adolescent state” (136) and does not definitively choose whether he will become a Sahib in the secret service, remain the lama's disciple, or even return to being a boy on the street. In this way, the novel maintains the cultural and racial ambivalence – and hence the attendant potential – of Kim's numerous subject positions. Kim thus retains a tenuous kind of imperially-mediated whiteness that has not rigidified into an identity that is completely, or conceptually, distinguished from blackness or in-betweenness.

When Kim was published in 1901, Britishness itself had already been theorized as being both mixed and mixable in an intra-European sense, as debates regarding the Saxon and Celtic influences on the nation continued into the late nineteenth century – a controversy that is reflected in the Irish ancestry of Kimball O'Hara.Footnote ⁷ However, Kipling takes the construction of the mixed “white” Briton a step further in Kim. The ideal British subject is more heavily infused with signs of racial otherness than had been conceived of, even by Kipling himself, up until this point. In Kim, whiteness is described unprecedentedly in terms of its essential mixture, as Kipling does not convincingly separate the external or internal nature of the text's idealised British subject from that of the native. That Hurree cannot physically embody whiteness in the sense that Kim can “slip into Hindu or Mohammedan garb” (Kipling, Kim 3; ch. 1), is perhaps a given, as Hurree's subjectivity is not as privileged as Kim's in this narrative concerning the construction of imperial whiteness. Even so, when Kim appears in the “dress of white men” (91; ch. 5), this, too, is only one of several possible identities, or “incarnation[s]” (91; ch. 5), that Kim might embody, rather than his essential, or preferred state. Indeed, Kim only latently “remember[s] that he [is] a white man” (244; ch. 13), or is prescriptively informed of it by others.Footnote ⁸ In this way, the hybridized characters in the novel, such as Kim and Hurree, are not cautionary figures who represent what the Russian agents pejoratively describe as “the monstrous hybridism of East and West” (239; ch. 13). Rather, Kim, in particular, emerges as the embodiment of Kipling's exalted British subject, and he is so favoured by having remained on the margins between East and West, and black and white.

Kim's intimate affinity with India, and with the dark, culturally hybridized Hurree in particular, closely links Kipling's idealized boy to a genealogy of Kipling's own ideas of race and miscegenation. At the same time, Kim’s late-Victorian nationality begins to anticipate a less fixed ideal of the “West” – one that is, as Robert Young asserts, “always . . . riven with difference,” being “Occidental and Oriental at once” (1). What has been overlooked to date is the fact that Kipling constructs this modern ontology using the same language that attends Victorian descriptions of racial hybridity. Moreover, Kipling's novel presents modern Englishness as an increasingly malleable subject-position; he creates an image of the “white” English subject who is always already shaped by the hybridizing Other, by virtue of the Britain's intimate contact with said Other in the imperial economy. Hence, Kim, when he appears in his physical dress, or “incarnation,” of a Hindu is also linked ideologically to his other incarnation, the one “in the dress of white men” (91; ch. 5). In this way, Kim forms a tenable connection between the racial presence of the black subject, and the fluid subjectivity of the white Briton. Kim's body is a metonymy of this linkage. White identity is conceptually dependent upon intimate proximity with the racial subaltern for its existence. Kipling thus fashions a form of national hybridity constructed in cultural – and racial – terms in that he forges a definitive linkage between racialized, embodied forms of mixture and ideas of white Englishness. Kim's whiteness, in this way, is conceptually meaningless if we do not understand its antecedents in historical and literary examples of racial hybridity. Kim's subjectivity is created in an affective and physical network of raced and hybridized people, who inform his own fluid subjectivity. As such, Kim does not just look “like a half-caste,” but, construed within this broader racial genealogy, he also stands in for the half-caste figures described in Kipling's earlier works. That is, Kim is simultaneously one of the “True People of India” while he is also “English.” He thus occupies the conceptual threshold between these two subjectivities, and, in so doing, he enacts Kipling's polyvalent ideal of Britishness.

The ramifications of the fact that Kipling links the apparent antipodes of race and culture in Kim's body are significant. Indeed, Kim has been read as Kipling's most definitive and predictive enunciation of modern English identity. The novel has been said to exemplify “the painful predicament of our contemporary experience of cultural identity,” and Kipling's ideology is thus located “on the cusp between the two paradigms of cultural selfhood” (McBratney xix). That is to say that Kipling straddles the line between a “Victorian racial typography that saw identity as fixed and deterministic” and “a modern ethnography that viewed identity as slippery and self-fashioned” (McBratney xix). While many critics see Kipling ultimately moving towards this culturally “self-fashioned,” and less racially “fixed,” ontology, deemed “modern,” Kipling's refusal to abandon the visual, embodied markers of race and racial hybridity where Kim is concerned signals that a “modern” polyvalent subjectivity is linked deliberately and palpably to the racial Other. Thus, Kipling's vision of modern subjectivity is one that is predicated upon intimate contact with the colonial subject to such a degree that, in Kim, the “white” subject is dependent “upon subaltern culture for its [very] self-constitution” (Moore-Gilbert 123). In this way, “[whiteness] can . . . never be . . . originary or complete” (123). Indeed, Kim demonstrates that the “white” “English” subject is always already in contiguous, overlapping contact with the racialized body – and the psyche – of the Other.

In Kim, the national subject is unceasingly described using the language attending racial mixture through the text's depictions of the nearly “half-caste” Kim, and that Kipling should so closely connect his construction of the “English” subject with that of the non-white Other of empire is significant. While Kim and Kipling certainly gesture towards newer, mobile modalities of Western identity formation, this impetus towards fluid identity is always predicated upon immediate contact with the racial subaltern. The novel ends and begins evidencing this point, as the “burned black,” “English” Kim of the text's opening pages morphs into the half-chela, half-Sahib – yet neither – adolescent of Kim’s closing pages. Kipling, who “thematizes the limen” (Randall 16), leaves Kim ambiguous, and the boy remains between states of being. This discursive move reveals a model of Englishness defined by a continual state of reinvention, and this shifting national and cultural subjectivity is predicated upon physical and psychical contact with the racialized Other. The result is an ambiguous English character that, while fluid, is also riveted and dependent, at its very core, upon forms of racial difference. Indeed, this racial difference is imagined as a constitutive element of cultural mobility. Kim's subjectivity, in this way, is innately heterogeneous, and he cannot be unmixed, or homogenised in this respect. In this sense, to have “burned black” skin is to retain a tangible token of the profound searing of race and empire onto the psyche of the white British subject.

In conclusion, Kim underscores that the origins of early-twentieth ideas of white, national identity are complicated and heterogeneous. That Kipling should simultaneously assert that Kim is white and black, that Kim's identity is English but also like those of mixed-race subjects, seems antithetical. But if Kim appears racially inconstant, it is because he reflects accurately the overlapping genealogies that inform his identity. For one, Kim is part of an imperial narrative of power, where whiteness must be fluid and cease to resemble whiteness, paradoxically, for it to retain its pervasive presence in colonial settings. But also, the affective and physical connections between Britain and its dark subjects are of such emotive importance that they remain enshrined in Kim's body. In this way, Kim also signifies a suppressed, but significant, affective history of imperial racial mixture that his body comes to signify at the same moment that it represents white identity. These uneasily overlapped signifiers of whiteness and mixture, coupled with the author's refusal to resolve this paradox, signal a more capacious idea of white British identity than has been previously attributed to Kipling. For him, whiteness must cease to function as a racially pure ideal, and must, instead, form part of a continuum of racial performance. Thus when Kim wears the costume of white men, this is but one of the identities that he embodies as an English subject. Kim's ambivalent whiteness becomes one of many racial selves that form his newer British identity. This identity is conceptually hybridized and constructs itself from previous descriptions of raced hybridity. Kim is thus a narrative about the closely allied ideas of blackness, whiteness, and in-betweenness, which are tangibly linked to, and directly construct, Kim's British identity. Kim thus emerges as a “white boy . . . who is not a white boy,” since Kipling's imperial whiteness must be understood as being derived from a lineage of dark and miscegenated bodies that physically – and psychically – forge Kim.