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...that "scholars of Rudyard Kipling's work may recall his notorious pronouncements on the impossibility of "White" and "Black" living together in harmony, but they find it difficult to assess why Kipling's Kim (1901) strangely vacillates between disbanding and reinvoking racial hierarchies" (15). I propose the Tibetan lama and his Buddhist discourse as an alternative venue to further speculate on this still bewildering ambivalence. In particular, I re-read the lama figure as a strangely disquieting "foreign" guest, arguing that his apparently domesticated presence in the empire's house of fiction in fact subtly unsettles the pleasure ground of colonialist adventuring. My focal point would be a chain of some counter-hegemonic side effects of the other knowledge, configuring the Buddhist subtext of the novel as a potentially dangerous supplement to the master discourse of the imperial romance. (1)
Kim begins with the eponymous boy's encounter with a Tibetan lama and ends with the lama's extended speech on his Enlightenment. It interweaves Kim's adventure with the lama's spiritual quest, as the boy joins the monk as his chela and at the same time begins to be trained as a spy-surveyor for the British Secret Service. What difference, then, does it make that Kipling selected a Tibetan lama and his spiritual quest as a sort of foil to the eponymous boy's adventure among other possible options? One immediate answer to be sure lies in the very core of the adventure plot, namely the Great Game. As the imperial rivalry between Britain and Russia intensified on the British Indian border, Tibet came to have a great strategic significance particularly after the two Afghan wars (2) It is fascinating, in this regard, to see the lama character in the novel resonate with some historical lamas deeply involved in the geopolitics of the Game. A man named Ngawang Dorieff, for instance, acted as Dalai Lama's envoy to the Russian Czar to seek Russia's protection against the imminent British invasion. Russia, in turn, attempted to attract Tibet to its side by means of Dorieff, whose complete mastery of Tibetan Buddhism enabled him to assume the political mission. (3) Seen against this backdrop of the Russo-Tibet diplomatic contact, the Russian agent in Kim is exorbitantly ignorant of Tibet. He thinks that the lama is "no more than an unclean old man haggling over a dirty piece of paper" whereas the monk is a sort of demigod to the surrounding Buddhist coolies (202). When the lama refuses to sell his drawing of the Wheel, the agent further commits a blasphemy by tearing the drawing and striking the monk full on the face. By contrast, Kim and Hurree make the best use of the local Buddhist coolies' anger against the Russian agent, which indicates that their knowledge of the lama's power enables them to defeat Russia. Kipling could have made Kim steal into the surveyor's tent or wheedle the desired documents out of them. By making the Russian commit such a clueless bungle, however, Kipling attributes a cross-cultural understanding only to the British, highlighting Britain's epistemic supremacy and its unique stance as a benevolent empire. In this way, Kipling succeeds, if only fictionally, in building an alliance between Britain and Tibet against Russia. This imaginary construction sounds extremely ironic when we consider the fact that Tibet was invaded in 1904 by Britain in an expedition that "ended up massacring an army of poorly armed Buddhist monks" (Kling 303).
Closely related to the Teshoo Lama in Kim, another historical lama Ugyen Gyatso deserves our notice as well. According to The Encyclopedia Britannica of 1910 Gyatso was trained as a native surveyor, and was a British deputy at his monastery when he helped British surveyors penetrate Tibet (924). In 1879, with Gyatso's help, the Bengali schoolmaster Sarat Chandra Das received permission from the local authorities to visit the monastery and joined the survey team. We may draw an intriguing parallel between these two men and Kipling's characters. If Hurree Babu echoes Sarat Chandra Das, Kim and the lama share Gyatso's role as a spy-lama. By setting up a separate lama figure who facilitates Britain's triumph in the Game, we can notice that Kipling considerably reduces the potential risk of Kim's conversion to Buddhism, whether or not he was actually aware of this correlation. (4) In addition, the same split allows the Teshoo Lama in the novel to remain almost completely ignorant of the political actualities of his own country, which intensifies the impression that he is a sort of apolitical, timeless Buddhist monk, and makes it possible for the British surveillance agency to take advantage of the lama's spiritual quest as a handy foil to its espionage activities.
The historical lamas' resonance thus helps us notice the paradoxical demand on Kipling's lama that he should be both empowered and dis-empowered at the same time. As Tibetan lamas actually do, he needs to have political power over the local Tibetans so that the British Empire can use him to beat Russia in the Game. Simultaneously, however, he should be dis-empowered in the sense that he seems to be entirely ignorant of the British imperial maneuvers, and therefore, would never be capable of an intervention. I accentuate that Kim addresses this paradoxical demand by tapping into the colonial discursive field, in particular, the late-Victorian construction of Buddhism. While the Teshoo Lama is equipped with a number of apparatus for reality effects, he embodies what late-Victorian Orientalists have inscribed as "Buddhism." (5) One conspicuous aspect is that the lama tends to avoid all worldly things in accordance with his Buddhist principles. Insofar as we take this quietist attitude at face value, I contend that we cannot but implicitly collaborate with the colonialist discourse that underpins the Buddhist subtext in Kim. The two aforementioned historical lamas, however, allow us to glimpse a crucial interstice in the representational facade of the character, namely the fact that a Tibetan lama cannot not know the actual contingencies of his country to such a remarkable extent as the lama in Kim. Our re-reading of the character thus begins with this proposition that Kipling's lama figure impinges on the "Victorian creation of an ideal textual Buddhism," which had a crucial function in disapproving the contemporary Buddhist practices in the East as degenerated derivatives of its pure ideal version. (6)
As is widely known, Buddhism "hit" Britain from around the 1860s through the last decades of the century, as a major part of the various religious and occult elements flowing into the heart of the empire from all over the world. (7) A significant number of Victorians regarded Buddhism as a powerful competitor to Christianity, and therefore, as a sort of cultural invasion from the East. Simultaneously, they conceived the moral demand of Buddhism to be incompatible with the ideal of material progress, the foundational value of Western capitalism. This fundamental disparity resulted in the Victorian invention of Buddhism as a religion based on extreme mortification and denial of desire. This deep impact of Buddhism in Britain at the turn-of-the-century is indispensable in reading Kim. In terms of readership, it signals that Kipling's target audience was eager to consume narratives of Buddhist terminologies, mantra, exotic priests and so on. Further, Kim reflects a new level of understanding of the Eastern religion in the age when even a blunt Christian depreciation of Buddhist doctrines was beginning to register a considerable extent of knowledge. This fervent interest, in turn, engendered a new awareness and fear of the dangerous possibility that Buddhism might seriously undermine Christianity. Locating Kipling's inscription of Buddhism in Kim within this larger cultural purview of the British Empire, my reading in the following pages seeks to elucidate some of the deeply ambivalent significations of the "other knowledge" beneath the seemingly unproblematic celebration of the Raj.
II "To those who follow the Way there is neither black nor white": The Buddhist Sub-Text and the Racial Hierarchy
When Kim gladly departs from St. Xavier to re-join the lama on a half-year's leave granted to him by Colonel Creighton so that he can be "de-Englishized," the boy confronts a devastating sense of self-estrangement out of nowhere, not being able to find any reassuring answer to the question: "who is Kim-Kim-Kim?" (156). A passing Hindu bairagi (holy man) intuits the nature of Kim's agony, and he says: "Thou wast wondering there...
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