Alan Sandison notes in his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Kim that ‘As a physical being, Kim remains a rather shadowy figure’. One of the shadowier aspects of Kipling’s young hero is his precise age during the first half of the narrative – the period of his Indian liberty before he is (reluctantly) made a ‘Sahib’. The opening encounter finds Kim – indistinguishable from Hindu lads of his age – playing ‘King of the Castle’ astride the great gun Zam-Zammah (a symbol of the mastery of the Punjab, as Sandison points out). ‘King of the Castle’ is, of course, child’s play. The brief description which Kipling gives of the game suggests the players are very childish indeed:
‘Off! Off! Let me up!’ cried Abdullah, climbing up Zam-Zammah’s wheel.
‘Thy father was a pastry-cook, Thy mother stole the ghi,’ sang Kim. ‘All Mussalmans fell off Zam-Zammah long ago!’
‘Let me up!’ shrilled little Chota Lal in his gilt-embroidered cap. His father was worth perhaps half a million sterling, but India is the only democratic land in the world.
‘The Hindus fell off Zam-Zammah too. The Mussalmans pushed them off. Thy father was a pastry cook—’ (Chapter 1)
At this point, Kim has his first astonishing sight of the Lama, whose chela, or guide, he is to become.
In passing we are given the bare details of Kim’s parentage. His father was a young colour-sergeant in the Mavericks, an Irish regiment. Kimball O’Hara married a nursemaid in a Colonel’s family (given the shortage of eligible young European women in India, Sergeant O’Hara must have been a dashing fellow). After marriage, he resigned the service and took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi railway. A child arrived soon after and soon after that Annie O’Hara died of cholera in Ferozepore. The husband, left with a ‘keen three-year-old baby’, went to the bad, took to opium, and died. From his very imperfect English (he thinks, for example, that his father served in an ‘Eyerishti’ regiment, Ch. 5), Kim must have been left a young orphan. He has been brought up by a lady of easy virtue in the bazaar.
The keynote in early descriptions of Kim, ‘the little friend of the world’, is the incantatory use of the term ‘little’. Take, for example, the early instance of his street-wise resourcefulness in kicking away the bull (a sacred beast to Hindus) from the stall of the vegetable seller, thus ensuring a charitable donation of food for the Lama:
The huge, mouse-coloured Brahmini bull of the ward was shouldering his way through the many-coloured crowd, a stolen plantain hanging out of his mouth. He headed straight for the shop, well knowing his privileges as a sacred beast, lowered his head, and puffed heavily along the line of baskets ere making his choice. Up flew Kim’s hard little heel and caught him on his moist blue nose. He snorted indignantly, and walked away across the tram rails, his hump quivering with rage. (Ch. 1)
‘Hard little heel’ suggests a hard little fellow. When he falls in with the Mavericks, the chaplain (seizing on the charm around his neck which contains his birth certificate) tells Kim: ‘Little boys who steal are beaten. You know that?’ (Ch. 5). A couple of pages on, in the same vein, the narrative observes that ‘small boys who prowl about camps are generally turned out after a whipping. But [Kim] received no stripes’. On the next page he is ‘a phenomenal little liar’ and a ‘little imp’ and a ‘little limb of Satan’.
Answering from their general impressions, most readers would see Kim as somewhere between nine and twelve. There is some confirmation of this when we are told that ‘Kim had many dealings with Mahbub in his little life, – especially between his tenth and his thirteenth year’ (Ch. 1; that is, between the ages of nine and twelve). When Kim falls into the hands of his father’s regiment, it is clear that he is too ‘little’ to be recruited as a drummer-boy – young soldiers who are fourteen and up. One (later discarded) plan is to send the little waif ‘to the Military Orphanage at Sanawar where the regiment would keep you till you were old enough to enlist’ (Ch. 6). Kim could, of course, enlist on his fourteenth birthday, as have other drummer-boys in the regiment. As the son of a not very illustrious colour-sergeant, this would seem quite appropriate.
It is fair to say that most readers see the Kim of Kipling’s early chapters as a twelve-year-old urchin, rather young and small for his years. It is partly because he is so ‘little’ that the Mavericks adopt him as a mascot, to be treated with unusual care. Hollywood, which has to be definite about such things, made Kim the same very juvenile age as Sabu the Elephant boy, or ‘Boy’ in the Tarzan films, in the 1950 film (starring Errol Flynn as Mahbub, and the child-star Dean Stockwell as Kim).
Perplexingly, a different calculus of Kim’s age emerges in the Maverick scenes – one which would make him significantly older. On the face of it, one can see why this happens. It is specifically stated in the first chapter that Sergeant Kimball O’Hara was demobilized from his regiment, which duly ‘went home without him’ (Ch. 1). Kim cannot have been born long after – at most a couple of years and conceivably less. What this means is that the Mavericks have been posted home from India to Ireland, and then posted out again. Moving a thousand men and all their matériel twice across the globe is no small thing, even for the rulers of the British Empire, and two such tours of duty in peacetime could not possibly have taken place without an interval of many years, and possibly decades. Father Victor, who was evidently a young Catholic chaplain on the earlier Indian posting, recalls ‘I saw Kimball married myself to Annie Shott’ (Ch. 5). The impression the reader gets is that it happened a long time ago.
By this second chronological scheme, Kim is something over fourteen – on the brink of adolescence. It is, of course, hard to square this with his playing ‘King of the Castle’ and flashing his ‘hard little heel’ at the Brahminical bull. But, by reference to specific date-markers in the book, we can calculate that Kim spends something under three years at St Xavier’s, where he makes remarkable progress:
It is written in the books of St Xavier in Partibus that a report of Kim’s progress was forwarded at the end of each term to Colonel Creighton and to Father Victor, from whose hands duly came the money for his schooling. It is further recorded in the same books that he showed a great aptitude for mathematical studies as well as map-making, and carried away a prize (The Life of Lord Lawrence, tree-calf, two vols., nine rupees, eight annas) for proficiency therein; and the same term played in St Xavier’s eleven against the Allyghur Mohammedan College, his age being fourteen years and ten months … Kim seems to have passed an examination in elementary surveying ‘with great credit’, his age being fifteen years and eight months. From this date the record is silent. His name does not appear in the year’s batch of those who entered for the subordinate Survey of India, but against it stands the words, ‘removed on appointment.’
Several times in those three years, cast up at the Temple of the Tirthankers in Benares the lama, a little thinner and a shade yellower, if that were possible, but gentle and untainted as ever. (Ch. 9)
It is earlier indicated that graduation from the school will happen when Kim is seventeen, which indicates that he enters at fourteen, or something over.
The cricket-playing Kim seems significantly older than the King-of the-Castle-playing Kim of eight months earlier (‘little Kim’, as we may call him). Possibly, as young boys do, Kim had his growing spurt at this period, and started on the dramatic physical changes and enlargements involved in puberty.1 What seems more likely is that Kipling has two Kims in his mind. One, ‘little Kim’, corresponds to the ‘Indian’ Rudyard, who left India at the age of six, and who idealized his early experience of the subcontinent in Kim’s early escapades in the bazaar. Kipling saw this early segment of his life as immensely important. He begins his autobiography, Something of Myself, with the statement: ‘Give me the first six years of a child’s life, and you can have the rest.’2 That formative phase of his life would seem to be memorialized in the early chapters of Kim, and Kim is correspondingly infantile.
The other Kim corresponds to the pubescent Kipling who was enrolled at the age of thirteen in the United Services College at Westward Ho! in Devon (an institution with clear similarities to St Xavier’s – both institutions train English boys for the colonial service). One Kim is a diminutive urchin, the other a coltish schoolboy. A third, and more stable Kim, the adolescent on the verge of manhood, dominates the second half of the novel. How old is Kim? It depends on the angle.
1. In Kipling’s case, puberty did not bring any great change in his stature. As Kingsley Amis notes: ‘Physically, Rudyard Kipling was a small man’ and never exceeded five feet six inches in height. See Kingsley Amis, Rudyard Kipling and his World (London, 1975), 9.
2. Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself (New York, 1937), 3.