Recasting India's Organicism in Rudyard Kipling's Kim

This paper draws upon the influential nineteenth-century metaphor of society as an organic body to argue that Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim buttresses the British Raj's power by obscuring the true essence of that power's origins. The novel exploits a fundamental paradox when it portrays institutions like the caste system as both natural and artificial in character. As a result of their ambiguity, these institutions evade categorization even while they empower British officials to categorize India's subjects. In this context, Kim's apparently naive faith in organic theory emerges as a calculated ploy both to manipulate and manufacture what it means to be authentically Indian. In turn, this ploy enables the novel to legitimize the Raj's rule in two contradictory ways. On the one hand, Kim suggests that Britain passively respects the harmony that India's communities supposedly exhibit by their very nature. On the other hand, the novel shows that Britain actively enforces harmony in India by artificially imposing boundaries between different communities imagined to be naturally hostile to each other. Ultimately, Kipling's novel seeks to justify the presence of a regulative European power in the subcontinent by appealing simultaneously to the natural and artificial qualities of India's social landscape. In doing so, Kim reveals the so-called facts of nature to be protean fabrications, and it bolsters the Raj's hegemony by means of a distinctively unnatural organicism.