Peter Scotchmer dives into two great reads- Saroo Brierley’s contemporary true story ‘Lion’ and Rudyard Kipling’s classic novel ‘Kim’ during his own travels through the Indian subcontinent.
While in India on family business, I picked up two outstanding books about the sub-continent which is the world’s second most populous state and democracy. This was from the impressively comprehensive bookstore of Bahri and Sons in the Saket district of Delhi.
Both books are set in India, albeit more than a century apart: the first, Lion,is a contemporary true story of Saroo Brierley’s, its author’s, difficult childhood in India and later life in Australia, while the other, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, is a fictional story of the life of an orphan boy during the heyday of the British Raj in India, yet both books have more in common than such a summary might suggest. Each book is concerned with its central character’s search for identity. Both Saroo and Kim are by circumstance the products of both eastern and western culture, and learn to come to terms with this mixed inheritance. Both Kim and Saroo are born into extreme poverty, and must in childhood rely upon their wits to survive. Both books are quest narratives. Lion is a search for its narrator’s roots in a faraway country, while Kim is a search for purpose and enlightenment on a journey in India itself. In other respects, the two accounts are quite different. Lion, first published as A Long Way Home in 2013, is a modern story by a writer now in his thirties. It is a riveting read not unlike that of the successful and satisfying detective story it resembles, while Kim makes greater demands on the modern reader’s patience and attention, as it is in large measure a detailed examination of a complex and ancient civilization then ruled over by Queen Victoria. Rudyard Kipling won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, six years after the publication of Kim, which is considered his masterpiece. He died in 1936, and is buried in Westminster Abbey.
Saroo’s Moslem father abandons his Hindu mother for another woman, leaving her to bring up their four children in abject rural poverty by herself. Saroo’s story begins when he makes the mistake of falling asleep at the age of five in an unattended train standing in a station near his home with its doors open in the evening to help dissipate the heat built up inside during the day.
When he awakens, Saroo finds himself locked in the carriage until it reaches its destination many hundreds of kilometers from home in the terminus at Howrah Station in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). Lost, hungry, helpless, unable to read or make himself understood to the indifferent crowds in a strange city to whom he is merely one of the 80,000 children who go missing in India every year, he does not know how to appeal to authority for help, does not know where home is, and is lucky to escape a kidnapping attempt. He is eventually adopted from an orphanage by a childless Australian couple who bring him up with love and compassion, for which he is deeply grateful, in Hobart, Tasmania. Nevertheless, he needs to know who he is, where he has come from, and whether his mother, brothers and sister are still alive. His search for his roots takes the form of painstaking, even obsessive, enquiry and research, and its ultimate success is due largely to advances in Google Earth technology. The book’s final chapters testify to the determination of the human spirit to overcome adversity, and the ending, with the author’s admission that he is “profoundly humbled” by the happy reunion with his family after a separation of 25 years, is deeply moving. It is then that Saroo discovers his real name is ‘Sheru,’ or ‘Lion’. In 2016, the book was made into an equally satisfying film starring Dev Patel.
Kim is a story born of its author’s deep love for, and understanding of, the land of his birth. Kipling was born in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) in 1865, the son of a British expatriate. The novel is often called a “picaresque spy story,” as its plot is episodic, like that of Don Quixote, with unconnected self-contained episodes creating a sense of plotlessness. In fact, in Kim the sequence of events that outline the plot is subordinated to rich characterization and leisurely descriptions of landscapes and native customs which can seem pointless digressions to the impatient modern reader. Kim’s story begins with his decision to accompany his friend and mentor, an elderly Tibetan lama on a spiritual mission. The lama, whom Kim deeply respects, has come down from the mountains to find a sacred river to free himself from the ‘Wheel of Things,’ the Buddhist belief that all humanity is caught up in an unending cycle of death and rebirth. Kim is free to wander with him: tanned by the sun, he looks like a native, but is the orphaned son of an Irish soldier and a poor white mother, and is thus technically British. A shrewd judge of character and imperturbably good-humoured, he has eked out a precarious hand-to-mouth existence in the slums of Lahore by artful dissembling, a glib tongue, a talent for disguise, and cunning sleight of hand. Although at first he denies it, he is, like Saroo above, caught between two cultures. When Kim’s friend the Arab horse-dealer Mahbub Ali asks him “Who are thy people?” Kim answers “This great and beautiful land.” Later, he hotly denies that he is Kimball O’Hara: “I am not a sahib!” Yet deep within himself, he ponders the existential question, “Who is Kim…Kim…Kim?” When the opportunity arises to abandon the lama and avail himself of the opportunity to obtain a private British education free of charge, he embraces it. When he has acquitted himself well there, he is successfully employed by agents of the Crown as a spy in what Kipling calls ‘the great game’ played between two great imperial powers: Britain and Russia, the latter mistakenly believed at the time to have designs on India, the ‘jewel in Queen Victoria’s crown.’ All of Kim’s past experience qualifies him as the master spy he becomes, and, in the end, he rejoins the lama to share in his rejoicing at a personal discovery.
How relevant is Kipling’s story today? This is a fair question, and one which cannot be dismissed merely by an appeal to the authority of the past. It is a canonical work nevertheless, and a reward, as most classics are, to those with the persistence and imaginative wisdom to see it as more than a product of the past, as Shakespeare’s works are, but also as a novel blessed by a great all-embracing romantic sweep containing the majesty of deeply poetic language. The sympathetic reader can recognize Kim as a love letter to India, and a tribute to the industriousness, respect for learning, family and the elderly, to the persistence, the stoicism born of a trusting fatalism, and the deep faith and vitality of the Indian people themselves, in all of their magnificent variety.
“Native police,” says Kipling in Kim, “mean extortion to the native all India over.” A devout Hindu guide I spoke to in Delhi, told me recently, “Centuries of oppression by Moghul invaders are not as bad as the 70 years of corruption done by our corrupt politicians since independence.” Minutes later, a policeman stopped the vehicle in which we were travelling. The policeman, whose colleague wore a bandanna across her face to protect her identity, gave our driver a ticket, which my wife photographed. The driver’s offences are alleged to have been “1. Without rear reflector” and “2. Without Knowledge of Traffic Rule.” No specific details are given. The reflectors were intact. No traffic rules were broken. The fine is 500 rupees. There is no appeal. Our careful driver shrugged philosophically. It has happened to him several times. What can you do but pay? What, indeed?
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Contributed by
Peter Scotchmer (Ottawa)
