How we cite our quotes: (Chapter. Paragraph)
Quote #1
True, he knew the wonderful walled city of Lahore from the Delhi Gate to the outer Fort Ditch; was hand in glove with men who led lives stranger than anything Haroun al Raschid dreamed of; and he lived in a life wild as that of the Arabian Nights, but missionaries and secretaries of charitable societies could not see the beauty of it. His nickname through the wards was 'Little Friend of all the World'; and very often, being lithe and inconspicuous, he executed commissions by night on the crowded housetops for sleek and shiny young men of fashion. It was intrigue,—of course he knew that much, as he had known all evil since he could speak,—but what he loved was the game for its own sake—the stealthy prowl through the dark gullies and lanes, the crawl up a waterpipe, the sights and sounds of the women's world on the flat roofs, and the headlong flight from housetop to housetop under cover of the hot dark. (1.5)
We know from the first chapter of this book that Kim was basically bornto be a spy: he's only around thirteen or fourteen here, but he is already "[executing] commissions" to carry secret messages all over the city of Lahore (usually messages about or for ladies). And Kim isn't running these secret errands for money; he's in it because he loves "the game for its own sake."
It's probably a lucky thing that Kim enjoys sneaking around and running secret missions "for its own sake," since being a spy means by definition that he will never get the public recognition that a more fame-hungry kid might crave.
Quote #2
The lama, not so well used to trains as he had pretended, started as the 3.25 a.m. south-bound roared in. The sleepers sprang to life, and the station filled with clamour and shoutings, cries of water and sweetmeat vendors, shouts of native policemen, and shrill yells of women gathering up their baskets, their families, and their husbands.
'It is the train—only the te-rain. It will not come here. Wait!' Amazed at the lama's immense simplicity (he had handed him a small bag full of rupees), Kim asked and paid for a ticket to Umballa. A sleepy clerk grunted and flung out a ticket to the next station, just six miles distant.
'Nay,' said Kim, scanning it with a grin. 'This may serve for farmers, but I live in the city of Lahore. It was cleverly done, Babu. Now give the ticket to Umballa.'
The Babu scowled and dealt the proper ticket. (2.7-10)
(In this case, the Babu is not the character Hurree Chunder Babu. Here, the term "babu" just refers to this guy's job as a low-level clerk.)
The friendship between Kim and the lama includes an interesting role reversal right at the start: even though the lama is an elderly man and Kim is a boy, the lama is a total innocent and Kim is absolutely world wise. So the lama is a bit frightened by the train when it pulls into the station in the middle of the night, but Kim is so used to the noise and excitement of the station that he notices right away when the clerk tries to cheat him. Kim may be much younger than the lama, but he is also clearly the cunning one of the two.
Quote #3
'When all is ready, thy sons, doubt not, will be told. But it is a long road from thy sons to the man in whose hands these things lie.' Kim warmed to the game, for it reminded him of experiences in the letter-carrying line, when, for the sake of a few pice, he pretended to know more than he knew. But now he was playing for larger things—the sheer excitement and the sense of power. (3.67)
At this early point in the novel, Kim is starting to get excited by the Great Game. He's run this successful (but still unofficial) mission to Umballa on behalf of Mahbub Ali, and he has found out some cool stuff about troop movements to the North as a result.
But Kim isn't experienced or mature enough yet to translate that excitement into a sense of duty for the British Indian State. So when he meets up with the Old Man Who Fought in '57 and tells him what he overheard about a coming war with the Five Kings in the north, Kim feels a "sheer excitement and the sense of power" to be the one with such important news. As Kim grows up a bit, he learns that it is actually more cunning—and more important—to hang onto news like that until he can use it.
Quote #4
Kim hailed a sweeper, who promptly retorted with a piece of unnecessary insolence, in the natural belief that the European boy could not follow it. The low, quick answer undeceived him. Kim put his fettered soul into it, thankful for the late chance to abuse somebody in the tongue he knew best. 'And now, go to the nearest letter-writer in the bazar and tell him to come here. I would write a letter.' (6.24)
Have you ever had a chance to travel in a country where everyone speaks a language that you are just learning? While we think that this kind of traveling is a really great experience in general, we aren't actually bringing this up as a PSA for study abroad programs. We're asking because it's such a fantasy of second- or third-language learners everywhere to become super-fluent in whatever language you're studying—to be so fluent that, if you overhear someone saying something about you, you can just jump in and talk back to them in their own language.
And that is what Kim is doing here: he is all dressed up in his school uniform, looking like a regular British kid. This Indian street-sweeper just assumes that Kim won't understand the "unnecessary insolence" (in other words, the trash talk) of his reply, since the sweeper isn't speaking in English. But Kim does know what the sweeper says, and he answers back in the guy's own language.
Quote #5
'Ohe', Mahbub Ali,' he whispered, 'have a care!'
The horse was reined back almost on its haunches, and forced towards the culvert.
'Never again,' said Mahbub, 'will I take a shod horse for night-work. They pick up all the bones and nails in the city.' He stooped to lift its forefoot, and that brought his head within a foot of Kim's.
'Down—keep down,' he muttered. 'The night is full of eyes.'
'Two men wait thy coming behind the horse-trucks. They will shoot thee at thy lying down, because there is a price on thy head. I heard, sleeping near the horses.' (8.84-7)
One effect of the fact that this is a spy story is that you get the feeling that there is always someone watching, that someone is always planning to harm one of our characters. So, here, Kim stumbles on an assassination plot against Mahbub Ali more or less by chance; there is also a price on the Babu's head. And when Agent E23 stumbles into Kim's life, he is on the run from killers from the south of India.
Just as it is the job of these Secret Service agents to watch the people around them for signs of betrayal and intrigue, it is also the danger of their jobs that these agents are constantly under surveillance by potential enemies. Throughout this novel, Kipling implies a huge network of unseen allies and enemies not unlike contemporary ideas about both terrorism and guerilla warfare. In Kim, Kipling foresees a model of modern warfare that is not fought obviously and openly between states, but that is conducted secretly, through spying and secret agents.
Quote #6
'Never mind your partner. Where are your horse-trucks?'
'A little to this side of the farthest place where they make lamps for the trains.'—
'The signal-box! Yes.'
'And upon the rail nearest to the road upon the right-hand side—looking up the line thus. But as regards Lutuf Ullah—a tall man with a broken nose, and a Persian greyhound Aie!'
The boy had hurried off to wake up a young and enthusiastic policeman; for, as he said, the Railway had suffered much from depredations in the goods-yard. Mahbub Ali chuckled in his dyed beard.
'They will walk in their boots, making a noise, and then they will wonder why there are no fakirs. They are very clever boys—Barton Sahib and Young Sahib.' (8.106-11)
It's funny: for a book that is so committed to British administration of India, Kipling really doesn't seem to think much of British bureaucracy. Mahbub Ali wants to get the English to help him to get rid of these two assassins that Kim has spotted, so he makes up this whole story about looking for his partner Lutuf Ullah, while just happening to mention two guys lying in wait near his horse-trucks. He wants the English forces to think that they have gotten the idea to arrest these two men, because they will be more likely to help him if they think the idea is all theirs.
Still, even while this scene with Mahbub Ali's skillful manipulations pokes fun at the arrogance of these low-level British government employees ("Barton Sahib and Young Sahib"), they also successfully throw Mahbub Ali's two potential assassins in jail. Even when Kipling makes fun of the British Indian state, he still clearly believes that it functions pretty well, for the most part.
Quote #7
They heaped the tray again with odds and ends gathered from the shop, and even the kitchen, and every time the child won, till Kim marvelled.
'Bind my eyes—let me feel once with my fingers, and even then I will leave thee opened-eyed behind,' he challenged.
Kim stamped with vexation when the lad made his boast good.
'If it were men—or horses,' he said, 'I could do better. This playing with tweezers and knives and scissors is too little.'
'Learn first—teach later,' said Lurgan Sahib. 'Is he thy master?'
'Truly. But how is it done?'
'By doing it many times over till it is done perfectly—for it is worth doing.' (9.100-105)
The Jewel Game is one of the things the novel Kim is best known for: Lurgan shows Kim a group of about fifteen different jewels before covering them up and asking Kim to describe what he has seen. Kim isn't that good at the game to start with—the little Hindu boy totally schools Kim in their first few rounds—but practice really improves Kim's observational skills.
Quote #8
'It is more, chela. Thou hast loosed an Act upon the world, and as a stone thrown into a pool so spread the consequences thou canst not tell how far.'
This ignorance was well both for Kim's vanity and for the lama's peace of mind, when we think that there was then being handed in at Simla a code-wire reporting the arrival of E23 at Delhi, and, more important, the whereabouts of a letter he had been commissioned to—abstract. Incidentally, an over-zealous policeman had arrested, on charge of murder done in a far southern State, a horribly indignant Ajmir cotton-broker, who was explaining himself to a Mr Strickland on Delhi platform, while E23 was paddling through byways into the locked heart of Delhi city. In two hours several telegrams had reached the angry minister of a southern State reporting that all trace of a somewhat bruised Mahratta had been lost; and by the time the leisurely train halted at Saharunpore the last ripple of the stone Kim had helped to heave was lapping against the steps of a mosque in far-away Roum—where it disturbed a pious man at prayers. (12.34-5)
The lama sees Kim's bit of cunning in transforming Agent E23 into a Saddhu holy man and completely disapproves. While the lama admits that Kim's healing of the Punjabi farmer's son was a good deed, he thinks that Kim's behavior with E23 was just Kim showing off his skills. And since Kim can't really explain about being a spy to the lama, he just lets the lama think the worse of him (even though it hurts him to do so).
Still, while the lama makes some wrong assumptions about Kim's motivation in this scene, he does say something absolutely true: that Kim's cunning has "loosed an Act upon the world." Kim can't know the huge effects that his disguise for E23 have had on a range of other people trying hard to assassinate the poor man. Kipling suggests that there are these big networks of causes and consequences for all of the little deeds that Kim and his friends do as agents of the British Indian Secret Service. But the weird thing is that none of these agents will ever really see the big picture.
The only person in the book who might come close to seeing all of these larger patterns is Creighton—and the narrator himself, of course.
Quote #9
'See here the Hell appointed for avarice and greed. Flanked upon the one side by Desire and on the other by Weariness.' The lama warmed to his work, and one of the strangers sketched him in the quick-fading light.
'That is enough,' the man said at last brusquely. 'I cannot understand him, but I want that picture. He is a better artist than I. Ask him if he will sell it.'
'He says "No, sar,"' the Babu replied. The lama, of course, would no more have parted with his chart to a casual wayfarer than an archbishop would pawn the holy vessels of his cathedral. All Tibet is full of cheap reproductions of the Wheel; but the lama was an artist, as well as a wealthy Abbot in his own place. (13.59-61)
When Kim hears the lama discussing his illustration of the Great Wheel, he listens respectfully to what the lama has to say. By contrast, in this passage, we see this Russian agent insist on buying the lama's painting—he doesn't understand that the lama has drawn this design, not as a piece of art for sale, but as a teaching tool and as part of his faith. And the Russian refuses to listen to anyone, including the lama, when they try to tell him that the Great Wheel can't be bought for money.
This exchange is actually really important for showing what Kipling thinks of Britain's competition with other European powers for imperial domination of India. Here Kipling strongly implies that the British belong in India because they get it better than the Russians. Kim respects the lama, whereas the Russian agent tears his painting and then hits him in the face.
Quote #10
Up the valleys of Bushahr—the far-beholding eagles of the Himalayas swerve at his new blue-and-white gored umbrella—hurries a Bengali, once fat and well-looking, now lean and weather-worn. He has received the thanks of two foreigners of distinction, piloted not unskilfully to Mashobra tunnel, which leads to the great and gay capital of India. It was not his fault that, blanketed by wet mists, he conveyed them past the telegraph-station and European colony of Kotgarh. It was not his fault, but that of the Gods, of whom he discoursed so engagingly, that he led them into the borders of Nahan, where the Rahah of that State mistook them for deserting British soldiery. Hurree Babu explained the greatness and glory, in their own country, of his companions, till the drowsy kinglet smiled. He explained it to everyone who asked—many times—aloud—variously. He begged food, arranged accommodation, proved a skilful leech for an injury of the groin—such a blow as one may receive rolling down a rock-covered hillside in the dark—and in all things indispensable. The reason of his friendliness did him credit. With millions of fellow-serfs, he had learned to look upon Russia as the great deliverer from the North. (15.2)
Once the people of the Himalayas turn against the two Russian agents, the Babu doesn't just let them run away. He sticks by them, pretending to be a helpful and loyal guide looking "upon Russia as the great deliverer from the North." But of course, what the Babu is really doing is leading them on a long, roundabout, inconvenient road out of the mountains. This passage indicates how clever the Babu truly is (even though the book often makes fun of him), but also demonstrates how stupid the Russian agents are.