Kim Reading Order

Kim (1901) by Rudyard Kipling is his masterpiece — the story of Kimball O'Hara (Kim), the orphaned Irish-Indian street boy of Lahore who becomes an agent in the 'Great Game' (the British-Russian intelligence competition for Central Asian influence) while also becoming the disciple of a Tibetan lama seeking a sacred river. The novel holds these two worlds — the espionage adventure and the spiritual quest — in deliberate tension, and Kim's freedom to inhabit both worlds (as Irish, as Indian, as spy, as disciple) without fully belonging to either is the novel's central concern. Kim is both the most vividly realized recreation of colonial India in English fiction and the most searching exploration of the divided identity that colonial rule produced — a book that Kipling's admirers and critics have argued over ever since Edward Said's reading of it in Culture and Imperialism (1993).