Orientalist and colonialist perspectives on the representation of the female in Kipling’s Kim

Abstract

The depiction of women has been pivotal in the Orientalist discourse of representation which has frequently been keen on inculcating in readers certain concepts and views of Oriental women, thus maintaining and expanding the Orientalist agenda. Rudyard Kipling’s Kim is no exception, even if it is predominantly a male novel as posited by a number of critics. This paper argues that some critical views on this issue are on the whole sketchy when it comes to this novel in particular. Drawing heavily upon his immediate and extensive knowledge of India, as well as on the enormous Orientalist chronicles, Kipling succeeds in creating an artistic masterpiece which offers a many-sided negative imagery of females whose echoes still resound in today’s media. Kim’s focus of representation remains largely concerned with the female status in the Orient socially, ideologically, mentally, and physically. Together, these well-knit dimensions, in addition to other elements, construct a picture that reinforces colonial aspirations. Re-considering the intricate threads and sophisticated processes of Orientalism depending on the contribution of critics like Edward Said and others in works such as Kim is likely to help today’s readers to better understand forms of cultural denigration and appropriation diffused purposefully by hegemonic actors in various media.

Keywords:

• Colonialism
• Eastern woman role
• Orientalism
• Oriental female representation
• Oriental male oppression

1. Introduction

One of the most important issues that has been dealt with, by both Orientalism and imperialism alike, is the issue of women in the East. The European mindset has been affected in this regard by the descriptions of the Orientalist legacy that are cut out of their appropriate context and placed in other contexts. The result is a distorted picture of the female status in the Orient. As Rana Kabbani puts it, “Europe`s feelings about Oriental women were always ambivalent ones. They fluctuated between desire, pity, contempt and outrage” (Kabbani, 1994, p. 26). Such an issue has recently become influential in the media especially after September 11, the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ascendancy of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe, events pertinent to terrorism, and Islamophobia, in the aftermath of the so-called “Arab Spring”, in addition to the continuous conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, Pakistan and India, Iran and the Arab world, as well as the persecution of Rohingya people by the authorities of Myanmar, etc. It is clear that the persistent negative images of Orientals given by the media echoed those same pictures that have been fabricated or, as argued by Edward Said, “made and remade countless times”, by Orientalist and imperialist discourses throughout centuries (Said, 1978, p. xlv). Within this frame, the representation of Oriental females has been a recurring theme in the works of numerous writers and poets who have sought to maintain and perpetuate such distorted images of women. Unfortunately, old Orientalist clichés and stereotypes are still rampant in the twenty-first century. Decades of globalization, technological advancement especially with mass media, and postcolonial theory have had little or no impact at all on the Orientalist world views. As argued by Said, the “binary typology of advanced and backward (or subject) races, cultures, and societies” has been maintained by latent and manifest forms of Orientalism until this era of postcoloniality, promoting and legitimizing new imperialist interventions (p. 206).

Orientalist concepts of female Otherness, in particular, have been able to travel through history and geography regardless of boundaries. In addition to their groundless horrendous descriptions, they insistently keep calling for helping those oppressed, as described for instance in Aeschylus’s play The Persians, in the grieving Asiatic women. From generation to generation, as E. Said resourcefully demonstrates in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, these ideas have been systematically spread until the era of Western colonialism. A number of Orientalists such as Samuel M. Zwemer¹ and authors such as Rudyard Kipling in his poem “The White Man’s Burden” followed on their predecessors’ footsteps by spreading such negative images, as exemplified by the recent images of Bibi Aysha, an Afghan woman brutally punished by local individuals, and whose picture was portrayed on the August 2010 cover of Time magazine (Stengel, 2010) without even pointing to the fact that this has nothing to do with Islam. Throughout that history of image-deformation, Kipling and his fellow Orientalists remain essential figures whose legacy needs to be scrutinized and deconstructed. The same can be said about the Hindu tradition of sati, or widow-burning, discussed by and commented by Gayatri Spivak in her “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak, 1988, pp. 298–309), which is not justified by Hinduism and used to be a social act in its origin and practice that was abolished since the early nineteenth century. In both cases, women must be saved from the brutality of the communities. In other words, the same misconceptions and normative assumptions commonly held nowadays by some Western actors originated a long time ago and have continued to exert a strong influence on the Western mindset. According to Christel Gärtner, empirical studies in several European countries show that Muslims are still associated with intolerance, misogyny, and violence due to widespread and old-established traps of secularist, culturalist, and essentialist concepts which should be problematized (Gärtner, 2021, p. 89). This is further stressed by Sameha Alghamdi who says that colonial orientalist representations of Eastern women that constructed them as oppressed, exotic, and disdained within their own culture are amplified and diffused (Alghamdi, 2020, pp. 84–85). Colonialist narratives have for centuries been pouring from the immense Orientalist treasure trove of stereotypes and generalizations about cultures which, as Lila Abu-Lughod explains, prevents us from appreciating or even from accounting for people’s experiences within their local contexts (Abu-Lughod, 2013, p. 6). Thus, discourses of knowledge about the Other(s) are created or recalled and fixed. They are not freely produced and impartially used, which establishes and perpetuates an epistemic dichotomy between the Orient and the Occident and holds the two in a deeply antithetical relationship. This is best shown by Michel Foucault when he writes,

In every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality. (Foucault, 1981, p. 52)

This can be said about the white civilizing mission upheld by Kipling and others. Revisiting works which largely reiterate such Orientalist views and representations like Kim is therefore essential because, as Said puts it,

We live … in a world not only of commodities but also of representation, and representations-their production, circulation, history, and interpretation-are the very element of culture. In much recent theory the problem of representation is deemed to be central, yet rarely is it put in its full political context, a context that is primarily imperial. (Said, 1994, p. 66)

An imperial othering, as Vishal Thomas says, persists in Kim as an influence and aftermath of the British colonial rule in India, which effectively informs the Occidental construction of the Orient in various ways including textual and visual representations until the present (Thomas, 2022, p. 30). A hegemonic Western discourse, as Jukka Jouhki explains, is thus sustained by that Indo-Orientalist essentialism (Jouhki, 2006, p. 2). As maintained by Sameha Alghamdi, Orientalism as a set of epistemologies, approaches, and modes of knowledge production is not just an archive; but rather it is still alive and influential in today’s world (Alghamdi, 2020, p. ii). Not only would it help contemporary readers trace the sources of biased accusations and allegations against the Other(s), but also enable them to understand that the deformed images of the other(s) circulated and recirculated every now and then, are but older forms of misrepresentation, of discourses of hegemony rehearsed, re-worded, and re-molded under modern garb.

2. Representation of females in Kim: basic view

Rudyard Kipling, as it shall be seen, also labored under that influence even if he had lived in India for a long period of time. There have been numerous studies discussing Kipling’s representation of females in his works, however few of them have presented a thorough and comprehensive study of the females in Kim solely due to their minor roles and passing presence. In spite of the fact that portrayal of female characters is brief in this novel, it is very significant, and its connotations are worthy of attention in a dedicated detailed article. Kim, argues Ahmad Abu Baker, “contains an embedded colonial discourse” promoting the ideals of the British empire (Abu Baker, 2009, p. 101, 83). In this novel, it can be shown that the author tries to amplify the Orient’s defects for the sake of justification of colonization. His patently anthropological and ethnographical portrayal of the defective female picture in Kim, which incidentally is rarely analyzed,² can be seen from two angles: a) first, he shows her role, function, ideology and status in the Oriental community, and b) second, he tries to draw a clear physical description of that female. The second endeavour, of course, supports and complements the first. This leads him to treat women as if he were dealing with a text, criticizing its content and form. It can be argued that women in Kim are repressed ideologically, mentally, and physically. By examining Kipling’s novel from this perspective, one can only agree with Richard King’s words,³ that:

The possibility of a link between feminist critiques of Western patriarchal culture and postcolonial critiques of Western hegemony opens up, since the colonial subjects of India and Africa have both been described in terms of the prevailing feminine stereotypes of the day. (King, 1999, p. 114)

In addition to that, it is noticeable that most of the novel’s characters, especially the main ones, who help trigger the chain of events are male, which may be seen as a signal meant by Kipling to remind the reader of the status of women in the East. What is more important in this context is that Kipling does not show any evidence of female struggle against colonization; rather showing complicity and harmony between both.

3. Females in Kim Depicted as subordinate to men

Throughout the novel, women are subservient to men. With the presentation of women in the Orient, he also makes it increasingly difficult for his readers to drift away from thinking and imagining the East as a passive subservient woman, as this will be seen later. The depiction of the female role and function in the East adds to the misleading realism of a work which is a re-presentation of the Orient rather than a representation properly speaking: “the narrative of the voyage is not and cannot be a direct transcription of the reality seen by the enunciating subject, but a re-writing of the Father’s text from which he derives his authority” (Behdad, 1990, p. 43).,⁴ Within this old-fashioned Orientalist discourse, Kipling draws his perspective of the female image. According to him, the female role is imposed on her by the dominant male (who is served in Kim by the female characters to a greater extent than the male ones). It is even “naturalized” by the characters’ dialogues that emphasize the fact that a female’s role is to serve males: “‘But that I am a little pressed with the care of the homestead I would take palanquin … I will give orders for provision. A servant to set you forth upon your journey? No … Then I will at least cook ye good food’” (Kipling, 1901, p. 276)., She assigns her own task in the first and last statements, and in the middle one she asserts that all that she does is in the service of males either inside or outside the household. These statements also point to the conservatism of the Oriental female in the sense that she is confined within the limits of the home, unlike men. This may shed light on the idea concealed in the first statement. Women’s domestic role is also highlighted on other occasions such as when the Lama tells Kim: “‘We will go to the woman from Kulu. She shall acquire merit in housing us’” (p. 321). Women’s role is even articulated by men in terms of blunt generalizations that indicate the essence of the Eastern males’ oppressive view of women as conveyed in the laconic but telling statement: “‘But all women can cook tarkeean,’” (p. 247). Moreover, Kipling did not forget to ornament the Oriental woman’s role by assimilating it to an object which is predestined to keep performing its task as long as it lives. He likens her role to the role of “mother earth” twice in the novel (p. 332). This is very significant in the Orientalist context of this work. It asserts that women’s role is to serve men forever, and even if men try to do them some good, they do it to perpetuate their role in serving men. Linked to this is the idea that since women are predestined to serve men, their way of thinking will be in line with that of their male masters or even somewhat worse.

4. Irrationality of females in Kim

Similarly to all the other characters, women are depicted in a way that fits with mainstream Oriental culture which is being undermined by Kipling in the novel. The most important ideological feature of Eastern women in Kim is that they believe wholeheartedly in the superstitious power of religion more than all other Oriental figures. In one ironical remark, the woman from Kulu issues a shocking statement in a conversation with the Lama that his charms “‘ … are better than ten thousand doctors.’ ‘I say, if they comfort thee, I who was Abbot of Such-zen, will make as many as thou mayest desire … ’” (p. 323). In the Lama’s sentence, she appears as more zealous than he is. The woman prefers the charms of the “Holy Men” to the empirical science of medicine, a recurrent motif, in all her interactions with the Lama. Incidentally, she also insists on the Lama to cure her child with his charms. This reminds us of the Punjab farmer whom Kim encounters in Benares as he looks for a magical power to cure his sick son who, ironically is treated by Kim himself. As the writer makes use of “the compare and contrast technique” all over the novel, here too he uses it to add to Kim‘s sarcasm. To a greater extent Kipling satirizes the women with this comparison technique. When she complains from her son’s sickness, her old servant articulates the cause of his sickness by saying: “‘This house is a cattle-pound, as it were, for all charlatans and—priests. Let the boy stop eating mangoes…but who can argue with a grandmother?’” (p. 265). In one sentence, Kipling expresses many things in this regard. First, the one who discovers why the boy has got sick is an “aged servant”, who is from the Lama’s party class, compared with Kim, who has discovered the sickness of the Punjab farmer’s son and is from Creighton’s party class. Second, the cause of the boy’s sickness is rather simple, in comparison with malaria, which is far more serious, that has struck the Punjab farmer’s son. Third, although the boy’s illness is no cause for worry, no one can argue with, let alone, convince the lady of it. Whence this female inability for logical, rational thinking and her obsession with supernaturalism which impedes the enhancement of her mental skills and demonstrate her inferiority to the Oriental male. Fourth, having an old native servant express such a statement about a grown-up lady undermines the intellectual status of both and grants it more credibility. Due to their extreme belief in Oriental metaphysics, women have become inflicted with a kind of inferiority complex which hinders the development of their ideology; her address to the Lama further stresses this point: “‘ … Bless the household, Holy One, and forgive thy servant her stupidities,’” (p. 276). In another instance, the woman of Kulu tells the Lama: “‘Good! I am the Holy One’s cow,’” (p. 323).

This way, she participates in perpetuating her own inferiority in the patriarchal society, and any change in this deep-rooted mentality, is almost impossible without the intervention of a “deus ex machina”. This kind of foreign interference is not neglected by Kipling when he describes the female ideology of his characters. The naivety and pathetic innocence of the female is shown by the author in the words of an old lady (from the lowest Indian caste) that colonization is necessary to bring justice as she puts it: “‘These be the sort to oversee justice. They know the land and the customs of the land … ’” (p. 124). She refrains from saying that an Indian is better in this regard because they are not even enough qualified in terms of anthropological knowledge for the task, while their European or Europeanized counterparts are. R. Kabbani further stresses this Orientalist reading,

The Western male could possess the native woman by force of his dominion over her native land; she was subjugated by his wealth, his military might, and his access to machinery. She was his colonial acquisition, but one that he pretended enjoyed his domination and would mourn his departure. (Kabbani, 1994, pp. 80–81)

More specifically, Edward Said highlights this device used by Kipling who seizes every opportunity in the novel to stress the Orient’s need for the assistance of the West. Said says it is

… Kipling’s way of demonstrating that natives accept colonial rule so long as it is the right kind. Historically this has always been how European imperialism made itself palatable to itself, for what could be better for its self-image than native subjects who express assent to the outsider’s knowledge and power, implicitly accepting European judgment on the undeveloped, backward, or degenerate nature of their own society? (Said, 1994, pp. 148–49)

Taking this into consideration, where can the female be placed within the Eastern community?

5. Females status in Kim’s India

Kipling, as mentioned elsewhere, divides Indian society into three classes: “the British, the Indian agents cooperating with the British, and the Indians who are not linked significantly to forms of cooperation with the British” (Albaqawi, 2007, p. 25). The lowest one is the class of Indians who are not immediately and significantly involved in contributing to the existence of colonization (or what Albaqawi calls the Lama’s party). Out of this lowly class, the female class branches out. “Such representations of women”, says Kabbani, “were in keeping with the general Victorian prejudice. All women were inferior to men; Eastern women were doubly inferior, being women and Easterners” (Kabbani, 1994, p. 51). In so doing, Kipling “hunts two birds with one stone”, as the Arabic proverb goes (which means to achieve two things by doing a single action). He describes the status of women who are subordinate to men in the Orient, and displays the Oriental society with another one of its many defects. “In this sense,” as King says, “one might wish to point out that colonialism, in the broadest sense of the term, is a problem for all women living in a patriarchal society, and not just for those living under the political domination of a foreign power” (King, 1999, p. 114)., So, Kipling makes use of the alleged hegemony of the male in the East to legitimate British hegemony. He adds to the misery of women by exaggerating the humiliation they suffer from in the East not in order to save, emancipate, or empower them, but rather to convince the readers that the West is more civilized than and superior to the East because it has achieved justice for both halves of that community.

Examples of this humiliation abound in the novel. Almost, all the female characters in Kim are satirized and looked down upon either by themselves, by the male characters, or by the description given by Kipling’s narrator. In one instance, the woman from Kulu says: “‘I am old and useless,’” adding “‘None now love me—and none respect … ,’”. In many occasions also the Lama expresses his disapproval of the woman from Kulu as when he says very rudely: “‘Women talk,‘ … , “but that is a woman’s infirmity,”” (p. 276). Still in a clearer instance Kim tells the woman of Shamlegh when she asks him to bid the Lama stay: “‘these matters are too high for thee’” and her response expresses an appeal for justice when she says: “‘The Gods be good to us! Since when have men and women been other than men and women?’” (p. 312). Thus, Oriental females are depicted, borrowing Gina Wisker’s words, as victims of cultural disempowerment who are marginalized, maddened, and silenced (Wisker, 2007, pp. 160–61).⁵ This, in fact, requires the interference of the world’s judge and policeman to discipline the Easterners and protect the Oriental female from Oriental male aggression, and colonization takes it upon itself to impose equality between Oriental subjects. Through female pictures, Creighton’s role as a symbol of British control and subjugation is indirectly reinforced as the gentleman who is able to plan for and administer those people. So, categories of excess and balance, emotion and reason, and nature and culture, as Veena Das argues (Das, 1986), are utilized to inferiorise not only women but also whole cultures.

One of the most complex pictures drawn by Kipling can be found in a conversation at the end of the novel which epitomizes all these ideas.⁶ In the course of this conversation, Kipling presents his reader with many false concepts regarding the Oriental female. The Shamlegh woman tells Kim boastfully that she was fair once, adding she was like the Europeans in her clothes, religion, language, and hobbies and that she was about to marry a Sahib whom she had nursed. However, he left and never came back, and when she saw Kim, she thought that her Sahib or “the knight of her dreams” has come back to lift her up from the misery in her home. Indeed, throughout the novel she expresses her disbelief in the Oriental Gods. The analysis of this multi-faceted picture readers are presented with implicitly suggests that the Western female is better than the Eastern one who seems to affirm once again that she suffers from the inferiority complex of the Orientals. Later, we are indirectly provided with Western female privileges over Oriental females which come under five aspects, namely physical, ideological, linguistic, artistic, and social. These, as well as other images in Kim, are significant in many Orientalist and imperialist writings especially when it comes to depicting women in that they are similar to the anthropological and ethnographical accounts provided among others by E. W. Lane, or R. Burton. Such anthropological and ethnographical remarks and descriptions remind us of the importance of the influence of science in the colonial process, as Said notes:

Of all the modern social sciences, anthropology is the one historically most closely tied to colonialism, since it was often the case that anthropologists and ethnologists advised colonial rulers on the manners and mores of the native people … Kipling was one of the first novelists to portray this logical alliance between Western science and political power at work in the colonies. (Said, 1994, pp. 152–53)

In their form and content, the first four aspects point to the change that must be made to the Orient. The final point appears as both utilitarian and hegemonic. This utilitarianism is manifested in the disappearance of the Sahib because the marriage of the Shamlegh woman to him does not serve Kipling’s narrative goals. In this respect he drops a hint to the female function in the East which is in tending people at home. Although she was disappointed because her dreams in marrying a Sahib have been thwarted, she still has not given up on them. When she meets Kim, she does not think of him as a compatriot but as someone who resembles her ex-lover. This idea of an Oriental woman falling in love with a foreigner is typical of Orientalism, in general, and of Kipling, in particular.⁷ Her mocking of the Eastern Gods and her endorsement of a sort of secularism are signs of the effect of Westernization which is, in the context of the novel, more realistic and rational than the Oriental supernatural religion. The role of the Oriental woman serving the man, is further stressed when she says: “These cattle’ - she did not condescend to look at them—“are thine for so long as thou shalt need”” (p. 314). Despite the fact she is authoritarian and a person of some power, her power is utilized ironically in the service of men. In addition, Kipling points to the Eastern polygamy as a form of sexual oppression against women when he imagines this woman with more than one husband as if it were a reaction to the women’s repressed wish in retaliation for male subjugation. Besides, the creation of this woman so distinguished and unique is, subconsciously, related to the fact that she has spent some time as a Westerner who even played music on a “piano” (p. 313). All the details of this sophisticated portrayal are so remarkably woven together that they have the effect of stilling the reader’s sense of disbelief into acquiescence. The woman’s position and function are also highlighted when she gives Kim money for his journey with the Lama to the mountains. Kipling’s narrator describes Kim’s response as an angry one instead of one of gratefulness as with most Easterners. Later, Kipling will stress the idea of gratefulness in the West as far more advanced and more emotional than in the East:

“How if I guess, though?” said Kim, and putting his arm round her waist, he kissed her on the cheek, adding in English: “Thank you verree much, my dear.”

Kissing is practically unknown among Asians, which may have been the reason that she leaned back with wide-open eyes and a face of panic.

“Next time,” Kim went on, “you must not be so sure of your heatthen priests. Now I say good-bye.” He held out his hand English-fashion. She took it mechanically. “Good-bye, my dear.”

“Good-bye, and - and” - she was remembering her English words one by one -“you will come back again? Good-bye, and - thee God bless you.” (p. 315)

Supposedly, this may stand as the most romantic scene throughout the whole novel, one in which male-female romance is intangible and light. Kim’s kiss is followed by a comment on the priest incidentally focusing the reader’s attention to this “good” Western custom which is not common in the East. This episode between the Indian woman and Kim is also meant to show that the East is tough on women, partly because it lacks the exchange of emotional gestures which are essential to humans in general and to the female in particular. That is why she is astonished and perplexed by Kim’s kiss, paradoxically becoming aware of the fact she has regained her life with that kiss with a “foreigner”. In other words, the Englishman is associated with normal, instinctual human behavior, and the Indian with animalistic actions. Reminiscing her English language is associated with the regaining of the instinctual element which has been missing in her, due to the cruel imposition of an inhuman tradition. It also signifies the importance of introducing the conqueror’s language to the natives, regardless of their social status, to his own advantage. When she asks him to come back in English, it is to save her from the insensitive Oriental male who cannot satisfy her desire, despite the fact she has had more than one husband. That can be achieved only by colonialist intervention, not by marriage to either an Indian or a European. In his narrative, Kipling keeps nourishing that binary opposition throughout the story best rendered by Spivak’s famous quote, “White men are saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak, 1988, p. 92). Thus, the Oriental female has become “a metaphor for injustice” in that society (Melman, 2016, p. 60), while the gentlemanliness of the European among the others is cherished (Kabbani, 1994, p. 78). This passage in itself is quite telling of the situation of Eastern women, but Kipling also stresses another aspect of Oriental women.

6. Physical description of females in Kim

The physical description of Oriental women occupies a vast part of the Orientalist ideology in general. In Kim, the physical description of the female is one of the recurrent narrative features whenever a female character appears, albeit with varying degrees. When it comes to this aspect of the female description, Kipling focuses on the Eastern woman’s body, clothes, and jewelry from a certain perspective to convey his view. The vividness of his description shows that it stems from his first-hand experience of, involvement in, and engagement with the Indian community. To see how that is achieved, one can focus on the characterization of the second most important female character in the novel, namely that of Huneefa, to whom lascivious sensuality and physical temptation or eroticism are not related. This is not, however, to say that Kipling’s image of Huneefa is anti-colonialist or anti-Orientalist, rather it is just different. After all, he remains the spokesman of British colonialism, always consistent with what he expresses in fictional and non-fictional writings, as Bart Moore-Gilbert states (Moore-Gilbert, 1986, p. 198). His Orientalist inclination is, in fact, so strong that developing a counter-argument becomes so difficult a task. Nothing is seductive in Huneefa unlike, for example, H. R. Haggard’s description of the bewitching Ayesha.⁸ Her portrayal perpetuates, using Sameha Alghamdi’s words,⁹ “the Orientalist fantasy of an ‘exotic East’ … which appealed to the darker recesses of the European psyche” (Alghamdi, 2020, p. 8). Kipling’s description of Huneefa is horrific as the following scene will reveal. On their way to her den, Mahbub talks to Kim about the dangers of women like Huneefa. Then, Kipling’s narrator proceeds to shed some light on the environment surrounding Huneefa’s place. “Kim paused before a filthy staircase that climbed to the warm darkness of an upper chamber, in the ward that is behind Azim Ullah’s tobacco-shop. Those who know it call it The Birdcage—it is so full of whisperings and whistlings and chirrupings,” (p. 225). The way leading to her place is dirty, and one has to climb up the stairs, which is even more tiring. Her chamber is dark, and it is located in the back of a tobacco-shop so the darkness is mingled with smoke, and this creates a sense of suffocation and imminent loss. In addition to that, it is disturbingly noisy. Her room is also depicted as filthy. Then, follows the description of Huneefa. She is seen as lying in a corner as if she were hiding from the male gaze. She is described as a huge shapeless woman with ominous clothes. To add to her ugliness and unseemliness, Kipling depicts her as blind, and her trade is related to magic and sorcery. She has colors on her skin that do not vanish easily, an indication that her defect is not easily curable. She also snores heavily. The sheer grotesqueness of color, smell, as well as the sounds made by her body and her physical environment engulf the senses. The connotations behind such a description are better explained by Bellie Melman when she says

In mainstream Victorian discourse “cleanliness” and “uncleanliness”, “filth” and “purity”, are terms supercharged with notions of class and gender, the two often being interrelated. Physical cleanliness, especially in women, signified sexual purity. Uncleanliness implied impurity and a pernicious and de-stabilising sexuality that threatened the social and even the political order. (Melman, 2016, p. 130)

It is a picture that reminds us of the image of witches in Europe, which somehow relates the East to a forlorn time of backwardness, and supernatural phenomena, a far cry from modernity or science.

Kipling’s description of the jewelry worn by female characters and the veil associated with them can also be read differently in his novel. Almost all the female characters drawn by Kipling in his story are seen wearing precious stones. Through the jewelry worn by Oriental women, the novel conveys several messages. First is the fact that jewelry, which is part of the females’ physical portrayal, is worn in the East to lessen their intrinsic defect(s). If not so, then it is to compensate for their feeling of inferiority, which requires them to attach valuable things to their bodies. Second is that although Oriental people are usually poor, their females wear jewelry, thus stressing the misuse of fortune by Orientals (jewelry here is given to the lowest classes). The tacit (unsaid) assumption is that this state of affairs necessitates the intervention of a foreign agent as the only one capable of ensuring a fair and rational distribution of wealth among this community. Third, sometimes precious gems are worn by Oriental women seeking protection from evil, a sign of their belief in superstition and metaphysics. Kipling also emphasizes the role of precious stones and gems in all the female characters. In most cases the Oriental women’s jewelry, instead of highlighting their beauty, seems to add to female imperfection. Along with the use of jewelry, the image of the veil also draws heavily on the typical Orientalist falsification of history. The veil appears significantly as an indication of male oppression as when the Kulu woman “laid aside her useless veil” (, p. 214), a cause of female backwardness (because it affects their sight which is very symbolic), or as a sexual undertone as when the women wearing “chudders”¹⁰ do a massage to Kim after his journey in the mountains with the Lama (p. 324). The concealment of the Oriental female body with the veil and jewelry multiplies the signifiers shrouding desire with imperialistic forms of possession. The Oriental woman’s body becomes the object of the western man’s insatiable desire to constantly create something unfamiliar or bizarre as he tries to satisfy his colonialist urge.¹¹

In Kim, the erotic implication of the veil can be understood clearly if the novel is looked at as an affair between the male West and the female East. This idea has been highlighted in many ways by some critics. Discussing Orientalist discourse in general, Kabbani says, “The European was led into the East by sexuality, by the embodiment of it in a woman or a young boy” (Kabbani, 1994, p. 67), while Karyn Huenemann notes that Kipling’s view of Indian women is infused with the idea of a feminized, controlled, and submissive India (Huenemann, 2009, pp. 24–27), or, as Paffard Mark notes, passive, female entity (Paffard, 1989, p. 20). Kim, as an Irishman, can be seen as the Western phallic symbol while the Indian veiled female characters symbolize the vaginal symbol. That illicit relationship starts at the beginning of the novel and the end is reached when the women give Kim a massage. To illustrate this point further, it is useful to consider the following extract focusing on the words italicized by myself:

And the two of them, laying him east and west, that the mysterious earth-currents which thrill the clay of our bodies might help and not hinder, took him to pieces all one long afternoon - bone by bone, muscle by muscle, ligament by ligament, and lastly, nerve by nerve. Kneaded to irresponsible pulp, half hypnotized by the perpetual flick and readjustment of the uneasy chudders that veiled their eyes, Kim slid ten thousand miles into slumber - thirty-six hours of it - sleep that soaked like rain after drought. (p. 324)

The connotations of the words italicized undoubtedly imply that kind of impregnation whose result is the Western hegemony over the Orient. The veil in this erotic scene is a symbol of the Orient’s hymen that is penetrated by the Western phallus. This is more or less the repressed desire of the writer, but one that is hidden in his consciousness only to be uncovered in his subconscious.

7. Conclusion

To a great extent, this enables Kipling to draw what can be considered a pitiful description of the Oriental female. Bolstered by a myriad literary and non-literary sources of imagery and details, his narrative is part and parcel of Said’s “Orientalist repertoire” of information and representations that has been and still is influential. It is the same repertoire that has provided Kipling with the various categories of information, and, in particular, the anthropological and ethnographical knowledge about the Orientals, which, in turn, “is rooted in an unequal power encounter between the West and the Third World”, as illustrated by Tala Asad, who adds that this encounter gives:

… the West access to cultural and historical information about the societies it has progressively dominated, and thus not only generates a certain kind of universal understanding, but also reinforces the inequalities in capacity between the European and the non-European worlds. (and derivatively, between the Europeanized elites and the “traditional” masses in the Third World) (Asad, 1998, p. 16)

Despite the extraordinary means of mass communication available today, the repertoire of information established by Orientalists and preserved ever since, still plays an important role in molding the Other(s). This explains why twenty-five years after the publication of Orientalism, Said writes in his preface to the 2003 edition that the general understanding of those Orientals has not improved. He points to the “profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of co-existence and enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control” (Said, 1978, p. xii-xlv).

Affected by the Orientalist heritage, Kipling’s Oriental females in Kim are seen as spiritually, mentally, socially, and physically complementing each other, as well as suffering under the dictatorship and repression of the Oriental male. They are caught in a deadlock, which requires an outsider’s intervention. This is plainly the “romantic” idea Kim is likely to inculcate into the readers’ minds.

Before concluding, a few other points are to be considered. On the political level, Indian women in Kim never clash with or pose any threat to colonization nor do they play any role in the larger picture. It can be assumed that no political task is assigned to women because that would allow them to participate in the formation of India. Denying them this eminently political role magnifies their isolation. Plurality of characterization and subjective self-determinacy of the Oriental female is nearly absent in Kim whose monolithic development of a discourse that uniformly constructs the Oriental female as the “Other” of the Occidental, does not allow for a heterogenous or polyphonic conception of the female character. The subaltern’s agency is excluded by Kipling who articulates that dichotomy, described by Spivak as “an old slogan” (Spivak, 1996, p. 269), of ruler and ruled, which is in tandem with the image portrayed in his other writings as in,

Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant, and the sergeant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, and the captain his major, and the major his colonel, and the colonel his brigadier commanding three regiments, and the brigadier the general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant of the Empress. (Kipling, 1894)

Within himself, brewed a conflict between the reality before him and the Orientalist ideological influence he has been exposed to and influenced by. The latter overwhelmed the first due to its massive impact on European mentalities and essentially its agreement with the imperialist desire. That is why the Eastern female picture is seen here as being distorted to a great extent. Kipling ignores the differences amongst Indian women and deals with them, assumedly, as if they were locked in a binary opposition with that of the Western female. In his novel, Kipling only shows one part of this culture, the one which benefits the colonizer. One of the important things that help Kipling achieve his goal is the fact that Kim is a male-dominated novel, wherein the female has not been granted any significant role which can affect the turn of events. Edward Said points to this when he writes: “It is an overwhelmingly male novel … The women in the novel are remarkably few by comparison, and all of them are somehow debased or unsuitable for male attention … ” (Said, 1994, p. 165). Kipling uses this to render an impression that the Orient is a despotic, patriarchal society which has not and cannot, give women their full rights, incidentally encouraging and legitimating western interference and control. In today’s world, we still can see many Western countries calling on governments in the eastern hemisphere to empower and emancipate women and allow them to play a greater role in the community in a westernized way, which is described by terms like “openness”, regardless of any cultural differences, often threatening them with all kinds of sanctions should they not fall in line. In doing so they tend to focus for example, on the plight of Yazidi women enslaved by ISIS, or stories of females forced to wear the hijab, all couched in the same rhetoric of injustice inherent among the victors. As Norman Daniel argues, this particular combination of sexuality, subjugation and enslavement of women appeals to the West because of its obvious political and social aspects (Daniel, 1962, p. 314). However, it has remained largely oblivious to rape crimes or hate crimes such as the ones committed by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway and by the Australian Brenton Tarrant in New Zealand more recently, as well as unpunished domestic violence, and workplace gender discrimination. To this extent, the Orientalist ideological discourse is still playing an effective role dragging the world into conflict zones. Kim and its likes form a vast part of that problematic discourse. Kipling’s sophisticated writing techniques, including his dialogues and descriptions, act as a crafty rhetoric of persuasion that intensely overwhelm his readers blurring their own ways of thinking and legitimating imperialistic desire. Twenty years after Said’s preface to the 2003 edition of Orientalism, the polarized Orientalist vision of the world is undoubtedly still framing many Western policies. Now more than ever is the time to expose and debunk colonialism’s signifying system and dismantle what Said calls the “structures of attitude” even as the latter is nurtured in such sophisticated and emotionally appealing narratives such as Kim.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See notably his Our Moslem Sisters A Cry of Need from Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It.

2. This is asserted by Karyn Huenemann: “Since 1990, for example, The Kipling Journal, the quarterly publication of the Kipling Society in Britain, has presented only three articles discussing gender issues in Kipling”. She adds, “On the topic of Indian women, however, Kim seldom appears on the critical radar” (Huenemann, 2009, pp. 23, 36).

3. I am using King’s words which were used in his book Orientalism and Religion in a different context.

4. Behdad’s words were used in the context of criticizing Orientalism in general in his article titled “Orientalist Desire, Desire of the Orient”, however I am “using” them in context as a way of criticizing the picture of the Oriental woman in the West.

5. I am using Wisker’s words which he uses to describe Bertha Mason, Rochester’s “mad” wife, in Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

6. See pp 312–315.

7. It is a motif that Kipling has maintained in other short stories like “Without Benefit of Clergy”, “Beyond the Pale”, and “Lispeth” where British males desert their beloved Indian females (Ameera, Holden, the Englishman—Trejago, Bisesa, and Lispeth, whose name is the same as that of the Shamlegh woman in Kim). Some critics, such as Karyn Huenemann, draw a connection between the two, claiming that Lispeth who opens Plain Tales from the Hills reappears in the concluding chapters of Kim (Huenemann, 2009, p. 36). In the former story, Lispeth is abandoned by her English lover with whom she is enamored. She is told by the Chaplain’s wife “that it was ‘wrong and improper’ of Lispeth to think of marriage with an Englishman, who was of a superior clay … ” (Kipling, 1888, p. 4).

8. Ayesha is the key character in a number of H. R. Haggard’s novels like She and Wisdom’s Daughter. She is described as a charming and tempting female.

9. ⁹I am using her words which she uses to describe depictions of Algerian women in French postcards.

10. According to the notes of the Penguin Classics 2000 edition, this word means “sheets or veils in front of the faces of women” (p. 365). By “sexual undertone” I do not mean to refer to any kind of relationship between Kim and that woman at all as this will be clarified shortly.

11. I am indebted to an idea discussed by Ali Behdad in a different context (See on Behdad, 1994, pp. 28–29).