The Psychology of
Victorian Buddhism
and Rudyard
Kipling’s Kim
DEANNA K. KREISEL
I
t would be difficult to overstate British
Victorians’ fascination with Buddhism.
Edwin Arnold’s 1879 poem of the life of Buddha, “The Light of
Asia,” sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the last decades
of the century;1 H. P. Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy,
claimed to have been initiated into “esoteric Buddhism” by
a cadre of Tibetan lamas; and the nineteenth century witnessed
the birth of comparative religion as a discipline largely in
response to the recent “discovery” of Buddhism by British
scholars and archaeologists.
Yet despite the fact that literally thousands of articles on
Buddhism appeared in the popular press during the reign of
Queen Victoria, the fascination with Buddhism as a literary
cultural phenomenon has only recently begun to attract the
attention of Victorianist scholars. Philip Almond’s 1988 study
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 73, No. 2, pp. 227–259, ISSN: 0891–9356, online ISSN:
1067–8352, 2018 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through
the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.
edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2018.73.2.227.
1
See Christopher Clausen, “Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia and Its Reception,”
Literature East and West, 17 (1973), 174.
227
228
nin e teenth-century literatu re
The British Discovery of Buddhism remains the standard historical
text, and J. Jeffrey Franklin’s The Lotus and the Lion has broadened the scope of inquiry to include literary representations of
Buddhism.2 Together with a recent important essay by Sebastian Lecourt in PMLA and a handful of articles by literary scholars treating representations of Buddhism in the Victorian
novel, these works constitute the small (if burgeoning) body
of scholarly literature on the topic.3
Yet several themes occur repeatedly in Victorian commentaries on Buddhism that are, potentially, of great interest to
literary critics. Later Victorian writers consistently characterized Indian religions as containing “scientific” insights into the
nature of the Ego or self; drew analogies between the doctrines
of karma and metempsychosis and Darwinian evolution or
degeneration; puzzled over the influence of Buddhism on
Christianity and/or vice-versa; and speculated about the nature
of a primitive ur-religion, of which they could see glimpses in
Buddhism and Hinduism, which supposedly generated all
world religious systems. (We can see an echo of this last
endeavor in Casaubon’s quest for the Key to All Mythologies
in George Eliot’s Middlemarch ([1871–72].)
In this essay I focus on the first of these three categories:
the psychological. My aim is to elucidate some connections
among the commentaries of the comparative religionists who
were busily translating, codifying, and retextualizing the religions of Asia; several important concepts central to the emergent discipline of psychology; and the most sustained literary
treatment of Buddhism in the Victorian period, Rudyard
Kipling’s Kim, published in 1901.4 Kim engages deeply with
several aspects of Buddhist thought that were also of central
concern to nineteenth-century psychology: the nature of consciousness, the problem of free will, and the formation of
2
See Philip C. Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1988); and J. Jeffrey Franklin, The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the
British Empire (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2008).
3
See Sebastian Lecourt, “Idylls of the Buddh’: Buddhist Modernism and Victorian
Poetics in Colonial Ceylon,” PMLA, 131 (2016), 668–85.
4
Rudyard Kipling, Kim, ed. Edward W. Said (New York: Penguin, 1987). Further
references are to this edition and appear in the text.
r u d y a r d k i p l i n g ’ s kim
229
identity. The novel’s treatment of these themes is subtle and
nuanced, reflecting the complexity of these topics in the Victorian discourses of psychology and comparative religion (and,
indeed, in the discourses of Buddhism itself).
Sustained attention to the ways in which Kim engages
Asian religious practice, particularly meditation and trance,
complicates an entrenched reading of the novel as championing British triumphalism, as a testament to Kim’s (and
Kipling’s) “collusion with imperialist propaganda.”5 This is
not to deny that Kipling was an apologist for empire—for he
most certainly was. It is instead to assert that the treatment of
Buddhism in Kim, in particular its insistence on the role of
discipline and will in the practice of that religion, complicates
Kipling’s apologist project in important (and perhaps unintentional) ways.
In the discussion that follows I proceed along two complementary tracks. First, I describe and elucidate several central tenets of Buddhism as understood by Victorian exegetes,
particularly the ways in which that exegesis, over the course of
the century (and by the time of the publication of Kim),
had become surprisingly approbatory and admiring. Second,
I perform close readings of three key passages in the novel
dealing with identity, will, and self-discipline that illuminate
Kipling’s understanding of the subtleties of Buddhist thought
and his investment in challenging certain stereotypes of that
religious practice. My aim is to enrich both our knowledge of
an important area of Victorian religious scholarship and
our ways of reading this most brilliant, vexing, and, in Edward
Said’s immortal term, “embarrassing” novel.6 A deeper understanding of late-Victorian Buddhism must force us to reject
any simplistic reading of the religious elements in Kim as
straightforward evidence for the novel’s endorsement of the
imperial project—even while we acknowledge the palpable
force of that endorsement on other narrative and textual
registers.
5
Brigitte Hervoche-Bertho, “The Wheel and the Way: Kipling’s Symbolic Imagination in Kim,” Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, 47 (1998), 368.
6
Edward W. Said, “Introduction” to Kim, ed. Said, p. 45.
230
nin e teenth-century literatu re
The potential connections between the
study of Buddhist “psychology” (this was the term that Victorian
commentators themselves used) and “scientific” British theories of mind and consciousness were clear to contemporary
exegetes. This recognition was a feature primarily of the later
decades of the century, when the British study of Buddhism
had matured to the point where many scholars were openly
admiring of the religion, as opposed to studying it merely to
facilitate the missionary conversion of Asian peoples;7 psychology also had become more firmly ensconced as a scientific discipline differentiated from philosophy or medicine. As A.
Bastian exhorts as early as 1882, “I . . . call the attention of Buddhist scholars to some points which appear to me not to have
received due attention, though in some respects they may be
regarded as turning-points of the whole system. . . . I cannot get
rid of the personal impression that Buddhism, as rooted in its
psychology, must be understood psychologically in order to
reach its genuine character.”8 One of the greatest British apologists for Buddhism, Paul Carus, put an even more approbative
spin on the psychological aspects of the religion in 1897:
if rightly understood, [Buddhism] will be seen to be the very
negation of all mystification in both religion and metaphysics.
Buddha is, so far as we know, the first positivist, the first humanitarian, the first radical free thinker[,] the first iconoclast, and
the first prophet of the Religion of Science. The more we study
the original writings of Buddhism, the more we are impressed
with the greatness of Buddha’s far-seeing comprehension of
both religious and psychological problems.9
7
A couple of decades later it was possible for a writer to admire Buddhism so much
as to declare, “Compared with the Buddha, Jesus was a puling, sickly infant in contrast
with a virile, healthy giant. The Buddha was a strong, daring and original thinker”
(Upasaka [pseud.], Buddha the Atheist [London: Pioneer Press, 1928], p. 3).
8
A. Bastian, “The Psychology of Buddhism,” Academy, 22 (1882), 264–65.
9
Paul Carus, The Gospel of Buddha, According to Old Records (Chicago: Open Court,
1895), Appendix (n.p.).
r u d y a r d k i p l i n g ’ s kim
231
Writing in a self-consciously retrospective way just three years
after Carus, Dawsonne Strong argues that the attraction of
Buddhist psychological thought is not just a narrow intradisciplinary affair: “The psychologist, too, was not slow to recognise that the philosophy of Buddhism contained speculative
matter of considerable value, which lent itself to assimilation in
the task of formulating theories of a positive science in his own
field of special research.”10 In fact, many of these fin-de-siècle
Buddhism apologists emphasized the benefits to Western psychology that would accrue from a serious study of the religion.
As R. Ernest writes in 1903, “Buddhism . . . has laid the basis of
an incomparable metaphysical system, and has worked out this
complicated puzzle of mental action, in a manner so detailed
and novel to western ideas, as to open up entirely new spheres
of thought.”11 A decade later, G.R.S. Mead claims that “the
subtlety of Buddhist psychological analysis . . . is well worth the
serious attention of Western psychology.”12
This insistence on the greater insights, knowledge, and
wisdom of Buddhist thought represents a dramatic shift from
the openly racist and frankly extirpative rhetoric of the first
decades of missionary encounter. Indeed, one of the most
remarkable features of much fin-de-siècle Western writing on
Buddhism is its volte-face from the discourse of just a few decades earlier, which had been full of stock Orientalist tropes
charging Buddhists with irrationality, jugglery, infantile credulity, and even imbecility. By the time J. E. Ellam writes
Nāvayāna: Buddhism and Modern Thought in 1930, he is able
to triumphantly exclaim that the doctrines of Buddhism “are
found to have anticipated in remarkable ways many of the
conclusions of modern science, and the method of that rationalist school of thought which is gaining ground in the Western world to-day. For these reasons, and because of its essential
naturalism, as opposed to supernaturalism, and its humanism,
Buddhism, although one of the oldest religions in the world,
10
D. M. Strong, “The Revival of Buddhism in India,” Westminster Review, 153 (1900),
272.
11
12
R. Ernest, Buddhism and Science (Rangoon: Buddhasasana Samagama, 1903), p. 4.
G.R.S. Mead, Quests Old and New (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1913), p. 112.
232
nin e teenth-century literatu re
has a real and vital message for our times.”13 Not only does
Buddhism have great insight into the workings of the mind,
but it was rationalist even before Western rationalism—this
kind of proclamation would have been unthinkable a hundred
years earlier.
It is important to note, however, that later commentators
did not attempt to deny Buddhism’s emphasis on unusual
states of consciousness such as trance, visions, etc.; instead, they
rationalized these phenomena by insisting that their causes
were not supernatural but rather strictly psychological (in the
Western sense of that term). For example, as Ellam claims in an
earlier treatise (1908), Buddhism treats as familiar “‘visions,’
trances and mystical experiences,” and “has them all carefully
analysed and classified.”14 Other commentators emphasize
that, in fact, only Buddhism can rationally explain not only
unusual mental phenomena, but most states of consciousness:
“Science has not yet penetrated into the mind, and our language at the present time is insufficient to express or even
classify the functions manifesting in our highest thoughts. At
the time of the Buddha, these higher thoughts were expressed
by men in a terminology which had been built up to suit the
greater metaphysical knowledge of the day” (Ernest, Buddhism
and Science, p. 3).
The Victorian study of Buddhism—and the elaboration of
that study in treatises on comparative religion, popular literature on Eastern mysticism, and the late-century novel—thus
constituted a rich source of psychological “limit cases”: such
phenomena as double consciousness, automatism, telepathy
and trance states, and mesmerism and hypnotism, which were
a crucial heuristic for psychological theorists.15 Several recent
13
J. E. Ellam, Nāvayāna: Buddhism and Modern Thought (London: Rider and Co.,
1930), p. 9.
14
J. E. Ellam, The Message of Buddhism to the West (London: Buddhist Society,
1908), p. 9.
15
See, for example: Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995); Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy: 1870–1901 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002); Jill L. Matus, Shock,
Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
2009); Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1991); Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking,
r u d y a r d k i p l i n g ’ s kim
233
commentators have identified the strong connection between
images of Orientalism and altered psychological states; as
Roger Luckhurst notes, for example, mediums were often controlled by Oriental spirits or ghosts (The Invention of Telepathy,
p. 156). Altered states of consciousness in general, and telepathy in particular, are associated with the Orient and Asian characters in H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887) and Ayesha (1905),
Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Kim (1901), and
E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), to name a few literary
examples. As Luckhurst claims, “Forgotten ‘supernatural’
powers of a now degenerate Egypt or Indian subcontinent
hinted at lost plenitude with a nostalgic allure that was precisely
constituted by the erasures effected by Western imperialism”
(The Invention of Telepathy, p. 156).
Patrick Brantlinger analyzes this linkage at length in his
now-classic study Rule of Darkness (1988): he isolates a subgenre
he has dubbed “imperial Gothic,” which “combines the seemingly scientific, progressive, often Darwinian ideology of imperialism with an antithetical interest in the occult”; in doing so it
“expresses anxieties about the waning of religious orthodoxy,
but even more clearly it expresses anxieties about the ease with
which civilization can revert to barbarism or savagery and
thus about the weakening of Britain’s imperial hegemony.”16
According to Brantlinger, this atavism is experienced as a threat
of broader cultural degeneration, and is consistently brought
about through occult and “spiritualist” experience such as
telepathy, spirit-trance, automatic writing, etc.
Yet what these critics have not emphasized is the fact that
in many of these cases, the association between Orientalism
and altered states of consciousness is mediated through representations of Eastern religions. In other words, Victorian
authors were not (for the most part) drawing simple equivalencies between, for example, Indian mysticism qua sheer
-
1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001); and Athena Vrettos,
“Displaced Memories in Victorian Fiction and Psychology,” Victorian Studies, 49 (2007),
199–207.
16
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 227, 229.
234
nin e teenth-century literatu re
Orientalness and telepathy or mesmeric states, but rather were
imaginatively drawing upon the East as a font of mysterious
religious practices, including but not limited to Buddhism and
Hinduism, that seemed to enable and propagate altered states
of consciousness and extraordinary mental powers as an
explicit part of their religious praxis.
For example, according to the commentator G.R.S. Mead,
among the capacities of Buddhist adepts are the “power of
resisting pain, death, etc.; [the] power of creating phenomena
outside one’s body; of transforming one’s body into different
personalities; [the] power of creating one’s own double.
Some of these ‘powers’ are evidently similar to those exercised
unconsciously by spiritistic mediums” (Quests Old and New,
pp. 117–18). Another commentator, in an article comparing
Buddhism and Christianity, asseverates that, in contrast to
Jesus’s, Buddha’s “miracles were more like tricks of jugglery.
. . . he showed himself suddenly sitting cross-legged in mid-air,
divided his body into many portions, each shedding forth luminous rays, or he transported himself through the air hither and
thither, to show that purely spiritual meditation can break
through all the chains of material laws, that the spirit is independent of matter.”17 Another Victorian exegete draws an analogy between the annihilation of the Ego stipulated by both
Buddhist and Hindu practice and “sound dreamless sleep
. . . epileptic and other fits, and . . . certain diseases believed to
originate in the mind.”18 As we can see from these examples,
Orientalist depictions of altered states of consciousness in the
Victorian period were just as likely to be associated with religious ritual as with explicitly racialized “tendencies” of mind.
Written shortly after the later-century
“apologist” shift in British commentaries got under way, Kim
dwells almost obsessively on such altered states of consciousness,
17
Ernest J. Eitel, Three Lectures on Buddhism (Hong Kong: London Mission House,
1871), p. 4.
18
William Brockie, Indian Thought: A Popular Essay (Sunderland: T. F. Brockie,
1876), p. 62.
r u d y a r d k i p l i n g ’ s kim
235
and how they are brought about (at least indirectly) as a result
of religious practice. One of the insistent themes of Kipling’s
bildungsroman is the oft-asked question of the true nature, or
identity, of Kim himself. Indeed, the question of Kim’s identity
is so persistent that it has also become an enduring topic of
inquiry for modern critics.19 This question, superficially a psychological one, is repeatedly modulated in the novel by the tropes
and images of Indian mysticism. To quote the first of the three
key scenes I will examine:
“Now am I alone—all alone,” he thought. “In all India is no
one so alone as I! If I die today, who shall bring the news—and to
whom? If I live and God is good, there will be a price upon my
head, for I am a Son of the Charm—I, Kim.”
A very few white people, but many Asiatics, can throw themselves into a mazement as it were by repeating their own names
over and over again to themselves, letting the mind go free upon
speculation as to what is called personal identity. When one
grows older, the power, usually, departs, but while it lasts it may
descend upon a man at any moment.
“Who is Kim—Kim—Kim?”
He squatted in a corner of the clanging waiting-room, rapt
from all other thoughts; hands folded in lap, and pupils contracted to pin-points. In a minute—in another half-second—he
felt he would arrive at the solution of the tremendous puzzle;
but here, as always happens, his mind dropped away from
those heights with a rush of a wounded bird, and passing his
hand before his eyes, he shook his head. (Kim, pp. 233–34)
Later in the novel, Kim returns to the question in a superficially
different form: “‘I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?’ His soul
repeated it again and again” (p. 331, emphasis added).
I say that these questions are “superficially different”
because in Sanskrit—the language of the Hindu vedas; the root
19
See, in particular, Ian Adam, “Oral/Literate/Transcendent: The Politics of
Language Modes in Kim,” The Yearbook of English Studies, 27 (1997), 73; Franklin, The
Lotus and the Lion, p. 169; Arnold Kettle, “What Is Kim?,” in The Morality of Art: Essays
Presented to G. Wilson Knight by His Colleagues and Friends, ed. D. W. Jefferson (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 220; and Sandra Kemp, Kipling’s Hidden Narratives
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 2.
236
nin e teenth-century literatu re
of Hindi, Kim’s and Kipling’s first and most deeply internalized
tongue; and a language about and through which Kipling consistently makes linguistic puns and in-jokes—the word kim is
a general interrogative particle that means “what? how?
whence? wherefore? why?”20 or in other words, a kind of generalized “what is the nature of?” So the questions “What is Kim?”
and “Who is Kim—Kim—Kim?” are essentially the same, and
would be rendered in Sanskrit (since the verb “to be” is implied)
as a perfect iteration: “Kim kim?” or “Kim kim kim kim?” Furthermore, the rules of external sandhi, or coalescence, in Sanskrit dictate that in this sentence, the final “m” in kim become an
anusvāra, or nasalized vowel, and that the string thus be pronounced essentially as one word: kim. kim. kim. kim, forming a kind
of nasal chant, or mantra.
For Victorian commentators on Buddhism and Hinduism,
the mantra is a particularly potent emblem of the mysteriousness of tantric practices in general. For example, an 1892 article in All the Year Round entitled “Through the Land of the
Lamas” has this to say about Tibetan chanting: “That prayer
is the mysterious and invariable ‘Om mané padmé hum,’ which
night and day for thousands of years had been uttered from
millions of human throats. . . . Literally interpreted, it means,
‘O the Jewel in the Lotus! Amen.’ But what that means, and
why it has to be said incessantly by the believer, no one seems to
know.”21 Writing a decade later, in 1902, the Blavatsky votary C.
Pfoundes does claim to know: “AUM is explained as the exhaling and the inhaling of the breath of life. . . . The sects that use
these forms . . . includes the Yoga, Tantra, etc., doctrines, the
efforts to acquire Riddhi, and other esoteric knowledge—and
consequently superhuman (or extraordinary) powers usually
considered supernatural.”22
At first blush, the confused sense of identity that Kim
experiences in the “mazement” scene is, however, presented
as a weakened or attenuated sense of identity. This seemingly
20
Translation from the online version of Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskr. itEnglish Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1899), available at <http://www.sanskrit-lexicon
.uni-koeln.de/scans/MWScan/2014/web/webtc/indexcaller.php>.
21
[Anon.], “Through the Land of the Lamas,” All the Year Round, 7 (1892), 302.
22
C. Pfoundes, “The Syllable ‘Aum’ and the Mantra Cult,” Open Court, 16 (1902), 318.
r u d y a r d k i p l i n g ’ s kim
237
paradoxical weakness is trebly determined: first, by the narratorial commentary (“letting the mind go free upon speculation as
to what is called personal identity”); second, by the popularly
understood effect of tantric repetition; and third, by yet
another pun buried in the first iteration of the “meditative”
question. In Sanskrit, the particle kim at the beginning
of a compound expresses “inferiority, deficiency, &c.” The
particle expresses this inferiority through a kind of default
implication by questioning. For example, the compound
kim. -rājan, which would be translated literally as “what-sort-ofking?” actually means, simply by implication, a deficient or
bad king (in other words, “If you have to ask . . . ”). To return
to our original Sanskrit question “Kim kim?”—“What is the
nature of Kim?” or “What sort of Kim?”: just as with the compound kim. -rājan, the inferior king, the accidentally formed
compound kim. -kim thus means “the inferior Kim.”23 It is
a question (“what sort of?”) that contains its own answer
(“deficient”). It is thus implied that Kim is “belittled,” his
unitary identity called into question through the sheer linguistic operations of the question itself.
Yet Kim’s seeming confusion in this scene turns out to be
something of a red herring, for this sense of “belittlement” is
decidedly not depicted as negative in the broader logic of the
novel. Kim’s ability to enter into a state of trance is ultimately
depicted as a source of strength—of discipline, focus, and flexibility—not weakness. The undermining of unitary identity in
esoteric practice does not contradict the exercise of will; in fact,
the two necessarily go hand-in-hand. The association of
“mazement” with willed discipline becomes more clear in the
second important occult scene in the novel, where the connection between (seemingly) attenuated identity and psychological vigor is made explicit.
Here Kim, who has been tapped to take part in the “Great
Game” of British espionage in India, is being tested by Lurgan
Sahib, a mysterious foreign trader who is living, like Kim, more
or less as an Indian, and who is an adept in the art of mesmeric
23
See Monier-Williams, Sanskr. it-English Dictionary, entry for “kim.”
238
nin e teenth-century literatu re
suggestion.24 Lurgan is trying here to hypnotize Kim into seeing a broken water pitcher come together again as a whole. The
passage is worth quoting at length:
Lurgan Sahib laid one hand gently on the nape of [Kim’s] neck,
stroked it twice or thrice, and whispered: “Look! It shall come to
life again, piece by piece. . . . ”
To save his life, Kim could not have turned his head. The
light touch held him as in a vice, and his blood tingled pleasantly
through him. There was one large piece of the jar where there
had been three, and above them the shadowy outline of the
entire vessel. He could see the veranda through it, but it was
thickening and darkening with each beat of his pulse. Yet the
jar—how slowly the thoughts came!—the jar had been smashed
before his eyes. Another wave of prickling fire raced down his
neck, as Lurgan Sahib moved his hand. . . .
So far Kim had been thinking in Hindi, but a tremor came
on him, and with an effort like that of a swimmer before sharks,
who hurls himself half out of the water, his mind leaped up from
a darkness that was swallowing it and took refuge in—the
multiplication-table in English! . . .
“But it is smashed—smashed,” he gasped—Lurgan Sahib
had been muttering softly for the last half-minute. . . .
“It is there as it was there,” said Lurgan, watching Kim
closely while the boy rubbed his neck. “But you are the first of
many who has ever seen it so.” (Kim, pp. 201–2)
The standard reading of this scene is that Kim asserts a kind of
robust English rationalism in the face of the (literally) seductive Oriental suggestion of mystical vision.25 For example, as
24
Although Lurgan is called “Sahib,” the question of his racial identity is never settled
by the text: “He was a Sahib in that he wore Sahib’s clothes; the accent of his Urdu, the
intonation of his English, showed that he was anything but a Sahib” (Kim, p. 199).
25
There is an inescapable suggestion that Lurgan indulges a somewhat unsavory
interest in young boys. Later, Lurgan comments to Kim’s other mentors, “I should have
used him long ago. . . . The younger the better. That is why I always have my really
valuable jewels watched by a child. You sent him to me to try. I tried him in every way”
(Kim, p. 220). Lurgan also maintains a disturbingly eroticized relationship with a young
Hindu servant-boy who tries to poison Lurgan out of jealousy when Kim arrives on the
scene; Lurgan takes the attempted murder in stride as he explains to Kim: “[it is]
because he is so fond of me. Suppose you were fond of someone, and you saw someone
come, and the man you were fond of was more pleased with him than he was with you,
what would you do?” (p. 203). As Luckhurst notes about the operations of trance in
r u d y a r d k i p l i n g ’ s kim
239
Margaret Feeley writes, “Lurgan tries to hypnotize Kim, who,
only with an enormous effort of will, is able to resist his teacher”;
the struggle between the two functions “as a metaphor of the
power struggle between India and England.”26 On the surface,
the logic of racialized psychology here seems perfectly consonant with the earlier scene: mesmerism/tantrism/esoteric
knowledges sap identity, will, and the capacity for rational
apprehension, while good old English stiff-upper-lip starchiness
(and arithmetic) reasserts them.
Yet this standard reading is undermined by several crucial
complications that many critics have overlooked. First, it is the
powers of Lurgan Sahib, however Oriental they may be, that
threaten to overwhelm English rationality to begin with. The
will of the magician, imposed upon the impressionable mind
of the boy, is the source of the tantalizing illusion. (Kim’s introduction to Lurgan underscores this point: “[Lurgan] slid off the
green shade and looked fixedly at Kim for a full half-minute.
The pupils of the eye dilated and closed to pin-pricks, as if at
will” [Kim, p. 197].) Asian esoteric practice is associated with
intensively focused disciplined will every bit as much as English
“rationality” is.
Second, it is not at all clear that the source of Kim’s ability
to fend off Lurgan’s spell is his Britishness, or even his whiteness. The crux of the water-pitcher scene is the question of
Kim’s susceptibility: the episode has been arranged by Kim’s
handlers in the British Secret Service as a deliberate test, to
ascertain if Kim can resist the seductions of the mesmerist and
thus has the psychological stuff necessary to be a good spy. The
test is figured, in the logic of the novel, as a kind of sounding of
the depths of Kim’s strength of will—which does not necessarily
spring from his whiteness. As Lurgan Sahib says immediately
after the test, “You are the first that ever saved himself” (Kim,
p. 203), and later to Colonel Creighton and Mabhbub Ali, “he
is the only boy I could not make to see things” (p. 220). Yet
there is no indication that Lurgan had tried only native Indian
-
general, “Susceptibility is rendered as an occult, Orientalized channel for sexual terror”
(The Invention of Telepathy, p. 206).
26
Margaret Peller Feeley, “The Kim That Nobody Reads,” Studies in the Novel, 13
(1981), 280.
240
nin e teenth-century literatu re
boys up until this point, which implies that some British boys
had already failed the test. Furthermore, Lurgan not only does
not explicitly ascribe Kim’s strength of will to his whiteness, but
he also declares himself mystified as to the nature of Kim’s
ability to resist the mesmeric trance: “I wish I knew what it was
that[.] . . . But you are right. You should not tell that—not even
to me” (p. 203). There is little reason, aside from the fact that
Kim had learned his multiplication tables in a British school, to
assume that Kim’s assertion of rational will in the face of
Lurgan Sahib’s wandering hands means, as it is nearly always
read, that Kipling attributed this capacity to Kim’s Britishness
rather than to his adroitness with esoteric practice, refined
during his study with the lama.
This reading makes sense of the otherwise puzzling scene
later in the novel where Kipling seems to undermine the supposed supremacy of Western rationality by depicting a protection spell, complete with whispering devils. The novel is
pointedly agnostic on the question of whether the devils “really”
did or did not appear: as James Thrall asks, “Is the spiritpossession merely an explicable cultural phenomenon, or a true
consorting with devils? Neither Babu nor the reader knows for
sure.”27 In fact, as Margaret Feeley has demonstrated in her
careful textual analysis of the novel’s early manuscript, Kipling
revised the scene so as to include a more deliberately esoteric
and supernatural element—thus, I would argue, undermining
any interpretation of the novel as an unalloyed endorsement of
the superiority of Western “rationality” over Eastern spiritual
practice: “In the manuscript, Mahbub’s sole purpose is to make
Kim a more efficient spy, to change his color so that he will
appear to be a true Indian when he plays the Game. But in the
published version, Mahbub’s primary purpose is to procure dawut (invocation) in order to protect Kim” (Feeley, “The Kim
That Nobody Reads,” p. 277).28 More important, perhaps, is
27
James H. Thrall, “Immersing the Chela: Religion and Empire in Rudyard Kipling’s
Kim,” Religion and Literature, 36 (2004), 57.
28
As Luckhurst notes, in some of Kipling’s early tales “native superstition is
demystified by the narrator, reasserting a divide between Eastern magic and Western
rationalism. But magic continually invests colonial perceptions of the margin and
other stories are less secure” (The Invention of Telepathy, p. 175).
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241
the fact that Kim’s repetition of the multiplication tables during
the Lurgan hypnosis scene also constitutes a kind of mantra
(“He clung desperately to the repetition” [Kim, p. 202]), and
thus hardly can be said to constitute a straightforward “Anglorational” response to the seductions of Lurgan Sahib.29 It seems
clear that the novel complicates in very deliberate ways the simplistic “West ¼ Rationality” formula upon which many later
readers have nonetheless insisted.
Kim’s resistance to mesmerism, and the
questions of will, self-control, and racialized “susceptibility” this
episode engages, should be read within the broader context of
popular Victorian writings on trance. The non-supernatural
status of trance was ostensibly established by the time Kipling
was writing Kim. As Alison Winter demonstrates, the view of
mesmeric trance states as subject to rational explanation gradually solidified throughout the course of the century: “In
the second half of the century mesmerism was absorbed into
a variety of different disciplines and projects” such as physics,
medicine, and psychoanalysis, all of which posited natural explanations for the phenomenon (Mesmerized, p. 348). Just a couple of years after Kim, Cora Linn Daniels declares in the
Encyclopædia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the
World (1903), “Hypnotism having become as indisputable and
established fact in experience and knowledge, its phenomena
29
Ian Adam further complicates the reading of this scene: “I have mentioned how
Kim recites the multiplication tables during his initiation with Lurgan Sahib, and how
this Western rational mode preserves him from delusion by way of archaic deceptions.
But the recitation of the tables is talismanic, oral, just as, conversely, ‘oral’ hypnotism is
a non-archaic product, through Charcot and Freud, of modernity’s medical interventions” (“Oral/Literate/Transcendent,” p. 74). As Alison Winter notes, the use of
mesmeric trance by medical practitioners in India was prey to similar bidirectional
confusions: mesmerism had “strong affiliations with precolonial Indian culture. It had
to be exported to Britain and brought back to India in order to become knowledge”
(Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000], p. 211). See also Luckhurst: “The discovery of supernatural or supernormal communications in dispersed theatres of Empire suggested to some evidence
of pre-modern powers lost to the Enlightenment but that could be recovered with
sufficient study” (The Invention of Telepathy, p. 158).
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nin e teenth-century literatu re
are no longer properly considered occult, and many believe
that it will ultimately afford an explanation of the many mysterious forces and strange possessions or obsessions that have
heretofore been classified under the terms superstition and
occult.”30 In an even earlier important commentary, “A New
Theory of Trance” (1877), James Beard offers a definitively
scientific explanation of the phenomena of trance states as
“a functional disease of the nervous system, in which the cerebral activity is concentrated in some limited region of the brain,
with suspension of the activity of the rest of the brain, and
consequent loss of volition.”31
This rationalist view was complicated, however, by the fact
that trance states continued to be associated with “mysterious”
Eastern religious practices. In her discussion of the introduction of surgical mesmerism into British colonial India, Winter
notes that “the strongest associations Victorians made with
India involved trances (opium poppies, superstitious peasants,
ecstatic religious states); it was easy to think of this territory as
fertile ground for the cultivation of altered states of mind”
(Mesmerized, p. 210). As Roger Luckhurst explains, the supposed prevalence of trance and similar phenomena within the
spaces of Empire “suggested to some evidence of pre-modern
powers lost to the Enlightenment but that could be recovered
with sufficient study” (The Invention of Telepathy, p. 158).
Thus, in the late-Victorian period, trance states were
“treated to multiple, contradictory theorizations. They were
cited as evidence by those emphasizing physiological determinism, or different forms of psycho-physiological inter-action and
parallelism, or by schools of dynamic psychology which gave
psychical action a larger degree of autonomy” (Luckhurst, The
Invention of Telepathy, p. 94). At the time that Kipling was writing
Kim, the status of trance had thus shifted definitively toward
naturalist, “scientific” explanations (in other words, hypnosis
had replaced mesmerism as the locus of interest), yet the exotic
30
Cora Linn Daniels and C. M Stevans, Encyclopædia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the
Occult Sciences of the World . . . , 3 vols. (Chicago and Milwaukee: J. H. Yewdale and Sons,
1903), III, 1721.
31
George M. Beard, “A New Theory of Trance, and Its Bearings on Human
Testimony,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 4 (1877), 5.
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243
and mysterious Orientalist associations of trance states still
stubbornly clung. We can see this ambivalence clearly enough
in the novel, where several “jadoo” episodes (the Hindu term
for magic that Kim employs) are never definitively explained
away as naturalistic phenomena; Kipling seems content to rest
in this ambivalence, if not actively to exploit it.
Victorian discussions of trance states tended to depict
some subjects as more susceptible than others. As Winter observes, “It was common for mesmerists to argue that their power
to create the trance was a sign of their superiority over the
person who succumbed to them” (Mesmerized, p. 200). While
Beard claimed that everyone is capable of being entranced, he
also noted that those people are predisposed to trance who
have “acquired a nervous system generally sensitive and impressible. . . . The best subjects are those who are predisposed, both
physically and psychically, who have sensitive organizations,
and unbalanced, ill-trained minds” (“A New Theory of Trance,”
pp. 23–24).
The question of sensitivity seems to be a rather vexed one;
Winter notes that the surgical mesmerist James Esdaile believed
that “lower” members of society were actually the least susceptible
subjects: “They were the least attuned to others, the least nervous,
the least delicate—and therefore the least responsive to nervous
influence” (Mesmerized, p. 201). However, this hierarchical relation was complicated in the Anglo-Indian context, since Indians
were supposedly one of the more susceptible “races”: “The main
reason for this was that . . . they were more culturally primitive.
A determining factor in a people’s responsiveness to the trance
was their ‘closeness to’ or ‘distance from’ the natural order”
(Mesmerized, p. 201). As Luckhurst observes more generally, narratives of psychic phenomena in colonial locations “show
a marked interest in transgression across other categories of identity, as in the mediation of race and colonial power in mesmeric
rapport across the colour-line. Occult relation oscillates between
distance and touch, restoring and dissolving boundaries in the
same moment” (The Invention of Telepathy, p. 150).
The issue of racialization in the context of trance is thus an
extremely complex one; on the one hand, Indian subjects are
aligned with the “higher” classes of society in being more
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nin e teenth-century literatu re
susceptible to trance; on the other hand, there is a strong suggestion that the source of this very sensitivity (in the case of
Indian subjects) is their supposed closeness to the natural
order, and thus their primitiveness and animalism. Kim’s resistance to trance is thus impossibly overdetermined within the
context of this unstable significatory landscape; again, an interpretation of the scene that ascribes his resiliency only to his
whiteness, or even his Englishness, threatens to flatten out the
rich ambiguity of the episode.
Perhaps the only point on which Victorian writers on
trance seem to be in agreement is the association of trance with
the evacuation of the will of the subject. As Beard definitively
declares, “The fully entranced person has no will; what he
wishes to do he cannot do; what he wishes not to do he does;
he is at the mercy of any external or internal suggestions” (“A
New Theory of Trance,” p. 12). While commentators agreed
that the entranced subject loses his or her will, opinion was
divided as to whether the will of the mesmerist simply takes
over and the subject becomes a kind of puppet. Beard did
not believe that “willessness” posed a particular moral threat
to the entranced subject: “Subjects in the mesmeric trance are
under the control of the external suggestions of the operator,
as expressed by voice or manner (not of his silent, unexpressed
will, as some imagine), because they go into the state with that
expectation; otherwise the operator has no power over him”
(“A New Theory of Trance,” p. 10). Yet other writers were less
sanguine. In his story “John Barrington Cowles” (1884), for
example, Arthur Conan Doyle worries: “A strong will can, simply by virtue of its strength, take possession of a weaker one,
even at a distance, and can regulate the impulses and the
actions of the owner of it. If there was one man in the world
who had a very much more highly-developed will than any of
the rest of the human family, there is no reason why he should
not be able to rule over them all, and reduce his fellowcreatures to the condition of automatons.”32
32
Arthur Conan Doyle, “John Barrington Cowles,” rpt. in his The Captain of the
Polestar, and Other Tales, 6th ed. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1893), p. 251;
quoted in Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, p. 205.
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245
For perhaps obvious reasons, mesmeric trance was thus
a threatening and anxiety-provoking state for many commentators. As Winter notes, naturalistic, scientific explanations of
trance states did not assuage these anxieties: “One could not
make mesmeric phenomena innocuous simply by making
them the product of the will. For the will itself was one of the
most controversial focuses of religious discussions of
mesmerism” (Mesmerized, p. 266). As Luckhurst explains, “any
practice which appeared to surrender the will (other than to
God) was tantamount to inviting non-being. The mesmeric
‘crisis’ was both a danger to public morals and an insult to
conceptions of self-control” (The Invention of Telepathy, p. 96).
Yet as we shall see, the question of the role of will in those
altered states of consciousness—including trance—found in
esoteric religious practice was becoming increasingly complicated by the end of the century. By the time that Kipling wrote
Kim, it was not at all clear to religious commentators that
mesmeric states necessarily entailed the evacuation of will—
in fact, quite the contrary.
The association of trance states with Buddhism, such as we see in Kim, reinforced—and was reinforced
by—the longstanding interest among late-Victorian commentators with that religion’s treatment of will, intention, and discipline. As Philip Almond stresses, “there were numerous
features of Buddhism that could be positively esteemed, that
were unequivocally in harmony with various and varied Victorian ideals” (The British Discovery of Buddhism, p. 41); examples
could include “moral earnestness, self control, responsibility
for one’s actions, reward according to merit, improvement
through the exercise of will and choice, and discipline in
achieving spiritual growth” (Franklin, The Lotus and the Lion,
p. 48). While comparisons of Christianity and Buddhism/
Hinduism were an extraordinarily popular topic for Victorian
exegetes, such juxtapositions tended to project qualities of one
system of thought onto another, to read the Eastern religions
through the lens—and according to the goals—of Victorian
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nin e teenth-century literatu re
British Protestantism.33 As William Brockie writes in an 1876
study modestly entitled Indian Thought: “What, then, is the
grand ultimate purpose subserved by this life? The moral victory and triumph of Mind over Matter, through spontaneous
effort, trial, suffering, action, self-denial, and devotion” (Indian
Thought, pp. 29–30).
The victory of mind over matter—the exercise of will—was
of paramount interest to Victorian Christian exegetes. While
the complicated question of the doctrinal role of free will in
Christianity—even simply in Victorian Anglicanism—is well
beyond the scope of this essay, it is merely necessary to note
here that many contemporary commentators felt that a challenge to human free will was a challenge to the underpinnings
of Christian morality.34 One significant contributor to this anxiety was Herbert Spencer, who was adamant that the concept of
radical human free will was simply a logical impossibility:
33
See also Franklin’s discussion of what he terms “hybrid religions”: “I propose that
late-Victorian hybrid religions. . . . carried Protestant individualism to its logical
extreme, centering heavily on individual vocation and will” (The Lotus and the Lion,
p. 62). David L. McMahan emphasizes that this imbrication was a particular feature of
the later discourse of “scientific Buddhism”: “It is hard to overestimate the extent to
which the early discourse of scientific Buddhism was inextricably intertwined with
Christianity” (McMahan, “Modernity and the Early Discourse of Scientific Buddhism,”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 72 [2004], 924).
34
This tension was felt primarily in the later decades of the nineteenth century. As
one recent commentator has explained, the natural theology of such earlier writers as
Thomas Chalmers, William Whewell, and John Herschel posited an “anthropomorphic
philosophy” that “argued that the mind, rather than physical science, applied intelligible experiences of causation. This argument placed the idea of free will at the centre
of nature and interpreted free will as a source of natural events.” Roger Smith,
“Physiological Psychology and the Philosophy of Nature in Mid-Nineteenth Century
Britain,” Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge Univ., 1970, p. 216; quoted in Boyd Hilton, The
Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought,
1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 187. This conviction united many
earlier Christian apologists and scientists. It was only in the second half of the century,
as Hilton notes, that the realization that “mind and matter . . . might be subject to the
same laws” was to throw this relationship into question (The Age of Atonement, p. 188).
Rick Rylance, quoting a Victorian summary of the state of the discipline in the 1850s,
writes: “After the advance in knowledge of the nervous system, the reflex mechanism
‘has begun to claim for itself the origination of many phenomena which were before
attributed to the direct effort of the mind, or the will’” (Rylance, Victorian Psychology and
British Culture 1850–1880 [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000], p. 196). Rylance
quotes from J. D. Morell, “Modern English Psychology,” British and Foreign MedicoChirurgical Review, 17 (1856), 352.
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247
“Psychical changes either conform to law or they do not. If they
do not conform to law, this work, in common with all works on
the subject, is sheer nonsense: no science of Psychology is possible. If they do conform to law, there cannot be any such thing
as free will.”35 Spencer’s model of evolutionary determinism
was seen, rightly or wrongly, as threatening to a Christianity
that seemed to place great emphasis on the role of redemption
through the free acceptance of the word of God. For example,
an anonymous reviewer of Spencer’s Principles of Psychology
(1855) had this to say about that work:
It is sketchy, highly abstract, audaciously speculative, subversive
of ordinary morality, and anti-Christian. We intend these latter
epithets as descriptive. Morality depends on man’s power to regulate his own conduct in accordance with a law either inward or
outward, to control his desires, to educate his moral sense—in
a word, to exert ‘free will.’ If the will is not free, man is not
responsible; and Mr. Spencer denies in the plainest terms that
man’s will is free.36
The author goes on to explain quite clearly that it is specifically
this particular doctrine that renders Spencer’s work “antiChristian”: “Christianity implies that man has a soul as well as
a body, and that the soul survives the dissolution of the body.
Mr. Spencer denies that man has a soul—that he is anything
but highly-organized tissue. . . . If the doctrines are true, morality is impossible, and Christianity is untrue” (“Spencer’s Principles of Psychology,” p. 28). As Archbishop Manning somewhat
tautologically insists in an 1871 entrée in an ongoing discussion with William B. Carpenter, “If there be a fact of human
consciousness, it is that we possess a will”; further, “life, intelligence, and will are all properties or faculties of a personal
agent, who is in contact with matter, but is not material. And
this personal agent . . . we call ‘soul.’”37
35
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, 2d ed., 2 vols. (London: Williams and
Norgate, 1870–72), I, 485; quoted in Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003) p. 149.
36
[Anon.], “Spencer’s Principles of Psychology,” review of The Principles of Psychology, by Herbert Spencer, The Spectator, 8 December 1855 p. 28.
37
[Archbishop Manning], “The Relation of the Will to Thought,” Contemporary
Review, 16 (1871), 478, 479.
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The Victorian characterization of the role of the will in
Buddhism was complex and contradictory—perhaps reflecting
and articulating tensions present in scientific discourse—and
shifted markedly over the course of the century.38 One major
strain of thought held that Buddhists (and Asian people in
general), were passive, indolent, lazy, and lacked the resolution
and tenacity of the British. As Franklin puts it, “Buddhists, even
more than other Orientals, were too passive, too ‘languid,’ to
38
Challenges to human free will were such a threat that it seems as though it was
difficult for most theorists to remain perfectly consistent on the question and to
embrace fully the implications of evolutionary determinism. This determinism-vs.morality conundrum was one that, according to Rylance, Spencer himself was prey to:
“A resolutely environmental determinist, who would not countenance the idea of
a free-acting will in psychology, Spencer none the less insisted, as a political economist,
a pacifist, an anti-colonialist, and a believer in altruism and the effects of human
sympathy, that people were able to exert moral agency to make a difference to things”
(Victorian Psychology, p. 222). Writing somewhat later than Spencer, George Henry
Lewes, in his magnum opus Problems of Life and Mind (1874–79), “emphasizes consciousness, will, and agency, and yet continues to work with a determinist model”
(Rylance, Victorian Psychology, p. 305). The theory of evolutionary determinism was,
during the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century, clearly an emergent
discourse that coexisted uncomfortably—even within the writings of a single theorist,
or within a single scientific work—with the dominant Christian discourse of human
free will. See George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 5 vols. (London: Trübner
and Co., 1874–79). There is, of course, another (voluminous) nineteenth-century
literature on free will from the point of view of mental science, which clustered around
the questions of the nature of consciousness and the “human-automatism” debate.
William B. Carpenter is the key figure here; he himself provides a clear overview of the
discussion up until the 1870s in his essay “On the Doctrine of Human Automatism”
(1875), and outlines his own theory in “The Physiology of the Will” (1871). See William
B. Carpenter, “On the Doctrine of Human Automatism,” Contemporary Review, 25
(1875), 397–416; and W[illiam] B. Carpenter, “The Physiology of the Will,” Contemporary Review, 17 (1871), 192–217. Essentially, the physiological/psychological view
accorded with the evolutionary perspective in emphasizing the great scope of
“automatic” (and thus unconscious, will-less) actions in human behavior, although
Carpenter himself was critical of the hard-line automatism position taken by writers
like Huxley: “the physiologist sees quite as clearly as the metaphysician that there is
a power beyond and above all such mechanism—a will which, alike in the Mind and in
the Body, can utilize the Automatic agencies to work out its own purpose” (“Physiology
of the Will,” p. 192). Yet Carpenter’s free-will protestations are checked by an insistence
on the great power and range of automatic actions that runs throughout his work; in
the same essay he also writes, “it may now be regarded as a well-established Physiological
fact, that even in the most purely volitional movements—those which are prompted by
a distinct purposive effort,—the Will does not directly produce the result, but plays, as it
were, upon the Automatic apparatus, by which the requisite nervo-muscular combination is brought into action” (“Physiology of the Will,” p. 196).
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actively seek their ambitions and desires. They lacked will. . . .
They were indolent when they should have worked, and they
sought surrender—in the spiritual as well as military sense—
when ‘we’ would have fought” (The Lotus and the Lion, p. 116).
Victorian commentator C. Pfoundes expounds the enervating
effects of the acquisition of esoteric knowledges: “The hold
which Buddhism has upon the majority of Asiatics is deeply
rooted in the inner life of its devotees and appears prominently
in the obsequies, memorial services, and ancestral rites, which
form an integral part of their monotonous existence.”39
As another writer puts it, rather more baldly, “to judge of its
effects on the priests, the practice of Buddhism seems to have
the most debasing influences, as they have nearly all of them an
expression approaching idiocy.”40
Of course this is, to a certain extent, simply stock racist
rhetoric: “Orientals” are more indolent, passive, lazy, etc.—
a perdurable characterization that has received sustained critical attention particularly since the publication of Edward
Said’s Orientalism in 1978.41 It is important to note, however,
that these topoi are refracted through quite specifically
described religious practice. As Almond writes, “In all respects,
the Oriental mind was [seen as] inferior, a fact the blame for
which was often laid at the door of Buddhism” (The British
Discovery of Buddhism, p. 41). The racist rhetoric is thus consonant with a broader discourse on will that seemed to many early
Victorians to challenge the foundations of their own Christian
doctrine: projecting willessness onto the Asian/Buddhist other
becomes a cultural anxiety-management technique.
As Almond also argues, however, “during the second half
of the century, Buddhism was often cited as a counter to the
generally accepted belief in the stagnation of Oriental societies” (The British Discovery of Buddhism, p. 51, emphasis added).
39
C. Pfoundes, “Why Buddhism?,” Open Court, 9 (1895), 4594.
J. F. Davis, quoted in George R. Mathews, “Notes on Buddhism at Home,” Literary
Digest, 3 (1891), 603.
41
See, for example, Almond: “there were however certain, so to say, childlike
qualities among certain Oriental people that were admired. . . . Like children, Orientals
are also simple, credulous, and lacking in originality” (The British Discovery of Buddhism,
p. 48). See also Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
40
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Almond’s interpretation of this phenomenon suggests that in
the latter decades of the century (perhaps as evolutionary
determinism was becoming entrenched and respectable),
more practical concerns might have begun trumping what
I have argued was a cultural reaction-formation: “Buddhism
provided a useful device to overcome the language of
unchangeability, fixity, or immutability that was no longer congenial to the colonialist philanthropist, whether religiously
inspired or otherwise motivated. A benevolent colonial policy
demanded at least the possibility of innovation and change”
(The British Discovery of Buddhism, p. 52).
The growing tolerance—and even popularity—of Buddhism among British Victorians could also be ascribed to the
growing utility of the religion on another front: as Christian
orthodoxy was challenged by evolutionary determinism, what
McMahan terms “scientific Buddhism” “offered the hope of
a religion that did not conflict with the dominant discourse
of science” to “spiritually unmoored Victorians” (“Modernity
and the Early Discourse of Scientific Buddhism,” p. 925).
Brantlinger’s conclusion is similar, although he reaches it
through a slightly different route: “Impelled by scientific materialism, the search for new sources of faith led many late Victorians to telepathy, séances, and psychic research. It also led to
the far reaches of the Empire. . . . the stunning success of Edwin
Arnold’s The Light of Asia (1879) suggests the strength of the
desire for alternatives to both religious orthodoxy and scientific
skepticism” (Rule of Darkness, p. 228).
Ironically (or perhaps not), the discourse of will also
shifted during this period so that the very concept that had
enacted such a challenge to Christianity to begin with was now
enlisted to burnish the reputation of the previously reviled
locus of “Oriental” indolence. We can see this shift throughout
later-century British commentaries on Buddhism. Even
advanced Buddhists’ purported supernatural powers, which
so fascinated British Victorians, were often ascribed to sheer
mental effort: “Buddhist adepts can fly through the air, go
through earth, on water, turn themselves into other shapes,
enter another’s body, and so forth. Yet these powers are attainable in their highest form only by Buddhistic training in will,
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effort, thought, and investigation”; more explicitly, “There are
no physical limitations that the adept cannot ignore at will.”42
One important later-Victorian scholar of Buddhism, Caroline Rhys Davids, authored an essay on the topic entitled “On
the Will in Buddhism” (1898), in which she specifically sets
out to correct the “hasty generalizations and one-sided conclusions concerning the nature of Buddhist ideals and discipline” on the part of both the general public and her
fellow scholars. 43 Rhys Davids begins by claiming that “it
seems to have been characteristic of the man [Buddha] to
have rated nothing higher in conduct than a supreme effort
of will in which ‘the whole energies of being consent’” (“On
the Will in Buddhism,” p. 50). She goes on directly to attack
the pervasive racist characterizations of Buddhists we have
seen in other writers:
The stony, stultified, self-centred apathy we often hear ascribed
to the Buddhist ideal is supposed to be the result—in so far as the
Indian climate is not held responsible—of a Schopenhauerian
pessimism as to the worth and promise of life and the springs of
life. If, however, the critic would dwell more on the positive
tendencies in Buddhist ethics, he might discern under the outward calm of mien of the Buddhist sage in literature and art,
a passion of emotion and will not paralyzed or expurgated, but
rendered subservient to and diffused around deep faith and
high hope. (“On the Will in Buddhism,” p. 55)44
Other commentators writing around the same time (and
the same time as Kim) shared Rhys Davids’s assessment of the
role of will in Buddhism: “In place of dependence on
intermediaries, each man was raised to the position of individual responsibility. Henceforward he was to stand alone. No
God, no priest, no mediator could save him. Herein lies the
superb optimism of the Buddhist, who believes that man can
be his own saviour. . . . Each individual has to work out his own
42
E. Washburn Hopkins, “Buddhistic Mysticism,” in Indian Studies in Honor of Charles
Rockwell Lanman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1929), pp. 116, 120–21.
43
[C. A. F.] Rhys Davids, “On the Will in Buddhism,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 30 (1898), 47.
44
Almond discusses the prevalence of the idea of the Indian climate’s influence on
Buddhist thought (see The British Discovery of Buddhism, pp. 43–51).
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nin e teenth-century literatu re
salvation with diligence” (Strong, “The Revival of Buddhism in
India,” p. 273). Or, as a slightly earlier (slightly less encomiastic) commentator put it, “The hardness of attainment and
apparent impossibility of Buddhist holiness lies in this doctrine
of free will.”45
In fact, a marked admiration for Indian religious adepts’
force of will and powers of concentration is found even in the
work of authors largely unsympathetic to the tenets of ancient
Buddhism and Hinduism in general. The scholar of Tibet
Graham Sandberg, writing in 1890, vilifies practitioners of
Indian religions as “most unwashen and most unpoetical
idler[s],” “plagiarist[s],” and vacuous idiots, who like nothing
better than to “lie as a log and sleep”;46 yet even he grudgingly
acknowledges that within Buddhist doctrine, “attainment to
the grades of perfection, and thence to saintship, is only to be
acquired by the most complete abstraction from external
objections and the profoundest internal contemplation,” and
that when a practitioner “has really made up his mind to
reach Nirvana, he must attain by perseverance in the prescribed ascetic exercises to the various settled grades of
perfection. He has, it must be noted, set himself apart from
the ordinary mass of mankind” (“Philosophical Buddhism in
Tibet,” pp. 266, 265). This marked shift in the rhetoric of
“Oriental” will by the last years of the nineteenth century
means that whatever stereotypes about Buddhism/Hinduism
later commentators may have held, they no longer clustered
around the depiction of adepts as lazy, enervated, or
undisciplined.
With these discussions in mind, we can
further elaborate the role of will in Kipling’s novel. The third
passage I would like to examine at length is the continuation
of the quotation discussed above—“‘I am Kim. I am Kim. And
45
Helen Graham McKerlie, “Western Buddhism,” Asiatic Quarterly Review, 9 (1890),
213.
46
Graham Sandberg, “Philosophical Buddhism in Tibet,” Contemporary Review, 57
(1890), 256, 262, 266, 263.
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253
what is Kim?’ His soul repeated it again and again.” It runs
as follows:
He did not want to cry—had never felt less like crying in his
life—but of a sudden easy, stupid tears trickled down his nose,
and with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being
lock up anew on the world without. Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper proportion.
Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle
to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked
to. They were all real and true—solidly planted upon the feet—
perfectly comprehensible—clay of his clay, neither more nor
less. (Kim, p. 331)
As Edward Said notes, “The whole of the passage . . . has in it
a kind of moral triumphalism which is carried by the accentuated inflections in it of purpose, will, voluntarism”
(“Introduction,” p. 20). Perhaps following Said’s highly influential essay, most critics have tended to read this passage in the
same way: as an affirmation on Kipling’s part of a solidly British,
pragmatic, and sedulous worldview that is at the very least perfectly consonant with—if not openly laudatory of—the Victorian colonial project. Christine Bucher, for example, writes:
“The ‘click’ signals the sudden correspondence of Kim’s soul
with the world around him”; “His ‘job’ and his training as a surveyor for the British imperial bureaucracy make this integration likewise the achievement of the nation-creating function
of ideology.”47 Brigitte Hervoche-Bertho observes: “In this
equation of spirituality and railway technology Kipling’s symbolic imagination reveals its true nature, its collusion with
imperialist propaganda. . . . The mechanical metaphor somehow implies that Kim has incorporated or internalized faith
in the coloniser’s technological superiority and understood
that he was part of the complex network of the British Secret
Service, a link in the chain of British Rule” (“The Wheel and
the Way,” p. 368); while Jeffrey Meyer notes: “When the Lama
offers salvation and freedom from the Wheel of Things, Kim
prefers to mesh his soul with the reality of the world and
47
Christine Bucher, “Envisioning the Imperial Nation in Kipling’s Kim,” Journal of
Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, 5, no. 2 (1998), 13–15.
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nin e teenth-century literatu re
become a cog-wheel connected with the machinery of the
Game”;48 and Ian Duncan explains: “In the last pages the accession of a totalizing perspective dislocates Kim’s subjectivity . . . to replace it with an instrumental and colonizing
relation to a world grasped anew as natural, familiar, everyday.”49 An early and influential essay on Kim by Mark
Kinkead-Weekes goes so far as to insist that in this scene Kipling
considered, only to reject, Buddhist teachings outright: “As the
‘gear’ imagery makes clear, this is commitment . . . to the Wheel
of earthly and human life, against the view which holds that
all these things are illusion, and one must keep oneself apart
from them.”50
While other critics suggest that the ambiguity of the “click”
scene signals Kipling’s ambivalence between, inability to reconcile, or even principled negotiating of the “Buddhist half”
and the “British half” of the novel,51 all of these readings still
undervalue the extent to which Kim is informed by contemporary English discourses of “Oriental” spirituality, as well as the
extent to which discourses of will are consonant with the
Buddhist half. Jeffrey Franklin’s reading is unique, as far as
I know, in emphasizing Kipling’s direct engagement with
Buddhist doctrine in the crucial scene: “when Kim sees that
the elements of the material world around him ‘were all real
48
Jeffrey Meyers, “The Quest for Identity in Kim,” Texas Studies in Literature and
Language, 12 (1970), 107.
49
Ian Duncan, “The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel, and Imperialist Panic,” Modern
Language Quarterly, 55 (1994), 304.
50
Mark Kinkead-Weekes, “Vision in Kipling’s Novels,” in Kipling’s Mind and Art:
Selected Critical Essays, ed. Andrew Rutherford (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1964),
p. 231.
51
See, for example, Feeley, “The Kim That Nobody Reads”; Matthew Fellion,
“Knowing Kim, Knowing in Kim,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 53 (2013),
897–912; Feroza Jussawalla, “(Re)Reading Kim: Defining Kipling’s Masterpiece as Postcolonial,” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, 5, no. 2 (1998), 112–30; Kettle,
“What Is Kim?”; Corinne McCutchan, “Who Is Kim?,” in Transforming Genres: New
Approaches to British Fiction of the 1890s, ed. Nikki Lee Manos and Meri-Jane Rochelson
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 131–54; Brunda Moka-Dias, “Migrancy and
Intimacy in Kipling’s Cultural Hybrid,” Exit 9: The Rutgers Journal of Comparative Literature,
1 (1993), 61–74; and Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins,
Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (New York: Routledge, 1988).
r u d y a r d k i p l i n g ’ s kim
255
and true—solidly planted upon the feet—perfectly comprehensible—clay of his clay, neither more nor less,’ he is not
disclaiming Buddhist spirituality, as some critics have argued,
but rather recognizing the givenness of each material moment
and expressing a gratitude that is consistent with a Buddhist
understanding of being fully in the present” (The Lotus and the
Lion, p. 175).52
Kim’s repeated questionings of his identity eventually allow
him to “click” back into a perception of reality—a reality that
happens to include a conveniently instrumental Indian landscape—that I would argue is perfectly consonant with the Victorian understanding of the aims of tantric and esoteric practice.
For example, in his 1876 treatise William Brockie explicates the
Hindu/Buddhist understanding of maya, or the illusory nature
of the external world: “The visible universe is the product of
illusion. . . . Material substances, as the ignorant call them, are
no more than gay or grim pictures, presented continually to our
minds by the Sempiternal Artist, God” (Indian Thought, p. 32).
Another Victorian commentator explains maya in terms that are
strikingly similar to those found in Kim:
In what we call, for distinction, the waking life a similar idea
sometimes arises, especially in times of great trouble, and the
question is occasionally actually formulated: Am I really awake?
If this question could only be fixed and made a subject of reflection in calmer moments the reply would not be long in coming,—“No, it is not so, I am not really awake.” Such person would
then begin to fall into the Buddhist habit of mind, and one day
he would actually awaken out of this, apparently, waking life to
a vivid perception of another and a much more “awake” state of
consciousness beyond. (Ellam, The Message of Buddhism to the
West, p. 9)
52
One recent critic, Young Hee Kwon, does acknowledge the Buddhist “sub-text” of
the novel—the “deep impact of Buddhism in Britain at the turn-of-the-century is indispensable in reading Kim. In terms of readership, it signals that Kipling’s target audience was eager to consume narratives of Buddhist terminologies, mantra, exotic priests
and so on”—yet still argues that the “click” scene “signals a closure of the master
narrative of imperial romance” (Young Hee Kwon, “The Buddhist Sub-Text and the
Imperial Soul-Making in Kim,” Victorian Newsletter, 111 [2007], 21, 25).
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nin e teenth-century literatu re
A somewhat later commentator insists, in terms similar to
those we have already seen, on the effort of will involved in
overcoming the illusion of maya: “if one confines the use of
mysticism to the meaning of oneness with reality and the
power (or desire) to effect it, then it is obvious that these
Abhiññās [higher states of knowledge] are not powers belonging to mysticism but rather to a simple faith on the one hand
and to a groping experimentation with scientific facts on the
other. All these powers are developed through a severe course
of mental training. They are not mystical gifts but ‘accomplishments’ painfully gained” (Hopkins, “Buddhistic Mysticism,”
p. 119).
In other words, it is through esoteric practice—itself an act
of intense will and of reason—that the adherent comes to
understand the external world as illusory, and then, paradoxically, as real. Young Hee Kwon writes about the parallel
enlightenment scenes at the end of the novel: “As if Kim were
an automaton or a mere part of the governing machinery, we
saw Kim’s restless soul automatically and mechanically locked
onto the Wheel by the invisible force of the empire. In contrast,
the lama’s enthusiastic determination to return to his chela ‘lest
he miss the Way’ indicates a mighty performance of will and
action” (“The Buddhist Sub-Text and the Imperial Soul-Making
in Kim,” p. 27). I clearly agree with the second part of this
reading, while disagreeing with the first. Kim’s “click” moment
is also the result of an arduous exercise of will on his part—in
the service of dispelling maya—that we have seen throughout the
novel, including in the infamous Lurgan Sahib seduction
scene. In all of these key moments, Kipling’s novel unsurprisingly depicts the great strength of will and discipline exercised
by its young protagonist. More surprisingly, it also strongly
suggests, and in some cases outright insists, that the source of
that strength is not racial superiority qua whiteness. While Kipling clearly did believe in that superiority (as Said, among other
theorists, has eloquently and powerfully argued), his depiction
of Buddhist practice, consonant with that of other lateVictorian exegetes, forms an important contrapuntal tension
to that prevailing ideology.
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257
It is not necessary to believe (or prove)
that Kipling consciously and deliberately larded Kim with laudatory depictions of Buddhism, or that he was an astute
scholar of the religion, in order to acknowledge the extensive
influence of Eastern religious thought on his novel. As many
critics have discussed, Kipling’s scholarly understanding of
Buddhism would certainly have outstripped that of the average
Victorian, given that his father, John Lockwood Kipling, was
curator of the Lahore Museum and the model for the keeper
of the Wonder House depicted in the early pages of the novel.
(Of course, Kipling was also writing during the “Buddhism
craze” in England, when any assiduous reader of popular journals would have been familiar with the basic tenets of the
religion.) Kwon, for example, argues that “the Buddhist subtext in Kim, with its potential of a radically different Weltanschauung subtly but surely invades the pleasurable discursive
field of the imperial adventure narrative” (“The Buddhist SubText and the Imperial Soul-Making in Kim,” p. 28). As I have
argued, however, the Buddhist elements in Kim constitute
more than just an ideologically disruptive subtext, but an
active and sustained engagement with questions of will and
identity-formation as refracted through perceived ideas of
Eastern religious and esoteric practice.
Similarly, we do not need to concede that Kipling was any
less imperialist, or even less racist, than he undoubtedly was in
order to feel the complexity and subtlety of his engagement
with late-Victorian Buddhism in Kim, and to acknowledge how
that engagement must complicate our ways of reading the
novel. It also must inform our understanding of British literary
representations of Indian nationalism in the early decades of
the twentieth century. While Kim may include a nuanced and
sympathetic depiction of Buddhism, it is still an Orientalist
one. Said argues persuasively that Kipling does not ignore or
repress a dawning awareness of the contradictions of the imperial project, which must surely have been growing importunate;
Kipling genuinely does not apprehend them: “There is no
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nin e teenth-century literatu re
resolution to the conflict between Kim’s colonial service and
loyalty to his Indian companions not because Kipling could not
face it, but because for Kipling there was no conflict and, one
should add immediately, one of the purposes of the novel was,
in fact, to show the absence of conflict” (“Introduction,” p. 23,
emphasis in original).
And yet Kipling’s representation of Buddhism, in its undeniably celebratory key, must be read as an early-modernist
harbinger of the uptake of Buddhism in modern and contemporary art and popular culture. As R. John Williams argues in
his recent study The Buddha in the Machine (2014), there has
been a prevalent belief among modern artists that “at the core
of Western culture since at least the Enlightenment there lies
an originary and all-encompassing philosophical error, manifested most immediately in the perils of modern technology—
and that Asian art offers a way out of that awful matrix.”53
Williams explores the modern trope of Asia as the site of preindustrial techne,
^ which functions as a potential solution to the
depredations of industrial society: “a compelling fantasy that
would posit Eastern aesthetics as both the antidote to and the
perfection of machine culture” (The Buddha in the Machine,
p. 1). As we have seen, late-Victorian commentators on Buddhism, including Kipling, prefigure this belief, and its contradictory character, in their ambivalent embrace of Buddhist
practice as a technology of self-improvement and discipline
of the will.
University of British Columbia
ABSTRACT
Deanna K. Kreisel, “The Psychology of Victorian Buddhism and
Rudyard Kipling’s Kim” (pp. 227–259)
This essay demonstrates that Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) engages deeply with several
aspects of Buddhist thought that were also of central concern to nineteenth-century
British psychology. It describes several central tenets of Buddhism as understood by
Victorian exegetes, paying particular attention to the ways this discourse became
53
R. John Williams, The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East
and West (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), p. 1.
r u d y a r d k i p l i n g ’ s kim
259
surprisingly approbatory over the course of the century. It also performs close readings
of three key passages in Kipling’s novel dealing with identity, will, and self-discipline
that illuminate the author’s understanding of the subtleties of Buddhist thought. Its
attention to the ways in which Kipling’s novel engages Asian religious practice, particularly the “esoteric” practices of meditation and trance, complicates an entrenched
reading of the novel as championing British triumphalism; it does so by challenging
earlier interpretations of the religious elements in Kim as constituting straightforward
evidence for the novel’s endorsement of the imperial project.
Keywords: Buddhism; Victorian psychology; Rudyard Kipling; Kim;
Esoteric practice