Knowing Kim, Knowing in Kim

This essay examines Rudyard Kipling’s canny treatment of knowledge in Kim. While the novel itself performs ethnology, seeming to convey suspect knowledge about the races, religions, and castes of India, it also examines this performance as a practice in itself and registers the challenges of knowing other people, both through ethnography and through the representations of fiction. Rather than undertake this examination explicitly, Kim uses the resources of the novel, such as narrative and dialogical strategies, to distinguish between practices of knowing and between categories of knowledge claims, and to explore the limits of these practices and claims.