Hybridity, History, and Empire in Rudyard Kipling's Kim

This essay undertakes a long overdue analysis of Hurree Babu in Rudyard Kipling's Kim, whom it places in the context of anticolonial sentiment pace Said and reads as a politically charged character, subject to novelistic controls such as comedic reduction on account of his potentially disruptive energy. It considers Hurree Babu as an early representation of characters like Forster's Dr. Aziz and Rushdie's Saleem Sinai, who feel the twin obligations of immersion in and resistance to Englishness.