Kipling in brief by rajib

Kim - Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Joseph Kipling was born in Bombay, India in 1865. He lived in India during the height of the British Empire so that the story of his life takes place against a background of imperial grandeur, followed by war and decline ( Fido 1). While living in India, Kipling wrote his best works. Looking closely, one sees that Kipling wrote about India all his life; almost exclusively in his youth, but many years after he returned to England for good, he was still looking back to India and reexamining the Imperial experience (Bauer xii). In 1907, Rudyard Kipling became the first English author to win a Nobel Prize for literature. Kipling’s brilliant works, although mostly children’s books, forced even his harshest critics to acknowledge his genius. In his later years his fame declined but, he has always had an attentive audience of readers, and has never been out of print. Brilliant, prolific, and still controversial, Rudyard Kipling remains one of the most widely popular authors in lit

Kim from Indopedia

Kim, (1901), a combined spy novel and picaresque novel by Rudyard Kipling written against the background of the Great Game -- the cat-and-mouse activities of Russia and Britain in northern India and Afghanistan in the 19th century.

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Kim (Kimball O'Hara) is a half-caste orphan son of a British soldier and a nursemaid who runs free on the streets of Lahore and who incidentally makes contact with the British secret service. He attaches himself to a Tibetan Lama who is on a quest to be freed from the Wheel of Life. He becomes his chela, or disciple, but is also used by the British to carry a message to the British army in the North. Kim's trip with the Lama along the Grand Trunk Road is the first great adventure in the novel.

Kim is recognized by chaplain of his father's army regiment and sent to school in Lucknow, but keeps in touch with the Lama and also with his secret service connections. He is trained in espionage; the game of looking at a tray full of mixed objects and noting which have been added or taken away is still used for training spies and is still called "Kim's Game".

Kim rejoins the lama and together they make a trip to the Himalayas, this time capturing papers from Russian spies but at the same time the Lama continues his spiritual quest. At the end of the novel, Kim is undecided between the spiritual life of the Lama and the life of action at which he excels.