Note: I’m sorry I haven’t posted in a while, but I’ve been bogged down and unable to pursue extracurricular projects to their conclusion. I do have a very exciting project on high-tension lines, marginal spaces and suburban hauntology in the works – stay tuned. As for this, it’s an old academic paper, which I am posting because I’m citing it elsewhere and would like to make it available. I’m afraid it is less lively than most of the things I post here, and it would be better if I had time to rewrite it with a few years’ extra knowledge, but hopefully it isn’t totally devoid of interest.
Sean
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Rudyard Kipling’s Kim comes at the end of a century in which opium had a privileged position within the British consciousness. Its role was complex and often contradictory, and the detailed story of how it transformed from a ubiquitous analgesic comparable to modern-day aspirin to a tightly controlled and restricted drug is beyond the scope of this paper[1]. However, there are certain general continuities in this discourse. One is the close alignment of opium and Empire, and the preponderance of Orientalist tropes in writing on opium. While this took the form of a fantastic exoticism earlier in the century, as in Thomas De Quincey’s seminal Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which one critic writes “invented the concept of recreational drug use” (Boon 37), the tone becomes much more urgent later in the century, as imperial anxieties become more acute. In numerous works of late Victorian fiction, among the more famous being Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (1891), opium acts as an agent through which the Orient contaminates and disrupts the stability of English society, subjectively transforming or inverting the English figures it encounters. Kipling engages tangentially with this history, utilizing opium to inscribe the Oriental within his central character and build his text out of this opiated origin.
Quantitatively the role of opium in the text is marginal; it is explicitly mentioned only ten times, usually in passing. Its most prominent appearance is in the important opening paragraphs, which establish Kim as a character and set his quest narrative into motion; these will be focused on here. The novel begins:
He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zamzammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher -the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-breathing dragon’, hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot.
There was some justification for Kim – he had kicked Lala Dinanath’s boy off the trunnions – since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English. Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white – a poor white of the very poorest. The half-caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait) told the missionaries that she was Kim’s mother’s sister; but his mother had been nursemaid in a Colonel’s family and had married Kimball O’Hara, a young colour- sergeant of the Mavericks, an Irish regiment. He afterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi Railway, and his Regiment went home without him. The wife died of cholera in Ferozepore, and O’Hara fell to drink and loafing up and down the line with the keen-eyed three-year-old baby. Societies and chaplains, anxious for the child, tried to catch him, but O’Hara drifted away, till he came across the woman who took opium and learned the taste from her, and died as poor whites die in India. (49-50).
Kim is introduced in a position of play dominance, striding a now unused gun outside the Lahore Museum, a symbol of imperial power/knowledge and a site incidentally curated by Kipling’s father from 1875 to 1894 (340 note 4). His position of mock authority is explained by the fact the he “was English,” a remark which we soon find to be a red herring, since he is not “English” but Irish, peripheral rather than central to the imperial center. Within the Indian setting this fact is blurred, as the distinction between colonizer and colonial subject becomes a gradient rather than a sharp dichotomy. Kim’s relative closeness, ancestrally, to the physical and ideological center of Empire as signified by his “white blood” (94, etc), allows him to gradually come to occupy the position of “Sahib.”
The phrase “white blood” is interesting, because as this introduction makes clear, his whiteness is not visibly signified: he “was burned black as any native.” Nor does his speech bely his heredity; he chooses to speak “the vernacular” rather than English, which is interestingly called “his mother tongue” despite its foreignness and Kim’s alienation from it. Despite all of these contradictions, the narrative attempts to achieve some kind of stability with the confident assurances offered by 19th century racialism: “Kim was white…”
Even if our fleeting omniscient narrator assures us Kim “was white,” whatever that may mean, he was raised by an opium-smoking woman who claims to be Kim’s aunt. For those who believed her, Kim was a hybrid figure in racial terms; we who are told his mother was “a nursemaid in a Colonel’s family” are given something more ambiguous until an apparently accurate clarification is put in the mouth of Bennett in a later chapter. But culturally, Kim is steeped in the depths of Indian “bazar” culture.
Before proceeding with Kim, a word is required about the Indian setting. India was where opium for the vast trade with China was produced (opium for use in the United Kingdom was grown in Turkey). This trade was a source of a tremendous amount of wealth, but at the same time, it was an uncomfortable fact that the Empire had amassed such riches at the expense of submitting millions of Chinese to a degree of opiate dependence that was uncommon or at least invisible in Britain (see Zheng, and Berridge, ch. 7). A debate over the morality in the trade which began around the time of the Opium Wars had blown up into a vigorous political movement by the 1870s, spearheaded by the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade. The issue was in and out of Parliament up until the time Kipling wrote, and the wide circulation of the Society’s Friend of China among middle and upper-class audiences had a significant effect on thought about the relationship of opium, Empire, and the Orient (Milligan 21). Berridge writes that the “myth of the opium den” was “the most obvious public legacy of the anti-opium movement” (195).
It is this mythology which will come to bear on the figure of Kim, through his father. Kim’s father is a poor, washed-up Irish soldier who has fallen into alcoholism. The figure of a no-good Irish drunk is a common enough one, and in a novel abounding with racialized aphorisms and characterizations its appearance is not surprising. It is interesting however that his drinking is narrated as a segue into his opium use. The discourses of alcohol and opium frequently overlapped in the 19th century, particularly with regard to the working classes and the poor, of whom the Irish would have comprised a disproportionate percentage. Public health officials routinely expressed alarm that working class alcohol culture could be combined with or be superseded by opium abuse (Berridge 105). De Quincey himself remarked on this: “But…some years ago, on passing through Manchester, I was informed by several cotton-manufacturers, that their work-people were rapidly getting into the practice of opium-eating…The immediate occasion of this practice was the lowness of wages, which, at that time, would not allow them to indulge in ale or spirits” (De Quincey 6).
The extent of working class opium use which could be clearly identified as “recreational,” or “stimulant” in the parlance of the times, was certainly quite low, in part because of the difficulty of impossibility of making the distinction between medical and non-medical use. The repetition of the anxiety in both the medical literature and in literary texts like Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) nonetheless reveals that the specter of this descent into abuse was always present, at least in the bourgeois mind.
It is the the fate that befell Kimball O’Hara, Sr., after he “came across” this woman, Kim’s surrogate mother to be. The language displaces any choice he might have had, construing the genesis of his opium habit as a seduction: “he came across the woman who took opium and learned the taste from her.” He dies with her in a haze of opium smoke.
The method of ingestion is remarkable, since opium smoking was a distinctly Chinese practice. Historian John Richards writes: “Indians usually ate opium by swallowing small pills or drank it in opium infused water. They had never adopted the practice of smoking it in pipes” (Richards 375). The effect is to draw into the text a history of late Victorian English writing on opium smoking. Smoking, localized by “the myth of the opium den,” was a prime target for moralistic and sensationalist writers because it was clearly non-medical and decisively foreign in origin. The image of the opium smoker lacked the complex system of connotations attached to laudanum use and could be employed as an unproblematic symbol of vice, corruption, and Oriental danger. As such, the dens – conceived as “foreign particles lodged in the body of British society” (Parssinen 67) – were the subject of a plenitude of journalistic treatments, which are “so conventionalized…that it is difficult to tell whether the authors actually made the visit, or simply plagiarized from one another’s accounts” (Parssinen 52). The formula remained more or less the same because these articles continued to do the same cultural work. Five titles from five different decades suggest the continuity: “East London Opium Smokers” (1868); “A Night in an Opium Den” (1874); “London Opium Dens: Notes of a visit to the Chinamen’s East End Haunts” (1885); “Chinese London and its Opium Dens” (1895); “Opium Dens in London” (1904).
Modern accounts suggest that if such “dens” existed at all, and were not just social spaces where Chinese happened to casually smoke opium, they did not extend beyond the small East End neighborhood of Limehouse and were so limited in number as to be hardly worth comment (Berridge 195ff); however, the presence of this seductive danger within the range of a hansom cab proved too alluring, and became the standard site of literary opium use after the 1860s. The “literary” as opposed to journalistic tradition began with Charles Dickens’s final, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and persisted into fin de siècle treatments roughly contemporaneous with Kim, such as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Man With the Twisted Lip,” both published in 1891. The echoes of this tradition are present in Kipling’s strange, factually inaccurate choice to make the woman smoke her opium.
The mythology of the den was also a sexual one. No sexual interaction between these two characters is narrated, but the fact that she remains Kim’s “mother” and the erotic potential suggested by drug-fueled cohabitation suggest the possibility; this would be a disruption of racial and imperial boundaries of a most transgressive sort, particularly since the “native” woman appears to be the dominant agent. The presumed racial mixing and closed quarters of the “opium dens” that were so central to the Victorian imagination of opiate use always suggested the possibility of miscegenation to a paranoid and sensationalist press, for whom there was “an almost uniform association between the Orient and sex” (Said 188).
Beyond this potential sexual relationship we have the a teacher-student relationship of initiation. This common enough trope suggests the cult-like, esoteric trappings given to opium culture, and in this case puts the Indian woman in a position of dominance by giving her the power to impart arcane knowledge (cf. “the true secret of mixing” in The Mystery of Edwin Drood). Incidentally this is the knowledge that leads to O’Hara’s death as narrated in the very same sentence, as if it were the necessary corollary to his contamination.
He leaves behind him three texts which derive from Anglo-Imperial institutions, which are to be Kim’s legacy from him:
His estate at death consisted of three papers – one he called his ‘ne varietur’ because those words were written below his signature thereon, and another his ‘clearance-certificate’. The third was Kim’s birth-certificate. Those things, he was used to say, in his glorious opium-hours, would yet make little Kimball a man. On no account was Kim to part with them, for they belonged to a great piece of magic – such magic as men practised over yonder behind the Museum, in the big blue-and-white Jadoo-Gher – the Magic House, as we name the Masonic Lodge. It would, he said, all come right some day, and Kim’s horn would be exalted between pillars – monstrous pillars – of beauty and strength. The Colonel himself, riding on a horse, at the head of the finest Regiment in the world, would attend to Kim – little Kim that should have been better off than his father. Nine hundred first-class devils, whose God was a Red Bull on a green field, would attend to Kim, if they had not forgotten O’Hara – poor O’Hara that was gang- foreman on the Ferozepore line. Then he would weep bitterly in the broken rush chair on the veranda. So it came about after his death that the woman sewed parchment, paper, and birth- certificate into a leather amulet-case which she strung round Kim’s neck.
‘And some day,’ she said, confusedly remembering O’Hara’s prophecies, ‘there will come for you a great Red Bull on a green field, and the Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes, and’ dropping into English – ‘nine hundred devils.’‘Ah,’ said Kim, ‘I shall remember. A Red Bull and a Colonel on a horse will come, but first, my father said, will come the two men making ready the ground for these matters. That is how my father said they always did; and it is always so when men work magic.’ (50).
These documents would have had the effect of assigning Kim to his father’s Masonic lodge and, by extension, implicating him within the greater military-imperial establishment of the Raj. But the documents’ signification is blurred, filtered through O’Hara’s “glorious opium hours” into a kind of wild fantasy. This fantasy, though containing a kernel of truth, is embellished with grandiose language and turned into a “prophecy” rather than a set of instructions. It contains some of the classic hallmarks of literary treatments of opium use, for instance: the tendency towards mythological language (“magic,” “whose God was a Red Bull on a green field,” “devils”; cf. De Quincey’s encounter with Vishnu, Siva, Isis, and Osiris, [82], etc.), an exaggeration of physical description (“monstrous pillars”; cf. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, The Mystery of Edwin Drood‘s oneiric opening paragraphs, etc), and a hazy, dreamlike tone (phrases like “magic,” “some day,” and the sudden, associative appearance of the variously narrated elements). This way of framing the “Red Bull” narrative is, in the logic of the story, distinctly “Oriental”; Creighton says, revealingly: “The transformation of a regimental badge like your Red Bull into a sort of fetish that the boy follows is very interesting” (161). It is moreover doubly filtered through opium, first by O’Hara, then by the woman who distorts his telling, literalizing his metaphors and decontextualizing his claims.
The documents have become a fetishized “amulet” and Kim’s fate as a “Sahib” has been derailed by opium-fueled misreadings and misunderstandings. Kim’s understanding of himself, deeply vexing for the European characters, must be demythologized by the appropriate colonial authorities in order for Kim to discard his “Asiatic” character. In this sense, the entire narrative is a struggle by the forces of Empire to efface Kim’s hybridity, which had been at least partially constituted by opium.
Works Cited
Berridge, Virginia. Opium and the People (Rev. ed.). New York: Free Association Books, 1999.
Boon, Marcus. The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. New York: Penguin, 1998.
De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Dickens, Charles. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. New York: Penguin, 2002.
Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. London: Penguin, 2000.
Milligan, Barry. Pleasures and Pains: Opium and Orient in Nineteenth Century British Culture. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1995.
Richards, John F. “Opium and the British Indian empire: The Royal Commission of 1895.” Modern Asian Studies. Volume 36, part 2, May 2002. p. 375-420.
Said, Edward. Orientalism (25th Anniversary edition). New York: Vintage Books, 2003.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Zheng, Yangwen. The Social Life of Opium in China. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
[1] Two of the best treatments are Berridge, Opium and the People (1981, revised 1999), and Parssinen, Secret Passions, Secret Remedies: Narcotic Drugs in British Society 1820-1930 (1983).
