O‟Conner 1
Caitlin E. O‟Conner
29 Oct 2010
Young Mister O‟Hara: Irish Identity in Kim
Published in 1901, Kim was written while Ireland was still a colony of England. Ireland
would not gain home rule for 13 more years and would not gain independence until 21 years
after Kim, though seeds of dissent and calls for home rule had been stirring since the 1870s.
Young Kimball O'Hara, the novel's protagonist, is thus a British colonial subject not only
through the novel's central focus on his life in India but also through his Irish ancestral
background. Unlike Indians, the Irish had been under official colonial rule since 1800, and
England had engaged in colonizing Ireland as early as the 16th century. Thus, Ireland was a
much longer-held colony than India, in which the British had only exercised control since the
late 18th century. In addition, the people of Ireland, though ethnically distinct from England,
were still racially white, highlighting the difference between ethnicity, identification by a
regional culture, and race, identification by skin color. Thus, the Irish occupied a precarious
position that is both submissively colonized (by ethnicity) and yet still European (by race), a
position that Kipling ranks somewhere between English civility and Oriental “savagery.” This
enables Kipling to layer Kim‟s traits according to race, ethnicity and influence by their
distinctive cultures. Kim's Irish heritage is a fact that often can generally be neatly ignored
because, like the English, he is white. His Irish ethnic identity comes into play only at strategic
moments when certain traits of Kim‟s personality or his actions cannot be explained by the
“Oriental in his soul” or by his English sense of superiority. Being primarily distinguished by,
alternately, his identity as a Sahib or an Oriental, Kim‟s Irish heritage only arises at moments to
explain a reckless temper, violence, drunkenness and working-class identity.
Copyright © 2011 by Caitlin E. O’Conner. All rights reserved.
O‟Conner 2
Teresa Hubel argues that Kim‟s identity is also linked to, and complicated by, his place
as a poor, working-class white — “a poor white of the very poorest” (Kipling 3) — in India. She
states, “That [Kipling] made Kim the orphaned son of Irish Catholics, one of whom was a
nursemaid in the employ of an English Colonel and the other a colour-sergeant with … an
imaginary Irish regiment, which means that Kim is by birth a member of a group Kipling calls
'poor whites ... in India,' suggests deliberation to me” (236). It suggests deliberation to me not
only in that Kim is a member of the working class, but more importantly that he is an Irish
member of the working class. Kipling chose to make Kim the son of an Irish sergeant, not an
English one, and an Irish nursemaid to an English family. This then presses the Irish to the level
of servitude, particularly in the case of Kim's mother who worked for an English family. This
reinforces Hubel‟s interpretation of Kim as a working-class protagonist, created by a middleclass Englishman, outside the middle-class norm (228). While Hubel stresses remembering that
“choosing to make Kim working class wasn‟t an obvious choice for [Kipling]” (235), it is also
important to remember that choosing to make Kim Irish was likewise an unobvious choice as
making him English would have been simpler, and even choosing a working-class English boy
would have been easier than an Irish one.
Edmund Wilson suggests that Kipling‟s views of the Irish are very much entangled in his
views on imperialism, migrating from a fondness to a later antagonism as Irish politics shifted.
Without examining the methods with which Kipling stamps the traits as Irish, Wilson argues,
“So long as the Irish are loyal to England, Kipling shows the liveliest appreciation of Irish
recklessness and the Irish sense of mischief” (115). Wilson contends that Kim is one such fond
portrait, and that it was only later that Kipling became “implacably opposed to every race and
nation which has rebelled against or competed with the Empire” (115). By May 1914, he had
Copyright © 2011 by Caitlin E. O’Conner. All rights reserved.
O‟Conner 3
become infuriated with the Irish as they began to push for Home Rule, something Kipling
reacted to with nearly hysterical anger. In fact, Kipling penned a leaflet on the subject where he
accused that “„the Home Rule Bill broke the pledged faith of generations‟” by bringing together
rebellion so that the Irish could “„work together, as they have always and openly boasted that
they would, for the destruction of Great Britain‟” (Wilson 138). Despite the fact that this
hysterical reaction is not present in Kim, Wilson fails to address the effect of Kipling's attributing
such “uncivil” characteristics to Kim‟s Irish heritage. Despite the presence of the fondness that
Wilson notes, further examination of Kipling's portrayal of “Irish” characteristics is necessary.
In a novel set in and concerned with the ethnic polyglot of India, Kim‟s identity instead
lies along racial lines. According to Hubel, his racial flexibility is another characteristic of his
position in the working class (233). When identified as European, Kim is often only identified
with whiteness, or being a “Sahib,” as opposed to a direct ethnic identity such as Irish. In fact,
Kipling seems to have forgotten at moments that Kim is Irish, mistakenly labeling him as
“English.” A very clear occurrence begins the novel. When playing with the other boys on the
cannon Zam-Zammah, the narrator chimes, “He had kicked Lala Dinanath‟s boy off the
trunnions—since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English” (Kipling 3). However, a
page later, the narration reveals that Kim‟s late father, the elder Kimball O‟Hara, was “a young
colour-sergeant in the Mavericks, an Irish regiment” (Kipling 3-4). This fallacy directly equates
Kim‟s sense of superiority with Englishness, and therefore English imperialism, instead of Kim‟s
whiteness. Additionally, Kim‟s father then, directly after he is identified as Irish, is revealed to
have been a drunk that essentially ceased to care for Kim and killed himself between alcohol and
opium, dying “as poor whites do in India” (Kipling 4). Kimball O‟Hara Sr.‟s fondness for the
drink extends to his fellow Irishmen in the Mavericks, who have a “reputation for liveliness to
Copyright © 2011 by Caitlin E. O’Conner. All rights reserved.
O‟Conner 4
live up to” (Kipling 97). As quickly as English identity is linked to superiority, Irish identity is
linked to alcoholism.
However, Kipling's slip can also be seen in another light: Kim himself seems to be
unaware of his Irish heritage. When he encounters the British regiments, he tells Father Victor,
“They call me Kim Rishti ke. That is, Kim of the Rishti,” then explaining “Eye-rishti—that was
the Regiment—my father‟s” until Father Victor finally understands that Kim means Irish
(Kipling 86). He does not identify “Rishti” as an ethnicity or nationality, but rather understands
that it was his father‟s regiment. He has a sense of identity drawn from this term, but not one
grounded in ethnic identity. However, if Kim does not understand what it means to be Irish, he
certainly understands what it means to be English, as evidenced by the opening scene with the
king-of-the-hill battle on the cannon where he declares his superiority based on being English.
This implies a sense of Irish identity that is either less distinctive than an English identity or less
important, both of which evoke a sense of imperialism.
After his encounter with the Mavericks, Kim‟s sense of Irish identity disappears beneath
his English education and his identification as a Sahib for the majority of the story. But if Kim
has forgotten (or never fully understood) that he is Irish, Kipling has not. When Kim witnesses
the Russian striking the lama, his slumbering Irishness is reawakened: “The blow had waked
every unknown Irish devil in the boy‟s blood” (Kipling 235). Here the Irish are not only equated
with tempers, violence and devils, but these traits are waked as if they are able to be hidden, if
not eradicated, and are “unknown” or unknowable to Kim. They are engrained within him
beyond his conscious knowledge. The ensuing triumph over the Russian spies, however, leaves
Kim feeling proud. Furthermore, “the humor of the situation tickled the Irish and the Oriental in
his soul” (Kipling 240). After spending the majority of his life unknown to the fact that he is
Copyright © 2011 by Caitlin E. O’Conner. All rights reserved.
O‟Conner 5
Irish, devoid of an Irish identity, Kim‟s Irish ancestry is suddenly awoken to explain both a
temper and a sense of mischief. Additionally, Kim speaks to the Ao-chung man “with the craft of
his mother-country” (Kipling 240). After naming the emerging Irishness in Kim and spending
most of the novel dwelling on the influence of India on him, Kipling makes it unclear whether
this deceitful artfulness arises from Ireland — the mother-country of his ethnicity — or from
India — the mother-country of his physical life — as Kipling has previously ascribed artful
mischief to both Oriental and Irish traits.
In addition to Kim's personal identity, conflicted between an Irish heritage and an English
education, Kipling uses two other characters to reinforce the divide between the English and the
Irish. Two European holy men are present with the army regiment that Kim stumbles upon: the
Church of England‟s Reverend Arthur Bennett and the Catholic Father Victor. These two
represent a distinct and insurmountable barrier between the English and Irish sections of the
regiment: “Between himself and the Roman Catholic Chaplain of the Irish contingent lay, as
Bennett believed, an unbridgeable gulf” (Kipling 85). This same religious difference divided
primarily Protestant England and Catholic Ireland, implying that the same distinct divide
separated the two countries. The two holy men also war, in a manner of speaking, over Kim,
reinforcing his status as a character in limbo between English and Irish. The fact that Father
Victor is a more sympathetic character than stalwart Reverend Bennett reinforces Wilson‟s
assertion that Kipling was, at the time that he wrote Kim, fond of the Irish, but the distinct
separation between English and Irish remains nonetheless. More importantly, it is Bennett, the
Englishman, who sees this gulf; Kipling does not presume the same from Father Victor‟s
perspective.
Copyright © 2011 by Caitlin E. O’Conner. All rights reserved.
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Ultimately, Kim‟s identity is complicated by this conflict between Kipling alternately
dividing Irish and English cultures and lumping them together into one European identity as a
Sahib. While he creates an Oriental identity for Kim that is merely environmental, Kipling
imagines that Kim, whether he understands that he is Irish or not, has some traits in his Irish
blood — a temper, violence, mischief — that cannot be eradicated. In his layering of Kim‟s
various identities, this Irishness allows Kipling to insert behaviors that fall somewhere between
English superiority and utter Indian savagery. As a character in a 1991 movie about Dublin said,
“The Irish are the blacks of Europe” (“The Commitments”). Yet, as far as Kipling is concerned,
they are still of Europe and have submitted to the civilizing force of British colonial rule for
centuries, placing them somewhat ahead of India in the process of “civilization.” In fact,
Ireland's split from British colonial rule in 1922 and subsequent partitioning along religious lines
— separating the Catholic Irish Republic from Protestant Northern Ireland — would foreshadow
the same cycle repeating itself later in India.
Copyright © 2011 by Caitlin E. O’Conner. All rights reserved.
O‟Conner 7
Works Cited
“The Commitments (1991).” The Internet Movie Database. Amazon.Com, n.d. Web. 21 Oct
2010. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101605/quotes>
Hubel, Teresa. “In Search of the British Indian in British India: White Orphans, Kipling‟s Kim,
and Class in Colonial India.” Modern Asian Studies 38.1 (Feb. 2004): 227-251.
JSTOR.org. Web. 21 Oct 2010.
Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003. Print.
Wilson, Edmund. “The Kipling that Nobody Read.” The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in
Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. 86-147. Print.
Copyright © 2011 by Caitlin E. O’Conner. All rights reserved.