Kim by Rudyard KIPLING

Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936)

Born in Mumbai, India. He studied at boarding school in England, in 1882 he returned to India to work as a journalist. In 1889 he returned to London, in 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He wrote Plain Tales From the Hills (1892), Barrack Room Ballads (1892), The Seven Seas (1896), Jungle Books (1894-1895), Kim (1901), Just So Stories (1902), Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), Something of Myself (1937).

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.