Hopkirk QUEST FOR KIM IN SEARCH OF KIPLING'S GREAT GAME

Quest for Kim

‘Here begins the Great Game . . .’
 

A German sniper's bullet, intended to kill a young French officer in the First World War, instead buried itself in a book he was carrying in his breast pocket. It was a French translation of Kim. Profoundly grateful, the soldier sent Kipling the badly mauled volume, a hole piercing all but its last twenty pages. Secured to it by a piece of string, threaded through the bullet-hole, was his most precious possession - a Croix de Guerre. He asked Kipling to accept both the book and the medal for thus saving his life, and as a token of his devotion to Kim.

After the war Kipling visited the Frenchman and insisted on returning both gifts, arguing that they rightly belonged to the soldier's newly born son. Instead, however, he agreed to become godfather to the boy, christened Jean after Kipling's only son, John, who had been killed in France in 1916 as an eighteen-year-old subaltern in the Irish Guards.

 What became of that copy of Kim, or of Kipling's young godson, alas is not known.

My own debt to Kim is considerably less dramatic than this, although the direction my life has taken owes much to a youthful reading of Kipling's masterpiece. For it was Kim, more years ago than I care to remember, which first intro­duced me to the intoxicating world of the Great Game. To a highly impressionable, romantically minded schoolboy of thirteen - the same age as Kim himself - the mysterious, il murky, activities of men like Colonel Creighton, Mahbub Ali and Lurgan Sahib were heady stuff indeed. This, after all, was at a time when the British still ruled India, and much of the rest of the world, and almost anything seemed possible.

So spellbound was I by this glimpse into the workings of the Indian secret service that I carried a copy of Kim every­where, even if much of it was lost on me. For Kim, despite what many people imagine, is not a children's book. Indeed, at the age of thirteen, I was far from certain what the Great Game — 'that never ceases day or night' — was really all about. Nevertheless, it appeared to be something incredibly exciting, and I yearned to discover more. The quest was to last a lifetime, and has still to run its course.

I have since learned that I was far from alone in my attachment to Kim. Wilfred Thesiger tells us that he rarely travelled without a copy of it in his saddlebag, while T. S. Eliot read it aloud to his wife in the evenings for the sheer joy of its language. Mark Twain said that he read it afresh every year, while, more recently, Phillip Knightley, the writer on espionage, told me that he too re-reads Kim every year, and moreover has named his own son after its young hero. And I once heard Tariq Ali, that one-time scourge of the Establishment, confess that Kim was the book he loved most as a boy in Lahore where he, like Kim, was brought up.

Some of today's more adventurous young also appear to be smitten by Kim. 'Nothing', one teenage traveller told The Independent, 'could ever surpass reading Kim while going along the Grand Trunk Road.' She found herself, she con­fessed, half hoping to encounter a Tibetan holy man and, like Kim, become his chela, or disciple. Surprisingly, in view of its imperialist tone, the book has its Indian devotees too. The great Bengali scholar Nirad Chaudhuri has described Kim as 'the finest novel in the English language with an Indian theme', and 'great by any standards that ever obtained in any age of English literature'. He admits, however, that he had for years avoided reading it for fear of being wounded by Kipling's well-known dislike of Indian intellectuals, and Bengalis in particular. In fact, one of the book's heroes -Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, or R17 on the Great Game payroll - is a Bengali intellectual, and one of its most lovable characters.

But my own youthful reading of Kim did more than simply introduce me to the Great Game. It also opened my eyes to a whole new world, brimming with promise - the mysterious East. The war was not yet over, however, and there was no question of even the most adventurous of teenagers making their way to India. Some twenty years or more were to pass before the hippy trail opened up the East to all comers. My own early forays into the Orient . . .