Reading Between the Lines: Geography and Hybridity in Rudyard Kipling's Kim

Abstract

Britain's occupation of India was not predominandy driven by mili tary force3 From its origins in the British East India Company, the empire's activities in India tended towards administrative and bureaucratic forms of power. It was a colonization which operated through the collection, archive, and administration of information, for which geography was the key. In order for the British to establish India as a colony, it was essential to gather knowledge of the territory. Through the India Survey, a project which was intended to provide ethnographical and cartographical knowledge in minute detail, the British Empire established borders which enclosed the colonial sub ject and could be defended. Through the Survey, the empire system atically catalogued the identity of colonial India. Rudyard Kipling's Kim is a novel which tells a story of the India Survey. In it, many of the main characters are engaged with the process of mapping India for the purposes of the imperial archive. Kipling, an Englishman, marks out the Indian landscape through his

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