The Imperial Agent

This is a Kim the reader takes time to adjust to, but follows breathlessly through his journeys from Shimla to Bombay and back to the northern plains of India, with the narrative spinning off to include the lives of the Colonel and his daughter Elizabeth. Turn of century India, with its underlying tumult, has been brilliantly and vividly captured, fiction being woven into fact seamlessly. For anyone who ever wondered what happened to Kim, this is a must read. PEOPLE

-A fascinating blend of magic and mysticism, religion and philosophy, history and legend and rumblings from men destined to lead the sub-continent to Independence. SUNDAY EXPRESS, London.

Murari’s skill lies in his choice of details, psychological details, which act as a trigger that will bring down the whole edifice of the Raj. What is fascinating is the way he tells his story, not by historical facts and dates alone, but by sounds and smells and texture and taste, and of things felt in the blood. INDIAN EXPRESS

-India in the early years of the century provides a gigantic, colourful and wondrous backcloth for Murari’s exciting sequel to Kipling’s ‘Kim’. SUNDERLAND ECHO.

-Murari skilfully blends the stories of two clashing cultures to produce a well-rounded and thought-provoking book. BRISTOL ILLUSTRATED.

-India in the early years of the century provides a gigantic, colourful and wondrous backcloth for Murari’s exciting sequel to Kipling’s ‘Kim’. There’s fascinating blend of magic and mysticism, religion and philosophy, history and legend and rumblings from men destined to lead the sub-continent to independence – Gandhi, Nehru, Joshi, Jinnah. SUNDAY EXPRESS.

-Murari skilfully blends the stories of two clashing cultures to produce a well-rounded and thought-provoking book. BRISTOL ILLUSTRATED.

Kim’s New Game

Kipling’s hero is all grown up and in a new India
For those who followed Kim on his great India adventure, it is a chance to get on the road with him once again. And for those who haven’t gone on that road before, here’s a chance to get acquainted with him.   

Rudyard Kipling’s boy-hero returns all grown up in Timeri N. Murari’s The Imperial Agent, in an India taking its first tentative steps towards swaraj and nationalism. The novel, first published in 1987, captures the events unfolding in India at the turn of the last century that signalled the beginning of the end of the British empire.

In Murari’s novel, Kim is still a British spy in the employment of the powerful Colonel but the rules of the Great Game just got more complex and the bazaar rumour darker. Lahore is missing in this new landscape but Simla and the dusty plains of India remain the backdrop against which the new adventure plays out. As in Kim so in The Imperial Agent, the road adventure is an opportunity to show India and its people, a country where daily realities merge effortlessly with mysticism. But this time the great Indian show is seen through Indian eyes.

In this sequel, Kim is not the only one who has grown up. The themes explored in Kipling’s Kim mature in Murari’s deft hands. The free spirited Kimball O’Hara’s love for India and its people gain poignancy here as the divided loyalties twist deeper and the question of identity gets more urgent. The Irish boy who grew up native has to make a final choice between India and its imperial masters. “His friend had died, and so had many others, all because an alien power wished to continue ruling his country. India was changing. Her long sleep was ending. How much longer could the Colonel and men like him continue to control India’s destiny? Kim knew that one day their time would come, that they would cross the kala pani and never return. He had changed, as had so many Indians who no longer wanted to be ruled by the British.”

Apart from identity and nationalism, Murari touches on other themes as well. Kipling’s Kim didn’t have women in a starring role but in The Imperial Agent, women often take the story forward and also show the common invisible lines that limit all women, Indian or European.

The Imperial Agent ends with a reference back to Kipling’s Kim and with the promise of a resurrection. “Kim knew his own story had yet to end. He had chosen his side and would now have to play the Great Game against the Colonel, the man he had loved as a father. Kim also knew he would have to continue his wanderings across India in search of those arrows which marked the turning points of his life; just as his dear Lama had searched for a mythical river, so he would search for arrows which did not exist, except in his vision.”

Murari keeps his promise. Kim’s adventures continue in The Last Victory in which he meets Gandhi, among other national heroes. INDIAN EXPRESS

At the end of Kim, Rudyard Kipling’s magnificent novel of India at the turn of the previous century, it is clear that young O’Hara will work for Colonel Creighton, and also that he will follow his beloved Lama who has returned to save him. One wondered often what happened, how he turned out and how his story continued.

Some 27 years ago, Timeri Murari published The Imperial Agent, a continuation of the story of the orphan who had so taken the colonel’s fancy. It was recently reissued by Penguin

The story begins with a grown-up Kim. He is still the friend of all the world. In fact, he talks to Jatayu,Vaamara and the divine Balas apart from mere mortals. But he is also an imperial agent, working for the mysterious colonel, here revealed as one of the most powerful men in India, powerful enough even to shake a viceroy as strong as Curzon. The Lama is gone and there is no mention of Mahbub All.

Intrigue is in the air and Kim is investigating it in Simla, the empire’s summer capital, where Lord Curzon is being given a farewell dinner. Lovers of Kim might at this point be getting ready for some nostalgia stuff but the writer wisely chose not to pursue that line. He decided instead to make it a reflection on empire, its seductions, corruptions and dangers, and how men and women who love a country have yet such a different idea on how to treat it and keep it.

This is a tale of the time after the partition of Bengal. a time of bombs and guns, when militant Indians targeted British officers. Kim becomes Creighteon’s inside man. But in this uncertainty, the Imperial agent, whose lack of a true nationality is his greatest asset to the colonel, is forced to look for himself as well as the men who would wreck the empire.

Primarily written as an adventure story, The Imperial Agent also looks at the effect events have on different characters, especially Kim and the colonel. The former’s troubled ambivalence over both his racial and cultural heritage is set against the latter’s rock hard certainties. Each loves the land of his birth, each has a completely different vision of it. In the end, eventually they collide, hut along the way we learn much about the colonel’s deviousness, which plumbs depths even Kipling would not have envisaged. The end is a bit surprising, but there is a logic to it. Although one misses the lightness of  touch of Kipling. NEW INDIAN EXPRESS