REISSUED BY PENGUIN India 2009.
Earlier Published By UK - NEL, US - St Martins Press,
Germany - Diana Verlag, Finland - Gummerus, Brazil
- Editora Record
In choosing to give us the succeeding adventures
of Kipling's Kim, Mr Murari has set his sights high.
As well as the excellence of the source, there is
ranged against the enterprise the weight and accomplishment
of Raj literature in general. But such is the drive
of the narrative and such is the author's feeling
for his native country, that the reader is borne pleasurably
along. When in addition we get the complications of
torn loyalties in the lives of the adult Kim and of
his emergent country, this becomes a very considerable
and entertaining novel. THE
INDEPENDENT, London
-There’s 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
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
Some lovely writing and research about a corner of
history not nearly explored enough in Indian writing
in English. Pick a long weekend to read it from cover
to cover. VERVE
-This novel conjures up a quietly vivid panorama
of Indian life.-THE GUARDIAN
-Timeri N. Murari’s novel takes off from where
Rudyard Kipling left of in his classic. Kim. Kimball
O’Hara, the orphan of Kipling’s book,
has nowgrown up and is a British secret agent in an
India that is spiralling towards independence. Kim,
torn between his upbringing as a native Indian and
his ‘gora’ blood, is the quintessential
wanderer, working for the Colonel who treats him like
a second son. He, unwittingly, causes an innocent
Indian to be killed and another to be jailed. The
novel is about him trying to set that wrong to right,
enroute falling in love with Mohini aka Parvati, who
is running away from a cold marriage to a much older
Rai Bahadur. Magic realism in the tradition of Marquez
infiltrates the novel with mythological references
to Vamana, the dwarf incarnation of Vishnu, Jatayu,
the vulture king, mystical experiences co-exist with
the sensuality of lust.
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
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 (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
-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
EDINBURGH EVENING NEWS interview
by John Gibson
TIM Murari could be sitting on a fortune with his
new novel, "The Imperial Agent." It's his
sequel to Rudyard Kipling's revered picture of British
India early this century, "Kim," and according
to its author it would make a blockbuster movie, even
more impact as a TV mini series.
Says Tim, Madras-born and now spending nine months
of the year in his native India: "It's a big
adventure story, an espionage tale in fact, and with
its five or six characters interwoven I feel it would
do better on TV than cinema. I've had my ego boosted
by some influential people who are suggesting it might
make another' Jewel in the Crown.'
Manipulated
"You have a Smiley character in control of Kim,
still harbouring divided loyalties and love. Kim's
now 30, as opposed to the Irish boy spy Kimball O'Hara
immortalised by Kipling, and we meet him at the start
of the freedom movement in India. Which way is he
to go? That's what the reader has to find out. In
the original story Kim was very Indian in his upbringing
until he was discovered by the colonel character who
trained him to spy for Britain. I've taken him on
from there and he's still being manipulated by the
colonel, your present- day Smiley."
Tim feels his timing with this formidable novel is
pretty well ideal.
"Kipling was 50 years dead last year and host
of Kipling books came out. His copyright was up last
January. There's a public who have heard of Kim and
a public who haven't heard of either Kim or Kipling,
so my novel shouldn't be hard to sell
"Hollywood owns the film rights to 'Kim' and
when they made the first film in the thirties Kim
was played by an American brat and Errol Flynn played
a friend of his.
"They re-shot it a few years ago with Peter O'Toole
as the Lama and an Indian boy cast as Kim. If they
bring my novel to the screen I could visualise Harry
Andrews as the colonel, but maybe Harry's too old
now.
"I wanted to write only one novel about Kim,
spanning 1905 to 1922. By the time I got to 1910 I
knew I'd need another 500 pages, so it's one novel
in two parts. There's a bit of sex in it, but Kipling
said that Kim knew all kinds of evil. You couldn't
call it steamy and I've woven some Indian mythology
into it. The book isn't aimed at one market, it's
intended for anybody who craves a good story.
"Rather than write about somebody who's having
a nervous breakdown in suburbia, I chose Kipling's
creation."
INDIAN EXPRESS interview by
Geeta Doctor
WITH his bushy eyebrows and faded blue jeans, Timeri
Murari is all set to play the part of the writer as
"angry young man".
He doesn't flick an eyelash though, when I ask him
what he feels at the normal response to his name,
"Murari who?", for certainly his work appears
to be almost unknown in India. He smiles in that manner
described as faintly quizzical in the best Victorian
novels. He doesn't have to justify his intriguing
first name which is taken from his ancestral village
just off Ranipet, near Madras, nor his work which
winged on the tag 'Best-selling', has made its way
into nine different languages. Sitting in the pale
pastel, cane-and-bamboo comfort of an old Madras house,
Murari waits for me to ask my next question. For Murari
is first of all a journalist. After studying at McGill
University, Canada, he worked for the Guardian at
London and then went over to New York, where he now
lives part of the time. In the USA, he started doing
a series of real-life TV, documentaries based on the
lives of newly arrived immigrant communities.
Murari then took to roaming the badlands of the Bronx
and came up with a police detective novel: The Shooter.
'Cops are great storytellers", he volunteers
by way of explanation. None of this, however, really
goes to explain how he moved into India next and produced
not only the best-seller Taj but also two books of
historical fiction, that form part of the same story
" that show him to be a writer of strong imaginative
fibre. He cites both Norman Mailer and Gabriel Garcia
Marquez as possible mentors, but turns to Kipling
to borrow a hero, Kim, for his panoramic plunge into
a period of Indian history, that is still the province
of autobiography, (Nirad Chaudhuri's being the latest
example) and liberation theology.
'I wanted to know more about recent events in India.
A lot has been written from the point of view of the
British. That was what was immediately apparent in
the course of my research, ...I wanted to re-create
the period between 1905 and 1919 and look at it from
the point of view of an Indian.
"Part of the reason that I took Kim was that
I wanted a character who was very special for the
British and make him eventually an Indian who would
be willing to die for his country. Kim had in him
all the ingredients of divided loyalties that made
him very interesting for me, I wanted to open him
up a bit more."
