“Lawbreaking ghosts of empire in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Man Who Would Be King’”

This essay argues that in Rudyard Kipling’s Indian fiction the model for adventure is subjected to an increasing tension as the genre was called to perform a particular function in the context of the writer’s rethinking of the meaning of Empire. By comparing one of his earlier Indian stories, The Man Who Would Be King (1888), and Kim (1901), the novel that brought to an end his fictional representation of the subcontinent, it attempts to show how he ultimately came to reject the formulaic tropes of the adventure even while describing political and social control as a “Great Game”.