How we cite our quotes: (Chapter. Paragraph)
Quote #7
'My son, said he, 'what need of words between us? But is not the little gun a delight? All six cartridges come out at one twist. It is borne in the bosom next the skin, which, as it were, keeps it oiled. Never put it elsewhere, and please God, thou shalt some day kill a man with it.'
'Hai mai!' said Kim ruefully. 'If a Sahib kills a man he is hanged in the jail.'
'True: but one pace beyond the Border, men are wiser. Put it away; but fill it first. Of what use is a gun unfed?' (10.19-21)
Mahbub Ali's attitude toward shooting people reveals an interesting cultural difference. Kim claims that "if a Sahib [white man] kills a man he is hanged," while Mahbub Ali claims that "one pace beyond the Border [in Afghanistan]," shooting people is fine. Why do you think Kipling associates formal law and order with the culture of the Sahib, the white man? How might Kipling's racial and imperialist assumptions come through in this scene between Kim and Mahbub Ali? Why does Kim receiving a gun become a kind of coming-of-age ritual for Mahbub Ali?
Quote #8
'We of the Game are beyond protection. If we die, we die. Our names are blotted from the book. That is all. At Bandakui, where lives one of Us, I thought to slip the scent by changing my face, and so made me a Mahratta. (11.140)
The Mahratta (a.k.a. E23) assures Kim that he can't ask for help from the Government to beat back his enemies. That's not how spies work—they have to stay secret no matter what, and if they get into trouble, they have to figure out a way to get out of it.
Quote #9
They gave him a glass of whitish fluid like to gin, and then more; and in a little time his gravity departed from him. He became thickly treasonous, and spoke in terms of sweeping indecency of a Government which had forced upon him a white man's education and neglected to supply him with a white man's salary. He babbled tales of oppression and wrong till the tears ran down his cheeks for the miseries of his land. Then he staggered off, singing love-songs of Lower Bengal, and collapsed upon a wet tree-trunk. Never was so unfortunate a product of English rule in India more unhappily thrust upon aliens.
'They are all just of that pattern,' said one sportsman to the other in French. 'When we get into India proper thou wilt see. I should like to visit his Rajah. One might speak the good word there. It is possible that he has heard of us and wishes to signify his good-will.' (13.24)
The Babu is pretending to be unhappy with English rule over India to get on the good side of these two Russian agents. The narrator sounds so dismissive when he claims that the Babu is "[babbling] tales of oppression and wrong"—as though such tales of Indian oppression by the British must be false or ridiculous. But the way that Kipling writes about the Babu's pretended outrage strikes us as a lot more moving than his real feelings of loyalty to the British Indian state.