Along with the Just So Stories (1902), also for children, they remain among his most widely read works today. Begun in the early 1890s, Kim was completed in 1900. At once a young reader’s adventure story and a serious adult novel, it not only describes the meeting of cultures under British rule in India, but also dramatizes India’s strategic importance within the larger British Empire.
The British in India. Britain’s presence in India began in the seventeenth century, when the English East India Company established a handful of coastal trading forts (called “factories”) at sites from Surat in the west (1619) to Calcutta in the east (1690). Only in the middle of the eighteenth century, however, with the breakup of India’s Mughal Empire into warring states, did British influence begin to extend inland from the coast. In 1757 East India Company forces under Robert Clive won a major victory north of Calcutta at Plassey; they defeated the Bengali ruler Siraj-ud- Daula, who had temporarily captured the factory in Calcutta. Another military victory followed in 1764, over the deteriorating Mughal armies further inland at Buxar.
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