Rudyard Kipling’s – that iconic novel of the Raj – first appeared as a serial in McClure’s Magazine in December 1900, a month before the death of Queen Victoria. At this point, the British Empire was arguably at its strongest.

The event that extended Victoria’s reign to India was the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, now referred to as the Indian Uprising or the Great Rebellion. After this, British rule in India passed from the East India Company to the British Crown.

Most references to the events of 1857-58 in Kim come from an old Indian villager, “who had served the [British] government in the days of the Mutiny as a native officer…”

He goes on to describe his loyal service for the Company army: “Nine wounds I bear; a medal and four clasps and the medal of an Order, for my captains, who are now generals, remembered me when the Kaisar-i-Hind had accomplished fifty years of her reign…”

Kaisar-i-Hind was the title Queen Victoria assumed as she was proclaimed the Empress of India in 1877. The queen marked the of her reign in 1887, at an event in which several Indian princes and soldiers participated.

Exactly a century after Kim, a young British author, born to a Jamaican mother and an English father,...