Kim is an orphan with too many fathers. As he develops deep bonds with both the lama and Mahbub Ali, these male characters symbolize Kim’s struggle to choose between his Indian and English ancestry--for although both of Kim’s parents were Caucasian, he was raised by a "half-caste" woman in a "native" setting and does not feel at home as a white "Sahib" at first. The reappearance of his biological father, symbolized by the appearance of his father’s Irish regiment, in fact threatens to interfere with Kim’s duty and desire to assist both the lama and Mahbub/Colonel Creighton in their apparently conflicting projects.

Kim displays Kipling’s fascination with and nostalgia for the exotic India of his childhood; Kim’s facility for language and disguise models Kipling’s interest in "putting on" various aspects of Indian culture in his narrative. In particular, the novel stages several occasions for comparing traditional Indian treatments to Western medicine, setting a romantic narrative against a realist one.

Besides the Sahiba’s "mysterious Asiatic" teas and Hurree Babu’s pose as a doctor peddling Western pills, Kim himself becomes a healer of sorts, several times curing others, literally and figuratively, using ordinary resources from both cultures like quinine and opium, ash and bouillion. Kipling thus advocates tolerance for non-Western customs and peoples, but his text is saturated with what now seem to us clearly orientalist stereotypes about the "Oriental’s" slowness or Kim’s innate sense of honor, prompted by his "white blood."