The cultural dichotomy that Kipling faced as a consequence of spending his earliest years in India – brought up predominantly by his native servants – and his formative years in England at Downe Lodge and USC meant that his sense of self was inextricably linked to the Anglo-Indian community, where English was the dominant language and its culture the assumed superior, and native India, where Kipling's early linguistic and social frames of reference lay. For the bicultural children of his Indian fiction, the search for subjectivity stems not from the geographical location that they are born into, but rather from making sense of and understanding the collective experiences of themselves as willing or unwilling travellers between two disparate worlds. Characters such as the appropriately named Adam, son of Kipling's Kim-like master of disguise, Strickland, in ‘The Son of His Father’ (in Land and Sea Tales) attest to Kipling's knowledge of the language and everyday life of native India that becomes fused in Adam's sense of identity operating within what was considered appropriate in the Anglo-Indian community. This blurring of the division between the Indian and the Anglo-Indian frames of reference both frighten and upset Adam's mother, but not, it seems, Kipling's narrator, who sees the enriching experience a cross-cultural upbringing can be:

Punch's bitter despair is a direct consequence of the nineteenth-century practice of expatriating Anglo-Indian children to England. Similarly, in Kipling's case, his exile separated him from his ‘best-beloved’ India.