Kipling, Kim, and Anthropology :: Essays Papers

Kipling, Kim, and AnthropologyIt is widely recognised that the relatively recent sciences of anthropology and ethnology have often seemed in thrall to, and supportive of, the colonial project. Supposedly objective in outlook, anthropological discourse has often been employed to validate and justify theories of race, hierarchy, and power. So-called factual intimacy becomes a means through which racial stereotyping can be bolstered or created. The ethos of Western rationalism allied with the discourse of pseudo-science in Orientalism and Indology creates a body of knowledge which can be utilise as leverage in the acquisition ,or, retention of power. Such theories, however flawed, become essential ingredients in the appendage of defining the Other, inevitably a process which measures itself against definitions of the Self. Nineteenth-century anthropological investigations in India proclaimed a body of supposedly verifiable truths about the land and its people. In the process of for mulating what or how the Indian people are, ideas of man-to-man agency are stripped from them. Ronald Inden writes that essentialist ways of seeing tend to ignore the intricacies of agency pertinent to the flux and development of any social system (Imagining India. Oxford Blackwell, 1990.p20).Rudyard Kiplings Kim exemplifies this in a variety of ways. Kim reveals a genuine love and sympathy for India but remains a jingoistic product of its time and place. Benita Parry points out that the narration of Kipling criticism mirrors the history of attitudes to the imperial encounter itself (Delusions And Discoveries Studies on India in the British Imagination. London Penguin, 1972. p205). Several of the characters in Kim illustrate the underlying links between imperialism and anthropology, even as Kipling himself seems to be engaging on a similar project. The encounter between the lama and the museum curator at Lahore is the first instance of this type of kindred in Kim. It is surely an omalous for the white curator to have the authority of knowledge in this meeting . The lama is meant to be a venerated Tibetan sage, and insofar the curator presumes to educate him through the labours of European scholars, who...have identified the Holy places of Buddhism(p7). By cataloguing, labelling, and classifying Indian ritual and practice the curator has somehow acquired a body of knowledge which renders the lama helpless as a child (p7). Time and again in Kim it will be seen how Western knowledge is used to appropriate indecorum and agency from the Indian people.