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 positive of, the colonial project. Supposedly objective in pop outlook, anthropological discourse has often been employed to validate and justify theories of race, hierarchy, and power. So-called factual knowledge becomes a sum 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 remains of knowledge which can be used as leverage in the acquisition ,or, retention of power. Such theories, however flawed, become essential ingredients in the process 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 state. In the process of formu lating what or how the Indian people are, ideas of individual 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 musical arrangement (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 history 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 mingled with 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 persona of relationship i n Kim. It is surely anomalous for the white curator to have the authority of knowledge in this meeting . The lama is meant to be a venerated Tibetan sage, and yet 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 arrogate autonomy and agency from the Indian people.