Kipling, Kim, and Anthropology :: Essays Papers

Kipling, Kim, and AnthropologyIt is widely recognised that the relatively youthful 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 authorize and justify theories of race, hierarchy, and power. So-called factual familiarity becomes a means done which racial stereotyping can be bolstered or created. The ethos of Western rationalism associate with the discourse of pseudo-science in Orientalism and Indology creates a system of knowledge which can be used as leverage in the acquisition ,or, retention of power. such(prenominal) theories, however flawed, become essential ingredients in the process of defining the Other, ineluctably 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 formulating what or how the Indian people are, ideas of individual agency are stripped from them. Ronald Inden writes that essentialist slipway of seeing tend to ignore the intricacies of agency pertinent to the flux and suppuration 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 bill 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). some(prenominal) of the characters in Kim illustrate the underlying links among 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 race in Kim. It is surely anomalous for the white curator to have the indorsement 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 divine 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 churl (p7). Time and again in Kim it will be seen how Western knowledge is used to appropriate autonomy and agency from the Indian people.