Student Essay on Colonial Stereotypes in Kipling's Kim

Examines the use of stereotypes attributed to colonial subjects in Rudyard Kipling's novel, Kim. Describes how the novel has primarily been rebuked for its promotion of cultural imperialism as it evokes British colonial rule in India.

Kim, being Rudyard Kipling's most enduringly best-selling "masterwork of imperialism" (qtd. In Mackean 1), was published in 1901 and has inexorably received important critical acclaim. The novel has primarily been rebuked for its promotion of cultural imperialism as it evokes British colonial rule in India, the exotic space that has to be exploited in full. Indians, correspondingly have been inscribed the image of that same center of investigation. Thus while applying a postcolonial frame, the essence of the present paper rests on unveiling the recurring cultural and racial representations projected onto the Colonized subject. Depicting the Indians as ignorant, childish, superstitious, dishonest, bestial, lustful and adds, in a way, to the prodigious divide between an exotic East and a Eurocentric West. Equally suggestive is Kipling's fossilization of such stereotyping which is.....