ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how George Eliot's experience demonstrates the traffic in representations, the absolute saturation of popular visual culture in images of India, resulting in an iconography that became familiar. The traffic in representations is itself represented as traffic, a global movement of images to and from India. Rudyard Kipling's Kim, the character, is at the junction of a number of representations: he is himself, like a commodity, a part of the flow of images and subject to the traffic of representation. Kipling's exploration of the traffic in representations and its formative effect on identity uncovers a number of cultural imaginaries. Throughout the novel Kim is at the junction of different knowledges and different forms of representation that are artificially separated. The interpenetration of cultures is everywhere apparent, and yet Kim is constantly enjoined to keep them apart or to belong duplicitously to one or the other. He is the subject of a uni-directional ideology and an ideology of uni-direction.
