ABSTRACT
Rudyard Kipling wrote during the heyday of the British Empire. His literary precursors were the Victorian novelists who functioned as apologists for empire, and their fictions reflected imperialist assumptions and aspirations, including most crucially an Anglocentric worldview. In Kim Kipling assumes the superiority of British civilisation and its moral responsibility to bring law, knowledge, and enlightenment to the people of India. It assumes that they are in need of western normative knowledge. It demonstrates how through the colonial discourse of Orientalism, the British administrators try to impose their hegemony on the life of the natives. This is done through the process of making contrasts and generalisations in Kim. Orientalism, as an adjunct of colonial control, is pre-eminently involved in the production of various categories of knowledge about ‘the native’: historical, linguistic, religious, moral, and political. Kipling believes that because of native administrators’ tendency towards despotism the continuance of British power is necessary to govern them.
