ABSTRACT
This chapter offers close and contrapuntal reading of Rudyard Kipling’s fiction and colonial documents from British India to suggest that the first major author of Anglophone world literature extensively used the empire to fashion his expressive resources and narrative techniques. Whether we look at Kipling’s soldier stories or his novel Kim (1901), this chapter argues, there is a clear and almost inexorable transformation of the anthropological reality of the empire into its fictional representation. This is most evident in the way Kipling draws on both textual traditions of Anglo-Indian memoirs/travelogues as well as colonial legislations like the Cantonments Act (1864) and the Indian Contagious Diseases Act (1868). In Kim, he consolidates this technique of fiction-making even further by first identifying the picaresque nature of the novel with not only the espionage services of the empire but also with the Ethnological Survey, turning the protagonist’s life coterminous with the empire. This strategy produced a version of useful empire that became a standard template for both postcolonial Britain and much of Anglophone territories.
