Kipling’s Holy Paternalism: Buddhist-Imperial Hierarchies in Kim

Abstract

In Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, David Cannadine argues that studies of the Victorian British Empire tend to focus too closely on the ways the British othered and exoticized their colonial subjects. In fact, the British concerned themselves with constructing “affinities” with their imperial subjects as least as much as they attended to the differences between themselves and others (xix). The notion of social hierarchy represented an especially important way by which affinities between the metropole and the periphery were constructed in the late Victorian Empire.

Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 novel, KIM, presents a view of the Victorian Empire as both exporting English hierarchy onto India as well as integrating an indigenous hierarchy with England’s own. The novel supports the notion that the British found a hierarchical structure analogous to its own in India, though, I argue, not in the caste system, as is often presumed. The paper proposes that instead of finding a sympathetic social structure in the Indian present, KIM suggests that the British found what they were looking for in a buried Indian past, characterized by an ancient and forgotten Buddhist heritage.