Legitimizing the Empire: A Postcolonial Reading of the Representation of Afghanistan in Rudyard Kipling’s Story, “The Man who would be King.”

Abstract

The project of Empire building and its consolidation has carved out knowledge base, narratives and ironic tropes that have been resonated in the discourse even after the end of European colonialism. Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was the first English man and the youngest Nobel laureate in literature in 1907. For his utterances, he was also called the Nightingale of British Empire (1). Through his fiction, poetry and journalistic works, Kipling has painted a parochial and stereotypical image of the orients generally and Afghans particularly. The themes created through his fiction have become the matrix to contextualize the East. As a poet, he not only sings about the glory of English empire but also considers it a natural duty bestowed from the heaven to accomplish the civilizing mission, to reach out to all the people who are unlike the Europeans. He created a peculiar ‘Us’ (West) and ‘They’ (Rest of the world) through perpetual journalistic, literary and political channels. “The Man who would be King”, portrays a picture in totality; the short story, deals with the idea of empire building and its justification which seems highly problematic in postcolonial context. Kipling’s portrayal is based on Eurocentric belief which merely conforms to the western minds. The native characters are depicted with sheer mockery; they are presented as unruly, chaotic, ignorant, uncultured, instincts driven and hence uncivilized. Kipling’s portrayal of this specific sub-cultural unit as exotic and barbaric deduced a remedy to be colonized. Kipling believes that the white men must ordain and fulfill their duties to humanize the unruly Afghans through their civilization mission. The article analyzes the text of the story through qualitative research methodology and re-creates a true picture which is stemmed in objective historicism.