In poems such as “The Song of the White Men” (1899), Kipling argues that the white man fights for freedom, for righting wrongs on a universal basis In “Kitchener’s School” (1898), he suggests that the English conquers in order to improve the natives, who are even made into judges and engineers. In fact, it can be argued that the English imperialism finds its most explicit apologist in Kipling. Kipling, no doubt, satisfied their crave and also stood for the Raj unflinchingly, undubiously.
It is not difficult to see that by the time Kipling started writing, India had become the most important colony for the British and the English reading population wanted to know more and more about their most precious and equally mysterious colony.
Interestingly, the greater part of his writings revive and help re-live the late nineteenth and early twentieth century high imperialism, and these two facts are more than co-incidences. Widely acclaimed as the greatest living English poet and story-teller, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.he also enjoyed popular acclaim that extended far beyond academic and literary circles. Rutherford in his introduction to the Oxford edition of Kim says: In fact, critics have pointed out that for almost three decades, Kipling was the “most popular” English writer in prose and verse throughout the English-speaking word. None of these facts are unconnected or co-incidental, and it is suggested here that Kipling’s extremely colonial and highly adventurous (the two often go together) self can be seen as accounting for these apparently unconnected issues. Interestingly, he is also the first English author to have owned an automobile “which was appropriate because of his keen interest in all kinds of machinery and feats of engineering” (Abrams 1863) which marked his difference from his contemporary writers (especially the aesthetes).
Further, he was the first English author to receive the Nobel Prize for literature (in 1907) which had become by that time the most significant marker of literary excellence, at least in popular perception. However, it should be remembered that he was also the unofficial poet-laureate of the empire as well as the most popular writer of his times. Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) is not generally considered to be a canonical writer in the “great tradition” of English novels, presumably due to the predominance of the adventurous and the adolescent in his works. After a symptomatic reading of this signs in Kim, the paper takes stock of the trajectory of Kim /Kipling criticism within the postcolonial field. It has been argued here that Kipling’s India, especially in Kim is true to the spirit of the Orientalists, not India. Kipling’s confident championing of imperialism seems to be lacking in documentation of the resistances to colonialism in India, as well as a representation of India as it was at that point of time.
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