Colonial Trauma and Its Existential Shattering Impact on Colonizing Subjects in Kipling's Kim: A Postcolonial Perspective

Abstract

This study reads colonial trauma in Rudyard Kipling's Kim from a postcolonial perspective. It employs Edward Said's colonial discourse theory to trace how the English novel represented colonial trauma during the modern colonial era. This research visualises Kim as a traumatised and existentially shattered colonising subject upon witnessing a traumatic event during his teenage years at the hands of colonial masters in British India. Therefore, Kim's identity crisis is studied here as a post-traumatic consequence of colonial trauma on his existence. In addition, this article delineates the hidden obstacles to reaching a compromise on Kim’s crisis, ascribing it to his oscillating will to align with colonial power. The study concludes that Kim’s inability to transcend his trauma embodied in his identity conflict is because his newly grown will to power is disturbed by bifurcated loyalties: willingly nurtured commitment towards the Indian culture and people, and unwillingly undertaken loyalty towards the Empire, imposed on him in the name of patriotism. Thus what hinders and complicates the healing of Kim’s colonial trauma seems to be the simultaneous loyalty to binary polar powers that keep clashing within him.