Abstract
The research paper aims to give an accurate account of how Kirpal Singh/Kip in The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje copies the socio-cultural and linguistic norms of the Europeans (colonizers) unlike Kipling’s Kim who emulates the Eastern people (colonized) and their culture. They are examples of going through a long drawn process of growing up, looking into the mirror of mimicry. Kip joins the English army as a grown up, learns the need to show affinity to the new culture by way of imitation, adopting their ways to weave a comfort zone. Being different could be an assaulting fact for both sides, Kip is quick to realize that. But his childish view of looking down upon his native culture is the irony of mimicry. It wipes out the original being to rewrite a new identity. Kip leaves the small community sprouted accidentally in the Italian monastery, showing traces of a stricken conscience. Kim, by the virtue of living in close company of Indians, adopts their habits and manners without any qualm, in a most unconscious manner. He never worries to look or sound his original self which he has not experienced for long. Thus, a kind of reverse mimicry is his fate and character when we look at him as an outsider living as an Indian native. The ambivalence of their characters, presented by both, is an interesting aspect of mimicry. In the paper, we have used the views of postcolonial and cultural literary theorists on mimicry, deliberating upon how with the effect of both the processes, Kip and Kim, consciously or unconsciously, get their national identity peeled off, affixing new hybrid identity.
Highlights
El presente artículo de investigación tiene como objetivo proporcionar un relato preciso de cómo Kirpal Singh / Kip en The English Patient de Michael Ondaatje copia las normas socioculturales y lingüísticas de los europeos a diferencia del Kim de Kipling, que emula a los orientales y su cultura
The colonizers use mimicry as a strategic tool of the subjugation of the ‘Other’/ ‘colonized people’
“the discourse of mimicry is constructed around ... ambivalence” (Bhabha 86); the colonized people remain in a state of constant flux or uncertainty
Summary
In general, is defined as an act of imitation, which has its close affinity to other words such as ‘parroting’, ‘copying’, and ‘emulation’ etc., occupies an imperative position in postcolonial study. In ‘reverse mimicry’, the ‘occupiers’ or ‘colonizers’ imitated and followed the food habit, dressing sense and behaviour of the ‘occupied’ or ‘colonized’ people In spite of such difference, ‘reverse mimicry’ finds a very close affinity to ‘mimicry’ and vice-versa as white has with black, and dark has with light. According to Amardeep Singh, an Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University, further elaborates it in his essay, “Mimicry and Hybridity in Plain English”: “reverse mimicry, which in the colonial context was often referred to as going native” (2009) To illustrate it further, Singh brings about a “... The paper further illustrates how the colonial mimicry got reversed; the colonizer internalized the cultural and linguistic norms of the colonized people. Besides Bhabha and Said, the evolutionary views proposed by other postcolonial theorists such as Bill Ashcroft and Frantz Fanon are applied and correlated during the analysis of the characters (Kim and Kip), while the scholarship of the poststructuralist Jacques Derrida and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan cannot be neglected here
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