Dialogics: A Research Journal of English Studies Volume 1, January 2021 ISSN: 2707-7004 An Affiliative Reading of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim: A Cartography of Religions for Imperialism Md. Habibullah Associate Professor, Department of English Presidency University, Bangladesh Abstract: For about hundred and twenty years, critics have been in controversy regarding the treatment of religions in Rudyard Kipling’s (1865-1936) novel Kim (1901). These scholars can be divided into two camps — the defenders and the detractors. The defenders support his accomplishment and sympathy in depicting devotion and attraction of the Victorian Era (1832-1900) towards Buddhism. On the other hand, the detractors claim that Kipling fictionalizes the confrontation between Western pragmatism and Eastern mysticism in such a way that it has an implication of racism. Against this backdrop, this paper pays an affiliative reading of Kim and finds out an interconnection between British imperialism and treatment of religions. The article argues that Kipling’s dealing with religions in South Asia in the last half of the nineteenth century seems a cartography of different religions to support the British imperial project in India. Keywords: Affiliative Reading, Cartography of Religions, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Eastern Mysticism, British Colonialism Kim (1901) is an elusively controversial text as it has been engendering many contradictory criticisms. Some critics, known as defenders, consider it a philanthropist text and an antithesis of disorder, chaos, and anarchy as it depicts a utopia of unity among people. Conversely, such criticism is regarded by some critics, known as detractors, as a gross oversimplification of the multi-performativity of this text in the then lives of both the Indian colonized and the British colonizers. These detractors usually contextualize the biog- raphy of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) with the British imperial project. As per his biography, born in 1865 in India, Kipling spent early childhood under the care of a Hindu nanny. Then he started his career as a journalist at the age of sixteen from 1882 to 1889 in British India. When, in 1889, he returned to England from India, he was regarded as a national literary hero at the age of twenty-four since his novel, short story, and poems were considered to be expressive of patriotism and attachment to colonial ethos. Accordingly, the novel Kim is regarded as a colonial canonical text that narrates overtly the intercultural communication and conflicts between the Indian and the British. The novel seems to portray the colonial project in such a way that it has often