Colonialism, Modernity and Mimicry in Kipling’s Pharaoh and the Sergeant: the Case of Egyptian Identity

This paper explores a cultural and colonial reading of Rudyard Kipling’s poem Pharaoh and the Sergeant. The poem serves to examine the psychological colonization that Great Britain practiced in the Nineteenth century over Egyptians under the guise of Modernization. It also reflects the hierarchical/colonial relationship between the dominating Self (represented by Great Britain) and the subordinate other (projected through Egyptian society), and how the introduction of a condescending Self stimulates imitation in the colonized other for the obtainment of some of the lost superiority which occurred with the introduction of the colonizer; such dislocation can stimulate an in-between for the colonized other, neither the traditional nor the Western, yet both at the same time also helps locate an identity that can possibly replace the distorted one.