Geopolitical Tropes and Popular Geopolitics: The Great Game and Historical Narrative in Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901)

Abstract

This article attempts to show the significance of the ‘geopolitical tropes’ in shaping the mind of people. It explores how public discourse and diplomacy are moulded with these tropes. The focus of the study is the trope of "Great Game" which was originally used to describe the 19th-century rivalry between the British and Russian Empires. This trope was amplified in general by mass media and literature. It functions as a cognitive shortcut as only a contest. While compressing the complex multilateral political and social dynamics in Central Asia into a simple, zero-sum binary match. These tropes make global affairs accessible and popular. The stories embedded with these tropes often obscure ground realities, reinforcing the deterministic views of international relations.

In order to understand the mechanics of the trope which is essential for deconstructing how popular culture influences a country's foreign policy. This paper puts forward the notion of "Great Game" as a simplified mindsets, that still persists from its 19th-century origins into the 21st century. To analyze this, this research adapts a dual framework integrating Critical Geopolitics and Narrative Theory. Using Rudyard Kipling's Kim, as a primary case study, the article demonstrates how these tropes are encoded in literature, circulated through popular culture, and implanted in the collective consciousness.