“Race,” Animals, and the Feral Child in Kipling's Mowgli

“TO ABANDON THE COLONIAL ANIMAL”: “RACE,” ANIMALS, AND THE FERAL CHILD IN KIPLING’S MOWGLI STORIES Dipika Nath How little! How naked, and—how bold! [. .] And so this is a man’s cub. Now was there ever a wolf that could boast of a man’s cub among her children? [. .] I have heard now and again of such a thing, but never in our Pack or in my time. [. .] I could kill him with a touch of my foot. But see, he looks up and is not afraid. [. .] Th e man’s cub . shall not be killed. He shall live to run with the Pack; and in the end, look you, hunter of little naked cubs [Shere Khan] . he shall hunt thee! [. .] He came naked, by night, alone and very hungry; yet he is not afraid! Look, he has pushed one of my babes to one side already. Rudyard Kipling1 While the stories [in Th e Jungle Books] appear to nar- rate an Indian space, the images and constructions of nation produced stem from an understanding of Englishness as a site of colonial authority. [. .] Kipling’s colonial animals map a racialized contras- tive space where national identity is inseparable from racial identity, leading Kipling fi nally to abandon the colonial animal in order to be able to represent proper Englishness. [. .] Indeed, all animals are not equal but they too are represented in racialized and nationed terms, which points to the fl exibility of the animal trope in colonial discourse. Jopi Nyman2 1 Rudyard Kipling, Th e Jungle Books, I & II (New York: Doubleday, 1948), I, 7–10. All page numbers for the Mowgli stories in Th e Jungle Books are taken from this edi- tion and appear in the text. 2 Jopi Nyman, “Re-Reading Rudyard Kipling’s ‘English’ Heroism: Narrating Nation in Th e Jungle Book,” Orbis Litterarum 56 (2001): 205. 252 dipika nath Th e idea of imperial ascendancy had implications for human relations with animals, no less than for relations between people. While some animals were to be sheltered from danger, others were classifi ed as vermin. Th ey were compared to human outlaws. eTh parallel was not merely a metaphorical one, given the energy and money expended on the eff orts to wipe out such vermin. Mahesh Rangarajan3 Th e term “feral children” refers to three kinds of individuals, oft en discovered in childhood, living in isolation from human society: one, individuals found living in the wild by themselves; two, those found living among animals,4 considered to have been raised by them and exhibiting “animal-like” cognitive, sensory, and physiological traits and behaviours;5 and, three, individuals raised in extreme isolation by their human caretakers. First recorded in Europe in the sixteenth century, feral children are enigmatic fi gures that have raised questions about what is natural or human in human nature and about the place of culture and education in craft ing “the human.” Th e absence of speech and self-identifi cation, in combination with such characteristics as four- footedness, asociality, and a preference for raw food, including fl esh, has traditionally resulted in philosophical, scientifi c, and cultural anxiety about the traffi c between “animal” and “human” in the feral child.6 3 Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces, 1860–1914 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). 4 I use the term “animals” to refer exclusively to nonhuman animals. Th is is primarily for linguistic convenience. 5 Whether individuals were found in animal company or in isolation, their “animal- ity” was oft en little more than their deviance from normative humanity. Th is animal- ness lay in what they were incapable of doing (speaking, walking on two legs), in the development of extraordinary sensory and physiological capacities, such as a keen sense of smell and their ability to run on all fours, as well as in their “wild” appearance and “uncivilised” mannerisms. A preference for raw fl esh, although not universally found, is a common trait and one that rendered them most viscerally animal-like. Absence of language may, however, be the most disturbing trait of feral children. While dietary preferences and four-footedness could be forcibly changed or at least restricted, feral children’s reticence about their past—and with it perhaps the past or origin of humanity—could not be broken. Even in cases where they acquired language, as in the case of Memmie Le Blanc (1731), they were unable to provide an insight into their earlier non-linguistic selves. 6 All these characteristics are not found uniformly or universally in all feral children but they are common enough that they may be used to develop a provisional type. For detailed descriptions of feral children, see Michael Newton, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (London: Faber and Faber, 2002); Douglas Candland, .

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