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Kipling's Jungle Eden Author(s): JAMES HARRISON Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2, LITERATURE AND IDEAS (Winter, 1974), pp. 151-164 Published by: University of Manitoba Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24776893 Accessed: 08-04-2020 06:50 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of Manitoba is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Kipling'sKipling's JungleJungle Eden :: i I BY JAMES HARRISON 'Sometimes you hear of dem in der census reports, but dey all die. Dis man haf lived, and he is an anachronism, for he is before der Iron Age, and der Stone Age. Look here, he is at der beginnings of der history of man — Adam in der Garden, und now we want only an Eva! No! He is older than dot child-tale, shust as der rukh is older dan der gods.'1 This is Muller, head of the Woods and Forests of all India, speaking of children raised by wolves2 in "In the Rukh," the first Mowgli story to be 'Rudyard Kipling, Many Inventions (London: Macmillan, 1899 - ), pp. 229-230. All subsequent quotations from Kipling's works are taken from the Macmillan Uniform Edition, and the references included in the text. 2"India is probably the cradle of wolf-child stories, which are here universally believed and sup ported by a cloud of testimony, including in the famous Lucknow case of a wolf boy the evidence of European witnesses." John Lockwood Kipling, Beast and Man in India (London, 1891), pp. 313-14. This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 152 Kipling's Jungle Eden published.3 Clearly his young hero's life among the animals had strong Edenic connotations for Kipling from the outset. Along with Rousseau's noble savage, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan4 and William Golding's Neanderthals, Mowgli takes his place as a modern Adam. The Eden he inhabits is, of course, a post Renaissance one, and man's exclusion from it an alienation from nature rather than from God; but such virtual metonymy has become so commonplace since the Romantics as almost to pass unnoticed, except that Kipling handles it with a difference. Eden in "In the Rukh" is glimpsed nostalgically as a charming, in many ways enviable, but largely irrelevant alternative or contrast to the normal life of man. Generically such children of nature "all die" and their sole surviver leads a peripheral, scholar-gypsy kind of existence in the rukh. Turning to The Jungle Books proper, however, we find that the Edenic theme recurs too often and too centrally to be thus brushed aside. This is almost as true of the stories in which Mowgli does not appear as of those in which he does. In "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi," for instance, the cobra pair, Nag and Nagaina, seek to gain possession of the garden they consider theirs by right. And in "The White Seal," after a seven-year quest from Arctic to Antarctic, Kotick finally dis covers and leads his people to paradisal beaches untrodden by the foot of man. Eden in "The White Seal" is assured only if the man that's foe to seals can be kept at a far remove. Similarly, in most of the Mowgli stories, the jungle is Edenic in sharp contrast to the world of men. Having tried both ways of life, Mowgli sums it up thus: 'Now, in the Man-Pack, at this hour, as I remember, they laid them down upon hard pieces of wood in the inside of a mud-trap, and, having carefully shut out all the clean winds, drew foul cloth over their heads and made evil songs through their noses. It is better in the Jungle.' (II, 151) In "The King's Ankus" it is man's greed for gold which, to their credit, the animals are wholly unable to comprehend. The only exception is the White Cobra, charged with keeping man's treasure. However, not only has he been rendered impotent by his long vigil over the far more virulent poison he guards, but his color bodies forth an inner corruption not of the jungle. For the first and only time it is of no avail to Mowgli to know the Master-word of the Law. "There is but one master word here. It is mine!" (II, 161) comes the reply. In "Tiger! Tiger!" and "Letting in the Jungle" the shortcomings of men are far more varied and serious, and Mowgli is throughout shown as barely tolerant or contemptuous of the villagers he comes to know. "They are idle, senseless, and 3Charles Carrington, in a footnote (p. 209) in Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work (London, 1955), claims that "The adult story, 'In the Rukh,' published before 'Mowgli's Brothers,' " was nevertheless "written after it." He gives no reason for this assertion, and Kipling, in Something of Myself (London, 1937), p. 113, states clearly: "It chanced that I had written a tale about Indian Forestry work which included a boy who had been brought up by wolves. In the stillness, and suspense, of the winter of '92 some memory of the Masonic Lions of my childhood's magazine, and a phrase in Haggard's Nada the Lily, combined with the echo of this tale. After blocking out the main idea in my head, the pen took charge, and I watched it begin to write stories about Mowgli and animals, which later grew into the Jungle Books." Clearly at least an early draft of "In the Rukh" was the first to be written. 'Something of Myself pp. 218-19, .. bear serenely with imitators. My Jungle Books begat Zoos of them. But the genius of all the genii was one who wrote a series called Tarzan of the Apes." This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Kipling's Jungle Eden 153 cruel; they play with their mouths, and they do not kill the weaker for food, but for sport" (II, 93). In the end their treatment of his foster parents leads to a protracted destruction of the whole village which has the quality of a ritual cleansing by nature. 'I have seen and smelled the blood of the woman that gave me food — the woman whom they would have killed but for me. Only the smell of the new grass on their door-steps can take away that smell.' (II, 95) Even more incensed than the criticisms levelled against man, however, are those reserved for the Bandar-log, denizens of the jungle itself. The very syntax he uses betrays the difficulty Baloo finds in even bringing himself to talk of them. 'They have no law. They are outcasts. They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep, and wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They are without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten. We of the jungle have no dealings with them. We do not drink where the monkeys drink; we do not go where the monkeys go; we do not hunt where they hunt; we do not die where they die.' (I, 51-2) Not even of Shere Khan or Tabaqui is it ever said, as of the Bandar-log, that they are "evil, dirty, shameful." The parallel with Swift's Yahoos suggests itself irresistibly when they drop "nuts and filth" on the heads of those beneath. It is, of course, the unflattering parody they offer of human behavior which makes us all find monkeys in some sense less estimable than panthers, and this parallel Kipling is at pains to underline throughout both books. "Why have I never been taken among the Monkey-People? They stand on their feet as I do" (I, 51), asks Mowgli in all innocence. "The monkeys sat and talked in the upper branches. and the old men sat around the tree and talked" (I, 96-7), writes Kipling in seeming innocence. "Bah!" says Mowgli unequivocally, "Chatter — chatter! Talk, talk! Men are blood brothers of the Bandar-log" (II, 79). Most barbed of all, since it is uncertain whether men or monkeys are being disparag ed, we read: "They would sit in circles in the hall of the king's council chamber, and scratch for fleas and pretend to be men" (I, 67). Kipling's antipathy toward the Bandar-log is almost certainly not indicative of a total or Swiftean misanthropy. J. M. S. Tompkins finds a similarity between them and Frank Midmore's intellectual friends, the Immoderate Left, in "My Son's Wife" (A Diversity of Creatures).5 An even more suggestive parallel might be with such educated, Westernized Indians as the luckless Grish Chander Dé, M.A., who has the temerity to be selected by the Viceroy to replace Yardley-Orde as Deputy Commissioner in "The Head of the District." "More English than the English," he ends up, like the Bandar-log, having "no speech of his own," merely "stolen words" which he has overheard — "much curious book-knowledge of bump-suppers, cricket matches, hunting runs" (Life's Han dicaps, p.

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