SOURCE: Randall, Don. “Post-Mutiny Allegories of Empire in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41, no. 1 (spring 1998): 97-120.

[In the following essay, Randall underscores how British imperial history, particularly the history of mutinies, informs Kipling's short fiction.]

In Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 Patrick Brantlinger highlights the special status of the Indian Mutiny in the British empire's cultural legacy. Briefly documenting post-Mutiny literary production, he observes, “at least fifty [Mutiny novels] were written before 1900, and at least thirty more before World War II. There was also a deluge of eyewitness accounts, journal articles, histories, poems and plays dealing with the 1857-58 rebellion.” Brantlinger concurs with Hilda Gregg, who first affirmed, in 1897, the Mutiny's unparalleled capacity to capture and command the British imperial imagination. He also remarks that Gregg, more impressed with the quantity than the quality of Mutiny fictions, regretted that Rudyard Kipling (in 1897, a young writer at the zenith of celebrity) had not made his contribution. Duly attentive to the inflammatory xenophobia of much Mutiny-inspired writing,¹ Brantlinger suggests, “Perhaps Kipling intuitively avoided a subject that so tempted other writers to bar the doors against imaginative sympathy” (199).

Unlike so many of his predecessors and contemporaries—Meadows Taylor, G. A. Henty, Flora Annie Steel, among others—Kipling never produced what one might properly call “a Mutiny tale.” Given, however, Kipling's status as the popularly acclaimed “bard” of the Indian empire, his silence upon the topic seems strange indeed. As Brantlinger asserts at the outset, “No episode of British imperial history raised public excitement to a higher pitch” (199). Making an abundantly documented case, he establishes the 1857 revolt as an emotionally charged, key referent of later-nineteenth-century imperial mythmaking and ideology. To accept, then, the main thrust of Brantlinger's argument is to recognize that the Mutiny constitutes, for Kipling, an unavoidable topic. The question is not if but rather where and how he addressed it.²

In this essay, I will strive to show how British imperial history and, most specifically, Mutiny history shape and inform Kipling's fictions and also how these fictions rework and reconfigure imperial history. As James Morris affirms in Heaven's Command, “the emotions of the Mutiny found their echoes all over the British Empire, permanently affecting its attitudes, and leaving scars and superstitions that were never quite healed or exorcised” (246). Kipling's engagement with the emotionally fraught issues of the Mutiny topic is, for the most part, oblique, allusive, and allegorical. Post-Mutiny allegories—that is, narrative sequences organized upon allusive evocations of Mutiny scenes, situations, and events—occur most notably in the Mowgli tales of The Jungle Books, the texts upon which my analysis will focus. Kipling's jungle saga, I will argue, presents an allegorical, empire-affirming restaging of the history of British India, a restaging that is ordered upon yet unsettled by its inscription of the Mutiny crisis.

I. HISTORICAL CRISIS AND FOLKLORIC TRIUMPH

To consider Kipling as a post-Mutiny imperial allegorist requires that one place Kipling's fictions in relation with Mutiny history and, more particularly, with the British story of that history. Following upon initiatives of Pierre Macherey's The Theory of Literary Production, Jenny Sharpe in Allegories of Empire proposes a critical orientation that strives to discover “the absent text of history in the margins of literature, as its unconscious or ‘unsaid’.” In Sharpe's view,

History, forming the conditions of existence of the literary imagination, places limits and restrictions on what can be represented at any one moment. Fiction is granted licence to imagine events as they might have happened or in a way that history has failed to record.

(21)

Taking, then, the Indian Rebellion of 1857 as the “absent text” of Kipling's jungle fictions, my analysis will strive to show how the history informs the fictions and how the fictions reconstrue and reshape the history.

“Popular cognizance of the modern history of the Indian subcontinent,” writes Eric Stokes, “is limited appropriately to three episodes dignified by the names of ‘Clive,’ ‘the Mutiny,’ and ‘Gandhi’. For these unerringly epitomize its three decisive historical phases—the colonial onset, the crisis of consolidation, and the colonial defeat and withdrawal” (1). Thus naming “the Mutiny” as the signal moment and organizing referent of a British imperial “crisis of consolidation,” Stokes also acknowledges the prevalent if potentially perturbatory influence of “popular cognizance” or “folk memory” upon the historical analysis and evaluation of “the Mutiny” (Stokes, 1). As he observes in the opening paragraphs of The Peasant Armed, the 1857 insurrection takes shape as “a period-piece” that “still holds Western attention because of the intimate, human scale on which the action was conducted”; it evokes “the picture-book world with which the later Victorian age peopled its imagination and named its streets and public houses” (1). The vividness and abundance of Mutiny lore poses an acute problem even for the assiduous historiographer: “That the past should remain charged with emotion is the precondition of the historian's activity, but such emotion almost imprisons him within the framework of its own lines of interpretation” (4).³

To confront the Mutiny as history is to recognize, first and foremost, that the uprisings of 1857-58 offered a deeply disruptive, multifaceted challenge to British claims to colonial authority, a complex, multiply articulated calling into question of the reign of “justice” and “efficiency.” Curiously, from the mid-nineteenth century through to the present day, the Indian rebellion has been insistently represented as “mutiny,” as a military revolt against a constituted and—tacitly, ostensibly—legitimate authority. Certainly, the Sepoys had rebelled against their British officers. Yet they were prompt in pursuing the capture of Delhi and in making their appeal to a higher authority, Bahadur Shah, nominally the “King of India.” Although the Shah's participation in the rebellion was both cautious and coerced, the inscription of his name and that of his capital upon rebel initiatives had considerable symbolic implications that the British could not ignore. Stokes sums up the case:

within the space of twenty-four hours, what began as merely the latest and ugliest of a long series of mutinous incidents in the Bengal army had swelled monstrously into full-scale political rebellion. Delhi, the capital of the ancien régime, had assumed the leadership of a movement to liberate India from the white man's yoke.

(18–9)

Thus, even the military insurrection rapidly acquired a more than military character. And, as Indian nationalist historian Sashi Bhusan Chaudhuri first emphasized, the overall development of the Indian rebellion consistently evidenced nonmilitary, populist and regional aspects, which are effectively effaced by the name of “Mutiny.” In his study, Stokes speaks of a “Mutiny Rebellion,” subdividing his topic into zones of military mutiny or of civil rebellion and submitting the revolt to a scrupulously regionalized analysis. He stresses, moreover, that, among nineteenth-century British interpreters, “The nature of the 1857 uprising aroused fierce controversy from the outset.” The name of “Mutiny” reflects a reassuring official perspective: “The official British explanation was that the Bengal Native Army alone had mutinied and that any civil disturbances were the natural by-products of the breakdown of law and order” (4). Other sources perceived, however, “a formidable civil rebellion” or even “a national insurrection” evidencing “premeditated design” and, for some, “a Mohomedan conspiracy” (5-7). Yet another interpretation, more securely grounded in historical data, propounded a “peasant revolt” energized by disruptive British interventions in preexisting local systems of property (9-12). This “predominantly economic interpretation,” Stokes observes, “is far from modern. Like most other theories of the revolt, it was one originally advanced by contemporaries.” It obtained, moreover, a significant degree of purchase in powerful circles, among post-Mutiny policy makers (11).

What British imperial interpretations grapple with—affirming or disavowing, to varying degrees and in different ways—is the possibility that the “Mutiny” constituted “a broad, popular uprising,” a generalized, if variously articulated, disaffection with and resistance to British rule—a view, as Stokes notes, that was not without its proponents in the post-Mutiny debate (13). During the 1857 revolt India asserted itself as a multifarious socio-cultural territory, which assembled various classes, castes, regional groups, and communities having various relationships with British colonial power. The insurrection, as history, therefore tended to resist British attempts to submit it to an all-encompassing interpretation, to generalize upon an event that appeared so spectacularly plural in its motives and its enactments. “In a real sense,” asserts Stokes, “the revolt was essentially the revolt of a peasant army breaking loose from its foreign masters” (14). As such, it certainly revealed the precariousness of British power, both militarily and politically. “For as in all fragile military despotisms,” Stokes astutely notes, “any mutiny of the army predicated political revolution” (15).

Still more curious, therefore, than its naming is the fact that this so-called “Mutiny” ultimately takes shape in the late Victorian popular imagination not so much as crisis but rather as triumph. First for journalists and subsequently for poets, novelists, historians, it becomes the object of an oft-repeated, obsessive return. As Brantlinger's richly detailed and evocative treatment reveals, in innumerable retellings the 1857 revolt finds the forms of the grand narrative, with its sites of tragedy (“the Well at Cawnpore”), its great actions (“the Relief of Lucknow”), its heroes and martyrs (Lawrence, Havelock), and its villains (Bahadur Shah, Nana Sahib). It becomes, to use the famous phrase of Anglo-Indian historian Charles Crosthwaite, “the epic of the race” (quoted in Morris, Heaven's Command, 243). The celebratory assertion of ultimate victory thus subsumes and elides the discourse of crisis. Transformed by its passage into popular discourse, the historical event is recuperated for imperial ideology and acquires, moreover, the status of folklore. The Indian Mutiny becomes, as both Stokes and Brantlinger suggest, a constitutive element of the British Empire's story of itself—the stuff imperial dreams are made on. Kipling, therefore, is able to rewrite the Mutiny story and, at the same time, the story of British India in allegorical form, as imperial fable. His allusive and evocative jungle fictions register imperial fear and desire, aspiration and doubt, drawing upon and contributing to a shared socio-genetic image repertoire that emerges in response to the Mutiny crisis.⁴

This essay, then, will not strive to contribute to historiography of the 1857 rebellion nor, certainly, attempt to claim for Kipling any status as a historiographer. It will, however, demonstrate that Kipling fictionally restages the Mutiny story and, in so doing, consorts with what Ranajit Guha calls “the prose of counter-insurgency,” that is, the British “historiography” that strives to assimilate Indian anticolonial insurrection “to the transcendental Destiny of the British Empire” (74). This writing of Indian history, like Kipling's rewriting of it, implicitly or explicitly “celebrate[s] a continuity—that of British power in India.” It “serve[s] admirably to register the [insurgent] event as a datum in the life-story of the Empire” (71). Kipling, as I will show, renders the imperial “life-story” affirmatively yet allegorically. In his tales of the feral boy who becomes, gradually but inevitably, the “Master of the Jungle,” Kipling produces a fictional “prose of counter-insurgency,” which attempts to resolve the enduring anxieties and tensions informing the history and discourse of British imperialism in India.

My analysis of the Mowgli saga seeks to demonstrate, first, that Mowgli's Bildung is an empire-affirming allegorization of the history of British India and, secondly, that this allegorization is organized upon and ultimately disrupted by the Mutiny moment. I begin by considering the triumphant representation of imperial consolidation in the tale of Mowgli's early manhood, “In the Rukh,” which stages Mowgli's enabling identification with the British empire and establishes his status as an imperial hero. Turning subsequently to the tales of boyhood, my argument identifies the adolescent Mowgli as an imperial proxy, as a protagonist who represents the British imperial mission in the absence of the British colonizer. I then examine the structuring of Mowgli's world as an Indological India constituted upon and deeply informed by Western, imperial “knowledge” of India. Moving on to a close examination of the jungle-boy's narrative progress, I isolate and analyze the unsettling, allegorical inscriptions of the Mutiny upon Kipling's jungle tales.

II. IDENTIFICATION WITH(IN) THE EMPIRE

An oddity in the publication history of the Mowgli saga makes of it a narrative that discovers its resolution in advance of its elaboration, a drama that is preceded by its epilogue. “In the Rukh,” published in Many Inventions in 1893, a year before the appearance of the first of the two Jungle Books, provides the comedic, empire-affirming dénouement of an as yet untold story: Mowgli, in the fullness of his youthful manhood, takes a wife and embarks upon a career of imperial service with the Department of Woods and Forests. His two principal actions are intimately intertwined, each being contingent upon the other: by accepting an imperial career Mowgli assures himself of the status and income necessary to claim a wife; by taking a wife, he confirms his stable placement within the human community and hence his candidacy for imperial service. Mowgli espouses, at one and the same time, humanity and the empire.⁵

In 1894 readers of Kipling open The Jungle Book with the reassuring foreknowledge that the ambivalencies marking Mowgli's drives, sympathies, and identifications, will discover an appropriately imperial resolution: the feral child among the wolves will ultimately pursue his human destiny in the service the empire. He has been chosen, moreover, to play an important role within the imaginative economy of the British imperial project. As the text of “In the Rukh” announces in a moment of epiphanic revelation, Mowgli is to be a hero of the imperial imagination. Having tracked Mowgli through the woods, Gisborne, accompanied by the wood-demon's reluctant father-in-law-to-be, comes upon a wondrous pageant:

There was the breathing of a flute in the rukh, as it might have been the song of some wandering wood-god. … The path ended in a little semicircular glade walled partly by high grass and partly by trees. In the centre, upon a fallen trunk, his back to the watchers and his arm round the neck of Abdul Gafur's daughter, sat Mowgli, newly crowned with flowers, playing upon a rude bamboo flute, to whose music four huge wolves danced solemnly on their hind legs.

(“Appendix A” of The Jungle Books, 345)

This sylvan flautist, this demigod who commands the natural world, associates himself with Orpheus or Pan or, as Gisborne's German colleague, Muller, observes, with “Adam in der Garden” (344). The rukh is presented in this key scene as an enchanted glade, as a little world constructed upon Mowgli's personal and individual scale, a world where everything is fitted to him—within his reach, available to his grasp. As the young man states his case, “The jungle is my house” (346), and the wolf-brethren “my eyes and feet” (347). Mowgli's lupine imago-figures have not, here, the potentially threatening, confrontational aspect that they, along with the other jungle denizens, frequently reveal in the tales of the hero's jungle boyhood. The ego has tamed its images, which now dance in ceremonial obeisance to the music of a sovereign will. Mowgli enjoys, in other words, what one might describe (in Lacanian terms) as an ideal imaginary relation with the jungle world: he is able to apprehend it in specular relation to himself, as a self-affirming system of similitudes and equivalences organized around his own body and selfhood.⁶ He therefore provides the possibility of a personal, intimate envisioning of an alien world. Certainly, there is truth in Muller's lament, “I shall nefer know der inwardness of der rukh” (344). And Gisborne, the other imperial alien, might also voice such a lament were he not granted a vision of that mysterious inwardness. To appreciative British eyes, Mowgli offers a glimpse of a “real” India, of a “natural and essential” India residing beyond the confounding veil of culture.

It is curious, yet strangely apt, that Mowgli, the first and still the most famous of Kipling's adolescent heroes, should be a feral child. The Mowgli saga draws upon existing knowledge of feral children, plays upon the European public's fascination with them. But, of course, Kipling's interest in the wild child is mythic rather than sociological and anthropological. Objects of public and scientific curiosity since the seventeenth century, feral children in Europe, as C. John Sommerville remarks, had been quite extensively documented by Linnaeus and others. Victor of Aveyron, a wild boy captured in 1798 (at the estimated age of eleven) and placed under the care and supervision of French physician Jean Itard, provides the most famous, most fully detailed case. Victor, under Nature's tutelage, acquires neither physical grace nor heightened sensibility and intelligence. He is, when first apprehended, “a surly, snapping beast”—amoral, emotionally and intellectually stunted, sensorially deranged (Sommerville, 134). “The crowds that turned out to watch Victor,” Sommerville pertinently notes, “expected that in a few months he would have picked up enough of the language to offer some striking observations on his life in the wilds” (135). In this respect, Victor frustrates most acutely the cultural desire he provokes, responding in significant ways to socialization, but never learning to speak. Kipling chooses against the historical feral child, electing instead his Mowgli, who gratifies, allegorically, the desire the factual and historical Victor disappoints, who brings a voice, provides a view, into the silence and secrecy of an alien world—the colonial “wilds.”

This offering of a privileged view into the secret world of the Other is not, of course, the full extent of the jungle youth's largess. Mowgli in his enchanted glade also presents an ideal image of imperial authority. “To be above yet to belong,” writes John McClure, “to be obeyed as a god and loved as a brother, this is Kipling's dream for an imperial ruler, a dream that Mowgli achieves” (60). And if Mowgli's power and knowledge must remain in large part mysterious, yet they are pledged to imperial service rather than to subversion and resistance: “I have eaten Gisborne's bread,” Mowgli affirms, “and presently I shall be in his service, and my brothers will be his servants” (347).

“Mowgli's paradise,” ascertains John McBratney, “is not a creation independent of imperial politics but a coextensive product of it” (289). Mowgli's status as a remarkably serviceable imperial hero is most saliently marked by Kipling's tale's subtle deployment and manipulation of the two modes of psychic identification which Slavoj Žižek, working from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, has characterized as “imaginary” and “symbolic” identification. Emphasizing the crucial role of the gaze in processes of identification, Žižek explains:

Imaginary identification is identification with the image in which we appear likeable to ourselves, with the image representing “what we would like to be,” and symbolic identification, identification with the very place from where we are being observed, from where we look at ourselves so that we appear to ourselves likeable, worthy of love.

(105)

The clear and thorough apprehension of the significance of the enchanted glade experience requires, then, the recognition that it is (and must be) observed. The glade is not a site of freestanding, “private” experience, but rather the setting of a pageant, whose presentation within the narrative is contingent upon the advent of a spectator, Gisborne. As Žižek stresses:

Imaginary identification is always identification on behalf of a certain gaze in the Other. So, … apropos of every “playing a role,” the question to ask is: for whom is the subject enacting this role? Which gaze is considered when the subject identifies himself with a certain image?

(106)

Gisborne's status as the appropriate spectator is confirmed, of course, by the presence of an inappropriate candidate, Abdul Gafur, whose terror and abject incomprehension contrast sharply with the ranger's appreciative wonderment and thus signal the colonial subaltern's effective exclusion from the economy of ideal imperial identifications. While the fulfillments of Mowgli's imaginary identification are contained within the glade (in the figures of the dancing wolves who “reflect” the jungle-master's sovereign status), his symbolic identification is to be located in the figure of Gisborne, who provides the imperial presence and the imperial perspective. Only in the eye of empire can the lupine sovereign of the jungle fully appreciate his own charms. And of course, one should note that Mowgli repays Gisborne in the same coin, by offering himself, first, as a pleasing image-object of ideal imperial sovereignty (which finds in the other an obedient brother) and, subsequently, by returning the gaze—“Mowgli turning with his three retainers faced Gisborne as the Forest Officer came forward” (347)—and thus providing the site of symbolic identification, the perspective from which Gisborne (as the wondrous Mowgli's acknowledged master) appears agreeable to himself, worthy of esteem.

For both Gisborne and Mowgli symbolic identification constitutes the empire-affirming nature of their encounter. “It is,” writes Žižek, “the symbolic identification (the point from which we are observed) which dominates and determines the image, the imaginary form in which we appear to ourselves likeable” (108); the “interplay of imaginary and symbolic identification” occurs “under the domination of symbolic identification” (110). Both Gisborne and Mowgli locate symbolic identification in a representative of empire: Gisborne apprehends himself from the perspective of the Master of the Jungle, Mowgli from the perspective of the British imperial officer. Each character recognizes and accepts, in symbolic relation to the other, “a certain ‘mandate’, … a certain place in the intersubjective symbolic network” (Žižek, 110): Mowgli (together with the “retainers” of his little empire) is pledged to service in the British empire; Gisborne is confirmed as a duly empowered, responsible representative of British imperial authority. Ultimately, then, “the point of symbolic identification, the agency through which we observe and judge ourselves” (Žižek, 108; my emphasis), is, for Mowgli as for Gisborne, the empire itself, or, more precisely, the imperial perspective, the gaze of empire. For both characters the symbolic “trait-of-identification” (Žižek, 105), the particularizing quality or characteristic that motivates identification, is imperial status. An idyllic and ideal envisioning of the imperial project is thus enabled by a finely balanced economy of complementary identification, which securely situates individual imaginary gratification and self-fashioning within the defining symbolic context of the British empire. But more crucially for the analysis of the Mowgli saga that is to follow here, the seminal scene in the rukh announces a mutually sustaining imaginary and symbolic relation between Gisborne and Mowgli, between an imperial subject whose characterization is marked by historical referentiality—there is, in British India, a Department of Woods and Forests; there are Forest Officers—and an entirely mythic, liminal boy. In “In the Rukh,” the first and the last of the Mowgli tales, the narrative point of origin and of resolution, imperial subjectivity is produced in contingent relation with the myth-figure of the boy, who represents, in ideal terms, the empire, and who is represented, at the same time, from the perspective of empire.

THE LIMINAL BOY AS IMPERIAL PROXY

Whereas Gisborne and Muller are active presences in “In the Rukh,” the Mowgli tales of The Jungle Books contain not one European character. The English are a matter of rare allusion, a distant, vaguely understood presence that never intrudes upon the little world of jungle and village. Imperialism, however, is always already there in the Indian scene even in the absence of the imperialist; it is inscribed in advance as the beginning and the end of the narrative progress. The Mowgli saga, as detailed in The Jungle Books, allegorizes an imperialist worldview in the nearly absolute absence of an imperial subject, inscribing and “naturalizing” imperial codes and values without immediate recourse to imperial agency and presence.

Crucial to this work of allegorization is the liminal boy—situated upon the in-betweens of the animal and the human, of nature and culture—who serves, even before the advent of Gisborne, as an imperial proxy. Mowgli's jungle history repeats, in ideal form, the history of the British presence in India: a weak yet “bold” newcomer (who pushes his brethren-to-be aside to reach the she-wolf's nurturing teat) establishes himself in jungle society, gradually reorganizing the jungle world around himself and emerging, with time, as master. An imperial progress is refigured as an extraordinary Bildung, as a jungle-boy's life process of growth and maturation. As “Kaa's Hunting” clearly reveals, Mowgli receives an education in which imperial codes are reenvisioned as jungle laws: under Baloo, “the Teacher of the Law,” Mowgli learns more and different lessons than the young wolves do, receiving instruction in “the Master Words of the Jungle,” which allow him to move freely and safely in jungle spaces controlled by potentially hostile jungle peoples (23). The imperial thrust of Mowgli's jungle formation is most clearly in evidence as the boy establishes relations with the specifically Indian world of the village. Employing quite sophisticated techniques of strategy and “intelligence,” Mowgli, aided by his jungle allies, uses village bullocks to destroy his archenemy, Shere Khan. And when the jungle-boy moves against the village in “Letting in the Jungle,” his mastery of techniques of surveillance and infiltration is still more clearly the key to his success. An insider/outsider in both the jungle world and the village world, liminal Mowgli is different from and superior to all other characters (animal or human) he encounters: he has always a mysterious supplementary power—the mystique of “Man” or the uncanny jungle knowledge. Native-born, yet set apart, Mowgli is different, undeniably special. Caught between two opposing worlds, divided in his identifications and his affiliations, he can be read as a fabulous, idealized analogue of the socio-cultural in-betweenness of an India-born Englishman (like Rudyard Kipling). With greater certainty, however, one can discover in Mowgli, the hybrid adolescent, an allegorical representative of a youthful, vigorous British imperial project and a figure of Kipling's ideal imperial subject, a subject capable of negotiating—not without hardship but with ultimate success—the antithetical demands of domination and assimilation.

IV. THE ALLEGORIZATION OF IMPERIAL SPACE: THE JUNGLE AND THE VILLAGE

Reading Mowgli as a protagonist of imperial allegory demands a reading of his world as allegorical fictional space. A reading such as mine would need to demonstrate, moreover, that Mowgli's progress toward the mastery of his world does not simply represent an archetypal, generalizable Bildung within a generalizable, more or less transcultural microcosm. At the literal level, the Mowgli saga is set in India, in an Indian jungle and, alternatively and secondarily, in an Indian village. However, allegorically too, India, or rather the “India” articulated by Western Indology, is the principal referent of Mowgli's little world. Imperialism, the “absent presence” of the Mowgli tales of The Jungle Books, is thus inscribed, conceptually and tropologically, in relation to biased European knowledge systems that reconstruct India as the Western world's dominated Other.

In Imagining India, a revaluative, deconstructive study of Western Indology, Ronald Inden documents the development and consolidation, particularly during the nineteenth century, of the notion of Hinduism as the religion that expresses and effectively embodies the “Mind of India” (85ff.). To understand Hinduism is, for the Indologist, “to grasp the mind of the entire [Indian] civilization” (86); in the words of Vincent Smith, British historian of India, “The unity underlying the obvious diversity of India may be summed up in the word Hinduism” (qtd. in Inden, 86). Smith's one word, however, contains a wealth of Indologically ascribed meanings. Hinduism and, by extension, Indian civilization are made to represent the negation of conceptions of rational order bestowed upon Western thinkers by the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment's “principles of order,” Inden recalls, are “mutual exclusion, unity, centredness, determinacy, and uniformity.” Entirely antithetical to these principles, the Hinduism of Indology “does not consist of a system of opposed but interdependent parts, but a wild tangle of overlapping and merely juxtaposed pieces. It is uncentred …, unstable …, and lacking in uniformity” (88). What Hinduism entirely lacks is Western “world-ordering rationality.” Not surprisingly, therefore, “the most widely used metaphor” in Indological accounts of Hinduism “is that of Hinduism as a jungle” (86).

Kipling's use of jungle as the principal setting of his tales is not to be read, then, as the elimination of specific cultural traces, but rather as the specification of cultural reference: Kipling's Indian jungle is not simply a culturally unmarked “world”; it is India as jungle. Like the “jungle” of Indian civilization, Kipling's manifests, in its nurturing adoption of the alien man-cub, a remarkable capacity “to absorb and include, … to tolerate inconsistencies” (Inden, 88). Significantly, however, Mowgli's jungle home, as he soon discovers, is not entirely lacking in world-ordering rationality: although it is a world of predation, where brute force is often the final arbiter, Kipling's jungle includes a “Jungle Law” quite distinct from “the law of the jungle.” If, as one learns in “How Fear Came,” the Jungle Law is mythic and archaic in its origins, it is also eminently pragmatic in its applications. As the narrator informs the reader, as Mowgli learns from Baloo, this Law orders and codifies all the eventualities of jungle life. If it is not the work of reason, yet it is fully rationalizable.

Although on first consideration the inscription of the Law would seem to place Kipling's jungle world at odds with the Indologist's “jungle,” the presence of Law—and, by implication, of world-ordering rationality—actually confirms the allegorical jungle's affiliation with Indological discourse more clearly and decisively than its absence might do. As Inden makes clear, Indology's “jungle” is disorderly, but for the duly informed, analytically adept, Western specialist, not beyond reasoned comprehension. The “Hinduism” that reveals “no apparent order” is nonetheless posited as “knowable” (86). This “jungle” is “after all, a part of the orderly world in which the jungle officer of the Indian mind, the Indologist, wishes to live” (87).⁷ Indeed, world-ordering rationality is precisely what Western systems of analysis and interpretation bring to the study of Indian civilization, just as Western legal and administrative intervention (supposedly) brings that same rationality to Indian cultural and political actuality. Indologists, observes Inden, “do not constitute an order out of the jungle, for it is inherently disorderly, but they can, it would seem, introduce a certain degree of rationality to it” (86). Even so, Kipling writes a jungle that knows disorder—for example, the interregnum that follows upon the fall of Akela—but he also provides his jungle with an inscription of rational organization.

Significantly, the “rationalizing” of the jungle is energized by an alien element. As Hathi relates in “How Fear Came,” the formation of the Law is instigated by the advent of an alien, Man, who sets in motion a chain of events that produces first Fear and subsequently, in response to that Fear, the Law. In a somewhat similar way, the much later advent of a man-cub provokes a massive mobilization of the Law: Mowgli's reception is attended by a complex process of “litigation”; his initiation to the Law requires one full- and two part-time instructors; his mastering of the jungle ultimately entails his unique privilege of taking the Law into his own hands. Kipling's writing of the Law in the Indian jungle thus conforms quite closely to Indology's central tenet, “the idea that the Indian mind requires an externally imported world-ordering rationality” (128). Preceding Mowgli's arrival in Kipling's jungle is an imaginative, Indologically informed, sense-making intervention, which sets the stage for the jungle-boy's allegorical reconfiguration of British imperial history in India. Mowgli's role is not to initiate but to confirm the jungle's colonization—a role he fulfills very prettily in “In the Rukh.”

As I noted earlier, Mowgli's world includes a secondary space, an Indian village. I characterize the village as secondary because of its lesser importance in the articulation of the boy-protagonist's life-story, because the jungle-boy is never allowed to discover a securely defined place within its structure, and, most importantly, because the village is clearly represented as subordinate to the jungle, the defining space in Kipling's fictive world. As is made clear when the jungle is “let in” upon it, the village is, in the last instance, a differentiated space within the jungle world, a space the jungle has the power to “de-differentiate” and reclaim. It is noteworthy, moreover, that Kipling's portrayal of the relationship between jungle and village reverses the expected distribution of the terms of contrast: in the jungle, there is law; whereas the village, a place of folkloric “tall tales” and superstition, is ultimately lawless—like the Monkey-People's anarchic community, which provides (as Mowgli duly notes) the jungle analogue of village society. Kipling envisions his village as an insular, tenuously differentiated space within an encompassing, ultimately dominant order, the jungle, even as the Indian village is envisioned by the Raj as an insular, representatively Indian, social structure encompassed by, and securely contained within, the British colonial administration.

Kipling's village, like his jungle, reveals its close affiliation with British Indological discourse. As Inden argues, the Indian village, an object of British survey and classification throughout the nineteenth century, becomes, like India's “jungle”-mind, another “pillar of … imperial constructs of India” (132). As the “living essence of the ancient” (131), the village construct enables Indological discourse to contrast the “archaic” (as represented by the Indian village) with the “modern” (as represented by British imperial government):

[T]he constitution of India as a land of villages was … due to the efforts of the British to deconstitute the Indian state. As they were composing their discourses on India's villages, they were displacing a complex polity with an “ancient” India. … The essence of the ancient was the division of societies into self-contained, inwardly turned communities consisting of cooperative communal agents. The essence of the modern was the unification of societies consisting of outwardly turned, competitive individuals. Just as the modern succeeded the ancient in time, so the modern would dominate the ancient in space.

(132)

Kipling's Mowgli tales first displace Indian socio-political structures on to the relatively simple, yet ostensibly representative village, then submit this same village to very literal extinction. Even a cursory consideration of Kipling's jungle-boy reveals that he is clearly imbued with the spirit of modernity: starkly an “individual,” he is an “outwardly turned” character who competitively seeks dominion over others, a character whose thrust will inevitably set him at odds with the “inwardly turned,” organic, and exclusive community of the village. My subsequent analysis will show that Mowgli's relationship with the Indian “archaic,” as manifested by the village and, in a different way, by Shere Khan, is intransigently aggressive, a relationship that is only to be resolved by the extremity of violence. As is already clear, however, Kipling's village figures forth an “ancient” Indian social structure posited and defined by an imperial knowledge system and pledged to destruction by the irresistible “modern” force of imperial power. The village is not simply “the social world” any more than the jungle is simply “the natural world”: both these fictive spaces represent highly specific Indological and imperial constructs for the imaginative ordering of colonial India.

V. THE MOWGLI SAGA AS POST-MUTINY ALLEGORY

Notwithstanding the assiduous, preparatory organization of his allegorical world, Mowgli's rise to prominence and power within his microcosmic Indian empire does not proceed without noteworthy instances of trial and contestation. In such instances the shadowy and fearful presence of the Mutiny can be discerned. Despite Mowgli's liminal placement between worlds, which signals his potential capacity to allegorically negotiate cultural difference, the narration of his Bildung allows no place for an India that resists. The boy invariably resolves adversarial confrontations by violence and, in a singularly important, defining instance, by the effacement of the inimical Indian Other.

The earliest and also the most obdurate adversary Mowgli must confront is Shere Khan. The tiger shares his name with a sixteenth-century Afghan chieftain, who invaded the subcontinent and, for a short time, unseated the Mughals. As Percival Spear observes, Sher Khan (also known as Sher Shah) is commonly credited with being “the virtual founder of the future Mughal empire on the ground that he provided the essential administrative framework” (28). The tiger's name thus associates him with the conquest and consolidation of empires. Significantly, Kipling's Shere Khan is old and lame, yet very dangerous—a rogue tiger, a cattle-killer, a manhunter. Both in relation to the wolf pack and in relation to the human society of the village, he is an outsider—almost an “alien,” very much an outlaw.⁸ Mowgli, another outsider, but one who becomes an initiate and a representative of the law, stalks and kills the tiger and by this richly symbolic action establishes himself unmistakably as an imperial protagonist.

As Sujit Mukherjee emphasizes in “Tigers in Fiction: An Aspect of the Colonial Encounter,” the tiger and the tiger-slayer are significant figures in British imperial mythologies. The myth-tiger of imperial imaginings purportedly has its origins in the north and is frequently envisioned as a “white tiger.” A pale invader from the north, this tiger “is clearly reminiscent of the fair-complexioned Indo-Aryan or Caucasian tribes who are believed to have entered from the north and conquered India several thousand years before the British did” (Mukherjee, 11). The tiger hunt thus takes shape as a contest between conquerors, one modern and one archaic. By his victory over the tiger, the British tiger-slayer implicitly lays claim to imperial authority, as the tiger's successor. Similarly, the killing of the tiger refigures the British conquest of India as a kind of return, as the reenactment of an earlier “white” conquest.⁹

Mowgli, by overcoming Shere Khan, stands in the place of the British imperial adventurer and restages the British consolidation of empire in India. This jungle-child, youthful and energetic yet duly schooled in the codes of the Law, is the alien liberator whose final victory signals the establishment of just rule in the place of an ostensibly corrupt and decrepit Mughal dynasty. As the rebel Sepoys of 1857 looked to Bahadur Shah for leadership, so, during a troubled period of interregnum within the Seeonee pack, restless young wolves rally around Shere Khan and turn against Mowgli. Just as the British, in 1858, put an end to the symbolic kingship of Bahadur Shah, so Mowgli puts an end to the lame tiger's pretensions to power. As the British, after 1858, articulated “a new imperial order … through Mogul emblems of power” (Sharpe, Allegories, 4), so Mowgli uses the tiger's splendid skin to symbolize his accession to the role of Master of the Jungle. The story of Mowgli's ultimately victorious struggle against Shere Khan thus mirrors key features of Mutiny history and of the British reconstitution of that history, recapitulating a British “triumph” in the midst of treachery and adversity.

The death of Shere Khan, however, cannot be taken to announce the definitive consolidation of Mowgli's imperial progress, because, as Mukherjee remarks, the myth-tiger is never definitively dead:

Particularly when we recall the nature and range of human qualities attributed to the tiger by Anglo-Indian writers of fact as well as fiction—memory, cunning, vengefulness, to mention only three—we shall realize that the tiger represented some enduring spirit of India that the British felt they had failed to subjugate. No matter how many successful campaigns the British had waged, how many decisive battles they had won, how many cantonments they had founded to guard settlements, some basic fear of India continued to haunt British Indian life and imagination. Therefore the tiger had to be shot again and again.

(12)

One can begin, at this point, to appreciate the full resonance of Kipling's allusion in his title “‘Tiger! Tiger!’” to William Blake's tiger of “fearful symmetry,” eternally burning “in the forests of the night.” The Mowgli saga, evidently, must be considered as an optimistic yet anxious discourse, as a narrative that assuages yet also revives the nagging doubts and fears troubling post-Mutiny British India. The new conqueror displaces rather than replaces his predecessor, as is tellingly signaled by the retaining of the tiger's pelt. The menacing tiger asserts (and invariably reasserts) the “undying” resistance with which the old order confronts the new, the resistance of “archaic” India to imperial innovation. Not surprisingly, therefore, the imperial hero who defeats the tiger immediately faces renewed resistance—this time from the very village he has saved from the ravaging “Khan.”

Already in “‘Tiger! Tiger!’” the tiger-vanquisher's heroic achievement goes unrecognized and unappreciated by those it presumably benefits most: Mowgli becomes the object of the villagers' superstitious fear and loathing and is cast out from village society. However, it is in the sequel tale, “Letting in the Jungle,” that the narrative organizes itself around themes of treachery and violence, punishment and revenge, and emerges most clearly as post-Mutiny allegory. To effectively read “Letting in the Jungle” as a post-Mutiny allegory requires focusing upon the production of a certain thematics of femininity within the tale. Mowgli's revenge upon his enemies is inspired not so much by violence against himself as by violence against his mother: upon seeing Messua's blood, Mowgli ominously declares, “There is a price to pay.” Messua's role in Kipling's story parallels that of “the English lady” (Sharpe, “Unspeakable,” 29ff.) in inflammatory Mutiny narratives: the violence done to her justifies the most extreme reprisals.

In the course of the Mutiny crisis, British women were captured and killed, most notably at Delhi and Cawnpore (Kanpur). In response to these events, the British press circulated lurid, richly detailed if unsubstantiated rumors of rape and sadistic torture. British counter-insurgency, in its effort to restore order and assert the “rightness” and necessity of British authority, took the form of punishments whose barbarous extremity was justified by the invocation of a moral imperative, the protection of women. As Jenny Sharpe argues in “The Unspeakable Limits of Rape: Colonial Violence and Counter-Insurgency”:

During the 1857 uprisings, a crisis in colonial authority was managed through the circulation of “the English Lady” as a sign for the moral influence of colonialism. A colonial discourse on rebellious Sepoys raping, torturing, and mutilating English women inscribed the native's savagery onto the objectified body of English women, even as it screened the colonizer's brutal suppression of the uprisings.

(29)

In Kipling's tale, Messua too is produced as an object, the body that must be violated if the narrative is to move forward. Mowgli “protects” his abused and endangered mother by instigating a suspension of Jungle Law and unleashing the jungle's savage, “primordial” forces of destruction upon an offending village. Messua provokes the action by providing an image of outraged virtue and kindness.

Just as importantly, Messua serves as the site of a displaced violence, of a violence that must, if she were absent, expend its full force upon Mowgli himself. As Sharpe points out, the public narratives of the events of 1857-58 rarely produced the broken bodies of English men. To have acknowledged this much more pervasive reality of the Indian uprisings would have been

[to deny] British power at the precise moment it needed reinforcing. … Once an English man has been struck down, then anything is possible; in death his mortality is revealed and sovereign status brought low. A focus on the slaughter of defenseless women and children displaces attention away from the image of English men dying at the hands of native insurgents.

(“Unspeakable,” 34)

Clearly, the symbolic importance of the “English man” resides in his being the representative of constituted imperial order and authority. In a like manner, authority and order in Kipling's allegorical empire—the little world composed of lawful jungle and ultimately lawless Indian village—are centered upon the figure of Mowgli, the Master of the Jungle. In “‘Tiger! Tiger!’” Mowgli does, in one brief moment, fall victim to village violence: a cast stone bloodies the boy's mouth. Mowgli's being bound, beaten, and imprisoned by the villagers, however, would undermine his charismatic authority and dispel the illusion of his heroic invulnerability. This much more humiliating violence, which would constitute not a provocation but a defeat, is displaced upon Messua.

Of course, “Letting in the Jungle” does present a male victim of violence, a rather significant one—Messua's husband, Mowgli's human father. Kipling's rendering of this male victim, however, serves to confirm violated “Woman” as the site of narrative focus. As Mowgli secretly enters the hut where his mother and father are being held—captives awaiting torture and death—the articulation of Kipling's text deftly shifts attention away from the male victim onto the injured and outraged female, carefully constituting violence against “Woman” as the violence that signifies:

Messua was half wild with pain and fear (she had been beaten and stoned all the morning), and Mowgli put his hand over her mouth just in time to stop a scream. Her husband was only bewildered and angry, and sat picking dust and things out of his torn beard.

“I knew—I knew he would come,” Messua sobbed at last. “Now do I know that he is my son!” and she hugged Mowgli to her heart. Up to that time Mowgli had been perfectly steady, but now he began to tremble all over, and that surprised him immensely.

“Why are these thongs? Why have they tied thee?” he asked, after a pause.

“To be put to death for making a son of thee—what else?” said the man sullenly, “Look! I bleed.”

Messua said nothing, but it was at her wounds [Kipling's emphasis] that Mowgli looked, and they heard him grit his teeth when he saw the blood.

“Whose work is this?” said he. “There is a price to pay.”

(193)

The passage names Messua, but not “her husband.” Although “the man” cries out for attention—“Look! I bleed”—he receives none. Conforming to the pattern of Mutiny reprisals, Mowgli's revenge shapes itself around imagery of violated femininity.

Consider also the answer to Mowgli's question, “Whose work is this?” His father replies, “The work of all the village” (193). The crime to be punished is the action not of specific individuals but of an entire community. Here, Kipling's narrative arrives at the core of the contradictory logic characterizing British response to the 1857 rebellion. On the one hand, the insurrection is constructed as a “mutiny,” as a thwarting of authority that has a specific and delimited context—the military hierarchy. On the other hand, the ascription of responsibility and guilt is generalized: to be Indian is to be guilty. Reprisals therefore enjoy the very broadest scope: not only rebel sepoys but chance-encountered peasants can be given over to summary execution; whole villages can be razed; estates and temples can be vandalized and looted (see Morris, Heaven's Command, 243-6). The barbarity of the avenger's justice surpasses the savagery that is ascribed to the insurgent.

In Kipling's tale, however, treachery and outrage are not punished by bloody atrocities. The villagers are spared, though their village is utterly destroyed, effaced. Kipling thus restages one specific strategy of British counter-insurgency, and his choice is significant: Mowgli spares the villagers' lives, but destroys all traces of their shared existence as a community, all the material manifestations of their society and culture. Certainly, Mowgli's revenge does stop short of the British excesses of 1857-58, but in evaluating this fact, one should recall that Messua is saved from violent death, whereas the women captured at Delhi and Cawnpore were not. While this tale is clearly marked as a post-Mutiny allegory, it stops short of invoking “unspeakable” acts of rape and mutilation. Although atrocities are suggested—“Let us see if hot coins will make them confess!” (199)—Mowgli's heroism preempts their enactment. Kipling's tale, however, does not really oppose the logic of British reprisals; it confirms and reinforces that logic. If one considers the relation of the crime to the punishment, one can detect the influence of the extreme emotional responses Mutiny scenes can evoke. Messua, an innocent woman, is bound and beaten; her son, to avenge the abuse, eradicates an entire village.

Interestingly, Mowgli's revenge takes shape as a sort of abandonment: the jungle is “let in” upon the offending village. The archaic and chaotic forces, which Mowgli had symbolically mastered by killing the tiger-outlaw, are unleashed, allowed to return. Not jungle law but a kind of primordial jungle madness takes possession of the village, negating, indeed effacing, all vestiges of socio-cultural order: “by the end of the Rains,” writes Kipling, concluding his tale, “there was the roaring Jungle in full blast on the spot that had been under the plough not six months before” (210). Kipling thus portrays, allegorically, the fate of a rebellious India. There would be no need of active punishment. India might simply be left to itself, abandoned to the misrule and disorder that supposedly preceded the establishment of British government.¹⁰ And indeed, even at the literal level of the story, British government—although distant and but dimly comprehended—represents the sole possibility of order and justice: it is to “the English” at Khanhiwara that the fugitive victims of injustice and brutality must fly.

But in the last analysis, Mowgli's agency in the destruction of the village is far from passive; he does not merely “unleash” the jungle's destructive forces, he commands and directs them. In “Letting in the Jungle” as in “‘Tiger! Tiger!’” the resolution of conflict requires a decisive act of violence. The liminal boy, who would seem to bear the promise of new possibilities for the negotiation of agonistic colonial encounter, does not in fact provide alternatives that differ significantly from those of 1857-58. “In the Rukh” stages, as I have shown, the liminal boy's capacity to experience seamless union with the spaces and societies of the colonial “wilds”; it reconfigures the imperial project as a masterful participation in the world of the colonial Other. Another sort of masterful participation is evident in Kipling's Indologically informed constitution of the protagonist's allegorical world. Nonetheless, Mowgli's world includes elements that offer an intransigent resistance to the process of imperial domination, assimilation, and incorporation represented in his Bildung. As Edward Said has argued in a recent analysis of Kipling's Kim, the liminal boy can be made to serve as an enabling figure in the representation of a putative “absence of conflict” in imperial affairs (140-1). Yet situated in the context of a Mutiny “scene of writing,” where colonial terror and conflict are manifest, the liminal boy proves unwilling or unable to manage difference and to forge a passage between opposing worlds. He follows upon the actions of his less gifted predecessors, resolving terror and conflict as British forces did during the mid-century crisis.

VI. THE INTRACTABLE PROBLEM OF POST-MUTINY IMPERIAL ALLEGORY

By way of concluding this discussion, I will briefly step outside the Mowgli saga but remain within The Jungle Books. Examined in relation with “Letting in the Jungle” (the tale that immediately precedes it), “The Undertakers” appears to present an interesting turn in Kipling's narrative strategy. The former tale allegorically reinvokes and revives the actions and emotions of the Mutiny story. “The Undertakers,” which contains explicit allusions to Mutiny events, attempts to bring the Mutiny narrative definitively to a close, or at least to assert the possibility of closure. In this tale, the forces of colonial disorder are embodied—most compellingly if not exclusively—in a gigantic crocodile, “the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut,” a monster that grows fat upon Mutiny corpses. When, however, he stalks a refugee boat and tries to carry off a British boy, the boy's mother—in the heroic style of “the Judith of Cawnpore” (see Sharpe, Allegories, 69-73; Brantlinger 295n)—rewards the overly intrepid mugger with several shots from her revolver.¹¹ The boy thus saved grows to manhood, becomes an engineer—the very man in charge of the building of a railway bridge at Mugger-Ghaut. Upon completing the bridge, the engineer shoots and kills the crocodile, ending his fearful reign over the village that bears his name.

The successful building of the bridge announces the end of the uncanny Indian monster, the mugger that gorges himself upon Mutiny horrors. The death of the mugger seems almost to be a necessary effect of the triumphant manifestation of British technological and administrative know-how. The bridge manifests new possibilities for communication and exchange in the erstwhile divided spaces of empire. And in lieu of a liminal Mowgli, this story offers a different sort of hero, a boy who is saved from the grim menace of the Mutiny, spared to become a bridge-builder. This imperial protagonist is evidently secure in his British cultural identity but possessed nonetheless of the capacity to negotiate cultural difference in the divided, agonistic spaces of empire. His answer to the problems of the Eastern empire is technical rather than intuitive—the engineering (physical and social) of modernization. And yet the bridge and the bridge-builder, being nothing more than new manifestations of an ongoing imperialist project, bring no really new potentiality to post-Mutiny allegory. The British-Indian colonial confrontation resolves itself once again in favor of the imperialist and by means of extreme violence: the mugger, like the tiger before him, must be shot. As if by the blast of “a small cannon (the biggest sort of elephant-rifle is not very different from some artillery)” (232), the Mutiny crocodile is blown apart, “literally broken into three pieces” (233). The mugger's grisly end recalls the brutal execution of rebel Sepoys, many of whom “were lashed to the muzzles of guns and blown to pieces” (Morris, Heaven's Command, 245). Thus, the closure of the Mutiny story, which “The Undertakers” seems intent to announce, is really only another return to that story, one more return to a story for which no imperial resolution is possible.

Recalling Michel Foucault's assertion that discourse is “a violence we do to things,” Stephen Slemon defines colonial discourse as “that system of signifying practices whose work it is to produce and naturalize the hierarchical power structures of the imperial enterprise, and to mobilize those power structures in the management of both colonial and neocolonial cross-cultural relationships” (6). Considering the example of imperial allegory, Slemon goes on to suggest that the discourse of colonialism strives to recuperate its Other “by reference to [the colonizer's] own systems of cultural recognition” (7). Following from Slemon's argument, I would suggest that, at least for colonial discourse in Kipling's historical moment, the mid-century Indian rebellion stands as an instance of the irreclaimable; the Mutiny, that is, manifests itself as British imperialism's limit-text—the social, historical “text” that can neither be circumvented nor made to serve. If Kipling's jungle allegories reassert and reconfirm the validity and viability of the British imperial mission, they also acknowledge and revive post-Mutiny doubts and fears, reasserting their presence and pertinence, giving them a renewed shape and substance. If the Mutiny history is a constitutive element in the empire's story of itself, its evocation also invariably interrupts that story by inscribing the agency of intransigent opposition, by speaking, albeit partially and indirectly, the story of the rebel. Imperial “systems of cultural recognition” can provide no secure and stable placement for such agency, for such a story—hence the fearful tiger that must be shot again and again or the hideously uncanny, unrecognizable crocodile that must be blown to bits. As Guha observes, in the prose of counter-insurgency “the rebel has no place … as the subject of rebellion”; empire-affirming historiography does not, cannot, “illuminate the consciousness which is called insurgency” (71). Significantly, however, in The Jungle Books the place of the intransigent, resistant element is not simply empty. It is designated and then voided, submitted, in psychoanalytic terms, to an action of disavowal. Although Kipling's post-Mutiny imperial allegories represent utopian potentialities of imperial subjectivity, agency, and experience, the enactment of domination ultimately requires a violent self-assertion, a violent disavowal of the presence and agency of the colonial Other. Allegorical empire, like the historical empire upon which it is predicated, is sustained by a violence that never achieves its final act. One cannot put an end to the Mutiny story, one can only return to it—again and again.

Kipling's repeated inscription of violence, as the seemingly inevitable final arbiter of imperial order, tears the fabric of his imperial allegory, revealing that the structure and meaning of social, cultural, and political relations within the empire are not constituted in advance, as reiterable features of given social “reality,” as stable points of reference for the process of allegorical reframing and restaging. The aggressive initiatives marking Mowgli's boyhood progress, his combative response to intransigent configurations of resistance, repeat, albeit in a different way, the enabling exclusion of Abdul Gafur from the magic moment in which the imperial subject attains clear, coherent recognition of itself. Such initiatives confirm the necessary exteriority of “In the Rukh” in relation to the narrative of Mowgli's boyhood: it is only in an idyllic narrative of utopian fulfillment—situated outside and beyond, both “before” and “after,” the agonistic context of Mowgli's Bildung—that imperial subjectivity can be constituted within a stable, self-sustaining economy of recognition and identification.

Notes

1. “Victorian accounts of the Mutiny,” Brantlinger observes, “display extreme forms of extropunitive projection, … an absolute polarization of good and evil, innocence and guilt, justice and injustice, moral restraint and sexual depravity, civilization and barbarism” (200). In the immediate aftermath of the event and throughout the remaining decades of the century, British Mutiny writing is typically marked by sensationalism and “a general racist and political hysteria” (202).

2. As Brantlinger briefly acknowledges, Kipling's Kim, although it is not a Mutiny novel, does address the Mutiny topic (294n).

3. The urge to remember the Mutiny vividly and concretely and, at the same time, to maintain the preestablished, socio-genetic “lines” of its interpretation is clearly manifested in the post-Mutiny production of monuments and memorials. As Stokes observes, “The shell-pocked Kashmiri Gate at Delhi … was left to point its moral. At Kanpur (Cawnpore) a weeping angel carved in marble by Marochetti was placed as a shrine. … At Lucknow the shattered remains of the Residency were left unrepaired, and from the tower the Union Jack continued to be flown day and night, as through most of the siege. … So long as the Raj endured, the living force of these symbols remained” (2).

4. As Brantlinger observes, the Mutiny story is so deeply resonant that the Victorian imagination can submit it, on occasion, to various forms of fictive displacement. First finding in Dickens's “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners” a restaging of the East Indian crisis in a West Indian setting (207-8), Brantlinger subsequently draws attention to noteworthy inscriptions of the Mutiny in A Tale of Two Cities and in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (208, 295n).

5. John McBratney, in his recent examination of Kipling's jungle saga, offers a similar argument, affirming “the decisive importance of the British Raj” in the resolution of Mowgli's “rival allegiances to bestial and human cultures” (287). He also notes that the jungle-man finds (in addition to a wife) “a new father-figure” in Gisborne, a European, imperial “father” to replace his “bestial fathers … Kaa, Baloo, and Bagheera” (288).

6. Homi Bhabha affirms in a different way the importance of Lacan's conception of the imaginary for colonial discourse theory: a process of imaginary identification, which enables the subject “to postulate a series of equivalences, samenesses, identities, between the objects of the surrounding world,” establishes and assures the colonial subject's relationship with the colonial “stereotype,” which is, for Bhabha, a fundamental figure within imperialism's discourse of domination (76-7).

7. Given Kipling's characterization of Gisborne, Inden's use of the figure of the “jungle officer” is startling. As one might expect, Inden is borrowing the figure from the Indological discourses he criticizes. I am tempted to surmise that Gisborne is drawn in part from the same sources.

8. To place this affirmation of the tiger's outsider status in relation with Inden's scholarship, I should emphasize that Shere Khan's symbolic affiliation is not with “Hindu” India but with Mughals and “Indo-Aryan” conquerors.

9. Kipling's imaginative participation in an imperial thematics of the tiger hunt is most clearly revealed in “The Tomb of his Ancestors” (The Day's Work), in which young John Chinn, a newcomer to colonial service, successfully undertakes an initiatory tiger hunt and thus confirms himself as the rightful successor—indeed, the reincarnation—of his grandfather, John Chinn, a highly revered district administrator.

10. In Pax Britannica James Morris sums up the British attitude quite nicely: “By the end of the century most people assumed, not least the public and the policy-makers at home, that an India without the British would fall apart in communal violence, and relapse into the chaos from which the Empire was supposed to have rescued it” (125).

11. The Cawnpore “Judith” is famously imaged in an illustration from Charles Ball's 1858 history of the Mutiny (see Brantlinger, 198). Here, the porcelain-pale “Judith” (one Miss Wheeler) is shown with blazing pistol in hand, stalwartly defending herself against notably “black-faced,” attacking Mutineers. According to Mutiny lore, “Judith”-Miss Wheeler later “killed her captor and his family” (Brantlinger, 295n).

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