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Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space in Kipling's Jungle Books

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SOURCE: McBratney, John. “Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space in Kipling's Jungle Books.Victorian Studies 35, no. 3 (spring 1992): 277-93.

[In the following essay, McBratney considers Kipling's concept of cultural identity as it relates to juvenile characters in the author's short fiction.]

The romantic image of the child held a special value for Victorian readers. In an age in which individual energies were increasingly disciplined, routinized, and regulated within an industrialized society, that Wordsworthian “Seer blest,” whose joyful amplitude of being was set against the encroaching “Shades of the prison-house,” represented both the vestige and hope of individual powers unfettered by school, factory, church, or state.

This figure of the child was equally valued by a nation that, toward the end of the nineteenth century, was not simply industrial but self-consciously imperial—whose conception of itself was defined less by Little Englanders than by Charles Dilke's notion of a “Greater Britain.” This shift in national identity put citizens of the Empire in a state of contradiction. On the one hand, Dilke's phrase inspired a larger vision of the self, and on the veldt of South Africa and in the rugged hills of the Indian Northwest Frontier young Britons found vast spaces within which to realize a grander vision of themselves. On the other hand, in the scramble for Africa in the 1880s and 1890s Greater Britain found its expansion checked by rival European powers in many parts of the world. In a society that featured strong pressures and enticements to support an embattled Empire, Britons both home and abroad felt constrained to define their identity in narrow, nationally self-serving rather than large, international terms. This was especially true in the Empire itself, for in military cantonments, civil stations, and colonial settlements, Britons encountered social, professional, and political arrangements whose codes were often more severe and unbending than those they had left at home. These codes were especially inflexible in British India. As Francis G. Hutchins has pointed out, the English middle class in India often outdid their counterparts at home in their fidelity to English middle-class custom (108). The young heroes of juvenile adventure literature seemed to promise readers an escape from this contradiction. In the adventure fiction of Charles and Henry Kingsley, R. M. Ballantyne, G. A. Henty, W. H. G. Kingston, H. Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling, male readers young and old embraced the myth that one could grow up to be robustly free and yet remain resolutely manly, Christian, and British. This myth flourished even more strongly in the juvenile magazines and papers, like Boy's Own Paper and the later Boys of Our Empire, popular in the jingoistic Britain of the turn of the century (for discussion of this popular literature, see Dunae; James).

But relief from paradox was, in most of these fictions, only apparent. While the youthful protagonists of this genre sought self-aggrandizement in imperial theaters far from home, they also protected sedulously the image of themselves as young English gentlemen, guarding themselves against the possibility of “going native” or otherwise being “contaminated” by the Africans, Asians, Native Americans, or Pacific Islanders with whom they came in contact. In effect, they went abroad to assert an essentially home-grown identity. The ideology embodied in this literature, urging at once expansion and retraction of the self, made for odd effects of characterization, especially in the novels of Henty, whose heroes stand curiously wooden and impervious amid their exotic surroundings. Among the authors of this nineteenth-century genre, only Kipling tried, with any real sense of the possibilities at stake, to create a scope and variety of individual self-definition commensurate with the adventure story's largeness of geographical imagination. The narrative of The Jungle Book, part fantasy, part fable, and part adventure story, provides a powerful analogy for the British imperial subject caught between individual desire and social restraint. As we will see, Kipling's attempted broadening of the terms of imperial identity depends largely on a subtle handling of imperial space.

Juvenile fiction typically enacts a struggle between child and adult that begins in youthful unsettledness (anxiety, anger, or confusion) and ends in grown-up stability.1 But as Sarah Gilead has pointed out, children's fiction, and particularly children's fantasy literature, often violates this Bildungs pattern. The progressive movement from child to adult, configured formally in the movement from fantastic episode to realist frame is often undone in unexpected ways (277-78). In The Jungle Book, the education of Mowgli seems, at first, to offer a sure, though painful transformation of child into adult. But a closer look shows this change to be hedged. In the final framing story of the Mowgli series, “In the Rukh,” the hero seems to retain the ability, despite his choice of an adult identity as a servant of the British Raj, to regress to his earlier, jungle self. Although, as I will show, this ability rests on specious grounds, The Jungle Book as a whole clings to the possibility of having it both ways, of a wolf-child's growing to manhood without quite outgrowing his lupine identity. What allows Mowgli this double pleasure is the persistence of a “felicitous space” that emerges in the fantasy of childhood and survives the modulation from fantasy narrative to realist frame. I have taken this phrase from Gaston Bachelard, who uses it to describe those childhood images of enclosed space—houses, drawers, chests, wardrobes, nests, shells, corners, etc.—that arouse a sense of recollected delight, intimacy, and comfort in the adult writer and reader (xxxi-xxxii). Within this vestigial realm, Mowgli seems able to return to a selfhood of dual aspect the resists the narrowing definitions of a single, unitary adult identity.2

What is the nature of felicitous space in Kipling? How is identity shaped inside its boundaries? How does it permit the apparent persistence of the childish alongside the grown-up self? To the extent that the Raj contributes to the formation of this adult identity, what relationship obtains between felicitous space and British imperium?3 Given the tension between juvenile freedom and imperial duty, what finally is the nature of Mowgli's identity?

I

The answers to these questions require a close look at Kipling's conception of cultural identity in an imperial world, a conception that colored all his writings about India and, arguably, many of his later writings about England. Kipling's wrestlings with this issue were, in one sense, intensely personal. Born in Bombay to Anglo-Indian parents; sent to England at age six to endure the Evangelical hells of Southsea; hired at sixteen to work at the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette; after India resettled unhappily in London to launch a literary career; married to an American woman with whom he tried, with disastrous results, to put down roots in Vermont; resettled again in England only to move restlessly from house to house until he finally found a home at Bateman's in Sussex—Kipling spent much of his early and middle life trying to solve a conundrum of cultural affiliation unique in British life. Yet in another sense, his private quest for a secure sense of citizenship reflected a larger, public concern in turn-of-the-century Britain with the formation of an imperial culture, one that integrated a sense of Dilke's Greater Britain with a nationalist idea of Britain proper.

Kipling assumed a leading role in articulating the terms of this cultural project. In “Recessional” (1897), he adjured an arrogant, jingoistic England to recall the need for humility and contrition in maintaining her “Dominion over palm and pine.” Although the poem construes the European contest for empire as a fight among nations (“Judge of the Nations, spare us yet”), it offers, a few lines later, a parallel interpretation of the struggle as racial—between the English and the “lesser breeds without the Law” (Complete 327). Although Kipling was referring to the Germans with this phrase, in doing so he was invoking a kind of distinction that had a wide relevance among a people still clinging to evolutionist assumptions of racial supremacy. To Kipling, the Germans were only one of many lesser breeds grading down by discrete steps from the Anglo-Saxon at the top to the Australian aborigine at the bottom.

The racial theory that informed this distinction was that of racial typology. According to it, the world's population was divided into a finite number of racial types sharply distinguished from each other and existing in a condition of relative permanence despite intermixture (for discussion of the concept of racial type, see Biddis 11; Stepan 93-94; Stocking 48-49). Nineteenth-century physical anthropologists, who propounded the separate creation of different races (polygenesis), promoted the idea of racial typology most strenuously. But even those scientists who, in the wake of Darwin's Origin of Species, believed in a single origin for all humankind (monogenesis) advanced arguments about racial difference that betrayed affinities with polygenist notions of type (for discussion of the persistence of polygenist thinking among monogenists, see Stepan 83-110; Stocking 42-68). For them, the lower racial groups had diverged from the higher so long ago and had evolved so little since then as to constitute wholly different categories from the European (Biddis 17). A principle central to typological thought was that of “linkage”: the binding together, through hereditary transmission, of measurable physical attributes with less easily measured mental capacities (for commentary on linkage, see Biddis 11; Stepan 86). In the popular version of this principle, “blood,” or lineage, was the term by which this binding together was understood. Whether in its scientific or popular form, linkage asserted that races that were physically different were, by necessity, intellectually, morally, and spiritually dissimilar, too. Thus race, which was perceived initially as biological, came to have wide implications for the understanding of culture (Bolt 9). That races were biologically and culturally different came to suggest quite conveniently that some were better than others (Biddis 16). In the wake of the 1857-58 Indian Mutiny and the 1865 Jamaican Revolt, fears of racial strife made Britons even quicker to aver their superiority to the lesser breeds. The results of the Darwinian struggle for existence seemed to confirm, among scientific and lay thinkers alike, the existence of a racial pyramid—with the “dear” Anglo-Saxon race at the apex and the “cheaper” races descending to the base. So powerful was the argument of racial typologists that, among all the factors influencing human behavior, race came to be seen as dominant (Biddis 12). Sidonia in Disraeli's Tancred gave this racial determinism a ringing encapsulation: “‘All is race; there is no other truth’” (1: 191).

The official Anglo-Indian community to which Kipling belonged shared this preoccupation with race. At the turn of the century, the Anglo-Indian predilection for typing peoples by race culminated in the 1901 Indian Census under the direction of H. H. Risley. For this census the Government of India attempted an ethnographic mapping, in conjunction with the traditional demographic survey, of the peoples of India (Cohn 17). Risley was a firm proponent of typological theory, as his later The People of India made clear:

The modern science of ethnology endeavours to define and to classify the various physical types, with reference to their distinctive characteristics, in the hope that when sufficient data have been accumulated it may be possible in some measure to account for the types themselves, to determine the elements of which they are composed, and thus to establish their connexion with one or other of the great families of mankind.

(6)

Using various anthropometric measurements, Risley argued a clear link between physical type, race, and caste in India; indeed, he affirmed that in some cases he could ascertain a person's caste by certain anatomical indices, most notoriously the width of the subject's nose (Risley 29). What emerged under his guidance was a stratification of races, ranging from the Aryan at the top to the Dravidian at the bottom. In his grading of the races Risley was, in one sense, only corroborating Brahmin doctrine as old as the Vedas; but in a more important sense he was validating that doctrine as it had never been validated before, with the stamp of Western science (Risley 5). Anthropologists after Risley, who saw racial and caste status as much more ambiguous and flexible entities than he had, pointed up the epistemological, social, and political dangers of Risley's efforts to pigeonhole Indians by physical type (for criticisms of Risley's classification, see Béteille 38-42; Cohn 15, 21; Ghurye 281, 285). However, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Anglo-Indian administrators adhered to Risley's brand of particularist and hierarchical racialism, insisting on clear distinctions between Indian racial types (Cohn 21). Naturally, they extended this way of thinking to British relations with Indians. If the gap between the Brahmin and the Dravidian was wide, then the distance dividing the Englishman from the Brahmin was equally great.

It was in the context of this ethnographic discourse that Kipling grappled with the idea of cultural identity in India. We might suspect that a man born in Bombay, whose first language was Hindustani, whose early companions were Indian servants, and who spent seven years of his early adulthood working as a journalist in India would question the truth of a discourse that made such hard-and-fast, invidious distinctions among races. Indeed, in many ways, both in his personal life and his work, Kipling quietly rebelled against the particularist and hierarchical premises of racial typology. Although many of his Indian works echo with irritating frequency the clichés of British racial ideology (e.g., the superiority of the “martial” Muslim to the “effeminate” Hindu), others reflect a more heterodox conception of race. Against the official attempt to draw lines between racial groups, these works feature the elision or transgression of racial boundaries. In this regard, his use of felicitous space is crucial. Within these spaces, the rigidities of typological theory are relaxed, and in the apparent absence of racial hierarchy, a limited egalitarianism flourishes. Kipling's memoir, Something of Myself, conveniently illuminates three crucial aspects of these spaces: their setting in a fictional landscape, the constitution of identity within their borders, and the nature of the law that secures their integrity.

An early scene from the memoir sheds light on the first aspect. In it Kipling recalls that after reading Robinson Crusoe as a boy he invented a game in which he “set up in business alone as a trader with savages”:

My apparatus was a coconut shell strung on a red cord, a tin trunk, and a piece of packing-case which kept off any other world. Thus fenced about, everything inside the fence was quite real, but mixed with the smell of damp cupboards. If the bit of board fell, I had to begin the magic all over again. I have learned since from children who play much alone that this rule of “beginning again in a pretend game” is not uncommon. The magic, you see, lies in the ring or fence that you take refuge in.

(11)

On one level, the ring that Kipling describes is the boundary that marks off all art from the world. However, on another, more important level, the child's fence is the prototype of all those frames that the adult used in his fiction to cordon off ideal realms from the real world. In some cases these frames are physical—for example, the barred gate separating Holden and Ameera's home from a world inimical to interracial love in “Without Benefit of Clergy.” In other cases the fences are abstract—the ethos that encloses the “Inner Ring” of spies in Kim (Lewis 115), for example, or the code of honor that separates the “two strong men” from lesser men in “The Ballad of East and West” (Complete 236). In every case, however, these enclaves permit within their borders the suspension of ordinary relations between persons of different “races.”

The nature of identity in these spaces is suggested by a second scene from Something of Myself. As a young boy, Kipling moved effortlessly within the Indian world of his parents' servants. As a special mark of this privilege, his bearer took him to Hindu temples from which adult Anglo-Indians were barred because of caste law (3). This ability to float between Anglo-Indian and Indian societies, without religious or social sanction, arose from the Anglo-Indian child's peculiar status in the Indian caste system. By birth, Rudyard was considered a mlech, or foreigner, who by definition existed in a condition of pollution outside the caste system. Yet the Anglo-Indian child was also, as his memoir puts it, “below the age of caste”—the age, that is, at which a person's caste status would have been formally confirmed.4 Thus, the child Rudyard was in effect uncasted, existing in a state of suspended caste identity that would be validated only later and that, in the meantime, allowed him free and unpenalized passage between Anglo-Indian and Indian realms. As we will see later, the distinction here between being outcasted (exiled from the caste system) and uncasted (free of the force of caste law) is crucial. The action of caste law having been postponed, a kind of Rousseauistic natural law obtained for the boy; under it, he was shorn of his normal caste status and allowed to accompany a Hindu as his virtual equal.

Throughout his career, Kipling was fascinated by the idea of castelessness. In Kim he gives the notion freest rein. The spy ring that Kim joins has as its shibboleth “‘There is no caste when men go to—look for tarkeean [curry]’” (300-01). And for Teshoo Lama, “‘To those who follow the Way there is neither black nor white, Hind nor Bhotiyal. We be all souls seeking escape’” (348). Other works also explore the idea of being beyond caste. In “The Ballad of East and West,” “there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, / When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!” (Complete 233). Brother Square-Toes finds, while living among the Indians, that “‘there wasn't much odds 'twix me and a young Seneca buck’” (“Brother” 193). And in the two Jungle Books, both Mowgli and Purun Bhagat are described as being without or beyond caste (Jungle [The Jungle Book] 305; “Miracle” 175). In Kipling such freedom from ethnic or social labels often requires a psychological return to childhood. Gobind, the bard in the Preface to In Black and White, finds the liberating power of story in its capacity to strip away the years: “‘God has made very many heads, but there is only one heart in all the world among your people or my people. They are children in the matter of tales’” (ix). When the middle-aged Kipling himself discovered a group of Serangs on a P& O boat bound for Egypt, he yearned for the delights of castelessness in childhood: “But for the passage of a few impertinent years, I should have gone without hesitation to share their rice. Serangs used to be very kind to little white children below the age of caste” (“Sea Travel” 243-44).

A third detail from Something of Myself hints at the law that permits free racial intercourse within these felicitous spaces. As a young journalist, Kipling joined the Freemasons as a member of “Lodge Hope and Perseverance 782 E.C.” in Lahore (51), an organization of which he remained a loyal member the rest of his life. The philosophy of Freemasonry, with its emphasis on human brotherhood regardless of race, creed, or nation, gave his hunger for intimacy beyond caste distinctions the justification of a strictly codified, quasi-religious law. The poem “The Mother-Lodge” presents in distilled form the tenets of this order. The Cockney speaker describes the activities of his Indian lodge, whose members include Anglo-Indians, Hindus, Muslims, and an Aden Jew. The refrain distinguishes the members' special relations inside from those outside the lodge:

Outside—“Sergeant! Sir! Salute! Salaam!”
Inside—“Brother,” an' it doesn't do no 'arm.
We met upon the Level an' we parted on the Square,
An' I was Junior Deacon in my Mother-Lodge out there!

(Complete 443)

Although it will become apparent later in the essay that this vision of fraternal equality is gravely flawed, for now it is enough to note how appealing the speaker finds this limited egalitarianism, this leveling of conventional rankings within a circumscribed space. Kipling valued the kind of cosmopolitan society depicted here: when he moved from Lahore to Allahabad to work for the Pioneer, he chose to enroll himself in the only lodge that included non-Europeans among its members (Wilson 314). In the depiction of felicitous spaces in much of his work, he was implicitly indebted to Freemasonry as a model and sanction for their egalitarian ethos.

II

A full catalogue of felicitous spaces in Kipling's oeuvre would be a long one. However, the combined landscapes of the two Jungle Books are more dotted with magical enclaves than any other piece of fictional geography in Kipling. In every instance, species who are normally antagonistic live in brotherhood with one another. The Mowgli series of the first Jungle Book is no exception. From his initial integration into the wolf pack in “Mowgli's Brothers” to his final enlistment in the British Raj in “In the Rukh,” the clearing of felicitous spaces ostensibly permits the hero to balance his allegiances to the normally rival human and bestial worlds.

“How Fear Came,” the third story in The Jungle Book, is the proper starting-point for any discussion of felicitous space, since here Kipling tells the story of the first such realm: Eden itself. According to Hathi the Elephant, the animals of the primordial forest “‘walked together’” under the Jungle Law, “‘having no fear of one another’” and knowing nothing of man (91). This perfect amity was destroyed, however, when the First of the Tigers, forgetting that he was protector of the jungle, killed first a deer and then a man. To restore order, the elephant Tha, the then Lord of the Jungle, introduced Fear into the world. Since the tiger had taught man to kill, from now on man would threaten all the animals of the jungle with death. On this cornerstone of fear, the Jungle Law, in many ways more just then human jurisprudence, was raised.

The tale has a crucial bearing on the relationship between felicitous space and Mowgli's identity. Under the original version of the Law, man was irrelevant to the jungle because there was no need for the terrible fear he aroused. But with the violation of jungle peace, the Law gave man a role in the jungle scheme of things, a role that proves ambiguous. Although he lives outside the jungle, he must nonetheless enter it at times to maintain peace. The Law provides for his occasional incursion to exact revenge for an animal's killing of a man or woman; however, it does not readily allow for the sustained presence of a human being. Yet that is precisely what Mowgli threatens when he crawls into Mother and Father Wolf's cave. As the innocuous toddler grows to manhood, he creates increasing conflict in the jungle community, dividing those who wish to include him in their ranks from those who want to expel him. This division creates, in turn, a schism within him between his lupine and human selves. Only by trying, paradoxically, to recreate the happy relations of the original Eden—in effect, returning to the time before the intervention of man—can Mowgli find peace with his jungle friends and within himself.

“Mowgli's Brothers,” the first of the Jungle Book tales, tells the story, from induction to exile, of Mowgli's life in the wolf-pack. It also defines the tension between the two sides of his identity and hints at a possible means of alleviating that strain. The boy enters the pack when he is abandoned by his parents, and like many orphans in Kipling (and in Victorian literature in general), he starts life with an advantage: the ability to fashion a self initially free of the constraints of his natural parents' “caste.” Other limitations are quickly imposed on his choice of identity, however, when the tiger Shere Khan challenges Mother and Father Wolf's adoption. This confrontation grows to involve the entire jungle community. In effect, the debate pits against each other two means of determining cultural identity: one based on ascription (or birth), the other on group affiliation. These two tests derive from different readings of the Jungle Law, a difference that points up a fundamental confusion.

Shere Khan and his supporters argue for ostracism because for them Mowgli, by “blood,” has no place in the jungle. Mother and Father Wolf, his teachers Baloo and Bagheera, and the wolf chief Akela contend, however, that since Mowgli has been inducted into the tribe by the proper ceremony, he is “‘[their] brother in all but blood’” (27). The disagreement revolves around the status of lineage. For one party that factor determines cultural identity absolutely; for the other it is subordinate to other criteria of cultural make-up. In the history of debate about race, the former position roughly corresponds to that held by late-nineteenth-century proponents of typology. The latter position, with its implicit recognition of Mowgli's capacity to move in two cultures, anticipates, in striking ways, the modern concept of “impression management,” by which a person can fashion different identities to fit into different cultural settings (Royce 211).

For a while, Mowgli's allies carry the day. During this time, the boy learns the intricate ways of jungle life under Baloo and Bagheera and befriends the creatures of the jungle. The tales that describe this period in his life—“Kaa's Hunting,” “How Fear Came,” and “The King's Ankus”—derive their quality of deep wonder from the felicity of Mowgli's relations with the animals, a harmony made possible by the uncasted hero's being neither clearly wolfish nor human. His name captures perfectly his ambiguous, amphibious selfhood at this time: “Mowgli” is Hindi for “frog” (McClure 61). By the end of the tale, however, some wolves think Mowgli has grown too old to maintain his dual identity, and grow more vehement for his expulsion. A bitter Mowgli in effect settles the debate by leaving the jungle. In doing so, he ironically endorses his enemies' viewpoint. By making his rivals quail before the Red Branch, he vindicates their belief in his foreignness: only a man could have resorted to the use of fire against the other creatures of the jungle. None other than his guardian, Bagheera the tiger, echoes his enemies' claim: “‘thou must go back to men at last,—to the men who are thy brothers’” (20).

Yet who are Mowgli's brothers? The human beings whose “blood” is his, but who have nonetheless abandoned him? Or the jungle companions who have sworn their fraternity? In spite of Bagheera's words, Mowgli's place in the world remains unclear. His enemies have made impossible his return to the bosom of the wolf-pack. However, his wolf brothers hold out the hope of a conditional return. They invite him to “‘Come to the foot of the hill when thou art a man, and we will talk to thee; and we will come into the crop-lands to play with thee by night’” (31). On one level, their envisioned play represents a regression to their childhood, when Mowgli and his brothers tumbled over each other heedless of the difference between skin and hide. On another level, it signifies a return to the days of the early Law, when jungle society was unriven by interspecies fear. On both levels, he is able to recuperate his previously ambiguous identity.

“Tiger, Tiger,” the story relating Mowgli's first encounter with human beings after his farewell to the wolf-pack, confirms his growing friendship with his wolf brothers. The inhabitants of the village into which the boy walks treat him with contempt and fear. Mowgli responds by turning to his jungle friends, enlisting their help to assassinate the tiger Shere Khan, who has threatened to kill him. After the killing, the villagers drive Mowgli from their midst despite the protests of his adoptive mother, Messua. Mowgli returns to the jungle to lay the tiger's hide on the Council Rock, but he knows he cannot remain with the wolf-pack. In the tail-verse “Mowgli's Song,” he laments his double alienation: as Mang the bat “flies between the beasts and the birds, so fly I between the village and the jungle.” “These two things fight together in me as the snakes fight in the spring. … I am two Mowglis …” (137).

Embittered, he departs to hunt in the jungle alone, but his four wolf brothers, in a crucial gesture, refuse to leave him. Mowgli agrees to their company, and together they compose a small, mobile, egalitarian elite. Mowgli's membership in the band yields him two things. First, he is allowed to be “two Mowglis” without the two fighting each other—in a sense, he trades the misery of the outcast for the pleasures of the uncasted. Second, he is given a home in the jungle with his wolf friends. This boon, however, has its limitations, for although Mowgli and his wolf brothers remain physically in the jungle, they constitute an anomaly within the wolf community, the majority of whom still consider him an enemy by blood. As the remaining Mowgli stories show, the need to attach this extraordinary circle to a larger social and political entity will become the wolf-boy's most serious task.

“Letting in the Jungle,” the next story in the Mowgli series, points in two different directions. On the one hand, it calls attention to the persistent conflict between Mowgli's two selves. On the other, it hints at that larger world with which Mowgli and his brothers could together affiliate themselves. Hunted now by the villagers, who also threaten to burn his adoptive human parents as witches, Mowgli enlists his entire band of jungle friends, including his wolf brothers, Bagheera, and Hathi the Elephant, to make war on the village. “‘It is not well that they should live here any more,’” he says, “‘I hate them!’” (173). His campaign ends in the total destruction of the village, as Hathi and his elephant children trample it flat.

Mowgli's words and deeds seem the most thorough-going rejection of humanity and the clearest endorsement of a continued life within the charmed circle of his jungle friends. Yet in crucial respects, his role in the war paradoxically underscores his status as a man antithetical to jungle ways. When Bagheera's glee at the prospect of human slaughter flares into grandiose visions of his power over the “‘the naked brown digger’” man (164), Mowgli checks him swiftly with a man's level stare. As Bagheera licks his foot, Mowgli whispers “‘Brother—Brother—Brother! … It is the fault of the night, and no fault of thine’” (165). Mowgli's condescension is obvious, as is the contradiction in his fraternal address. When he compels Hathi, the most powerful beast in the jungle, to serve in his campaign, he makes complete his supremacy over the jungle animals. Although he asks them to destroy a human habitation, he does so by unabashed exploitation of that human power over the bestial vouchsafed by Jungle Law. Mother Wolf reminds Mowgli, “‘Man goes to Man at the last’” (160).

With the ruination of the village, however, it remains unclear how Mowgli can rejoin his human companions. Indeed, the tension between his jungle and human affiliations has been screwed to its highest pitch yet. The key to resolving Mowgli's dilemma lies in Bagheera's enigmatic speech to Baloo about the newly assertive wolf-boy: “‘There is more in the Jungle now than Jungle Law’” (147). By his leadership, Mowgli has introduced a new element of rule, human rule, into the jungle. This is not simply the old fear of human beings, but a new respect for human leadership. Yet where does this rule originate? It cannot come from the villagers, since they, in their cruelty and injustice, effectively have no law. Nor can it derive from any other human community, since Mowgli has known no other since his orphanage. Indeed, the new authority he represents is proleptic; his impulse to decency and order, having outstripped his jungle training, awaits the confirmation of a more powerful, upright, but as yet unknown human law. Messua unwittingly reveals this higher law when she speaks of the English in Khanhiwara, who can offer her legal redress for her grievances. To Mowgli's qustion about the nature of this “‘Pack,’” she answers, “‘They be white, and it is said that they govern all the land, and do not suffer people to burn or beat each other without witnesses’” (160).5

The decisive importance of the British Raj in Mowgli's life will become obvious only in the last Mowgli tale, “In the Rukh.” Yet, taken together, Bagheera's words about Mowgli's emergent authority and Messua's speech about English law mark a significant shift in jungle life: they give the action of The Jungle Book a dimension of history that has been largely lacking until now. The time within which Mowgli moves in the early tales is clearly the timelessness of fable. Indeed, much of the charm of The Jungle Book derives from its evocation of a world outside of historical time. Bagheera's enigmatic assertion in “Letting in the Jungle,” however, suggests a shift from one dispensation to another and, with it, the entrance of history. Mowgli will have to clarify his relationship to the British with whom his future lies. In this process felicitous space will again be crucial in reconciling his rival allegiances to bestial and human cultures.

III

“In the Rukh,” the concluding tale of The Jungle Book, relates Mowgli's entry into adulthood as a servant of the British Raj.6 In the beginning of the story, Mowgli introduces himself to the English forester Gisborne as “‘a man without caste, and for matter of that, without a father’” (305). In the previous Mowgli tale, “The Spring Running,” the hero had formally departed the jungle, and in so doing, had cast off his bestial fathers in Kaa, Baloo, and Bagheera. He comes to Gisborne, then, to find a new father-figure, and by the end of “In the Rukh” he has found him in the British ranger. At the same time, he has also discovered his caste as a ranger and forest-guard working for the British Raj. With the discovery of his place in the world, his identity, formerly ambiguous, seems single and fixed: that of an Indian, susceptible to occasional wolfish tendencies, but safely employed by the British.

Despite his desire to become a servant of the Raj, however, Mowgli is unwilling to sacrifice his ties to the jungle. He keeps intact his dual affiliations—human and jungle—by separating his public from his private life. As a public servant, he works for a Raj headquartered in Gisborne's bungalow. But his domestic life, which includes his Indian wife and his four wolf brothers, unfolds on the edge of the rukh, “in a little semicircular glade walled partly by high grass and partly by trees” (333-34). One day Gisborne finds them there: “In the centre, upon a fallen trunk, his back to the watchers and his arm round the neck of [his wife] sat Mowgli, newly crowned with flowers, playing upon a rude bamboo flute, to whose music four huge wolves danced solemnly on their hind legs” (334). Gisborne refrains from trespassing on the glade, and Mowgli's little paradise remains inviolate. The Raj's German head forester, Muller, calls Mowgli an “‘Adam in der Garden’” who has found his “‘Eva’” (332). It seems that the Eden in “How Fear Came” has been reassembled on a higher level (a kind of Blakean “reorganized innocence”), with man and beast at peace with one another. There, beyond the confining pressures of the adult world, Mowgli seems able to slip back into a state of playful, primordial castelessness in which he is neither human nor bestial.

A closer look, however, reveals a snake in the new Eden. In staking off the glade for himself and his family, Mowgli has not really escaped the world of Gisborne and Muller. In fact, “newly crowned with flowers,” he has established a kingdom whose rule depends heavily on notions of imperial rule. Earlier he seemed to live in fraternal egalitarianism with his wolf brothers, yet their relationship here belies any notion of true equality. Indeed, Mowgli presents to his wolf companions a dual aspect: that of master and of brother. Mowgli's friends are what Chinua Achebe, quoting Albert Schweitzer, has called “junior brothers”—brethren in intimacy but juniors in rank (787). The potential for condescension in this brotherhood had been present from the start. Even as a child, the weakest of the wolf-pack, Mowgli could always outstare the jungle creatures. And as he grew older, the strain between the fraternal and magisterial impulses in him increased. The contradiction in Mowgli's relationship with his wolf brothers appears blatantly in his description of his early life to Gisborne: “‘So I learned to track and to hunt, sending and calling my brothers back and forth as a king calls his armies’” (337).

Kipling's version of brotherhood here is a late-Victorian revival of that social arrangement celebrated earlier by Carlyle and Ruskin: the close reciprocity of feudal patronage, in which the grateful fealty of the servant was matched by the master's warm noblesse oblige (Stokes, Political 26). In India, this conservative doctrine was embodied in the paternalists' school initiated by the British administrators Munro, Malcolm, Elphinstone, and Metcalfe in the early nineteenth century and revived by the Lawrence brothers in the Punjab of the 1840s. Combining a Romantic fondness for the peasant with a close knowledge of traditional Indian government, the paternalists sought to create an administration of benevolent, personal rule (Stokes, English 8-25, 243-45). Kipling admired the paternalist achievement, and if his Indian works are any indication, the young writer hoped for its resurrection as an alternative to the remote, coldly efficient Utilitarianism that dominated British government after the Indian Mutiny (Stokes, English 268-69).

“In the Rukh” shows the paternalist ideal to apply throughout the rukh, both outside and inside Mowgli's glade. Although the walled-off paradise seems to restore an Edenic castelessness where modern distinctions between man and beast are erased, it in fact imports into its midst a version of the authority it wishes to exclude. The glade's wall is permeable, and that permeability belies the clear distinction between inner and outer on which Kipling's conception of felicitous space depends. To use the terms of “The Mother-Lodge,” with the dissolution of the lodge walls, the Masonic vision of equality in brotherhood melts away.

We might be tempted to see in Mowgli's kingly position and Dionysian dress the accoutrements of divinity. As McClure puts it, “to be above yet to belong, to be obeyed as a god and loved as a brother, this is Kipling's dream for the imperial ruler, a dream that Mowgli achieves” (60). But godliness, the absolute freedom of the divine, is illusory, for Mowgli's paradise is not a creation independent of imperial politics but a coextensive product of it. As Foucault has pointed out, to speak of liberation from the claims of power, as if power relations could be transcended, is a misconception (156-59). Tactical reversals within these relations (subversions, insurgencies, destabilizations) may occur, and indeed this is what Mowgli's enclosure is meant to represent: a tiny realm of personal rule that seems to ward off the Raj's enveloping authority. But this resistance requires the Empire's tacit cooperation (Gisborne's polite non-intervention) and approval (Muller's wonder). Without the artifice of antithesis thus agreed upon, Mowgli's enclave would have little point or force. Mowgli and his family are not the only beneficiaries of this arrangement: from it the Raj, too, derives profit, for sites of resistance like Mowgli's help to mask the extent and power of its rule. (These felicitous spaces also provide comfort for imperialists: it is doubtful whether Kipling's public commitment to empire would have been so strong had not his private “Daemon” allowed him the respite of such Mowglis in the glade.)

Complicity in empire marks, more or less, all the Mowgli stories. Many readers of The Jungle Books have celebrated Kipling's power to expose the primitive otherness that lies beneath the surface of our civilization. J. M. S. Tompkins has spoken of the books' powerful evocation of “the wild and strange, the ancient and the far” (68). For J. I. M. Stewart, the series' appeal lies in Kipling's “power to bring, as from very far away, reports which validate themselves in the telling” (143-44). Daniel Karlin stresses the element of “dark inward play” and of “something other, something recalcitrantly estranged from human experience” (Introduction 8, 23). But it would be wrong to divorce this strangeness from the ordinariness of empire. Throughout the Mowgli series, Kipling hints at the presence of the British Raj. In the first tale, the real reason against man-killing is that it means, “sooner or later, the arrival of white men on elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with gongs and rockets and torches” (5). And intermittently, in the other stories, the Raj announces its quiet yet mighty presence on the edges of the wild, fabulous jungle. Across this rukh the Empire has lightly stretched its grid of authority, and though the Law of the Jungle may seem far from the white man's law—older and more authentic—it is in fact bounded and permeated by the Raj.

That authority ultimately determines the lives of all who live under it, including Mowgli's. It regulates his relations with his jungle friends and finally governs the riddle of his identity. As much as we are meant to believe that he can withdraw into the glade to be a brother to his wolf friends, the Raj's insistence on hierarchy foils this dream. Likewise, as much as “In the Rukh” would have us believe that he can escape the straight-jacket of a unitary adult self-hood to enjoy the liberty of juvenile castelessness, imperial ideology, with its need for clear distinctions between colonizer and colonized, forbids such murkiness of identity. By the time that Mowgli has joined Gisborne, he has found both his father and his caste under that father's law. No longer “below the age of caste,” he can no longer enjoy the fruits of the non-specific, non-stratified subjectivity he enjoyed as a child. Shere Khan was thus both wrong and right about Mowgli's identity. His insistence on the primacy of lineage held little force when Mowgli was no more than a cub. But the factor of “blood,” that concept so fundamental to the discourse of racial typology, was always latent in the on-going definition of Mowgli's identity, ready to express itself when the Raj required its emphasis. Although “blood” in itself is not determinative, its value within an imperial framework, in which all adult members are required to serve the Raj according to their rank, does prove crucial. In this sense, imperial ideology gives the theory of racial types a particular applicability. As long as Mowgli is too young to serve the Empire, he may dwell in happy castelessness beyond racial distinctions. But once he becomes part of the Raj, he has to bow, regardless of where he stands, to the decisive, disambiguating force of race.

The deep joy in ambiguity of the early Jungle Book tales is undeniable, but it lies in a freedom from caste that disappears with adulthood. The figure of the Romantic child had its charm for Kipling, and in Mowgli he lent that image a unique magic by grounding its full and various being not simply in “primal sympathy” with Nature but in identification with a primordial castelessness. In light of the powerful prohibition against “going native” in most nineteenth-century adventure fiction, Mowgli's early integration of the “native” (i.e., lupine) into his human self represents a bold departure from the mainstream. But given the requirements of empire, the power of this uncasted figure to inform adult imperial identity is sharply limited. The delights of early felicitous space cannot be translated to those later reconstructions of it in Mowgli's adult life. If that early space seems to lie beyond Foucault's power relations, it is only because the action of those relations has been postponed. Only by a willful nostalgia for childhood, indulged in the face of imperial exigencies, could Kipling and his readers hold that, in the rukh's glade, Mowgli returns to the protean selfhood of his wolf-boy days. Mowgli manages to avoid the constriction of identity that afflicts so many young heroes of nineteenth-century adventure fiction, but only for so long. As Mother Wolf reminds us, “Man goes to Man at the last.”

Notes

  1. See Bettelheim 63; Coveney 277. For some readers, including Peter Coveney, much Victorian children's literature features a retreat from rather than an acceptance of adult identity (Bratton 147; Carpenter 16; Coveney 240). For a study of maturational patterns in Kipling's fictions of adolescence, see Moss.

  2. Readers have often noted Kipling's fascination with ambivalence, ambiguity, and other forms of doubleness, and recently, with the post-structuralist predilection for seizing on the self-reflexive and self-interrogative in literature, the Kipling of two, and sometimes more, sides of his head has drawn increasing attention. For more traditional treatments of ambiguity in Kipling, see among others Dobrée; Mason; Shahane; Wilson. More recent explorations of doubleness tend to focus on the vexed, multiple, proliferating, or indeterminate readings created by Kipling's complex narrative strategies. In this regard, see Crook; Hanson; Karlin, “Plain”; Kemp; Lodge. Most of these writers, early and late, find in Kipling's use of uncertainty profound consequences for the construction of identity.

  3. Several critics have noted that The Jungle Book is a primer, in thin disguise, for future imperial servants. John A. McClure and Mark Paffard offer the most recent and incisive accounts of the Mowgli series as a “fable of imperial education and rule” (McClure 59). I agree with much of what they have to say. However, my argument has less to do with the book's lessons than with its pedagogical settings—in particular, with the formal and ideological functions of felicitous space.

  4. Strangely, no Kipling scholar has ever bothered to gloss this important phrase. Anthropologists and other writers who have commented on the role of children in Indian life, however, shed some light. Although according to Hindu custom all children enter their parents' caste at birth (Mayer 340) and quickly become inculcated in caste matters (Mandelbaum 1: 120), caste identity does not seem deeply marked until later in life. The touching of children outside of one's caste, for instance, is the least polluting of actions among those that count as violations of caste law (Dumont 133).

  5. The importance of Messua here and Mother Wolf earlier suggests the need for an understanding of the maternal in The Jungle Book. The resonances of the phrase “The Mother-Lodge” would require us to widen our inquiry to include maternal influences on Kipling's general notion of felicitous realms.

  6. Some readers have objected to the inclusion of “In the Rukh” in The Jungle Book. Dennis Karlin, for one, frowns at the “creeping legitimization” of its place in the Mowgli series (Introduction 347). But “In the Rukh” has the important role of rounding off the Mowgli story. “The Outsong,” the tail-verse to “The Spring Running,” alludes to a life of “toil” to succeed Mowgli's time in the jungle (295). “In the Rukh” describes that future of work. Kipling may have revised the tale to fit in with the series (Stewart 140-41), he wrote a preface to it in 1896 that shows the close relationship between it and the foregoing tales (Karlin, Introduction 346-47), and he himself moved it from Many Inventions to The Jungle Book for the Outward Bound Edition (1897). The exclusion of “In the Rukh” from The Jungle Books of the Sussex Edition is, I think, unfortunate.

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