Though there are many young readers
who grew up reading Kipling and a few who turned out to be authorities on
Kipling in their adulthood, the writer has been in general neglected as a
children’s writer because of his reputation as an imperialist and racist. John
McClure had argued in 1981 that the Mowgli stories amount to “a fable of
imperial education and rule, with Mowgli behaving towards the beasts as the
British do to the Indians…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” (Booth 96).
Roger Lancelyn Green, on the other
hand, argued that Kipling’s Jungle Books
give access to ‘universal’ resonances to the child reader that lasts a
lifetime. Lancelyn Green assumes that everyone has inhabited a ‘Jungle’ of
childhood, at once wild and secure, in which he learns the Law by which he will
live when he leaves it, as he must if he is to become an adult. Thus, Mowgli’s
story can be ‘universal’ in the sense that he invites identification as the
ideal boy everybody would like to be. In fact, earlier readers of Kipling’s
writings saw the Jungle Books more
simply, as a charmed world to which politics was irrelevant.
In my paper, I will try to go beyond
mere ideological or imperialist readings of The
Jungle Books by using samples from the text that will show that the ‘Jungle
laws’ follow no neo-Darwinian law of the survival of the fittest, but an
elaborate civil and criminal code that is dependent on wisdom that comes from
experience and a rich treasure-trove of jungle-lore, and the transformation of
Mowgli from the ‘frog’ to the alpha-male who will rule both worlds (the animal
and the human) because he is an alien to yet a part of them.
Dr. Naina Dey teaches at Maharaja Manindra Chandra College (University of Calcutta). She writes for newspapers, books and academic journals. Her books include Macbeth: Critical Essays, Edward the Second: Critical Studies, Real and Imagined Women: The Feminist Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Fay Weldon, Representations of Women in George Eliot’s Fiction and her own book of poems Snapshots from Space and Other Poems. She has participated in workshops and presented papers in various colleges and universities throughout India. She is also a member of the guest faculty for P.G. course at Bhairab Ganguly College (West Bengal State University) and P.G. Dept. of English, University of Calcutta. She may be contacted at naina.dey@gmail.com.
Dr. Naina Dey teaches at Maharaja Manindra Chandra College (University of Calcutta). She writes for newspapers, books and academic journals. Her books include Macbeth: Critical Essays, Edward the Second: Critical Studies, Real and Imagined Women: The Feminist Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Fay Weldon, Representations of Women in George Eliot’s Fiction and her own book of poems Snapshots from Space and Other Poems. She has participated in workshops and presented papers in various colleges and universities throughout India. She is also a member of the guest faculty for P.G. course at Bhairab Ganguly College (West Bengal State University) and P.G. Dept. of English, University of Calcutta. She may be contacted at naina.dey@gmail.com.