The conversation between literary and visual text in The Jungle Books and Just-so Stories opens up some of the many contexts within which
Kipling’s fiction operates. Lockwood Kipling (JLK) illustrates the first, and
Rudyard Kipling the second collection of stories, but both redraw lines of
complicity and resistance in relation to the colonial period in ways that are
difficult to predict and impossible to define. In this paper I hope to look at
their re-configurations of imperial rule, their shifting perspectives on
‘letting in the jungle’ and their insistence on re-negotiating the relationship
between fiction and illustration. Who is the reader after whom these two very
different people seek? Does the reader need to look at the visual evidence, or
to look away? What is the relationship between visibility and vulnerability that
develops as the beast fable constructs people, their surroundings, and the
structures of power within which they live out their lives? These are some of
the questions with which I hope to engage.
Prof. Christel R Devadawson is affiliated to the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. She is the author of Out of line: Cartoons, caricature and contemporary India (Orient Blackswan 2014). A Cambridge-Nehru scholar for her Ph D, her thesis was published as Reading India, writing England: The fiction of Rudyard Kipling and E M Forster (Macmillan, 2005). She edited a critical anthology on A Passage to India with G. K. Das (Pencraft International, 2005) and Word, image text: Nature and time in literature and the visual arts with Shormishtha Panja and Shirshendu Chakrabarti (Orient Blackswan, 2009). She also edited Jane Eyre (Macmillan, 2000) and A Passage to India (Orient Longman, 2004). She may be contacted at christel.rashmi@gmail.com.