John Lockwood Kipling, “Mowgli”
I’ve been having a strange experience teaching Kipling’s Jungle Books (1893-95) in my British Fantasy class. On the one hand, I love Mowgli’s rapport with all the animals of the jungle and find myself cheering for him in his adventures. Unfortunately, the books also read like a social Darwinist forerunner of Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan, and the Tea Party. In today’s post I’ll explain what I mean by this and explain how there is a liberal as well as a conservative fantasy in Kipling’s work.
We all know about Mowgli escaping from the lame man-eating tiger Shere Khan and being adopted by the wolves. The wolves refer to themselves as “the Free People,” as in this scene where Mowgli is introduced to te pack:
Akela [the head wolf] never raised his head from his paws, but went on with the monotonous cry: “Look well!” A muffled roar came up from behind the rocks—the voice of Shere Khan crying: “The cub is mine. Give him to me. What have the Free People to do with a man’s cub?” Akela never even twitched his ears. All he said was: “Look well, O Wolves! What have the Free People to do with the orders of any save the Free People? Look well!”
Kipling here is echoing the Brits’ vision of themselves, even under the monarchy, as ultimately free. “Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:/”Britons never will be slaves,” wrote the 18th century poet James Thomson in what would later become the lyrics of an unofficial national anthem.
There were many reasons for the British to feel good about themselves in 1893. They did in fact rule the waves, and social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer viewed British preeminence as proof that, evolutionarily, they were the lords of creation. That’s one reason why Kipling is so keen on “the law of the jungle.” Mowgli may technically be Indian but he is really British, wielding his technological superiority (fire, knife, brain, adaptability) to lord it over all other animals. Furthermore, as my students pointed out, there is something very British about thinking of the jungle being ruled by such laws as fair play.
But all is not well in the wolf world, which seems to be veering from the ideals of its founding fathers—or rather, from the ideals of the lords who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta to insure their rights. As Mowgli grows older, Shere Khan begins corrupting the young wolves, who become lawless and participate in a coup attempt against Akela. It fails only because Mowgli brings fire into the animal world, and “free people” becomes a phrase that one uses sarcastically. Here’s Bagheera the Black Panther after the young wolves are not willing to honor the bull price he paid for Mowgli’s life years before:
“Also, I paid for him with a bull when he was accepted. The worth of a bull is little, but Bagheera’s honor is something that he will perhaps fight for,” said Bagheera in his gentlest voice.
“A bull paid ten years ago!” the Pack snarled. “What do we care for bones ten years old?”
“Or for a pledge?” said Bagheera, his white teeth bared under his lip. “Well are ye called the Free People!”
Historically speaking, I think doubts were beginning to creep into Britain’s imperial enterprise, doubts that would be expressed more directly six years later in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). Whether the impotent tiger represents an aging and parasitical monarchy or, more generally, an existential malaise, there is a sense that Britain’s founding vision was in trouble. This of course is how originalists like Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Tea Party types see the American Republic today. They believe something has gone terribly wrong.
I’m not bothered by this aspect of The Jungle Books. People of all political persuasions routinely complain about how their country has veered from its founding ideals and point to different culprits depending on their values and agendas. What bothers me is the libertarian fantasy that Mowgli and his wolf brothers can just walk out of society altogether, shoving the young wolves’ decision in their faces. “I see ye are dogs,” says Mowgli as he threatens his fellow wolves and Shere Khan with fire. It’s a little like Ayn Rand’s fantasy of how society will miss the supermen when they’re gone. Here’s how the third chapter ends:
Ever since Akela had been deposed, the Pack had been without a leader, hunting and fighting at their own pleasure. But they answered the call from habit; and some of them were lame from the traps they had fallen into, and some limped from shot wounds, and some were mangy from eating bad food, and many were missing. But they came to the Council Rock, all that were left of them, and saw Shere Khan’s striped hide on the rock, and the huge claws dangling at the end of the empty dangling feet. It was then that Mowgli made up a song that came up into his throat all by itself, and he shouted it aloud, leaping up and down on the rattling skin, and beating time with his heels till he had no more breath left, while Gray Brother and Akela howled between the verses.
“Look well, O Wolves. Have I kept my word?” said Mowgli. And the wolves bayed “Yes,” and one tattered wolf howled:
“Lead us again, O Akela. Lead us again, O Man-cub, for we be sick of this lawlessness, and we would be the Free People once more.”
“Nay,” purred Bagheera, “that may not be. When ye are full-fed, the madness may come upon you again. Not for nothing are ye called the Free People. Ye fought for freedom, and it is yours. Eat it, O Wolves.”
“Man-Pack and Wolf-Pack have cast me out,” said Mowgli. “Now I will hunt alone in the jungle.”
“And we will hunt with thee,” said the four cubs.
So Mowgli went away and hunted with the four cubs in the jungle from that day on.
In other words, I’m so disgusted with you that I’m just going to leave and start my own society. And you’ll be sorry.
Nor is this the only problematic answer that Kipling proposes to social threats that he perceived. Two forces in the Europe of his day that worried him were the anarchists, whom he depicts through the monkey people or Bander-log, and the communists, whom he depicts through the red dogs or the dhole. Both of these mass movements represented threats to traditional individualism and the British Way and in each case we can see his panic through the extremity of his solutions.
When Mowgli is kidnapped by the rule-breaking, attention-deficit Bander-log, Baloo and Bagheera are forced to do something they would rather not: enlist the services of the fascist Kaa. If you think I’m exaggerating when I describe the python this way, check out how he operates:
“Bandar-log,” said the voice of Kaa at last, “can ye stir foot or hand without my order? Speak!”
“Without thy order we cannot stir foot or hand, O Kaa!”
“Good! Come all one pace nearer to me.”
The lines of the monkeys swayed forward helplessly, and Baloo and Bagheera took one stiff step forward with them.
“Nearer!” hissed Kaa, and they all moved again.
Mowgli laid his hands on Baloo and Bagheera to get them away, and the two great beasts started as though they had been waked from a dream.
“Keep thy hand on my shoulder,” Bagheera whispered. “Keep it there, or I must go back—must go back to Kaa. Aah!”
What does it take to rid the world of a massive threat that doesn’t play by the rules? Bring in a leader who mesmerizes people and twists them to his ends.
Communists get a taste of their own medicine in “Red Dog” when the relentless and well-organized wild dogs, or dhole, are defeated by “the Little People of the Rocks.” The “place of Death” is a vast wasteland inhabited by millions of bees that will sting to death any living thing that gets close. Although the chapter ends with a heroic fight for civilization against the few dhole that survive the bees, it’s clear that British rules of fair fighting could never stand up to the hoards. Kipling all but says that the future of the world belongs to the masses, whether dog packs or bees.
Kipling, in other words, has written a fantasy in which heroic individualism is fighting for its life against the forces of modernism. I find it particularly interesting that Kipling wrote Jungle Books after spending four years in America, where he came to admire our entrepreneurial spirit.
For all of his suspicion of the faceless masses, however, I don’t see The Jungle Books as altogether a reactionary fantasy. Progressives should applaud individual initiative no less than conservatives. Marx, after all, believed that society should be reorganized, not so that we would become faceless, but so that we would cease to be faceless. Only when we are not underfed or trapped in mindless work can we begin to achieve our full individual potential.
Furthermore, it’s noteworthy that Mowgli never achieves his successes by himself. He always works with others to achieve his ends, whether with Baloo, Bagheera, Kaa, his wolf brothers, Kathi the elephant, or countless others.
Now that I look back, I realize that what I loved about The Jungle Books as a child was Mowgli’s collaborative work. What made me uncomfortable was Kipling’s insistence on Mowgli’s superiority.
