The Jungle Books
Rudyard Kipling
The feeling of authenticity
There are a few books that so struck me that I remember exactly where I was when I read them: Pushkin‘s masterpiece Eugene Onegin, Pride and Prejudice (actually, it is my second reading of P&P that I remember), and Rudyard Kipling‘s Jungle Books.
I was probably nine or ten years old and was staying for a few days with my grandmother. Like any addict on arriving at a new place, my first concern was to secure my supply. I therefore checked out Nana’s bookshelves for books I could read during my visit. On one of her shelves -- I can still picture it -- there was a series of classics by different authors, published and bound in uniformly formatted hardbacks. It was the kind of series that is intended not so much to be read as to look good on a bookshelf. I was familiar with Kipling‘s name because my mother read to us from his Just So Stories, and even I could not forget a name like Rudyard Kipling. And there, in red leather among other red leather-bound books, were two side-by-side, The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book, within convenient reach of one of Nana’s armchairs. (It is possible that I am the only person who ever actually opened those books.)
They were good. They were really good. I subsequently read everything by Kipling I could find. And I still consider him one of the best story-tellers who has ever written in English. To my mind, what is distinctive about Kipling is the feeling of authenticity he gives to his stories. I can read a story written in the voice of a mongoose, and while I’m reading I can’t help but believe that this is exactly and authentically what’s it’s like to be a mongoose.
I know of course that’s nonsense. If I concentrate I can even occasionally see the magic being worked -- the detail so strange and yet believable that it could not possibly just have been made up -- even though I know it was.
Like many Anglo-Indians born in India to English parents Kipling spent his first five years in the care of servants who spoke Hindi.
In the afternoon heats before we took our sleep, she (the Portuguese ayah, or nanny) or Meeta (the Hindu bearer, or male attendant) would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution ‘Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.’ So one spoke ‘English’, haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in.
I assume much of that feeling of authenticity that pervades The Jungle Books was learned from those Hindu servants. I say “learned” rather than “borrowed” or “stolen” because many of the stories in The Jungle Books were not told him by those childhood caregivers -- for instance, “The White Seal” or “Quiquern,” a story about Inuits surviving a hard Arctic winter.
About half the stories concern Mowgli, a boy raised in the jungle by wolves and his animal friends (the wolves, Bagheera the panther, Baloo the bear, Kaa the python) and enemies (chiefly the tiger Shere Khan). The other half are standalone stories. The majority of these are also set in British India, with the exceptions already noted.
Like many books written by white men around the turn of the 19th century (1894 and 1895), The Jungle Books contain much that looks objectionable to a 21st-century reader. Opinions differ, of course, but I think they repay the effort of tolerance.