Kipling’s support for the British Empire is clear throughout the stories of The Jungle Book. In the Mowgli stories, Kipling’s imperialist messaging largely hides beneath the surface. He does not directly address the relationships between Indian and British people. Instead, the stories are morality tales akin to Aesop’s Fables where Mowgli represents the “savage” Indian, while the animals who instruct him, such as Baloo and Bagheera, represent the British imperial order. This parallel is especially clear in “Kaa’s Hunting,” the story where Baloo teaches Mowgli the Law of the Jungle. The Law of the Jungle emphasizes knowing one’s place in the world and insists upon adhering to established social hierarchies. At the end of the story, Mowgli gets punished for disrespecting the Law of the Jungle and discovers its value. In other words, the story serves as a defense of British colonization of India, justifying it on the basis that British imperialism and the western ideals it represents are at the top of the social hierarchy.
Kipling’s pro-imperialist sentiments are more blatant in the later stories, which feature British soldiers and families. For instance, Teddy’s family in “Rikki-tikki-tavi” is a British family living in India, and it’s possible to interpret the story as an allegory for British imperial rule. In the story, Kipling associates the cobra, Nag, with the Indian people by giving him special markings on his hood, which Nag claims come from the Hindu god Brahm. Meanwhile, Teddy and his family are British subjects, whom Nag repeatedly attacks. Kipling depicts Teddy and his family as the story’s heroes, while Nag and his wife, Nagaina, are the villains. Moreover, in using humans to represent British culture and cobras to represent Indian culture, Kipling effectively dehumanizes Indian people and devalues their culture.
Kipling’s positive portrayal of British imperialism is heavily biased and often racist. Always, the British people in his stories are upstanding, moral members of society who exist at the top of the social hierarchy. Meanwhile, their colonized subjects are either happy about being colonized or evil and foolish for wanting to overthrow their subjugators. As such, although The Jungle Book seems innocent on the surface, modern readers may find its politics outdated and problematic. It argues for the greatness and superiority of British colonialism while downplaying the negative impacts on those who the British colonized.
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British Imperialism Quotes in The Jungle Book
‘Better he should be bruised from head to foot by me who love him than that he should come to harm through ignorance,” Baloo answered very earnestly. “I am now teaching him the Master Words of the Jungle that shall protect him with the birds and the Snake People, and all that hunt on four feet, except his own pack. He can now claim protection, if he will only remember the words, from all in the jungle. Is not that worth a little beating?’
‘I have taught thee all the Law of the Jungle for all the peoples of the jungle—except the Monkey-Folk who live in the trees. They have no law. They are outcasts. They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep, and wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They are without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten. We of the jungle have no dealings with them. We do not drink where the monkeys drink; we do not go where the monkeys go; we do not hunt where they hunt; we do not die where they die.’
Bagheera gave him half a dozen love-taps from a panther’s point of view (they would hardly have waked one of his own cubs), but for a seven-year-old boy they amounted to as severe a beating as you could wish to avoid. When it was all over Mowgli sneezed, and picked himself up with a word.
‘Now,’ said Bagheera, ‘jump on my back, Little Brother, and we will go home.’
One of the beauties of Jungle Law is that punishment settles all scores. There is no nagging afterward.
Then they sing long, long songs with odd native quavers at the end of them, and the day seems longer than most people’s whole lives, and perhaps they make a mud castle with mud figures of men and horses and buffaloes, and put reeds into the men’s hands, and pretend that they are kings and the figures are their armies, or that they are gods to be worshiped.
‘I haven’t been doing anything but fight since the middle of May. The beach is disgracefully crowded this season. I’ve met at least a hundred seals from Lukannon Beach, house-hunting. Why can’t people stay where they belong?’
‘Who is Nag?’ said he. ‘I am Nag. The great God Brahm put his mark upon all our people, when the first cobra spread his hood to keep the sun off Brahm as he slept. Look, and be afraid!’
He was afraid for the minute, but it is impossible for a mongoose to stay frightened for any length of time, and though Rikki-tikki had never met a live cobra before, his mother had fed him on dead ones, and he knew that all a grown mongoose’s business in life was to fight and eat snakes. Nag knew that too and, at the bottom of his cold heart, he was afraid.
But his wife was a sensible bird, and she knew that cobra’s eggs meant young cobras later on. So she flew off from the nest, and left Darzee to keep the babies warm, and continue his song about the death of Nag.
Rikki-tikki had a right to be proud of himself; but he did not grow too proud, and he kept that garden as a mongoose should kept it, with tooth and jump and spring and bite, till never a cobra dared show its head inside the walls.
Kala Nag, which means Black Snake, had served the Indian Government in every way that an elephant could serve it for forty-seven years, and as he was fully twenty years old when he was caught, that makes him nearly seventy—a ripe age for an elephant. He remembered pushing, with a big leather pad on his forehead, at a gun stuck in deep mud, and that was before the Afghan War of 1842, and he had not then come to his full strength.
‘But who gives them the order?”
‘Now you want to know too much, young un,’ said Billy, ‘and that is one way of getting kicked. All you have to do is to obey the man at your head and ask no questions.’
‘They obey, as the men do. Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant, and the sergeant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, and the captain his major, and the major his colonel, and the colonel his brigadier commanding three regiments, and the brigadier the general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant of the Empress. Thus it is done.’
Children of the Camp are we,
Serving each in his degree;
Children of the yoke and goad,
Pack and harness, pad and load.
See our line across the plain,
Like a heel-rope bent again,
Reaching, writhing, rolling far,
Sweeping all away to war!
While the men that walk beside,
Dusty, silent, heavy-eyed,
Cannot tell why we or they
March and suffer day by day.
