Re-reading Rudyard Kipling's 'English' heroism: Narrating nation in The 'Jungle Book'

This essay explores the construction of colonial English national identity in a text not always read in the context of its author's imperial project. Since Kipling's The Jungle Book has been relegated to the category of child ren's fiction and is today usually red in its Disneyfied version, its const ructions of nation, race and class in colonial space, exposed through its n arrations of local inhabitants (both animals and humans), have not attracte d the attention that they deserve. I will argue that the stories' racialize d and interrelated images of Indian children and animals contribute to an i magining of Englishness as a site of power and racial superiority. While th e stories appear to narrate an Indian space, the images and constructions o f nation produced stem from an understanding of Englishness as a site of co lonial authority. Thus its is argued that Kipling's colonial animals map a racialized contrastive space where national identity is inseparable from ra cial identity, leading Kipling finally to abandon the colonial animal in or der to be able to represent proper Englishness. While Kipling constructs co lonial animals as racialized Others by writing monkeys and snakes in his ju ngle sketches, he also promotes 'truly English' identities in the nationali st allegory of "The White Seal". Indeed, all animals are not equal but they too are represented in racialized and nationed terms, which points to the flexibility of the animal trope in colonial discourse.