The Jungle Book

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussions of racism and racist violence.

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, in 1865 to English parents. In his autobiography, Kipling recalls his childhood in India fondly, describing how he was raised in a bilingual household: “one spoke ‘English,’ haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in” (Kipling, Rudyard. Something of Myself. London: Macmillan, 1937). At the age of five, Kipling was sent to live in England, but he disliked his strict, Evangelical caretakers and described his time there as torturous. When Kipling completed his education in England, he returned to India and became a newspaper editor in Lahore. He began publishing stories, eventually relocating to the literary center of London, and then to Vermont in the United States, where he wrote and published The Jungle Book. Kipling’s multilingual childhood and his subsequent feeling of alienation and hybrid cultural identity is reflected in many of the stories in The Jungle Book.

In 1899, Kipling published a poem commenting on the potential for American military intervention in the Philippines entitled “The White Man’s Burden.” This poem exemplifies his perspective on race and imperialism, depicting white men as “saviors” to the rest of the world and colonialism as a way to improve supposedly inferior societies. Kipling’s poem treats European imperial aggression as a form of charitable labor, using metaphors that compare non-white people to both animals and children. The poem instructs white men to labor on behalf of “new-caught sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child” (Kipling, Rudyard. “The White Man’s Burden.” The Kipling Society, 1899. Lines 7-8). Kipling attempts to portray colonial rule as a service to non-white societies, describing the white man’s burden as “[n]o tawdry rule of kings, / But toil of serf and sweeper” (Lines 26-27). Edward Said points out the fallacy of this rhetoric in his preface to the 2003 edition of his influential work Orientalism: “every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort” (Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 2003.) While Kipling and other white writers justified the British Empire as a benevolent, civilizing force for good, contemporary critics have pointed out that this rhetoric obscures and ignores the violence and racial discrimination enacted against colonized peoples. Kipling’s racist and imperialist perspectives are integrated throughout his literary work, informing his portrayal of authority, order, and leadership in The Jungle Book.