The moral of all the stories in the
Jungle Books is that all animals and humans must obey “The Law of the Jungle.”
When humans or animals do not obey the Law of the Jungle, they are greatly
looked down upon and often meet an unfortunate end. The Law states that
different animals have different roles and spots on the food chain, with Man,
especially the white man, at the top. In fact, “The Law of the Jungle, which
never orders anything without a reason, forbids every beast to eat Man” (The Jungle Book 4).
When
Mowgli is kidnapped by the monkeys, he is aggravated that they seem to have no
laws. He observes that “The monkeys called the place [where they lived] their
city, and pretended to despise the Jungle-People because they lived in the
forest. And yet they never knew what the buildings were made for nor how to use
them…and would pretend to be men” (24). By trying to take on the role of men,
the monkeys are disrupting the natural order. It is no coincidence that the
monkeys are also portrayed as stupid, lazy, and quarrelsome to go along with
their apparent lawlessness. With the monkeys, Kipling gives the clear message
that without strict laws, a society will collapse.
Similarly,
when Mowgli is taken in by the villagers, he believes them to be as insensible
and lawless as the monkeys. However, according to the narrator, “Mowgli had not
the faintest idea of the difference caste makes between man and man” (34) when
he helps the potter on the donkey. This is difficult to believe since Mowgli
grew up learning the strict hierarchy of the jungle, and that some animals like
the monkeys and jackals were considered lowly. Through this incident, Kipling
is trying to show that Mowgli is more civilized than the other Indians since he
wasn’t raised in their culture, but rather by wolves, but his disregard for
their culture is somewhat baffling since a caste system aligns with Kipling’s values.
When we
see Mowgli again after he has grown up a bit, he and the wolves have to fight
against the dholes to regain control of their jungle. The dholes’ “boast was
that all jungles were their Jungle” (The Second Jungle Book 132) and they are all
killed for their arrogance. The important part of the Law of the Jungle is to
never infringe upon anyone else’s territory, as Shere Khan did by killing cattle,
or how the humans made it nearly impossible for the seals to find safe nesting
grounds.
The emphasis in The Jungle Books on territory, specifically on not infringing on the territory of others, is interesting because it seems contradictory at times. At the beginning, the quote about the Law of the Jungle forbidden the consumption of humans continues with the statement “except when he is killing to show his children how to kill, and then he must hunt outside the hunting-grounds of his pack or tribe,” (12). This seems contradictory to the importance of not infringing other’s territory because animals are only allowed to kill humans if they are on the territory of others. However, I agree that the primary idea presented in “The White Seal” is that the humans are infringing on the territory of the seals, and so they are the villains or the story. “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” seems to present the same idea, with the cobras as the villains who are infringing on the Rikki-Tikki’s territory, until he kills enough of them that “never a cobra dared to show its head inside the walls” (158). On the other hand, in “Toomai of the Elephants,” Little Toomai more or less infringes on the territory of the elephants by going to their dance and seeing “what never man had seen before” (187). Toomai is awarded for his infringement. The distinction with this story may be that Toomai only watched what the elephants were doing, rather than participating or killing anything like the humans and the cobras. Still, overall The Jungle Book seems to contradict itself in its view of infringing on the territory of others as negative or not.
ReplyDeleteI would disagree with the idea that Kipling supports a caste system in The Jungle Books. In the story “Tiger! Tiger!” Mowgli fails to understand the cast system of the village in which he lives. When the donkey of a low-caste man slips and falls into a clay-pit, Mowgli helps to rescue it and send the man off. The priest’s rebukes are met with a threat to put him on the donkey as well. Mowgli’s failure to understand the workings of the caste system may seem paradoxical at first, since the hierarchy of the jungle seems so well-defined. Upon further inspection, however, it makes more sense once one realizes that there is a distinct separation between the two systems.
ReplyDeleteThe Jungle’ hierarchy is based upon the physical attributes of each particular species – wolves are hunters, elephants rule the jungle, and so on. Despite the tiered system it seems to provide, with distinctions between herbivores and carnivores, each of these animals has their own rights, between those who eat like them and those who eat them. For example, when the Water Truce is declared in the story “How Fear Came”, “it is death to kill at the drinking-places” (151). This differs from the Indian caste system as described by Kipling, where the different castes seem arbitrary, and the system itself seems corrupt. A person’s caste is not determined by their skills, but by where they are born, and one can only move up in caste by acquiring money. In “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat”, Kipling portrays caste as losing all meaning for those of the highest caste, and all of Purun’s indiscretions are covered by donations to the priests. These differences portray two widely different systems, and explain Mowgli’s inability to understand the Indian Caste system.
I think part of the reason why Mowgli “had not the faintest idea of the difference caste makes between man and man” (56) is because he cannot see a clear difference in the strength, wisdom, or abilities of humans. In the jungle, there is a distinct hierarchy of animals based on their species and their size, strength, cunning, wisdom, etc. In “Tiger! Tiger!” Buldeo is the “village hunter, who had a Tower musket” (57), and he is a respected leader of the village. Mowgli can’t see him as a leader or as someone to be respected amongst the people, because Buldeo tells stories about the jungle that are all “’cobwebs and moontalk’” (57), and Mowgli knows more than Buldeo does about matters of the Jungle although he is just a child. Also, Mowgli has come into the village knowing nothing of the customs of humans, so it makes a lot of sense that he would not know what type of work and what type of people should or should not be respected in the village. He learned about money, but “he did not in the least understand” (56), which is another reason why it would have been difficult for him to grasp the caste system in the village. In the Jungle it was much easier for Mowgli to see the hierarchy because different species formed it; in the village, the humans all seemed pretty much the same to Mowgli, and without grasping the concepts of power, prestige, and money, it would have been almost impossible for him to understand the different castes in the village.
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