• Story of the Month

Kaa’s Hunting
What draws me back to this particular Mowgli story? When I came on the Jungle Book as a little girl it opened a door onto a new world, one that was more alive, more radiant with feeling; though I couldn’t have named it, I think I sensed it was more truthful, too. The world I was being taught to inhabit was bleached—blame post-war austerity, the nuns at my convent school, as you will. I loved the Jungle Book right from the opening incantation ‘Now Chil the Kite brings home the night That Mang the Bat sets free—’ That tone of magic comes with an undernote of threat, for the herds have to be protected, ‘shut in byre and hut’ from the ‘talon and tush and claw’ of the proud and powerful creatures that stalk abroad. For me, ‘Kaa’s Hunting’ creates that sense of ruthless threat, embodying it in Kaa’s terrifying hypnotic power over all other animals, even while holding it in balance. Countering that threat is the care of Baloo and Bagheera, in teaching Mowgli before putting their lives at risk to save him from the bundar-log, the lawless and dangerous monkey people. Decades after that first reading I spent several years immersing myself in Kipling’s personal experience in order to write Kipling and Trix, my fictionalised account of his life. These days, as a reader, I find myself picking up other patterns in his writing, connections between ‘Kaa’s Hunting’ and his earlier visit to the abandoned ancient city of Chitor, described in Letter XI, of Letters of Marque (1888). Memories of that sinister ruin may lie behind the Cold Lairs of ‘Kaa’s Hunting’. In Chitor he felt a terror, a sense of ancient danger that threatened to overwhelm his very identity: he felt ‘he would fall off the polished stones into the stinking tank, or …the Gau-Mukh (river) would continue to pour water until the tank rose up and swamped him, or that some of the stone slabs would fall forward and crush him flat.’ I find that terror of the loss of self to be echoed in his account of the mesmerising power of the great rock-snake to overwhelm identity in others. (Letters of Marque are well worth reading for entertainment: they were written as he was sent travelling in Rajasthan, a twenty-three year old, who had made India too hot to hold him.) As for the bundar-log, I sense they owe a good deal to the child’s pained response to the social world little Ruddy found on arriving in Southsea. Remember ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’? When Auntie Rosa takes steps to have him humiliated among the other boys, Punch can’t contain himself: ‘If I was with my father,’ said Black Sheep, stung to the quick, ‘I shouldn’t speak to those boys. He wouldn’t let me. They live in shops. I saw them go into shops—where their fathers live and sell things.’ It’s not an attractive response, I admit, but it reflects the social stratifications that boy, Ruddy’s stand-in, had been brought up with. At home in India little Ruddy had also grown up hearing talk among adults, Indian and English, that was often intelligent and thoughtful. In later years, now a writer, he didn’t forget the impression made on him as a child when overhearing conversations between the adults who were Auntie Rosa’s friends: perhaps in the limited interests and concerns of the bundar-log, he was recalling those speakers.

Kaa’s Hunting

What draws me back to this particular Mowgli story? When I came on the Jungle Book as a little girl it opened a door onto a new world, one that was more alive, more radiant with feeling; though I couldn’t have named it, I think I sensed it was more truthful, too. The world I was being taught to inhabit was bleached—blame post-war austerity, the nuns at my convent school, as you will.

I loved the Jungle Book right from the opening incantation
‘Now Chil the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free—’
That tone of magic comes with an undernote of threat, for the herds have to be protected, ‘shut in byre and hut’ from the ‘talon and tush and claw’ of the proud and powerful creatures that stalk abroad. For me, ‘Kaa’s Hunting’ creates that sense of ruthless threat, embodying it in Kaa’s terrifying hypnotic power over all other animals, even while holding it in balance. Countering that threat is the care of Baloo and Bagheera, in teaching Mowgli before putting their lives at risk to save him from the bundar-log, the lawless and dangerous monkey people.

Decades after that first reading I spent several years immersing myself in Kipling’s personal experience in order to write Kipling and Trix, my fictionalised account of his life. These days, as a reader, I find myself picking up other patterns in his writing, connections between ‘Kaa’s Hunting’ and his earlier visit to the abandoned ancient city of Chitor, described in Letter XI, of Letters of Marque (1888). Memories of that sinister ruin may lie behind the Cold Lairs of ‘Kaa’s Hunting’. In Chitor he felt a terror, a sense of ancient danger that threatened to overwhelm his very identity: he felt ‘he would fall off the polished stones into the stinking tank, or …the Gau-Mukh (river) would continue to pour water until the tank rose up and swamped him, or that some of the stone slabs would fall forward and crush him flat.’ I find that terror of the loss of self to be echoed in his account of the mesmerising power of the great rock-snake to overwhelm identity in others.

(Letters of Marque are well worth reading for entertainment: they were written as he was sent travelling in Rajasthan, a twenty-three year old, who had made India too hot to hold him.)

As for the bundar-log, I sense they owe a good deal to the child’s pained response to the social world little Ruddy found on arriving in Southsea. Remember ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’? When Auntie Rosa takes steps to have him humiliated among the other boys, Punch can’t contain himself: ‘If I was with my father,’ said Black Sheep, stung to the quick, ‘I shouldn’t speak to those boys. He wouldn’t let me. They live in shops. I saw them go into shops—where their fathers live and sell things.’ It’s not an attractive response, I admit, but it reflects the social stratifications that boy, Ruddy’s stand-in, had been brought up with. At home in India little Ruddy had also grown up hearing talk among adults, Indian and English, that was often intelligent and thoughtful. In later years, now a writer, he didn’t forget the impression made on him as a child when overhearing conversations between the adults who were Auntie Rosa’s friends: perhaps in the limited interests and concerns of the bundar-log, he was recalling those speakers.

“Kaa’s Hunting”