THE UNDERTAKERS: THE FORGOTTEN KIPLING

 

Tucked away and somehow forgotten in Rudyard Kipling’s The Second Jungle Book is one of Kipling’s best short stories that does not involve Mowgli and is animal friends. And yet, in many ways, “The Undertakers” is quintessential Kipling.

The bulk of the story involves a conversation between three residents of India’s Wainganga River (said in the Mowgli stories to be the home of Shere Khan)at the time the British were building a railway bridge over its waters, a golden jackal, a stork and a mugger crocodile. Their conversations will be familiar to readers of the best remembered Jungle Book stories, hierarchies within the animal kingdom (the jackal appreciates the crocodile so long as he leaves enough of his kill to scavenge on) to the relationship between man and nature and what the coming of the railway means to life in the Wainganga. All this with the common thread of order and rank and the space each player plays in the established hierarchy, be it human, animal or both.

For all his obsession with law and order, however, Kipling harbored a fascination with revenge that runs through much of his fiction. This is apparent even outside of the two Jungle Books. An entry into his later Just So Stories tells us of Farsi bakers revenge on a rhino when the horned beast steals his bread. Of course, the sentiment runs throughout The Jungle Books. The very reason the jungle animals are not allowed to hunt man as per the Jungle Law is for fear of man’s revenge against all beasts of the forest. Later, in “Letting in the Jungle”, when a grown Mowgli is cast out of the man-village following a failed attempt to return to his own species, the feral boy takes vengeance on the humans that scorned him by ordering Hathi of the elephants to destroy their village and their crops. Upon his return to the jungle Mowgli’s primary goal is revenge on Shere Khan the tiger that set the wolves of the Seoni pack against him.

“The Undertakers” is, ultimately, a revenge tale also involving a child and a predator in which the crocodile’s attack on an English child comes back to haunt him some years later. In the Mowgli stories, Mowgli’s driving vendetta pitted boy against tiger (though he had support from the wolf pack), In “The Undertakers” revenge is laid out much less thoughtfully but also a lot more cleanly. What’s interesting, however, is the reaction of the two other animals, in particular the jackal. The jackal has a use for the crocodile but when the moment comes, he decides the alliance is too costly for him and proves incapable of loyalty. This may be the single most revealing instance in Kipling’s work. For all his faith in the system he was all to aware of human nature, even when portrayed by, tellingly, animals.