Never the twain shall meet? : representations of nature in children’s literature by Rudyard Kipling and Rabindranath Tagore : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

Abstract

Rudyard Kipling and Rabindranath Tagore: two astonishing writers, both of whom lived in colonial India, wrote about the Indian environment, crafted texts for children, were born and died within years of each other and yet who appeared to live “lives that ran coldly parallel, like sets of railway tracks” (Nair). Even their careers followed similar trajectories. Both rose to immense international fame, being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature only six years apart (1907 and 1913) and then experienced a decline in reputation (in the West), during their lifetimes, for different political and aesthetic reasons. Kipling was often derided as a pro-imperial jingoist; Tagore as an anti-nationalist, sentimental mystic.

These evaluations do not do justice to their writing and ignore the role both writers played in representing nature and the natural environment in colonial India. Addressing this gap, in a discussion of Kipling’s 𝘑𝘶𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘦 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴 and selected poems, plays and stories by Tagore, I ask a number of key questions: What might these texts suggest about attitudes towards nature and the natural environment in in colonial India? How is nature represented – as a backdrop, a character, a resource, or a sacred entity? What ecological relationships (hierarchical, symbiotic, exploitative) are modelled in the literary works? What kind of environmental subjectivity, if any, is being cultivated in the implied child reader?

While recognising Kipling’s pro-imperial stance, and without seeking to claim, anachronistically and mistakenly, that he was an environmentalist in the current sense of the term, I argue that Kipling’s stories offer insights, if unconsciously, into the negative ecological effects of colonial practices in India. Contra many postcolonial evaluations of the 𝘑𝘶𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘦 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴, I argue the stories are more than allegories advocating the imposition of imperial “Law” on India’s people and landscapes. They reveal a deep love and respect for the life of India’s jungles/forests. I explore how, in the 𝘑𝘶𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘦 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴, Kipling offers detailed, accurate representations of Indian fauna and flora as animals and as plants, not mere symbolic cyphers. Further, I argue that, in a variety of ways, the stories ambivalently document, and at times lament, the ecological disruption caused by deforestation, water diversion, bridge building, the hunting and extermination of wildlife, and the introduction of non-native plant species. The 𝘑𝘶𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘦 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴 offer an equivocal testament to the colonial era’s conflicted environmental anxiety where admiration for nature is in tension with an ideology that demanded its subjugation. I extend existing readings of Kipling by examining the ecological agency and complexity of the non-human world alongside the imperial and allegorical meanings that critics have identified.

I argue that critical analyses of Tagore’s spirituality, mysticism, educational philosophy and anti-colonial politics give scant regard to his ecological prescience. Recent scholarship, including Ramachandra Guha’s account of Tagore as an important figure in the history of Indian environmental thought, has established the significance of Tagore’s ecological concerns. This thesis extends that discussion by examining the spiritual and philosophical foundations of those concerns and by tracing their expression through Tagore’s children’s writing and his representations of children, education and the natural world. Rather than treating Tagore’s environmental thought simply as an early form of modern environmentalism, I argue that it emerges from a broader conception of interconnectedness rooted in Indian intellectual and cultural traditions. In plays like 𝘔𝘶𝘬𝘵𝘢𝘥𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘢 and 𝘙𝘢𝘬𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘣𝘪, Tagore shows the destruction caused by dams and mining long before these became global issues. In his writing for children, as in that for adults, he drew on ancient Indian religious and philosophical sources that saw nature as sacred and alive. He promoted a vision of the symbiotic, non-hierarchical co-existence of humans, non-human animals and non-animal life forms. Further, Tagore posits that authentic adulthood is achieved by reclaiming the child’s innate ecological consciousness, capable of healing the rupture imposed by colonial and anthropocentric modernity. Tagore’s child – of whom and for whom he writes – 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘴 the ontology of living within a sacred, reciprocal natural network. True maturity, therefore, is not an exile from the garden of childhood innocence but a conscious reawakening of foundational empathy, wonder, and sense of unity with creation.

By reading Kipling and Tagore together, I show colonial Indian children’s literature was a complex site in which competing relationships between humans, non-human life, childhood and nature are represented and negotiated. Both writers articulate an elegiac sense of the loss of prelapsarian childhood and pre-colonial natural India, whether this involved unconscious documentation or conscious condemnation. I thus resist the reduction of the works of both writers to imperial allegories or oriental mysticism and read them with an eye open to what they reveal about nature in colonial India why this is important today. In all their complexity, the visions of “the twain,” Kipling and Tagore, “meet” in the awe both express in the face of the Indian forest/jungle and the anxieties they express about its future.