As a child of the sixties, I was exposed to that great 1967 Disney classic, The Jungle Book; I remember being taken to the cinema to watch it and at the end, as the credits rolled, I begged to stay and watch Mowgli, Baloo and Shere Khan all over again (I seem to remember we’d been a bit late and missed the first few minutes so I built my justification upon that; it didn’t work). Meanwhile, at school, a copy of the book on which the film was based was a staple of the class bookcase: Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Most of the short stories must have been read out to us at one time or another but one in particular stands out in my memory: the tale of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, so named for his chattering vocal sounds, was a young Indian grey mongoose who befriends an English family residing in India. He gets to know the other creatures inhabiting the garden and is warned of the cobras Nag and Nagaina (names perhaps inspiring J K Rowling to choose, years later, the name Nagini for Voldemort’s snake), who are angered by the human family’s presence in their territory and seek to kill them
Accordingly, Nag enters the house’s bathroom before dawn to kill the humans, but Rikki attacks Nag from behind in the darkness. The ensuing struggle awakens the family, and the father kills Nag with a shotgun blast while Rikki bites down on the hood of the struggling male cobra. The grieving female snake Nagaina attempts revenge against the humans, cornering them as they have breakfast on a veranda, but again Rikki saves the day, pursuing Nagaina to her underground nest where an unseen final battle takes place. Rikki emerges triumphant from the hole, and dedicates his life to guarding the garden.
The stories in The Jungle Book were inspired in part by ancient Indian fable texts such as the Panchatantra and the Jataka tales, and indeed there is a similar mongoose and snake version of the Rikki-Tikki-Tavi story found in Book 5 of Panchatantra. Kipling’s “beast tales” were thus the revival of an old tradition, with Kipling’s own spin gleaned from his experiences growing up in India for the first five years of his life (and with a hearty dollop of abandonment issues, perhaps, after Kipling was sent back to England for an unhappy period, but that’s another story). Here are the opening lines to the story.
THIS is the story of the great war that Rikki-tikki-tavi fought single-handed, through the bath-rooms of the big bungalow in Segowlee cantonment. Darzee, the tailor-bird, helped him, and Chuchundra, the muskrat, who never comes out into the middle of the floor, but always creeps round by the wall, gave him advice; but Rikki-tikki did the real fighting.
He was a mongoose, rather like a little cat in his fur and his tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and his habits. His eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink; he could scratch himself anywhere he pleased, with any leg, front or back, that he chose to use; he could fluff up his tail till it looked like a bottle-brush, and his war-cry as he scuttled through the long grass, was: “Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!”
One day, a high summer flood washed him out of the burrow where he lived with his father and mother, and carried him, kicking and clucking, down a roadside ditch. He found a little wisp of grass floating there, and clung to it till he lost his senses. When he revived, he was lying in the hot sun on the middle of a garden path, very draggled indeed, and a small boy was saying: “Here’s a dead mongoose. Let’s have a funeral.”
“No,” said his mother; “let’s take him in and dry him. Perhaps he isn’t really dead.”
They took him into the house, and a big man picked him up between his finger and thumb and said he was not dead but half choked; so they wrapped him in cotton-wool, and warmed him, and he opened his eyes and sneezed.
“Now,” said the big man (he was an Englishman who had just moved into the bungalow); “don’t frighten him, and we’ll see what he’ll do.”
It is the hardest thing in the world to frighten a mongoose, because he is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity. The motto of all the mongoose family is, “Run and find out”; and Rikki-tikki was a true mongoose. He looked at the cotton-wool, decided that it was not good to eat, ran all round the table, sat up and put his fur in order, scratched himself, and jumped on the small boy’s shoulder.
“Don’t be frightened, Teddy,” said his father. “That’s his way of making friends.”
“Ouch! He’s tickling under my chin,” said Teddy.
Rikki-tikki looked down between the boy’s collar and neck, snuffed at his ear, and climbed down to the floor, where he sat rubbing his nose.
