What is Nineteenth-Century British Imperial Politics

The chapter explores the gendered imperial politics in short fiction for children through analyzing “The Mowgli Stories” and “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” selected from nineteenth-century colonialist author Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894). The reason for the selection of the stories is that they have not attracted the interest they deserve as products and perpetuators of the gendered imperial ideology. The chapter asserts that they both reflect the British concerns about the future potential Indian rebellions after the Mutiny of 1857 and applaud the faithful colonizing Indians' struggle against the rebellious ones through masculinist power of body and language. The stories narrate the masculinized bodily actions of the double outsider animalized characters involved in violence after the rebellion of one of them in colonial India. Thus, the chapter indicates the author's response to the mutiny through the techniques empowering masculinized imperialism in allegorical fiction for children.