Mowgli, science, and religion

Rearranging books, hoping to create a cranny for new acquisitions, I came across a 1917 pocketbook edition of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Time had frayed the back of the red leather binding, but the gold on the edges of the pages was still crisp and inviting. I got lost in the first story, ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’.

Father Wolf taught him his business, and the meaning of things in the jungle, till every rustle in the grass, every breath of warm night air, every note of the owls above his head, every scratch of a bat’s claws as it roosted for a while in a tree, and every splash of every little fish jumping in a pool, meant just as much to him as the work of his office means to a business man.

Mowgli learned the meaning of everything in the jungle, and this made him a scientist. For meaning goes well beyond the instrumental and the practicalities of personal survival, and is driven by humans’ deepest urge – curiosity. Unlike the other animals in the jungle, who only speak their ‘language’, Mowgli’s curiosity mastered them all and thus made him everyone’s friend – from hawk to Kaa, the python. In the story, Mowgli is portrayed as forever being ‘without fear’. Fearlessness is not a (manly?) virtue so much as a readiness to confront the unknown and find a way to adapt to the predicament.

In the ensuing chapter, ‘Tiger! Tiger!’, Mowgli now lives among the humans in the village. He uses his cunning and knowledge to kill Shere Khan, the despised lame tiger. His wolf brothers and Akela, the deposed leader of the Free People, help him split the herd of buffalo first in order to surround Shere Khan. The bulls stampede the beast.

As he goes about the business of skinning the dead brute, Buldeo, the village hunter, arrives and looks on, uncomprehending. He should have killed the tiger, on which the government had set a bounty of 100 rupees. He had preferred to sit under a great fig tree and spin heart-chilling or fanciful yarns:

Wonderful tales of gods and men and ghosts; and Buldeo told even more wonderful ones of the ways of beasts in the jungle. […] Mowgli rose to go. ‘All the evening I have lain here listening,’ he called back over his shoulder, ‘and, except once or twice, Buldeo has not said one word of truth concerning the Jungle, which is at his very doors. How, then, shall I believe the tales of ghosts and gods and goblins which he says he has seen?’

Buldeo tries to appropriate the skin and claim the bounty. Mowgli asks Akela to chase away the intruder. Buldeo runs back into the village: ‘It was sorcery, magic of the worst kind, and he wondered whether the amulet round his neck would protect him.’ When Buldeo got to the village, he told a tale of magic, enchantment, and sorcery that made the priest look very grave. The news of the killing of Shere Khan spreads:

When they got near the village, Mowgli saw lights and heard the conches and bells in the temple blowing and banging. […] As a shower of stones whistled about his ears, the villagers shouted: Sorcerer! Wolf’s brat! Jungle-demon! Go away!

Mowgli, the scientist, has used his knowledge of the jungle to free the village of the tiger’s scourge. He is rejected. The village prefers to hear Buldeo’s tales:

The horrified villagers saw Mowgli, with two wolves at his heels and a bundle on his head, trotting across at the steady wolf’s trot that eats up the long miles like fire. Then they banged the temple bells and blew the conches louder than ever; and Buldeo embroidered the story of his adventures in the jungle.

Curiosity and story-telling are both part of the human make-up. Science defers to the material context and, in so doing, conquers it – it is a hard, subtle, and humbling slog. Unbridled imagination, too, gives a warming feeling of conquest – at least in our dreams and in the tales we tell ourselves of omnipotence. The traits are uneasy partners. Curiosity needs a spark of imagination to ignite the process. In the end, however, we often prefer the bonfire of our imagination to the slog of observation. Meanwhile, we gladly make use of knowledge, even as we decry its ‘truth’.

A small cautionary tale for our future nestles in Kipling’s story. When the gap between knowledge and story-telling yawns too widely, knowledge is rejected, for it threatens the social identity of the onlookers. It is not surprising that the country where science has made such great strides is also the country where the backlash against science is so strong. Knowledge and belief are locked in a struggle in the USA.

Can we improve the situation? To me, the core issue is the threat posed by science to our identity. Soothing this fear cannot be achieved through adversarial proceedings, where ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ joust against each other. Mowgli brings Shere Khan’s skin to the meeting place of the Free People, and his experience brings a closure – of sorts.

The post was first published on DeepDip.

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