Kipling and Scouting, or "Akela, We'll Do Our Best"

Abstract

Kipling and Scouting, or "Akela, We'll Do Our Best" Richard Flynn (bio) Speaking of Rudyard Kipling's deservedly obscure collection of stories, Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923), Gillian Avery argues that Kipling "should never be thought of as the type of the official writer to [Lord] Baden Powell," the founder of the Scouting movement in England. Avery speculates that the Jungle Books are not as popular among children as they ought to be because "the official hand of the Scout movement has helped to deaden them" (115). "All the ritual of the Wolf Cubs," she writes, "is derived from the first Jungle Book. Cubs weekly stalk and kill Shere Khan the Tiger and Tabaqui the Jackal, so that for many the jungle is overlaid by the thought of a dusty church hall and little boys in green caps chanting 'Akela, we'll do our best'" (115). Avery's point is well-taken, and it is even further supported by such curiosities as the 1967 Boy Scouts of America Wolf Cub Scout Book, in which Mowgli is a little American Indian boy, "who thought what fun he and the other boys would have playing as wolves" and in which Akela is a human being, "the Big Chief of the Webelos" whose "law of the forest" is "live and help live." Mowgli's brothers, likewise, are brave Indian warriors, "unmatched in battle and fierce in attack," but "very kind to their women and children" (vi-xiv). The 1984 Bear Cub manual restores Kipling's character names to cartoonish versions of the Kipling characters, but only to use them to deliver a didactic message: How Balloo taught Mowgli to "Just Say No" (6-9). Although the Kipling we value as a children's writer tells powerful stories antithetical to this kind of pabulum, there is also, unfortunately, the Kipling who lends his official imprimatur to just such bowdlerization of his texts. As pioneering essays by Edmund Wilson and Randall Jarrell make clear, Kipling labored his whole life under a fundamental conflict between the childhood paradise he knew in India during the first six years of his life and the childhood hell he knew during the next six—his sentence in the famous "House of Desolation" where his parents had left him and his sister at the mercy of Mrs. Holloway (or Auntie Rosa as she is called in the brilliant autobiographical story, "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep"). Despite the fact that Kipling's "best of parents," as Jarrell puts it, were responsible for leaving him with the woman who "introduced" him to Hell "and all its terrors," Kipling would never openly blame them. On the surface, Jarrell argues, Kipling "extenuated everything, blamed for nothing," all the while denying the part of himself that "extenuated nothing, blamed for everything" (341). It is the Kipling of the Mowgli stories and of Kim, that readers of children's literature value today, the work in which we detect the tensions "between two worlds"—the worlds of innocence and experience, child and adult, animal and human. We respond most deeply, I think, to the Kipling that wants to extenuate nothing, blame for everything, but who, like a child, is afraid to risk displeasing those "best of parents." Indeed, in concentrating on the work in which Kipling wrestles with his Daemon, we often disregard the fact that this creative genius of the first order was often a jingoistic moron. Even if we don't completely accept S.P. Mohanty's argument in the essay "Kipling's Children and the Colour Line" that "restored to their colonial context, Kipling's Mowgli and Kim...tell a distinct and specifiable political story in which [End Page 55] adventure is indistinguishable from surveillance, pleasure intertwined with power, and the values of childhood a thin allegory for imperial ideology" (31) we can all agree that Kipling, perhaps uneasily, endorsed Great Britain's measures to shore up an embattled empire. Indeed, though he recognizes that it caused Kipling a certain amount of tension, Angus Wilson admits that "Kipling meant every word of his Imperial beliefs" (205). In his association with the Scouting Movement, Kipling either tacitly approves of or actively endorses...