Many years before I encountered Hugh Brody’s writing, I read Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894). This was the first book I remember that significantly influenced my life. I read it many times, and still regularly re-read Kipling. The Jungle Book is a colonial version of the “wild child” story: it explores the withdrawal of human care, and acceptance into a different world of nurture and home set amongst danger, enmity and death.
The child raised by wolves finds himself appalled and confused by the insistent hierarchies of colonial Indian human society, instead negotiating his unique place with the non-human inhabitants of the jungle.
.png?w=600)
