“I have the Jâtaka; and I have thee”: Fables and Kipling’s Political Zoology

The Jataka tells the story of an elephant with an iron-ring on his leg, with which he was fettered by the King’s hunters, who had captured him. This chapter focuses on the roles of the Jatakas in Kim, and adresses why animal fables, which played an important part in creating an imperial vision in the Jungle Books, had to be edited out from Kim to knock it into shape. Kipling’s engagement with the Jatakas was, of course, part of the nineteenth-century Orientalist enterprise. Kipling was happy to engage with the Jataka-style storytelling in the early 1890s, just as he had done in his earlier Indian stories.