My personal issue with RTT is that it is a big huge MASSIVE promotion of British Imperialism over India, and general colonial rule. (Especially Victorian Rule, as Queen Victoria was made Empress of India while Kipling was writing)That means the British culture (represented by Rikki living with a British military family) wiping out the population of the native Indian culture (represented by the cobras and their offspring). I've seen adaptations where RTT lets Nagaina leave the garden with the last of her eggs, which for me looks like native Indians fleeing with what they can rather than bow to their invaders. And that is pretty much what was going on with British Imperialism in India during Kipling's time. "Convert to our ways and be second class citizens, or die".
That mindset carried through most of the British Empire at the time, right down to Australia with (for lack of a better term) kidnapping Aborigine children and forcing them to learn British culture.
Kipling was a massive supporter of not just British Imperialism, but United States Imperialism, which is what the White Man's Burden is about. In fact, RTT has passages very much like The White Man's Burden.
Also, I would expect a very young mongoose to be stricken with trauma and homesickness after being flooded out. But this is an Imperialism story! Gotta do your duty for queen and country!
Here is a passage from the study website Schmoop, comparing a passage of Kipling's colonial rule poem The White Man's Burden, to a passage in RTT
From a postcolonial perspective, Rikki-tikki can be viewed as a subject of colonial rule. Consider this excerpt from Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden":
Take up the White Man's burdenó
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guardó
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:ó
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?" (source)
The poem speaks to what Kipling called the white man's burden, a rally cry for Imperialist British society to civilize so-called "primitive" societies. According to Kipling, no matter how much the other societies may hate British rule, civilizing will ultimately be for their benefit. Or, as K.B. Rao put it, Kipling wanted to "portray the heroism and self-sacrifice of Englishmen working in India for the empire" and promote imperialism as the great cause (source).
Now consider this quote from "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi:
[…] because every well-brought-up mongoose always hopes to be a house-mongoose some day and have rooms to run about it, and Rikki-tikki's mother (she used to live in the General's house at Segowlee) had carefully told Rikki what to do if ever he came across white men. (17).
Unlike the free-willed hero above, here Rikki-tikki seems like someone who has given up his traditional role as an Indian for the comforts of colonial rule. He desires to become domesticated but not just by anyone. His mother specifically tells him to seek out and come into the good graces of the imperialist conquerors. So he protects the British family from the native dangers in exchange for the comforts of their home.
In this light, Rikki-tikki is the "burden"óand he's working with his colonialist overlords to civilize and sanitize the garden for the British family. The cobras, which stand in opposition to such change, must be eliminated because they are getting in the way of the British's family's desire to live in the garden. (And never mind that the cobras lived in India first.)
In this light, Rikki-tikki is less a hero fighting for the protection of the family than a subject fighting to introduce the presence of his colonial masters to the land.
It's incredibly irking to me when storytellers try to use RTT as an allegory for courage, because he has very little fear in what he does. He has tentativeness, but he never once thinks about backing away or trying to find his home burrow from where he was washed out from. He goes straight in because it's what he was taught to do, because "a good mongoose never looks back".
Point two is that it's pretty much the first two thirds of Beowulf with animals. Big Cool Warrior comes to Place Needing Help by water. Kills Primary Enemy #1 in the dead of night; fight results in death by body being split (Grendel having his arm ripped off, Nag being shot in half). Turns out female family member is a much, much bigger threat, and is p!$$ed beyond all reason. Big Cool Warrior fights and kills her in her own home. Like RTT, Beowulf is about a dominant culture wiping out another culture that's very livelihood is being threatened by their presence. Just switch out Paganism/whatever the rival religion was for Hinduism.
The Cobras' perspective of RTT matches that of the native Indians when they started taking over. They came out of nowhere, started parading around like they owned the place, and started attacking their people. Of course they were going to fight back, there was an invader on their doorstep! To this day, Kipling's work is thought of very negatively in India because he supported utter British takeover, which was narrowly avoided.
So what do I have to say? Native subjugated people that are bullied by pompous colonialists Cobras. Because in the context of RTT, mongooses represent one of the most horrible, evil things a person or a population can do, and that is colonial rule. To violently intrude into a place where one doesn't belong and shed blood to take it. And should the native population kill to keep it? I say yes. It's their culture, their home, their land, their families, their children. The colonialists have no right to get uppity and try to claim it's their moral duty to rule them; because it's not. This behavior is matched throughout the world of European colonists as they spread. The whole of the Americas were underfoot by the British, French, and Spanish and their White American heirs, who to this day subjugate the Natives. I even support giving Native Americans back their native lands, especially because they're living in deplorable conditions in the reservations. Up until the 1970's, and maybe even a little tiny bit to this day, the Aborigines of Australia pretty much had their children kidnapped (for lack of a better term) and had even greater force and pressure to learn British behavior and practices. Same for the Maori of New Zealand a little bit more north. India was mercifully freed a few decades ago.
*Whips of finger* And on another note, Nag and Nagaina are very badly written King Cobras!
King Cobras DO NOT have marks on the back of their hoods, and DO NOT eat birds! There's a reason why they're called King Cobras and it's because they nearly exclusively eat other species of snakes! It's even in the scientific name for King Cobra, as the single member of the genus Ophiophagus, which means snake eater. Now, in the context of Nag eating the baby tailorbird, let me say this. A flightless baby bird is helpless. Once it falls out of the nest, there's no way to get it back up, and it is effectively doomed. Really, really doomed. Something was going to eat it anyway, or it would die from exposure.
And Muskrats don't live in India!
