Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India in 1865. Growing up in India was glorious for young Kipling who visited markets with his nanny, and swiftly learned the language growing to love both the country and it’s complex culture, but his stay was brief, at the age of six, he was sent by his mother to Southsea, England for a proper classical education. Southsea, England was a living hell for the boy, here he was abused both physically and psychologically by his “foster mother” Mrs. Halloway, a callous woman who grew to loathe Kipling. After years of suffering, and self-imposed isolation, spent mainly in the company of stolen books, a nervous breakdown at the age of eleven lead to Kipling’s rescue by his mother. She swiftly whisked Rudyard away on a long holiday after which she and switched him to a new school in Devon, here he lived with family. Here Kipling flourished, and his writing began.
After he finished school, a lack of money bade Rudyard Kipling forgo college and return to India. Here he was once again immersed in the culture, and working for a local newspaper, he formed an unusually close bond with the native people granting him access to aspects and areas of the society that most Englishmen never saw. Reportedly a severe case of insomnia lead to a myriad of midnight wondering through the streets, and these experiences formed the backbone for a the beginning of Kipling career as an author. Inspiring with an anthology of 40 short stories titled “Plain Tales from the Hills” based on his various early adventures in India. This work was his first success and gained him wide popularity back in England. Upon his later return to England, he formed a friendship with the american publisher named Wolcott Balestier, this acquaintance proved a great asset to Kipling’s career and his aid led to Kipling’s release of two more collections: Wee Willie Winkie (1888), and American Notes (1891), the product of chronicling his early impressions of America, after Balestier introduced Kipling to his own childhood home in Brattleboro, Vermont. While in Vermont, Kipling was first acquainted with Balestier’s sister Carrie, and the two were quick friends. Following Wolcott Balestier's sudden death to Typhoid fever, the young woman summoned Kipling back from England to where he had recently returned to help her deal with the loss. Wolcott Balestier, had proved to be a man who was confirmed as incredibly influential in the course of Rudyard's early life. In the years after the death of Balestier, Rudyard Kipling and Carrie were married. From here Kipling moved between his Vermont dwelling in America and England with Carrie and their subsequent children, he continued to write now inspired by both his own children and all those in both the United Kingdom and America who adored his work. Kipling became enormously popular and by the young age of only 32, he was the most highest paid writer in the world. During his lifetime Kipling suffered the loss of not one, but two of his own beloved children, both of which deeply impacted him: first his daughter Joshephine to Pneumonia, and then his son John who disappeared in the first World War. During his early time in Vermont following his marriage to Carrie, Kipling wrote his crowning glory: “The Jungle Book”(1894), “The Naulahka: A Story of the West and East” (1892) and "The Second Jungle Book" (1895), as well as several short stories which would later feature in “All the Mowgli Stories”(1933) a compilation of such stories telling of various escapades of his classic characters.
One of the stories included in “All the Mowgli Stories” was "Kaa's Hunting", to which “Road-Song of the Bandar-Log” was a companion poem. The Bandar-Logs played a significant role in “Kaa’s Hunting,” here the loyal Baloo, reasonable Bagheera, and the infamous Kaa band together to form a rescue mission for Mowgli who has been kidnapped by the clan of “monkey people”. Upon whom Kaa releases his terrible wrath in an act of retribution. The “Monkey People,” are depicted as living in frivolous and irresponsible anarchy: this causes them to be treated as social outcasts by the other inhabitants of the jungle. Ironically, Kipling depicted his apes as being the most foolish and inarticulate of the Jungle dwellers, communicating almost solely through the repetition of another animal’s speech. Their foolish and chattering ways are illustrated by their slogan: “We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true”. An adaption of “Road-Song of the Bandar-Log” called "I Wan'na Be Like You" is featured in the Disney’s “The Jungle Book”.
“Road-Song of the Bandar-Log” is a playful piece that demonstrates Kipling's strong adherence to poetic form. This is a song of all the glorious things the Bandar-Logs would do if their words could ever be matched by their actions, and though seldom are. Kipling’s composition is written in flawless iambic pentameter, and his flamboyant rhythmic pattern follows the care-free and mocking exploits of the brash and audacious “monkey people” as they progress through the jungle in a slightly hysteric manor, from their jumping between the trees and their foolish swipes at the moon, to their descents to the earth to taunt all the inhabitants of jungle with the repeated phrase: "Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!" so perfectly arranged is Kipling’s composition that even the upward curl and strength of monkey’s tail of which they are so proud is mimicked in the rhythmic organization of the lines. Additionally, as the monkey’s boorish and puerile movement through the jungle continues into the final stanza the structure of the poem becomes awkward and ungainly to reflect the baseless arrogance of monkeys claims:
“Then join our leaping lines that scumfish through the pines,
That rocket by where, light and high, the wild-grape swings.
By the rubbish in our wake, and the noble noise we make,
Be sure - be sure, we're going to do some splendid things!”
However graceful or lithe, the monkey’s agile and nimble operation by way of the trees may seem to be as they “scumfish” along, in actuality they are just the “scum” of their society, fustian, capricious, incapable of independent thought or action, full of only empty boasts: too facetious to be criminals, and too idiotic to be true members of society, they are doomed to be forever below all recognition but reproach.
Rudyard Kipling’s poem has attracted many fascinating and relevant deconstructions from various exploratory writers and literary critics Martin Fido to Roger Lancelyn Green. Fido defends Kipling’s dismissal, not of scholars or academics but of the condescending tone taken and ceaseless diminution of ordinary people, Fido claims Kipling presents a flipped society where the true value of such excessive and exultant thought is elucidated, he blatantly states, “Intellectuals are consciously attacked as the Bandar-Log: chattering monkey-people who play with ideas – particularly ideas which offend other people – but achieve nothing themselves. The unflattering picture has, naturally, offended many serious adult readers and attracted for Kipling the unfortunate vocal admiration of anti-intellectual philistines. Yet as a comment on the parlour-pink aesthetes who valued their skill in the expression of supercilious malice without making any very obvious contribution to the quality of life around them, it should have been usefully provocative in 1894.” Green takes another view altogether criticizes the over-complication and analyzation of Kipling’s work, “As with all stories of this kind, there are readers on whom the magic does not work. These presumably include the critics who have tried desperately to find political meanings in the Jungle Books and disagree among themselves as to whether the Bandar-Log represent the Americans or the Liberals or such ‘lesser breeds without the law’ (“Recessional”) as they believe Kipling was most anxious to insult at the moment of writing.” According to Green Kipling’s work is best left to its simplest translation for it was written for the pleasure of children not the slander of adults. Other scholars who explored this particular composition of Kipling’s include Peter Keating(who offered a literary deconstruction of “Road-Song of the Bandar-Log” and Marghanita Laski( who while discussing “The Jungle Book,” used the Bandar-Logs to accentuate the magnitude law carries, additionally . . . “ . . . the need to avoid contamination by jabber, (See Verse 3.) rabble-rousers or dreamy intellectuals, here personified by the Monkey-Folk, the Bandar-Log . . .”. Kipling has influenced a flood of thought among his readers, whether it was analytical, creative or critical and he continues to do so today.
Rudyard’s Kipling’s “Road-Song of the Bandar-Log” is a spirited and energetic piece that perfectly embodies the temperament of his “monkey people”. Equally poignant, in its allegories, and jocund in it’s rhymes and deliberate decline of poetic structure leading up, perhaps more appropriately down to the his final stanza. Whatever, you may take away from Kipling’s work, he leaves his reader with something unique and often some extraordinary imagery. “The Jungle Book,” was an exotic and compelling fairy tale open to any audience regard’s of ethnicity, gender or age, and even this small taste of it is exquisitely engaging. Rudyard Kipling’s was and remains a brilliant and well spoken author, whose creative expression of his experiences in India have charmed countless generation of audiences and persist in doing so today.