Kipling’s “Mixy” Creatures

When a Russian spy derides “the monstrous hybridism” of the “smiling Bengali” Hurree Chunder Mookerjee in Kim, Kipling is clearly being ironic. For Kipling still values the pliability of a multiculturalism that, like his own, transcends national and ethnic divisions. His investment in such hybrid figures predates Kim. But his positive portraits of an “Anglo-American-German-Jew” as America’s “Man of the Future,” and of mixed-race and multicultural protagonists in “His Chance in Life” and “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat” are hardly irony free. Whereas Mowgli the wolf-boy cannot reconcile his split identity, the 1902 Just So Stories rely on a mixture of story, graphics, captions, and verse to free Kipling into a playful modification of species. Thereafter, however, he will distrust the hybridity he had once prized.