Sample Sunday: From The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated.
From the prefatory essays:
Mr Pyle on dry-land farming and ranching
Wemyssie - although he’s pilfered a surname from the Scots side of the family for his penname - hails mostly from my own distantly-ancestral Wiltshire. (Yep, we’re about umpteenth cousins mumble-times removed. It happens. There were two Winston Churchills publishing at the same time, after all.)
Land matters, and the land that shapes you matters, and the land that matters to you shapes you and what you know and what and how you write; in GW’s case, that’s Wilts. All chalk and cheese. We have land like that in America, too: the Shenandoah Valley, for one. Supports an animal unit per acre, or more, sometimes, land like that (one cow with calf makes an animal unit).
So Cousin Wemyss is not precisely the one to talk about the sort of land the villagers roundabout Seoni have.
I am. Texas has a heck of a lot of dryland habitat. Of course, big as it is, Texas has a heck of a lot of dang near anything.
The villagers of India, with their accumulated generations’-worth of land-wisdom, their planting sense and irrigation methods - look at ‘Letting in the Jungle’ - weren’t and aren’t exactly ‘lo-the-poor-Indian’. They knew what they were doing when it came to ploughing (I just know GW’s going to change what I wrote to the UK spelling) and grazing, in a landscape no Englishman - note that I don’t say no Welshman, or no Scot - could grasp. And they knew this because they understood the land they lived on. Their poverty and their inability to prosper was the result of bad governance and bad economic governance, and one reason India now prospers as a large and valued part of the Anglosphere is that, whatever else the Brits did - and they did plenty, a right smart of it bad - they left behind better law and governance, and democracy.
The fault wasn’t in the land, or the cultivators. Anybody who thinks that the Indian villager didn’t know split beans from coffee about cattle hasn’t considered the convergent evolution of the Longhorn towards similarity with Bos indicus, during its feral period, from dryland stock from dusty Murcia, Andalusia, and Estremadura; or why it is that a right smart of Kings and Klebergs spent a right smart of money creating the Santa Gertrudis breed of cattle.
Which brings us to the next point.
Houston is at 29 North. Corpus Christi is at 27 North. Brownsville is at 25 North.
Seoni is at 22 North.
Madhya Pradesh isn’t tropical, it’s subtropical. That’s why the village Mowgli let the jungle in on had irrigation channels. Its average yearly rainfall is just shy of 54 inches. Houston gets 49 inches. The forests of Madhya Pradesh are not the lush, tropical rainforests that the term ‘jungle’ nowadays evokes: they are more like the brasada, the scrub, of South Texas. Except a mite wetter than the South Texas Brush Country. Point being, it ain’t the Amazon, neighbour. It’s gullied, grassy, open in a good bit of it, with a fairly uncluttered understory: a subtropical mixed forest. The ‘amiable canvas of the douanier Rousseau’ that’s on the cover of this book must not be allowed to mislead you. (Neither Gervie nor I can remember whose line about Rousseau that was; we think it may have been Kenneth Clark’s).
So as you picture these scenes in Kipling’s work, remember that it’s a scene of mixed forest, glades and meadows, lakes and little villages: not the Big Thicket or something impenetrable to be hacked through by Intrepid Explorers (preferably Groucho as Captain Spaulding).