ABSTRACT
Mackenzie draws on Rudyard Kipling's account in Something of Myself, of the sinking of a well and the clearing of a pond at Bateman's which between them produced a series of objects that are variously categorized as Jacobean, Cromwellian, Roman, Elizabethan and Neolithic. Kipling's engagement with the emotionally fraught issues of the Mutiny topic is for the most part, oblique, allusive, and allegorical. Two observations can be made; the first is that the Mutiny, that is to say its events, is figured by Randall as the reality situated behind or beneath the tales of The Jungle Books. As such the history' to which Randall refers when he aims to show how British imperial history and, more particularly, Mutiny history inform Kipling's fictions', even whilst it is configured as a narrative organized by particular perspectives, is at the same time constituted as the unarguable real event' necessarily of specific importance to Kipling.
