ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Kipling negotiates this paradox of hospitality and welcoming in The Jungle Books. Anglo-Indian with a longing to belong, and because they explicitly take up the issue of the man seeking to be master of space but caught between two worlds that each threaten to cast him out. While Kipling examines to its edges the possibilities of an absolute welcoming hospitality, he also recognizes the hostility that undergirds the hospitable relationship. The jungle of The Jungle Books is a space that welcomes not in spite of its violence, but because of its violence. Negotiating between two equally violent systems of hospitality, Mowgli struggles in each place to speak the language in which he must justify himself. In the end, Mowgli recognizes that he is not even securely at home in his own mind, struggling to speak any language of hospitality as he becomes a stranger to himself and returns to man despite his intentions.
