[Folkserv] Next week: "Father Kipling's Animal Ethnography" 2/28

[Moriarty, Megan]

It's next Tuesday:  The Center for Folklore Studies and the South Asian Studies Initiative presents Sadhana Naithani with her lecture, "With Admirable Effect: Father Kipling’s Animal Ethnography." It's on February 28th from 4- 5:30 pm in the 18th Ave. Library Research Commons (3rd floor).


John Lockwood Kipling wrote an ethnography of Indians’ perceptions of free and wild animals before his son Rudyard Kipling’s world famous The Jungle Book (1894). John Kipling’s Beast and Man in India (1891) was a famous book of its time, but is long forgotten. He documented beliefs, practices, proverbs and stories that ordinary Indians assigned to almost all free and wild non-human animals of their habitat. Viewing them critically, appreciatively and quizzically, Kipling created a narrative of his own – in words and in drawings - about Indians and their ecological worldview and its relationship with the British colonial state. This ‘narrative relationship’ between two perceptions of the non-human animals - that of Indians’ and that of the British state in India - is a colonial contact zone where significant struggles, administrative action and legal battles took place, but it has received scant attention from historians, and none from folk narrative scholars. This paper presents a close textual analysis of J.L. Kipling’s work.


Sponsored by the Center for Folklore Studies, the South Asian Studies Initiative (SASI) and the Humanities Institute. This event is free and open to the public.


For more information, to go our website: https://go.osu.edu/cfs_sn_ls


Sadhana Naithani is professor of German literature and cultural anthropology at the Centre of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is also the Coordinator of Folklore Program at the same institution. She is president of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research and Fellow of the American Folklore Society. Currently she is a Fulbright Visiting Professor (AY 2022-23) teaching at the Department of Anthropology/Folklore, U.C. Berkeley, and working on a book of narratives about wild animals.




Megan Moriarty

Communications Specialist


The Ohio State University

Humanities Institute

456 Hagerty Hall, 1775 College Road, Columbus, OH 43210


614-247-1650

moriarty.8 at osu.edu<mailto:moriarty.8 at osu.edu> / osu.edu<http://www.osu.edu>


Pronouns: she/her/hers

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