The 19th Century Colonial Archetype of the Indian Crocodile: The aquapelagic roots of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Muggers’

This article studies the archetype of the Indian crocodile (also called by the British as ‘mugger,’ derived from the Hindi word magarmachh, meaning aquatic monster’) in late-19th century colonial anthropological and zoological accounts. These constitute a vital archive of imperial views of environmental others, especially within Indian lacustrine contexts. I attempt to explore the historicity of the crocodile-archetype—that Rudyard Kipling, for instance, used in his famous story ‘The Undertakers’ (1894) as a scapegoat for overcoming the traumas of the ‘sepoy Mutiny’ or India’s First War of Independence, of 1857 (which saw fierce battles between the British and Indian rebels and revolutionaries on the plains). In taking Kipling’s story as the point of departure, this article tries to trace the evolution of the crocodile archetype through its appearances in popular accounts in Victorian periodicals, sporting, adventure, and anthropological literature, in their representations of Indian lacustrine contact zones. What makes the colonial archetype of the crocodile Kiplingesque is the author’s historical coupling of it with the gory events of 1857 (as they were represented in British popular imagination) and India’s lacustrine settings, as if to relocate the site of Anglo-Indian conflict from the plains to aquatic zones, on the one hand, and the internecine conflict to an inter-species conflict (that is, from British versus Indian to Anglo-Indian versus crocodiles), on the other hand. This ideology of representation of Indian crocodiles in colonial hunting narratives ended up obscuring an emerging geological narrative of the Indian subcontinent’s deep past and traces of the hypothetical supercontinent, Gondwana, that British geologists had found in India. Since a holistic understanding of crocodilian origins was key to understanding India’s geological deep pasts—that could have created an aquapelagic understanding of the crocodile as opposed to its diabolical image in Victorian popular imagination—demonising the crocodile hurt India’s intellectual interests, too.