In the Jungles of the Night: A Novel about Jim Corbett

by Stephen Alter

But as the British Empire pulled up its tent pegs and struck camp to head home, I realized that there would be anger and resentment towards my race. The white man has given India many things of great value but he has also taken far more than his share and, in many cases, imposed unjust prejudices and priorities on people who have lived under the yoke of foreign domination for nearly a century and a half. Whatever reprisals occur might not take the extreme forms of violence that erupted in 1857, when my grandfather and other family members were slaughtered during the Mutiny. Nevertheless, if politics spills into the streets it is a scourge that turns friends into adversaries, reducing human behaviour to a brute contest in which all rules are abandoned and there can be no victor, only the vanquished. Some journalists have described it as the ‘law of the jungle’, which is an odious comparison, for in the absence of man, most jungles exist in peaceful harmony, governed by laws of nature and the eternal, equitable balance between life and death.

Humanity is a deceptive noun that suggests our best qualities as a species, though it often masks prejudice and inequity.

A piece of wisdom we are yet to reaise.

It isn’t reason or religion that makes us a successful species, or the literature we read in school, or the patriotic discipline and dedication with which we defend our nation’s interests. Instead, it is the primitive impulses we follow, which have been with us from our earliest incarnations. Whatever we may have become, Homo sapiens were once nothing more than lonely hunters with no sense of right or wrong but only a feeling inside our marrow that somehow we must carry on. In that simple equation lies our sole claim to nobility and virtue. The survival of our species is the only moral choice we face.