‘I do not wish to leave the jungle,’ says a heartbroken Mowgli, returning, as he must, to the man-village (JB, p. 52). With a profound love for his jungle ‘family’, the man-cub, Mowgli, as his epithet suggests, is a liminal being caught between contrasting worlds. Like the sahib/outcaste Punch in ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’ whose identity is founded upon his Anglo-Indian duality, Mowgli's subjectivity straddles the borders of human/animal, culture/nature, and in Kristevan topography self/Other. For critics such as Zohreh Sullivan, the marking of boundaries of self/ Other necessitates an acknowledgement of the ‘colonial rule of power, law and government’. But as Sandra Kemp has noted, ‘there is more to this duality’ than a self-representation that aligns the colonial subject to Empire. Whilst Kemp maintains that the duality inherent in Kipling's adolescent characters is an expression of the ‘interweaving of private and public self’, I would argue that this duality, when viewed from a Kristevan perspective, mirrors the more profound, universal struggle of an identity that, once disentangled from the mother/child dyad, emerges into the signifying space of the symbolic. The ‘double-self’ that Kipling's adolescents are subject to is magnified by the specific split in the author's own ambivalent subjectivity due to the exilic moment in his childhood. The former takes on a particular cultural inflection in his fiction as a consequence of his double socialisation in India and England. In his introduction to Kipling's early newspaper sketches, Thomas Pinney notes the author's contrasting perspectives on India. Firstly is the ‘official view [that is] essentially paternalistic and administrative’ and secondly, an altogether more ‘personal [Kemp might say ‘private'] and humane’ vision that shows ‘the Indian scene delighting in its variety and copiousness, and responding to the individuality of its people’.