COPPERFIELD IN THE JUNGLE - BY RUSKIN BOND

 

This story was published in ‘Tigers For Ever’ in 1996. It is autobiographical in nature. It tells us how the young Ruskin Bond could never get interested in the hunting expeditions of his Uncle Henry and some of his sporting friends. Perhaps he had inherited this trait from his grandfather who never understood the pleasure some people obtained from killing the creatures of our forests.

Even at the tender age of twelve Ruskin disliked anything to do with hunting. He also found it terribly boring. To illustrate this point he narrates an experience. Uncle Henry and some of his sporting friends once took him on a hunting expedition into the Terai forests of the Siwalik Hills (mountain range of outer Himalaya). The prospect of spending one whole week in the jungle with several adults with guns only filled him with dismay. They would all the time be thinking and talking of hunting a tiger or an elephant and he did not at all look forward to it. So, on their second day in the jungle, he managed to be left behind at the rest house. And in a corner of the back veranda of that old bungalow he discovered a shelf of books - some thirty volumes, obviously untouched for many years. Much too young to know what was good and what was not, he would have read any thing and every thing with pleasure. However much to his delight the bookshelf contained, among others, P.G.Wodehouse’s Love Among the Chickens, M.R.James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Edward Hamilton Aitken's A Naturalist on the Prowl and Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. This chance acquaintance with Mr.Micawber and family, Aunt Betsy Trowood, Mr.Dick, Peggoty and many other characters in Dickens's novel seemed to set him off on the road to literature.

Ruskin's imagination becomes active the moment he discovers the books.

At the end of the week the four men with guns could only see a spotted deer and shoot two miserable, underweight wild fowls. Sitting in the rest-house with his treasure of books Ruskin Bond saw not only the spotted deer crossing the open clearing in front of the bungalow but also a large leopard making off into the jungle with one of the dogs held in its jaws. Since the leopard had done it only to help itself to a meal, it did not disturb young Ruskin beyond a point and he returned to his reading. The hunting party however, refused to believe this, attributing this bit of information to his overactive imagination under the immediate influence of Dickens's vivid portrayal of Master Copperfield. Ruskin brings the half - finished novel back with him. David Copperfield, published in 1849-50, is Dickens's veiled autobiography.