A review by handsomelibrarian
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi by Rudyard Kipling

0.0

I adore the Pinkneys. When filling picture book displays, I will often grab the entire holding of a certain illustrious author to fill the space (like Lois Ehlert, Eric Carle, and all of the Pinkneys!). Which is how I came across this one. Too many alarm bells were going off, and I was weirded out by the Google results for "Is Rikki Tikki Tavi racist" because none of the first 20 were from reputable sources, just random blogs or op-eds. So I would have to read this myself to find out. 

Plot
  • A little English colonizer boy rescues and nurses to health a sick mongoose in India. The mongoose loves the boy for it and becomes his friend. The parents behavior is that they live in a scary and unsafe area. The mongoose leaves and protects a bird family from two big cobras in a violent clash, and the kid from another snake. The cobras come back and the mongoose drives them out of the house, kills them and all their unborn babies, and then lives with the boy as a tame pet.

Setting
  • Colonized English settlement in India
  • Home
    • They live in a house with a beautiful garden and a tall white fence surrounding
    • "table with the teacups"
    • "Rikki-tikki kept the garden as a mongoose should keep it, with tooth and jump and spring and bite, till never a cobra dared show its head inside the walls."
      • very defend and protect (colonizey)
      • Sounds like what the colonizers wanted the colonized to do
  • Indian wilderness (habitats of the animals mentioned)

Characters
  • Rikki-tikki-tavi - mongoose
    • "That bite paralyzed Karait, and Rikki-tikki was just going to eat him up from the tail to the head, after the custom of his family, when he remembered that a big meal makes a slow mongoose" (it's the "custom of his family" that stands out to me and brings the trope of the "savage Indian or [insert indigenous group name here]" to mind)
    • "Though it was very pleasant to be petted, he remembered Nag and Nagaina, and from time to time he would give his war cry of Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!" (It's WAR CRY for me, that makes it bad)
    • "For sure he would be banged to death, and, for the honor of his family, he wanted to be found with his teeth locked." for the honor of his family trope
    • Kills 25 unborn baby cobras
  • Son - Teddy (perhaps as in Teddy Roosevelt?), 8-11 years old, white, colonizer,
  • father - "big man", English colonizer, 
    • "His father ran out with a stick"
    • "The man will have a big stick"
    • "The big man brought the bang stick"
  • mother - kind, accepting, wary of danger
  • Darzee - tailorbird and his wife and babies
  • Darzee's wife - important character at the end, but she never even gets a name.
  • Nag and Nagaina - big cobra married couple (aside: their names are a lot like Voldemort's snake Nagini, and Harry Potter is well-known to have a plethora of harmful racist tropes in it, so that is just interesting)
  • Karait - smaller venomous snake
    • "little brown snakeling that lies on the dusty ground in India and whose bite is as dangerous as the cobra's"
  • Chuchundra - muskrat
  • red ants

Highlights
  • Pinkney is a gifted artist. Simply stunning. 
  • I love "The motto of the mongoose family is "Go and Find Out."

Lowlights
  • The first sentence puts the colonizer (England) as the victim of the colonized (India)
  • See character bullet point for Rikki-tikki-tavi
  •  See character bullet point for Darzee's wife

I wouldn't buy this for my kid. I wouldn't recommend it be in picture book collections. I would instead recommend picture books by authors from India. 
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