Language is extremely important in Postcolonial literature. As a means of communicating with the other and of representing the other, language in itself can serve as a colonizing instrument. For this reason, Postcolonial texts are actual laboratories for experimenting with language. This is the case with both Rudyard Kipling The Jungle Books and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. The two novels are very different in terms of subject and execution, but quite similar in the message they transmit. Both of them introduce language as a major issue for colonization, either as a linguistic screen between two cultures or as a means of deconstructing the other.
             Although there are major differences between the two texts, it is to be noted that both are presented from the point of view of children narrators, Mowgli in The Jungle Books and Estha and Rahel in The God of Small Things. This fact is important since the children are still in the process of language acquisition, and this leaves room for linguistic experiments and language games. In Kipling's text, language is a major concern since Mowgli, although a human being, is raised among the animals of the jungle and is not acquainted with human language at first and can only speak the language of the wild beasts. Kipling's text has thus many mythical resonances, through the presence of the talking animals and through the fable-like character of the story. The books follow the adventures of Mowgli and of many animals in the jungle, all recounted in a fable-like frame. The text has a didactic substratum that points to the way in which cultural difference influences the relationship of the individual with his environment. From a postcolonial perspective, the text is a multi-mirrored structure which reflects the way in which different species or races see each other. By displacing a human child and placing him in a different environment, Kipling demonstrates that although an ...