Nevli the mongoose

Nevli is the mascot; nevla is the language. Both are the mongoose in Hindi: नेवला (nevlā) is the noun, and नेवली (nevlī) is a female mongoose, which she is. The language borrows her disposition: small, fast, and fatal to snakes.

The name this project gave up

This language spent its first week named rikki, with a runner called tk, after Rikki-Tikki-Tavi in Kipling’s Jungle Book. The story was loved in childhood and the homage was sincere.

It was also naive. Read as an adult, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is imperial allegory: a domesticated mongoose loyally defending an English family’s bungalow garden against the native cobras, the garden standing in for colonized India kept safe for its colonizers. This is the mainstream scholarly reading, not a stretch; Kipling is the poet of “The White Man’s Burden”, and the politics are in the story’s bones. A project name is an endorsement renewed every time it is typed, and this project will not carry that one.

So it was renamed, days after the naming, while the cost was near zero (ADR 0014 records the decision). The new name walks the other direction: the story’s failure was the colonial gaze on India, and nevla returns the animal to its own language.

The mongoose herself stays. The animal was never the problem, and no story owns her.

The artwork lives in art/ (CC BY 4.0; the code is MIT and stays that way).