The Jungle Book is an 1894 collection of stories by the English authorRudyard Kipling. Most of the characters are animals such asShere Khan the tiger andBaloo the bear, though a principal character is the boy or "man-cub"Mowgli, who is raised in the jungle by wolves. Most stories are set in a forest inIndia; one place mentioned repeatedly is "Seeonee" (Seoni), in thecentral state ofMadhya Pradesh.
A major theme in the book is abandonment followed by fostering, as in the life of Mowgli, echoing Kipling's own childhood. The theme is echoed in the triumph of protagonists includingRikki-Tikki-Tavi and The White Seal over their enemies, as well as Mowgli's. Another important theme is of law and freedom; the stories are not aboutanimal behaviour, still less about theDarwinian struggle for survival, but about humanarchetypes in animal form. They teach respect for authority, obedience, and knowing one's place in society with "the law of the jungle", but the stories also illustrate the freedom to move between different worlds, such as when Mowgli moves between the jungle and the village. Critics have also noted the essential wildness and lawless energies in the stories, reflecting the irresponsible side of human nature.
The Jungle Book has remained popular, partly throughits many adaptations for film and other media. Critics such as Swati Singh have noted that even critics wary of Kipling for his supposedimperialism have admired the power of his storytelling.[1] The book has been influential in thescout movement, whose founder,Robert Baden-Powell, was a friend of Kipling.[2]Percy Grainger composed hisJungle Book Cycle around quotations from the book.
Rudyard Kipling's stories were first printed in magazines in 1893 and 1894; the original publications also contained hand-sketched illustrations, with some fromJohn Lockwood Kipling, his father. Rudyard himself was born inMumbai—then referred to asBombay—in the western coastalIndian state ofMaharashtra, where he spent his first six years of life. After around 10 years back inEngland, and having completed his schooling, Kipling went back to India to work for nearly 6½ years. Later on, his original stories would be written when he lived atNaulakha, the property and home he owned inDummerston,Vermont, US.[3] There is evidence that Kipling wrote the collection of stories for his daughter, Josephine (who died from pneumonia in 1899, aged 6); a first-edition copy of the book—including a handwritten note by the author to his young daughter—was discovered at theNational Trust'sWimpole Hall,Cambridgeshire, in 2010.[4]
The tales in the book (as well as those inThe Second Jungle Book, which followed in 1895 and includes eight further stories, including five about Mowgli) arefables, using animals in ananthropomorphic manner to teach moral lessons. The verses of "The Law of the Jungle", for example, lay down rules for the safety of individuals, families, and communities. Kipling put in them nearly everything he knew or "heard or dreamed about the Indian jungle".[5] Other readers have interpreted the work asallegories of the politics and society of the time.[6]
Places inIndia named by Kipling in versions of the stories
The stories inThe Jungle Book were inspired in part by the ancient Indian fable texts such as thePanchatantra and theJataka tales.[7] For example, an older moral-filled mongoose and snake version of the "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" story by Kipling is found in Book 5 ofPanchatantra.[8] In a letter to the American authorEdward Everett Hale, Kipling wrote:[7]
The idea of beast-tales seems to me new in that it is a most ancient and long forgotten idea. The really fascinating tales are those thatthe Bodhisat tells of his previous incarnations ending always with the beautiful moral. Most of the native hunters inIndia today think pretty much along the lines of an animal's brain and I have "cribbed" freely from their tales.
In a letter written and signed by Kipling in or around 1895, states Alison Flood inThe Guardian, Kipling confesses to borrowing ideas and stories in theJungle Book: "I am afraid that all that code in its outlines has been manufactured to meet 'the necessities of the case': though a little of it is bodily taken from (Southern) Esquimaux rules for the division of spoils. In fact, it is extremely possible that I have helped myself promiscuously but at present cannot remember from whose stories I have stolen".[10]
Kipling lived inIndia as a child, and most of the stories[a] are evidently set there, though it is not entirely clear where. The Kipling Society notes that "Seeonee" (Seoni, in the central Indian state ofMadhya Pradesh) is mentioned several times; that the "cold lairs" must be in the jungled hills ofChittorgarh; and that the first Mowgli story, "In the Rukh", is set in a forest reserve somewhere inNorth India, south ofSimla. "Mowgli's Brothers" was positioned in theAravalli hills ofRajasthan (northwestern India) in an early manuscript, later changed to Seonee, and Bagheera treks from "Oodeypore" (Udaipur), a journey of reasonable length to Aravalli but a long way from Seoni.[13][14] Seoni has atropical savanna climate, with a dry and a rainy season. This is drier than a monsoon climate and does not support tropical rainforest.[15] Forested parks and reserves that claim to be associated with the stories includeKanha Tiger Reserve, Madhya Pradesh,[16] andPench National Park, near Seoni,[17] but Kipling never visited the area.[13]
A boy is raised bywolves in the Indian jungle with the help ofBaloo the bear andBagheera theblack panther, who teach him the "Law of the Jungle". Some years later, the wolfpack and Mowgli are threatened by the tigerShere Khan. Mowgli brings fire, driving off Shere Khan but showing that he is a man and must leave the jungle.
"Hunting-Song of the Seeonee Pack"
The story has been published as a short book:Night-Song in the Jungle.
"The tiger's roar filled the cave with thunder". 1894
During the time Mowgli was with the wolf pack, he is abducted by theBandar-log ("monkey lads") to the ruined city. Baloo and Bagheera set out to rescue him withKaa thepython. Kaa defeats the Bandar-log, frees Mowgli, and hypnotises the monkeys and the other animals with his dance. Mowgli rescues Baloo and Bagheera from the spell.
Mowgli returns to the human village and is adopted by Messua and her husband, who believe him to be their long-lost son. Mowgli leads the village boys who herd the village's buffaloes. Shere Khan comes to hunt Mowgli, but he is warned by Gray Brother wolf, and with Akela they find Shere Khan asleep, and stampede the buffaloes to trample Shere Khan to death. Mowgli leaves the village, and goes back to hunt with the wolves until he becomes a man.
Kotick, a rare white-furredfur seal, sees seals being killed by islanders in theBering Sea. He decides to find a safe home for his people, and after several years of searching as he comes of age, eventually finds a suitable place. He returns home and persuades the other seals to follow him.
"Lukannon"
Many names in the story are Russian,[b] as thePribilof Islands had been bought (with Alaska) by the United States in 1867, and Kipling had access to books about the islands.[18]
An English family have just moved to a house in India. They find Rikki-Tikki-Tavi themongoose flooded out of his burrow. A pair of largecobras, Nag and Nagaina, attempt unsuccessfully to kill him. He hears the cobras plotting to kill the father in the house, and attacks Nag in the bathroom. The sound of the fight attracts the father, who shoots Nag. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi destroys Nagaina's eggs and chases her into her "rat-hole" where he kills her too.
Big Toomai rides Kala Nag the elephant to catch wild elephants in the hills. His son Little Toomai comes to help and risks his life throwing a rope up to one of the drivers. His father forbids him to enter the elephant enclosure again "until he has seen the elephants dance" (which no man ever did). One night he follows the elephants walking without drivers out of the camp, and is picked up by Kala Nag; he rides into the elephants' meeting place in the jungle, where they dance. On his return he says "I've seen the elephants dance" and falls asleep from tiredness. The drivers follow the elephants' tracks into the forest and find a newly cleared glade, showing that Little Toomai has told the truth. When they come back, he is hailed by both hunters and elephants, and the oldest and wisest hunter says that when Little Toomai grows up, he'll be called Toomai of the Elephants like his grandfather.
"Shiv and the Grasshopper"
This story has been published as a short book, and was the basis of the 1937 filmElephant Boy.[19]
On the night before a British military parade for the Amir of Afghanistan, the army'sworking animals—mule, camel, horse, bullock, elephant—discuss what they do in battle and how they feel about their work. It is explained to the Afghans that men and animals obey the orders carried down from the Queen.
"Parade-Song of the Camp Animals" is set to the tunes of several well-known songs.[d]
"'Anybody can be forgiven for being scared in the night'", said the Troop-Horse. 1894
Many of the characters (marked *) are named simply after theHindustani names of their species: for example, Baloo is a transliteration of Hindustani भालू/بھالو Bhālū, "bear". The characters (marked ^) from "The White Seal" are transliterations from the Russian of thePribilof Islands.
The book has appeared in over 500 print editions,[22] and over 100 audiobooks.[23] It has been translated into at least 36 languages.[24] In 2024, page proofs of the book were donated toCambridge University Library.[25]
Critics such asHarry Ricketts have observed that Kipling returns repeatedly to the theme of the abandoned andfostered child, recalling his own childhood feelings of abandonment. In his view, the enemy, Shere Khan, represents the "malevolent would-be foster-parent" who Mowgli in the end outwits and destroys, just as Kipling as a boy had to face Mrs Holloway in place of his parents. Ricketts writes that in "Mowgli's Brothers", the hero loses his human parents at the outset, and his wolf fosterers at the conclusion; and Mowgli is again rejected at the end of "Tiger! Tiger!", but each time is compensated by "a queue of would-be foster-parents" including the wolves, Baloo, Bagheera and Kaa. In Ricketts's view, the power that Mowgli has over all these characters who compete for his affection is part of the book's appeal to children.[26] The historian of IndiaPhilip Mason similarly emphasises the Mowgli myth, where the fostered hero, "the odd man out among wolves and men alike", eventually triumphs over his enemies. Mason notes that both Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and The White Seal do much the same.[27]
The novelistMarghanita Laski argued that the purpose of the stories was not to teach about animals but to create humanarchetypes through the animal characters, with lessons of respect for authority. She noted that Kipling was a friend of the founder of theScout Movement,Robert Baden-Powell, who based the junior scout "Wolf Cubs" on the stories, and that Kipling admired the movement.[26][28] Ricketts wrote that Kipling was obsessed by rules, a theme running throughout the stories and named explicitly as "the law of the jungle". Part of this, Ricketts supposed, was Mrs Holloway's evangelicalism, suitably transformed. The rules required obedience and "knowing your place", but also provided social relationships and "freedom to move between different worlds".[26] Sandra Kemp observed that the law may be highly codified, but that the energies are also lawless, embodying the part of human nature which is "floating, irresponsible and self-absorbed".[26][29] There is a duality between the two worlds of the village and the jungle, but Mowgli, like Mang the bat, can travel between the two.[26]
The novelist and criticAngus Wilson noted that Kipling's law of the jungle was "far fromDarwinian", since no attacks were allowed at the water-hole when in drought.[h] In Wilson's view, the popularity of the Mowgli stories is thus not literary butmoral: the animals can follow the law easily, but Mowgli has human joys and sorrows, and the burden of making decisions.[26][30] Kipling's biographer,Charles Carrington, argued that the "fables" about Mowgli illustrate truths directly, as successful fables do, through the character of Mowgli himself; through his "kindly mentors", Bagheera and Baloo; through the repeated failure of the "bully" Shere Khan; through the endless but useless talk of the Bandar-log; and through the law, which makes the jungle "an integrated whole" while enabling Mowgli's brothers to live as the "Free People".[31]
The academic Jan Montefiore commented on the book's balance of law and freedom that "you don't need to invokeJacqueline Rose on the adult's dream of the child's innocence or Perry Nodelman's theory of children's literature colonising its readers' minds with a double fantasy of the child as both noble savage and embryo good citizen, to see that theJungle Books .. give their readers a vicarious experience of adventure both as freedom and as service to a just State".[32]
Sayan Mukherjee, writing for the Book Review Circle, callsThe Jungle Book "one of the most enjoyable books of my childhood and even in adulthood, highly informative as to the outlook of the British on their 'native population'".[33]
The academic Jopi Nyman argued in 2001 that the book formed part of the construction of "colonial English national identity"[34] within Kipling's "imperial project".[34] In Nyman's view, nation, race andclass are mapped out in the stories, contributing to "an imagining of Englishness" as a site of power and racial superiority.[34] Nyman suggested thatThe Jungle Book's monkeys and snakes represent "colonial animals"[34] and "racialized Others"[34] within the Indian jungle, whereas the White Seal promotes "'truly English' identities in thenationalist allegory"[34] of that story.[34]
Swati Singh, in hisSecret History of the Jungle Book, notes that the tone is like that of Indian folklore, fable-like, and that critics have speculated that the Kipling may have heard similar stories from his Hindu bearer and his Portugueseayah (nanny) during his childhood in India. Singh observes, too, that Kipling wove "magic and fantasy" into the stories for his daughter Josephine, and that even critics reading Kipling for signs of imperialism could not help admiring the power of his storytelling.[1]
The Jungle Book came to be used as a motivational book by theCub Scouts, a junior element of theScouting movement. This use of the book's universe was approved by Kipling at the request ofRobert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouting movement, who had originally asked for the author's permission for the use of theMemory Game fromKim in his scheme to develop the morale and fitness of working-class youths in cities.Akela, the head wolf inThe Jungle Book, has become a senior figure in the movement; the name is traditionally adopted by theleader of eachCub Scout pack.[2]
The Jungle Book has been adapted many times in a wide variety of media. In literature,Robert Heinlein wrote theHugo Award-winningscience fiction novel,Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), when his wife,Virginia, suggested a new version ofThe Jungle Book, but with a child raised by Martians instead of wolves.[35][36]Neil Gaiman'sThe Graveyard Book (2008) is inspired byThe Jungle Book. It follows a baby boy who is found and brought up by the dead in a cemetery. It has many scenes that can be traced to Kipling, but with Gaiman's dark twist.[37]
In music, theJungle Book cycle (1958) was written by the Australian composerPercy Grainger, an avid Kipling reader. It consists of quotations from the book, set as choral pieces and solos for soprano, tenor or baritone.[38] The French composerCharles Koechlin wrote several symphonic works inspired by the book.
BBC Radio broadcast an adaptation on 14 February 1994 and released it as a BBC audiobook in 2008.[39] It was directed by Chris Wallis with Nisha K. Nayar as Mowgli,Eartha Kitt as Kaa,Freddie Jones as Baloo, andJonathan Hyde as Bagheera. The music was byJohn Mayer.[40]
^Many of the 'animal language' words and names in this story are a phonetic spelling of Russian (probably as spoken with anAleut accent), for example 'Stareek!' (Старик!) 'old man!'; 'Ochen scoochnie' (said by Kotick) 'I am very lonesome' Очень скучный (correctly means 'very boring'); holluschick (plural -ie) 'bachelor male seal' (холощик) from холостой ('unmarried'); Matkah (Kotick's mother, матка, 'dam', 'mother of an animal', or 'womb').
^"Cavalry Horses" is set to "Bonnie Dundee". "Elephants of the Gun-Teams" fits the tune and has a similar first line to the marching song "The British Grenadiers", as does "Gun-Bullocks". "Screw-Gun Mules" is set to the tune of the English folk song "The Lincolnshire Poacher" and echoes some of its lines.[20]
^When the water level of the Waingunga comes below the summit of the Peace Rock, "Hathi, the wild elephant, proclaims the Water Truce [...] By the Law of the Jungle it is death to kill at the drinking-places when once the Water Truce has been declared. The reason of this is that drinking comes before eating." (How Fear Came, inThe Second Jungle Book (read online)).
^ab"History of Cub Scouting". Boy Scouts of America.Archived from the original on 2 November 2017. Retrieved30 October 2016.A strong influence from Kipling'sJungle Book remains today. The terms "Law of the Pack", "Akela", "Wolf Cub", "grand howl", "den", and "pack" all come from theJungle Book.
^Rao, K. Bhaskara (1967).Rudyard Kipling's India. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press.
^Hjejle, Benedicte (1983). Fddbek, Ole; Thomson, Niels (eds.). "Kipling, Britisk Indien og Mowglihistorieine" [Kipling, British India and the Story of Mowgli].Feitskrifi til Kristof Glamann (in Danish). Odense, Denmark: Odense Universitetsforlag. pp. 87–114.
^abcKaori Nagai; Caroline Rooney; Donna Landry; Monica Mattfeld; Charlotte Sleigh; Karen Jones (2015).Cosmopolitan Animals. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 267.ISBN978-1-137-37628-2.Archived from the original on 29 June 2023. Retrieved27 May 2019.
^Hotchkiss, Jane (2001). "The jungle of Eden: Kipling, wolf boys, and the colonial imagination".Victorian Literature and Culture.29 (2): 440.doi:10.1017/s1060150301002108.S2CID162409338.
^abcdefUnderwood, F. A.; Radcliffe, John (30 July 2008).""Mowgli's Brothers"". Kipling Society. Archived fromthe original on 26 October 2017. Retrieved16 December 2017.
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