the jungle book

 

  • [4] Book Description The tales in the book (as well as those in The Second Jungle Book, which followed in 1895 and includes eight further stories, including five about Mowgli)
    are fables, using animals in an anthropomorphic manner to teach moral lessons.

  • — Rudyard Kipling[7][9] In a letter written and signed by Kipling in or around 1895, states Alison Flood in The Guardian, Kipling confesses to borrowing ideas and stories
    in the Jungle 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 literature, Robert Heinlein wrote the Hugo Award-winning science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), when his wife, Virginia, suggested a new version of The
    Jungle Book, but with a child raised by Martians instead of wolves.

  • [24][26] Ricketts wrote that Kipling was obsessed by rules, a theme running throughout the stories and named explicitly as “the law of the jungle”.

  • [8] In a letter to the American author Edward 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.

  • [32] Swati Singh, in his Secret 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 Portuguese ayah (nanny) during his childhood in India.

  • [42] Many films have been based on one or another of Kipling’s stories, including Elephant Boy (1937),[43] Chuck Jones’s made for-TV cartoons Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (1975),[44]
    The White Seal (1975),[45] and Mowgli’s Brothers (1976).

  • The Jungle Book has remained popular, partly through its many adaptations for film and other media.

  • [29] The academic Jan Montefiore commented on the book’s balance of law and freedom that “you don’t need to invoke Jacqueline 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 the Jungle Books .. give their readers a vicarious experience of
    adventure both as freedom and as service to a just State”.

  • Later on, his original stories would be written when he lived at Naulakha, the property and home he owned in Dummerston, Vermont, US.

  • 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.

  • [2] Adaptations The Jungle Book has been adapted many times in a wide variety of media.

  • A major theme in the book is abandonment followed by fostering, as in the life of Mowgli, echoing Kipling’s own childhood.

  • [30] Reception Sayan Mukherjee, writing for the Book Review Circle, calls The 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'”.

  • 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.

  • This use of the book’s universe was approved by Kipling at the request of Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouting movement, who had originally asked for the author’s
    permission for the use of the Memory Game from Kim in his scheme to develop the morale and fitness of working-class youths in cities.

  • [11] Setting Kipling lived in India as a child, and most of the stories[a] are evidently set there, though it is not entirely clear where.

  • First edition, 1894 Main article: List of The Jungle Book characters Many of the characters (marked *) are named simply after the Hindustani names of their species: for example,
    Baloo is a transliteration of Hindustani Bhālū, “bear”.

  • Context Rudyard Kipling’s stories were first printed in magazines in 1893 and 1894; the original publications also contained hand-sketched illustrations, with some from John
    Lockwood Kipling, his father.

  • [24] The historian of India Philip Mason similarly emphasises the Mowgli myth, where the fostered hero, “the odd man out among wolves and men alike”, eventually triumphs over
    his enemies.

  • [1] The Jungle Book came to be used as a motivational book by the Cub Scouts, a junior element of the Scouting movement.

  • Another important theme is of law and freedom; the stories are not about animal behaviour, still less about the Darwinian struggle for survival, but about human archetypes
    in animal form.

  • [7] For example, an older moral-filled mongoose and snake version of the “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” story by Kipling is found in Book 5 of Panchatantra.

  • In fact, it is extremely possible that I have helped myself promiscuously but at present cannot remember from whose stories I have stolen”.

  • [31] The academic Jopi Nyman argued in 2001 that the book formed part of the construction of “colonial English national identity”[32] within Kipling’s “imperial project”.

  • Most of the native hunters in India today think pretty much along the lines of an animal’s brain and I have “cribbed” freely from their tales.

  • Most stories are set in a forest in India; one place mentioned repeatedly is “Seeonee” (Seoni), in the central state of Madhya Pradesh.

  • [24][28] 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”.

  • [h] In Wilson’s view, the popularity of the Mowgli stories is thus not literary but moral: the animals can follow the law easily, but Mowgli has human joys and sorrows, and
    the burden of making decisions.

  • Rudyard himself was born in Mumbai—then referred to as Bombay—in the western coastal Indian state of Maharashtra, where he spent his first six years of life.

  • [38] The book’s text has been adapted for younger readers with comic book adaptations such as DC Comics Elseworlds’ story, “Superman: The Feral Man of Steel”, in which an
    infant Superman is raised by wolves, while Bagheera, Akela, and Shere Khan make appearances.

  • [6] Origins Places in India named by Kipling in versions of the stories The stories in The Jungle Book were inspired in part by the ancient Indian fable texts such as the
    Panchatantra and the Jataka tales.

  • The theme is echoed in the triumph of protagonists including Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and The White Seal over their enemies, as well as Mowgli’s.

  • After around 10 years back in England, and having completed his schooling, Kipling went back to India to work for nearly 6½ years.

  • The Kipling Society notes that “Seeonee” (Seoni, in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh) is mentioned several times; that the “cold lairs” must be in the jungled hills
    of Chittorgarh; and that the first Mowgli story, “In the Rukh”, is set in a forest reserve somewhere in North India, south of Simla.

 

Works Cited

[‘1. “The White Seal” is set in the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea.
2. ^ Many of the ‘animal language’ words and names in this story are a phonetic spelling of Russian (probably as spoken with an Aleut 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’).
3. ^ Originally titled “Servants of the Queen”.
4. ^ “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”,
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5. ^ Bandar-log means “Monkey People” in Hindustani.
6. ^ Darzee is the Hindustani for tailor.
7. ^
Raksha is Hindi for “defence”.
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‘]