Is Kipling's Jungle Book Only About Mowgli? The Wolf Boy, the Law of the Jungle and a Mongoose
Kipling's 1894 Jungle Book is a story collection: Mowgli's tales sit beside a mongoose, a white seal and an elephant boy. What's really inside.
No. Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894) is not one novel about Mowgli but a collection of stories, and several of them have nothing to do with the wolf boy at all. Alongside the Mowgli tales you will find "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi", about a mongoose, "The White Seal", about a seal in the Bering Sea, and "Toomai of the Elephants". Most people meet the book through the famous films, which focus on Mowgli, so reading the original is a little like opening a box you thought you knew and finding a whole set of other things inside.
A book of stories, each with its poem
The stories first appeared in magazines in 1893 and 1894, and were collected and published by Macmillan in the United Kingdom in 1894. Each story is followed by a poem that works as a kind of epigram, so the book alternates between prose and verse. That rhythm is easy to miss in modern retellings, but it is part of the original reading experience: you finish an adventure and then hear the same world speak in song.
A year later Kipling published The Second Jungle Book (1895), with eight more stories, five of them about Mowgli. When people today talk about "the Jungle Book", they often mean the Mowgli stories taken from both volumes.
Written in Vermont, remembered from India
Kipling was born in Bombay, now Mumbai, and spent his first six years in India before later returning to work there for about six and a half years. Yet the later stories were written far from any jungle, at Naulakha, his home in Dummerston, Vermont, in the United States. The magazine versions carried illustrations, some of them drawn by his father, John Lockwood Kipling.
The book was probably written for his daughter Josephine, who died of pneumonia in 1899 at the age of six. In 2010 a first edition with Kipling's handwritten note to her was found at Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire.
Who is Mowgli?
Mowgli is a baby lost during a tiger attack and raised by a wolf family, Mother Wolf, called Raksha, and Father Wolf. The tiger Shere Khan wants him killed, but the wolves refuse to give him up. Bagheera the black panther pays for his place in the pack with a freshly killed bull, and Baloo the bear teaches him the Law of the Jungle.
In the stories his name is said to mean "frog", because he has no fur. Kipling later admitted that he had invented the name and that it did not mean "frog" in any language he knew. Mowgli first appeared not in The Jungle Book at all but in "In the Rukh" (1893), a story about a forest ranger who meets a grown-up Mowgli; it was later collected in Many Inventions.
The three Mowgli stories in the first book
"Mowgli's Brothers" tells how the boy joins the wolves and learns from Baloo and Bagheera. In "Kaa's Hunting" he is carried off by the Bandar-log, the chattering monkey people, and the great python Kaa helps rescue him. In "Tiger! Tiger!" he goes back to a human village and finally leaves it again to hunt with the wolves.
The end of Shere Khan is not a duel. Mowgli uses fire against the tiger, and later, with two wolves, drives him into a ravine where a herd of buffalo tramples him. Afterwards the villagers accuse Mowgli of witchcraft and drive him out. He belongs fully to neither world, and that tension runs through every story about him.
The other heroes: a mongoose, a seal, an elephant boy
"Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" makes a small, fierce mongoose its hero. "The White Seal" follows Kotick, a white seal in the Bering Sea. "Toomai of the Elephants" takes its title from a boy named Toomai, and "Her Majesty's Servants" is also part of the collection. These stories are a big part of why the book is loved by readers who never think of Mowgli at all.
What the Law of the Jungle really means
The "Law of the Jungle" in Kipling's verses is not "might makes right". It sets out rules for the safety of individuals, families and communities. The writer Angus Wilson argued that this law is "far from Darwinian", pointing out that no attacks were allowed at the water-hole during a drought.
Critics also notice the themes of abandonment and fostering. Harry Ricketts linked them to Kipling's own childhood, and the stories balance obedience and knowing one's place with Mowgli's freedom to move between the jungle and the village. Some scholars, such as Jopi Nyman, read the book as part of the construction of a colonial English identity.
Real places, real wolf children
Most of the stories are set in India, and "Seeonee", today's Seoni in Madhya Pradesh, is named several times. Kanha Tiger Reserve and Pench National Park both claim a link to the stories, although Kipling never visited the area. Mowgli himself may have been inspired by William Henry Sleeman's accounts of children said to have been raised by wolves; one later case often mentioned is Dina Sanichar, found in a wolf's den in Bulandshahr district in 1867. The tiger's name, Shere Khan, echoes the Afghan ruler Sher Shah Suri.
From Cub Scouts to Disney
Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting, asked Kipling for permission to use the book, and Kipling agreed to its use for the Cub Scouts. That is why Cub Scout pack leaders are still traditionally given the name Akela. Mowgli also influenced later "wild boy" heroes, including Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan.
On screen the book has lived many lives: Elephant Boy (1937), based on the Toomai story; Zoltán Korda's film (1942); Disney's animated film (1967) and its 2016 remake; Chuck Jones's TV cartoons of the 1970s; a Soviet animated series later joined into a single film in 1973; and an Italian-Japanese anime in 1989. The book itself has appeared in more than 500 print editions and at least 36 languages.
Learn with The Jungle Book: English expressions
| Expression | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| the law of the jungle | a situation where the strongest win (everyday use, unlike Kipling's) | It's the law of the jungle in this market. |
| to be raised by wolves | (joking) to have no manners | Use a napkin! Were you raised by wolves? |
| to find your feet | to become confident in a new place | Mowgli took a while to find his feet in the village. |
| a fish out of water | someone who feels out of place | In the village he was a fish out of water. |
| the bare necessities | only the most basic things you need | We packed just the bare necessities. |
Try this: Notice that the everyday phrase "the law of the jungle" means the opposite of Kipling's rules for safety. Write three sentences: one using the everyday meaning, one explaining Kipling's meaning, and one using "a fish out of water" about Mowgli.