Type of Plot: Fables

Time of Work: Nineteenth century

Setting: IndiaPrincipal Characters: Mowgli, Father Wolf, Mother Wolf, Shere Khan, Akela, Bagheera, Baloo, Kaa, The

Bandar-Log, Hathi, Messua, Messua’s Husband, Buldeo, Gray Brother

Genres: Fable, Short fiction, Bildungsroman, Adventure, Fantasy

Subjects: Justice, Maturation or coming of age, Snakes, Tigers, Nature, Nineteenth century, Courage, Betrayal,Friendship, Violence, Loyalty, India or East Indian people, Jungles or rain forests, Adventure, Bears, Boys,

Arctic, Animals, Wolves, Fables

Locales: India

The Story:

Shere Khan, the tiger, pursued a small Indian boy who had strayed from his native village, but Shere Khan was lame

and missed his leap upon the child. When Father Wolf took the boy home with him to show to Mother Wolf, ShereKhan followed and demanded the child as his quarry. Mother Wolf refused. The tiger retired in anger. Mowgli, the frog,

for such he was named, was reared by Mother Wolf along with her own cubs.

Father Wolf took Mowgli to the Council Rock to be recognized by the wolves. Bagheera, the panther, and Baloo, the

bear, spoke for Mowgli’s acceptance into the Seeonee wolf pack. Therefore, Mowgli became a wolf. Baloo became

Mowgli’s teacher and instructed him in the lore of the jungle. Mowgli learned to speak the languages of all the jungle

people. Throughout his early life, the threat of Shere Khan hung over him, but Mowgli was certain of his place in thepack and of his friends’ protection; someday when Akela, the leader of the wolves, would miss his kill, the pack would

turn on him and Mowgli. Bagheera told Mowgli to get the Red Flower, or fire, from the village to protect himself. When

Akela missed his quarry one night and was about to be deposed and killed, Mowgli attacked all of the mutual enemies

with his fire sticks and threatened to destroy anyone who molested Akela. That night, Mowgli realized that the junglewas no place for him, and that someday he would go to live with men. That time, however, was still far off.

One day, Mowgli climbed a tree and made friends with the Bandar-Log, the monkey tribe, who because of their

stupidity and vanity were despised by the other jungle people. When the Bandar-Log carried off Mowgli, Bagheera and

Baloo went in pursuit, taking along Kaa, the rock python, who loved to eat monkeys. Mowgli was rescued at the old

ruined city of the Cold Lairs by the three pursuers, and Kaa feasted royally upon monkey meat.

One year during a severe drought in the jungle, Hathi the elephant proclaimed the water truce; all animals were allowed

to drink at the water hole unmolested. Shere Khan announced to the animals gathered there one day that he had killed aman, not for food but from choice. The other animals were shocked. Hathi allowed the tiger to drink and then told him

to be off. Then Hathi told the story of how fear came to the jungle and why the tiger was striped. It was the tiger who

first killed man and earned the human tribe’s unrelenting enmity; for his deed, the tiger was condemned to wear stripes.For one day a year, the tiger was not afraid of man and could kill him. This day was called, among jungle people, the

Night of the Tiger.

One day, Mowgli wandered close to a native village, where he was adopted by Messua, a woman who had lost her son

some years before. Mowgli became a watcher of the village herds; from time to time, he met Gray Wolf, his brother,and heard the news of the jungle. Learning that Shere Khan intended to kill him, he laid plans with Akela and Gray

Brother to kill the tiger. They lured Shere Khan into a gully and then stampeded the herd. Exiled by stoning from the

village because he was believed to be a sorcerer who spoke to the animals, Mowgli returned to the jungle, resolved to

hunt with the wolves for the rest of his life.

Buldeo, the village hunter, followed the trail of Mowgli, Gray Brother, and Akela. Mowgli overheard Buldeo say that

Messua and her husband were imprisoned in their house and would be burned at the stake. Messua’s husband had

saved some money, and he had one of the finest herds of buffaloes in the village. Knowing that the imprisonment of

Messua and her husband was a scheme for the villagers to get their property, Mowgli laid plans to help his friends.

Entering the village, he led Messua and her husband beyond the gates in the darkness. Then the jungle people began to

destroy, little by little, the farms, the orchards, and the cattle, but no villager was harmed because Mowgli did not desirethe death of any human. Finally, just before the rains, Hathi and his three sons moved into the village and tore down the

houses. The people left, and thus the jungle was let into the village.

Kaa took Mowgli to Cold Lairs to meet the guardian of the king’s treasure, an old white cobra who had expressed a

desire to see Mowgli. The old cobra showed them all the treasure; when he left, Mowgli took a jeweled elephant goad,

a king’s ankus, with him, even though the cobra had said it brought death to the person who possessed it.

Back in the jungle, Mowgli threw the ankus away. Later that day, he went with Bagheera to retrieve the ankus and

discovered that it was gone. They followed the trail of the man who had picked it up and found that altogether six men

who had had possession of the ankus had died. Believing it to be cursed, Mowgli returned the ankus to the treasure

room in the Cold Lairs.

Sometimes fierce red dogs called dholes traveled in large packs, destroying everything in their paths. Warned of the

approach of the dholes, Mowgli led the marauders, by insults and taunts, toward the lairs of the Little People, the bees.

Then he excited the bees to attack the dholes. The destruction of the red dogs that escaped the fury of the bees was

completed by the wolves lying in ambush a little farther down the river, which flowed under the cliffs where the Little

People lived; it was the last battle of old Akela, the leader of the pack when Mowgli was a little boy. He crawled out

slowly from under a pile of carcasses to bid Mowgli goodbye and to sing his death song.

The second year after the death of Akela, Mowgli was about seventeen years old. In the spring of that year, Mowgli

knew that he was unhappy, but none of his friends could tell him what was wrong. Mowgli left his own jungle to travel to

another, and on the way he met Messua. Her husband had died and had left her with a child. Messua told Mowgli that

she believed he was her own son lost in the jungle years before and that her baby must be his brother. Mowgli did not

know what to make of the child and the unhappiness he felt. When Gray Brother came to Messua’s hut, Mowgli

decided to return to the jungle. On the outskirts of the village, however, he met a girl coming down the path. Mowgli

melted into the jungle and watched the girl. He knew at last that the jungle was no longer a place for him and that he hadreturned to the man-pack to stay.

Critical Evaluation:

Although originally published separately, The Jungle Books are usually combined into one volume. For most readers,The Jungle Books tell the story of Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves to become ruler of the jungle, only to have to

return to the human world as an adult. Mowgli’s adventures in fact take up only eight of the fifteen stories that make up

The Jungle Books, but those eight stories captivate the reader’s imagination in a way that the others do not. Mowgli’s

story is essentially a reworking of an ancient folklore theme, the child raised by animals. In most versions of this motif,

human society remains the frame of reference; the child’s animal existence is simply a prelude to his or her reintegration

into humanity. In contrast, Kipling places Mowgli in the context of a complete jungle society, which appears more

attractive than the few glimpses of the human world allowed into the stories. Although Mowgli’s return to the outside

world is predicted in the first of the stories, it is his development within the animal world that interests the author. Kiplingwrote one story about Mowgli as an adult in the human world, but did not choose to include it in The Jungle Books.

The animal world in the Mowgli stories has been described as a post-Darwinian Eden, with Mowgli as Adam given

dominion over the animals. Animal existence is rough, with survival dependent on the individual’s strength and cunning,

and even the revered leader of the wolf pack, Akela, must constantly demonstrate his fitness. That a helpless human

child in such an environment could survive infancy, let alone grow to dominate all other jungle creatures, seems an

impossible fantasy. Kipling makes it more plausible by reversing expectations. It is the savage jungle that is governed by

order and law, while the “civilized” humans are bound by no law and little morality. Humans attack their own out of

superstitious fear of witchcraft, or out of greedy desire for gold. To Mowgli, gold seems useless—it cannot be eaten and

is too soft to use as a tool or weapon.

In contrast, each animal has its place under the law of the jungle. All know what is required and what is prohibited, both

for themselves and for others. With the singular exception of Shere Khan, each animal obeys the law with scrupulous

care. The law, with its prohibition on killing humans, protects the infant Mowgli. His eventual mastery of the law in all its

nuances grants him authority over the jungle animals.

Kipling’s jungle law is in many ways little more than a codification of (carnivorous) animal instincts, which accounts for

its universal applicability. As various critics have written, the insistence on law and order reflects late-nineteenth century

concepts about the formation of stable societies and the legal basis of imperial rule.

Born to English parents in India, learning Hindi before he learned his mother tongue, Kipling found himself as child and

adult without a stable place in either Indian or British society. At the age of six, he was sent away from his family to beschooled in England, where he lived with an abusive caretaker. Later, he endured life in an English boarding school

designed to prepare boys for military life, for which he was personally unfitted. As a young man, he returned to India as

a newspaperman, reporting on the Anglo-Indian community.

To Kipling, personal experience and professional observation demonstrated the vulnerability of the individual in an

unregulated, chaotic world. The law, with its strictures on behavior and social relationship, offered a means to offset the

precarious condition of life as he knew it, and incidentally provided a place for everyone regardless of background.

Mowgli is accepted by the animal world, but he can never completely become part of it. In the final Mowgli story, the

python Kaa cites the law: “Man goes to man at the last, though the jungle does not cast him out.” Mowgli, caught

between two worlds, is an extension of the author into his work. Kipling’s own childhood was less than idyllic;

Mowgli’s life would compensate. In the jungle, Mowgli experiences a world of freedom made possible, ironically, by

the strictness of a law that grants even an in-between child protection. Moreover, Mowgli’s position as an outsider

enables him to learn as much as the jungle can teach; he masters far more of the jungle law than any animal.

The Anglo-Indian community into which Kipling was born and which he chronicled as a journalist also had reason to

feel its position precarious. On behalf of the crown, a comparative handful of British soldiers, bureaucrats, and ordinary

citizens ruled millions of Indians. Just how tenuous that rule could be was demonstrated by the Indian Mutiny of 1857-

1858, an event that continued to reverberate forty years later. Kipling alludes to the Indian Mutiny in “The

Undertakers,” one of The Jungle Books’ non-Mowgli stories.

Only by a strict adherence to imperial law, and by the subject peoples’ recognition of the laws, could order prevail in

such a colonial empire. Kipling’s jungle law serves as a model for effective colonial administration, just as Mowgli’s

complete immersion in and knowledge of the culture of those he will later rule is Kipling’s model for the ideal colonial

education. The other stories in The Jungle Books elaborate the vision of a hierarchical world, one in which harmony

prevails when socially ordained boundaries are respected. Still essentially beast fables, these stories are more realistic in

depicting animal protagonists without the ability to communicate with humans. While several, such as “Rikki-Takki-Tavi,” are interesting in their own right, they function in the context of The Jungle Books primarily as foils to Mowgli’s

experiences.

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