The Jungle Book and its sequel The Second Jungle Book (1894) were written by Rudyard Kipling. Kipling (1865-1936) was one of the dominant British popular writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Readers whose only exposure to the stories of Mowgli are from the Disney movies are in for a pleasant surprise, for the Mowgli stories are considerably more than the movies present.

Mowgli is an Indian child who is separated from his birth mother when just a baby and is adopted by a family of wolves. Mother Wolf takes him in partly because of his soft hairless helplessness, partly because the dread tiger Shere Khan wants him as prey, and partly because Mowgli is not afraid of the wolves and pushes his way to Mother Wolf’s teat to drink. Mowgli is accepted by the wolves and taught the Law of the Jungle, which guides the behavior of all the creatures of the jungle. Mowgli is also taught the Master Words of the jungle, which protect those who utter them, by the sleepy brown bear Baloo and the sleek and deadly black panther Bagheera. Mowgli grows up as part of the Free People, the pack of wolves in the jungle, but eventually Akela, the leader of the Free People and Mowgli’s adoptive father, grows old and loses control of the pack. The young wolves fall under the sway of Shere Khan and turn against Mowgli, forcing him to leave the jungle for the village, where he meets his birth mother. However, the villagers are superstitious and do not accept Mowgli, and he is driven back into the jungle. Mowgli eventually kills Shere Khan and goes on to have a variety of adventures in the jungle with his friends, Baloo, Bagheera, the enormous, old, and wise python Kaa, and the three wolves Mowgli grew up with. They suffer through a punishing drought, they use their brains (and a huge and deadly colony of bees) to slaughter a rampaging pack of dholes, and they discover a massive treasure trove in a cave beneath a deserted city (and learn about the curse of greed while doing so). Mowgli becomes the master of the jungle, but eventually, when he is eighteen, he becomes unhappy and accepts that he must go out among men and find human companionship. He is enlisted into the service of the colonial government as the guardian of a rukh (a forest reserve) and meets and falls in love with a Muslim woman, who joins him in the wilds and bears his children.

The filmed versions of the Mowgli stories are bowdlerized and unnaturally cheerful versions of Kipling's work. The Mowgli stories are actually animal fables about talking animals and a feral child. They are written for children and lack some of the adult sensibilities of Kipling’s other Indian work, as in Kim, “The Mark of the Beast,” and “The Phantom Rickshaw.” The stories in The Jungle Book are particularly innocent of many of the unhappier realities of life. But in all of the stories the animals are animals first and anthropomorphized characters second. Death is not sugarcoated in the stories, but is a fact of life which eventually comes to everyone, even those Mowgli loves. The stories in The Second Jungle Book have a much sharper edge than those in The Jungle Book. There is a real sense of desperation during the drought in “How Fear Came.” Shere Khan becomes far more formidable than he was in The Jungle Book. And the White Cobra of “The King’s Ankus” is unpleasantly insane.

The Disney movies, too, do not deal with the sad reality of Mowgli’s growing up; Kipling was too conscientious a writer to ignore that. So the stories–which as a whole are a bildungsroman--follow Mowgli’s growth, which is pronounced and painful, matching that of a real person. And there is always a sense of alienation about Mowgli which is missing from the films. Kipling’s Mowgli does not belong anywhere. Mowgli is truly happy in the jungle, but he can never be an animal, no matter how much he acts like them and how fully he follows the Law. He can forget this for shorter or longer periods, but he is always reminded of it eventually. But Mowgli never fits in among the villagers, either, and sees houses as traps. Mowgli is always different, always Other, despite his best efforts to forget this.

The preceding makes the stories sound depressing. They are not; they are highly entertaining. Kipling is never less than compulsively readable, and he conveys a wonderful sense of what the jungle might be like to live in. Because the stories are for children they lack the aphorisms which appear in Kipling’s more adult stories, but the dialogue is always sprightly and there is also the occasional vivid image. The characters are memorable, from sleepy, amiable Baloo to Kaa, who (counterintuitively) becomes one of Mowgli’s best friends. And occasionally Kipling introduces surprising elements, such as in “The King’s Ankus,” when Kaa and Mowgli reconstruct a murder scene using deduction and detective work.

But to many modern readers the Mowgli stories will be troubling in ways that Kim was not. The question of race, empire, and imperialism is ever-present, or should be, when considering Kipling. There are certain implicit assumptions in some of his stories, reflecting the time and place in which Kipling wrote, which will make most modern readers at least slightly uncomfortable. Most of these assumptions are absent in Kim, or far more covertly expressed, but are present and openly expressed in the Mowgli stories, and because the Mowgli stories lack the more sophisticated approach available to Kipling in Kim these assumptions can be discomforting. Although the Mowgli stories are cynical about the advantages of “civilization,” the stories do privilege whites and the English, presenting them as higher and better beings than the Indians and imposing an order on the jungle which the native Indians are incapable of creating. Even Mowgli is deferential, in “In the Rukh,” to the English game warden Gisborne. “In the Rukh” is enamored of the lifestyle of the English game warden, and like the other Mowgli stories in which other humans play a part does not show the downside of the Raj. (The view from the top may be lovely, but many backs have to be stood on to achieve it). And most of all, the constant drumbeat of the Law of the Jungle, and how it must be followed, begins to seem a prescription for a conservative existence, rather than simple advice for surviving the jungle, and the punishment of those animals, like the Bander-Log and the dholes, who do not obey the Law, begins to seem like repression rather than acts necessary for survival.

Kipling is a confounding writer, one who continues to trouble and excite critics, and in fact has always done so. (Robert Buchanan, 1900: “How, then, are we to account for the extraordinary popularity of works so contemptible in spirit and so barbarous in execution?”¹) His popularity, and the complexity of their relationship with matters of empire and colonialism and race, have produced bookshelves’ worth of critical works attempting to figuratively get to the bottom of the subject. They have failed, for Kipling’s fiction, as Zorah Sullivan notes, “negotiates an uneasy series of truces between the resistance of the self to the authority of empire...and the antithetical longings for empire,”² and such negotiations and truces are virtually unplumbable. But some points seem at lest inarguable. If the jungle stands in for India, as Don Randall argues,³then it is

a seemingly confusing and confused space, which nonetheless has an internal code or law that Mowgli masters and, to some degree, he has the power to shape and change by the end of his story. Mowgli can be seen as invader or colonizer of the jungle, one who is changed by the jungle as he himself changes it....

Reading Mowgli as an allegorical imperial colonizer of the jungle is problematic, however. Mowgli must abide by the animals’ rules and Law, even if he can dominate them with his human gaze. He does not exploit the resources of the jungle, but lives in harmony with them, and even fights on the side of the animals in his battle with Shere Khan. He is ultimately exiled from the jungle. Most importantly, Mowgli is no Tarzan, no European boy raised by jungle animals, but an Indian boy. This alone would problematize his status as imperial proxy, but his situation is further complicated by the fact that when he returns to the village to rescue his parents, his human mother and father must flee for aid to British order and law in a cantonment some miles away. The British surround and contain the village and jungle, Mowgli and the animals: Mowgli, although he does not realize it, is as much colonized as colonizer.⁴

However–and this seems to be underappreciated by the critics–while Mowgli is as much “colonized as colonizer,” he no more belongs fully to the human world than he does to the animal world. As stated above, he is always different, always Other, a state that will not change even when he marries and has children. In this Mowgli can be compared to characters out of American frontier fiction, from Hawkeye, in The Last of the Mohicans to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to Ethan Edwards in John Ford’s The Searchers to Tom Doniphon in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance–all the characters who are of a frontier world but belong neither to the natives of the frontier nor to the forces of colonization, and who find themselves outsiders once the “settling” of the frontier is complete.

For some or perhaps many readers the imperialism of The Jungle Books will negate what pleasure they can derive from them. But most modern readers will find the Mowgli stories tremendously enjoyable.

Print: Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008.

¹ Qtd in M. Daphne Kutzer, Empire’s Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 14.

² Zorah T. Sullivan, Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1993), 1.

³ Don Randall, “Post-Mutiny Allegories of Empire in Kipling’s Jungle Books,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40, no. 1 (1998): 97-120.

⁴ Kutzer, Empire’s Children, 24-25.