Now better known through its enchanting – yet rather sanitised – Disney adaption, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book deserves a deeper study and understanding as a classic of children’s literature.
The Jungle Book serves as a metaphorical exploration of the notions of law and freedom – with the “animal” world acting as a an analogue for a world outside the restraints of Human Society. Kipling drew on his own experiences as a child and later as an adult in Raj era India to mould a story that owes it’s genesis to ancient Indian fables like the Panchatantra.
As Kipling says:
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 that the Bodhisat tells of his previous incarnations ending always with the beautiful moral. 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.
Of course, this is The Jungle Book viewed through adult eyes – for the child reader, it is a much simpler tale, concerning – for the most part – the story of the abandoned child Mowgli and his adventures in the jungle.
Mowgli is abandoned in the jungle and is raised by a wolfpack, led by the wise Akela – aided and guided by the wise animal archetypes – the bear Baloo and Bagheera the black panther. As he grows, he learns the all important “Law of the Jungle”- which amongst it’s many tenets states:
The Law of the Jungle, which never orders anything without a reason, forbids every beast to eat Man except when he is killing to show his children how to kill, and then he must hunt outside the hunting grounds of his pack or tribe. The real reason for this is that man-killing means, sooner or later, the arrival of white men on elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with gongs and rockets and torches. Then everybody in the jungle suffers. The reason the beasts give among themselves is that Man is the weakest and most defenceless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him. They say too—and it is true—that man-eaters become mangy, and lose their teeth.
as well as:
The Law of the Jungle lays down very clearly that any wolf may, when he marries, withdraw from the Pack he belongs to. But as soon as his cubs are old enough to stand on their feet he must bring them to the Pack Council, which is generally held once a month at full moon, in order that the other wolves may identify them. After that inspection the cubs are free to run where they please, and until they have killed their first buck no excuse is accepted if a grown wolf of the Pack kills one of them. The punishment is death where the murderer can be found; and if you think for a minute you will see that this must be so.
Mowgli also learns important lessons about life and his place in this “Animal Society” – as well as the dangers that lurk in the jungle. For instance, he is abducted by the Bandar-log monkeys to the ruined city and is rescued by Kaa the python and also has to face the feared tiger Shere Khan, who hunts him after he returns for a while to the human world.
Kipling’s description of the terrifying Shere Khan will delight – and scare every child who reads it – or has it read to him –
Then Shere Khan roared: “Bah! What have we to do with this toothless fool? He is doomed to die! It is the man-cub who has lived too long. Free People, he was my meat from the first. Give him to me. I am weary of this man-wolf folly. He has troubled the jungle for ten seasons. Give me the man-cub, or I will hunt here always, and not give you one bone. He is a man, a man’s child, and from the marrow of my bones I hate him!”
One of the joys of The Jungle Book is Kipling’s wonderful and evocative use of language. He has clearly absorbed the story telling style of the Indian oral tradition, and makes it come alive for western audiences. For me, the opening paragraph of the book is a wonderful way to start the story:
It was seven o’clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day’s rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips. Mother Wolf lay with her big gray nose dropped across her four tumbling, squealing cubs, and the moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they all lived. “Augrh!” said Father Wolf. “It is time to hunt again.” He was going to spring down hill when a little shadow with a bushy tail crossed the threshold and whined: “Good luck go with you, O Chief of the Wolves. And good luck and strong white teeth go with noble children that they may never forget the hungry in this world.”
Another favourite is the initial description of Bagheera – really wonderful poetic prose that trips off the tongue:
A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path; for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.
For the initial reader – and for the child reader, I would recommend reading the 3 “Mowgli” stories in the collection first – and then perhaps moving onto the famous Rikki-Tikki-Tavi – the wonderful tale of a battle between the titular mongoose and the cobras Nag and Nagaina.
The other stories in the collection are excellent, but perhaps not of such a high quality as the “Mowgli” stories .
To conclude – a classic of children’s story telling that fully justifies its reputation.
Read and enjoy here
A great roofless palace crowned the hill, and the marble of the courtyards and the fountains was split, and stained with red and green, and the very cobblestones in the courtyard where the king’s elephants used to live had been thrust up and apart by grasses and young trees. From the palace you could see the rows and rows of roofless houses that made up the city looking like empty honeycombs filled with blackness; the shapeless block of stone that had been an idol in the square where four roads met; the pits and dimples at street corners where the public wells once stood, and the shattered domes of temples with wild figs sprouting on their sides. The monkeys called the place their city, and pretended to despise the Jungle-People because they lived in the forest. And yet they never knew what the buildings were made for nor how to use them. They would sit in circles on the hall of the king’s council chamber, and scratch for fleas and pretend to be men; or they would run in and out of the roofless houses and collect pieces of plaster and old bricks in a corner, and forget where they had hidden them, and fight and cry in scuffling crowds, and then break off to play up and down the terraces of the king’s garden, where they would shake the rose trees and the oranges in sport to see the fruit and flowers fall. They explored all the passages and dark tunnels in the palace and the hundreds of little dark rooms, but they never remembered what they had seen and what they had not; and so drifted about in ones and twos or crowds telling each other that they were doing as men did. They drank at the tanks and made the water all muddy, and then they fought over it, and then they would all rush together in mobs and shout: “There is no one in the jungle so wise and good and clever and strong and gentle as the Bandar-log.” Then all would begin again till they grew tired of the city and went back to the tree-tops, hoping the Jungle-People would notice them.