The Jungle Book

 CONTENTS 

Many things begin at the end. It’s a back-to-front sort of paradox, but it’s nonetheless true. Murder mysteries, for example, tend to begin with the discovery of the murder, and then gradually work their way back to the beginning as we learn who did it and why. And it’s not uncommon for writers to begin at the end—to write a story that reveals earlier stories, which they then write.

The Jungle Book
began at the end, when Rudyard Kipling wrote a story called “In the Rukh.” It is about an Englishman who encounters a forest ranger named Mowgli with almost supernatural powers of endurance, able to talk with wolves because, as the Englishman discovers, he was brought up by wolves in the jungle. That is where the story ends. But I can imagine Kipling unable to get the story of Mowgli out
of his head, wondering what it would have been like to be a boy in the jungle, raised by wolves, wondering how that tale began.…

The next Mowgli story he wrote, very different in tone, with its own voice, was “Mowgli’s Brothers.” I half suspect that Kipling intended this to be the only young Mowgli story when he wrote it. It begins with Mowgli (which means “little frog”; it is remarkable how much some babies do look like little frogs) arriving in the jungle, and it ends with him facing his foe, then leaving the jungle for the world of men. It introduces Bagheera, the panther, who is, like Mowgli, a creature of both worlds, for he was raised in captivity; Baloo, the bear, who teaches the child the rules and the ways of the jungle; and Shere Khan, the lame tiger who breaks one of the laws of the jungle by hunting a human child and sets in motion the events that will prove his eventual doom.

But having written that story, Kipling needed to write other stories with Mowgli in them, some of which occurred before the end of the first story (if you see what I mean) and some of which occurred afterward. In “Kaa’s Hunting,” we learn of the
Bandar-log
, the monkeys, while in “Tiger-Tiger!” the story of Shere Khan comes to an end. (The names of the jungle animals, by the way, come from Hindi—
bandar-log
means “monkey people,”
shere
means “tiger,” and
khan
means “king.”) Those were the Mowgli stories in the first
Jungle Book;
there were other stories in the book, of seals and elephants and baggage animals, and there was a story about two cobras and a heroic mongoose named Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, which is in the book that you are holding.

Then Kipling wrote the stories of
The Second Jungle Book
, in which we see Mowgli learning about man, and learning to formulate plans. The story continues as a patchwork, both earlier and later than the stories in the first
Jungle Book
. My favorite is probably “The King’s Ankus” (an
ankus
is a goad, used by a driver to direct an elephant), in which Mowgli is unable to understand why mankind would murder for pretty stones. When I took
The Jungle Book
as inspiration for my own
The Graveyard Book
, I began with that story.

Kipling later put the stories of young Mowgli together as
The Jungle Book
, and that is this.

I think it is often a mistake to look for authors in their work, but I wonder to this day about
The Jungle Book
. Like Mowgli, like Bagheera, Rudyard Kipling was raised far from his own kind. He was born in Bombay, India, to English parents, and he thought and dreamed in Hindi. He loved India, but at the age of six, he was sent away to England, to a country he didn’t know and yet still belonged to. He was treated harshly by the couple who were meant to be looking after
him, then went to a boarding school in Devon. At the age of sixteen, he returned to India, where he felt once more at home. He drew on what he saw and experienced and heard in India for his fiction—and one of the things he drew on was the tales and reports of children raised in the jungle by wolves.

Mowgli is raised in the jungle by creatures who are wiser and more civilized than the foolish and superstitious human race to which he belongs by birth, and to which he is going to have to return. He learns that he belongs to neither the people of the jungle nor the people of the villages, but he must leave the jungle and embrace his humanity, just as Bagheera left his cage and returned to the jungle. Although Mowgli has to leave, he can never be truly happy away from his jungle, just as he can never truly be part of it.

I wonder whether Kipling noticed that he was telling his own story as he was writing it, or if that was something he realized only at the end.

Neil Gaiman