The Jungle Books (45 page)

One has no right to go beyond these and must learn to respect the space. If the lion were to change his territory,
the birds would be threatened by his presence and change their habitat. The boundaries between men and animals are just as clearly defined. Most jungle dwellers despise the tiger Shere Khan because he is entirely unsportsmanlike; instead of hunting wild beasts, he kills helpless domestic cows and is also prone to eating humans, the weakest and the most defenseless of all living things: “The Law of the Jungle…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 animals are individualized and anthropomorphized, so it is easier to identify with them. The wolves leave the pack when they are “married” and live in nuclear families (but when the cubs are grown, they must meet the pack once a month during the full moon and introduce the scent of their children so that the other wolves can recognize them). The jungle even has a tribunal; Mowgli has to get two signatures to be accepted into the tribe. The bear and the panther vouch for him and offer a dead bull in return for his acceptance. The lame tiger and the jackal are enemies. The friend and foe are black and white. Kipling has created an alternative society of the jungle, which counters the one that people live in: “Mowgli was now reasonably safe against all accidents in the jungle, because neither snake, bird, nor beast would hurt him.”

By the time he is prepubescent, the boy has already acquired a plethora of survival skills and overcome moral obstacles. In “Kaa’s Hunting,” Mowgli is attracted to the other primates because they physically resemble him, but Baloo tells him monkeys are lawless; they have no speech but use stolen words; they have no memory. The rest of the jungle doesn’t deal with them; they are outcasts confined to live in the ruins of an old temple and despise the jungle. The monkeys kidnap Mowgli because they want to exploit his skills—they want him to teach them how to weave sticks and canes together to protect them from bad weather. Mowgli sees that they
are stupid and aimless, as if they have caught the
dewanee
, the madness. “[M]adness is the most disgraceful thing that can overtake a wild creature.”

Some of the stories that once were favorites still hold together, like “Tiger-Tiger!” which is an homage to the popular William Blake poem “The Tiger.” In this story, Mowgli returns to the human village and is adopted by Messua and her husband, who believe him to be their long-lost son, Nathoo. But he has trouble adjusting to human life, and Shere Khan is still on his trail. In the tradition of classic coming of age stories, his time has come to confront the monster—in this case, the tiger—as well as find his place among his own people.

Some of the stories bear no relation to Mowgli’s saga but concern other beasts of the jungle in other situations. In “Rikki-tikki-tavi,” a mongoose is swept away from his burrow during a terrible flood and is found by a little boy named Teddy. He becomes a pet and gets into all sorts of mischief. In “Toomai of the Elephants,” a ten-year-old boy who tends domestic elephants is told that he will never be a full-fledged handler until he has seen the elephants dance. When he actually witnesses this extraordinary event, we ourselves experience a mystical moment of grace through Kipling’s transcendent descriptive skill.

Since the film version of
The Jungle Book
was released, it is difficult to dissociate from the images of the loin-clothed actor Sabu and his animated jungle allies. Mowgli’s dilemma of whether to return to humanity or to remain in the jungle is glossed into a Hollywood treasure hunt, replete with temples in ruin overgrown with giant plants, excited cobras, and hundreds of extras darkened with makeup to resemble people of color. There are no real Indians in this version.

Few authors have had their work stifled by the current vogue for political correctness more than Kipling, whose works have fallen prey to taboo of the excesses of colonial times and exultation in the arrogant superiority of European civilization. Some critics have viewed
The Jungle
Books
as a metaphor for the British Raj—a jungle version of “the white man’s burden,” the doctrine that considers the non-European cultures as unevolved and demonic and considers it an obligation for the civilized cultures to dominate the savages until they shape up:

Although a belief in the virtues of imperialism and England’s manifest destiny to become a great empire was widespread at the time, the publication of this poem caused bombastic arguments, both pro and con—most notably from Mark Twain and Henry James. However, readers still loved Kipling’s romantic tales about the adventures of the English in strange and distant parts of the world and disregarded their political implications.

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, on December 30, 1865. His father was a professor at the Bombay School of Art and his mother came from a family of accomplished women—one aunt was married to the prominent Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. His early childhood, when he was raised by an ayah, brought him in direct contact with the Indian culture; his first language was Hindustani. When Rudyard was six, his parents, convinced that he should be educated properly in the mainland, sent him to a foster home in England, where he endured five miserable years of traditional beatings and inhumane discipline. The sudden change in environment and this horrible treatment caused chronic insomnia, which had a profound effect on Kipling’s literary imagination and productivity. His short story “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” his novel
The Light
That Failed
(1890), and his posthumously published autobiography,
Something of Myself
(1937) allude to this period in his life. Finally, his parents removed him from this rigidly Calvinistic foster home and placed him in a private school where the English schoolboy code of honor and duty formed his social and political beliefs, especially as they involved loyalty to a group.

In 1883, Kipling returned to India and worked as a journalist. He published six volumes of short stories set in India, which he knew intimately and loved. His poetry collection
Barrack-Room Ballads
(1892) captured the zeitgeist vividly, conjuring up nationalistic urges. When Kipling married an American woman, Caroline Balestier, and settled down to live a respectable Puritan life in Brattleboro, Vermont, Willa Cather wrote that his future as an artist was endangered. “Ah, Mr. Kipling,” she mourned, matrimony “has shorn the wings of your freedom, and your freedom was your art.” Urging him to “go back to the East, flee out into the desert before it is too late,” she lamented, “Alas! There were so many men who could have married Mrs. Kipling, and there was only you who could write
Soldiers Three
.” Kipling had come to be regarded as the soldier’s author, because he had written so much from their point of view and had mastered their colorful slang. This in itself is a remarkable feat, considering that he had never participated in any military duty.

Though the jungle boy and the creatures who inhabit
The Jungle Books
were conceived in India during the author’s childhood, they were given birth in the unexotic setting of a small New England village: “It’s an uncivilized land (I still maintain it), but how the deuce has it wound itself around my heartstrings in the way it has?” After a family feud, the Kiplings returned to England, settling down in Sussex, which was to replace India as the setting for much of his later work.

In 1907 Kipling won the Nobel Prize in literature “in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas, and remarkable talent for
narration which characterized his writings.” However, the bravado of his writing took a turn when his son went missing in action in World War I. This tragic loss led Kipling to change from being the bard of the Empire to becoming the poet of bitterness and guilt. His works published in the years after the death of both his children, Josephine and John, display deep suffering, emotional stress, breakdown, and recovery. He became obsessive about obtaining and destroying letters he had sent—to protect his private life before his death. Having seen the slow crumbling of the Empire, a disenchanted Kipling died in 1936 and was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

For me, growing up in Turkey, reading
The Jungle Books
held no political overtones, just the mysterious and awesome world of the jungle, a respect for the wild, and a longing for adventure. It is ironic that Kipling created a “curry” of Indian culture and myth with the Western style of literature. In “Brushwood Boy,” (1898) one of my all-time favorite stories, he uses several Indian themes against the unemotional banality of life in the upper classes, distilling common Sanskrit myths into a Victorian costume drama.

Only after T. S. Eliot described Kipling’s poems as “great verse that sometimes unintentionally changes into poetry” did Kipling’s work receive a reassessment from other critics that revived his literary reputation to the merited level. The prejudices against the worldview of colonialism should not diminish our appreciation of this brilliant writer’s artistic achievements.

—Alev Lytle Croutier

All fifteen stories in
The Jungle Books
had their original publication in magazines. Macmillan and Company, London and New York, published the first edition of
The Jungle Book
in 1894; the first edition of
The Second Jungle Book
followed in 1895. This Signet Classic is reprinted from these first editions. Typographical errors have been corrected.