Kipling’s work on The Jungle Books corresponds almost exactly with the years he spent in Vermont, 1892 to 1896. It was during this period in America that Kipling first voiced his determination to write works for children. In a letter to a friend composed not long after his arrival in Vermont, Kipling wrote, “I would sooner make a fair book of stories for children than a new religion or a completely revised framework for our social and political life” (letter to Mary Mapes, in The Letters of Rudyard Kipling). Not long after making this pronouncement in November 1892, just before Josephine’s birth, he wrote the first of the Mowgli stories, “Mowgli’s Brothers.” In The Jungle Books, Kipling does, in fact, attempt to generate a “framework” for collective life, a set of precepts the jungle animals call the “Law.” In the ten years following the publication of the first Jungle Book in 1894, Kipling went on to write his most important books for young people, works that have remained in print and are still commonly read: Captains Courageous (1897), Stalky & Co. (1899), Kim (1901), and Just So Stories (1902).
Kipling’s determination to write for children may have stemmed in part from his own childhood experiences. Living in America, far from India and England and the scenes of his childhood and adolescence, Kipling was able to recast the separations of his early years imaginatively. Perhaps the most prevalent theme in The Jungle Books, a subject around which many of the stories turn, is painful separation and loss. Many of the stories describe a parental loss or a necessary departure from home followed by the forging of new ties and a rise to heroic status. Mowgli, like so many child heroes from nineteenth- and twentieth-century children’s literature, is a virtual orphan, abandoned by his parents as a toddler when a tiger storms their encampment. Kipling emphasizes this motif of abandonment through repetition. Not only does Mowgli suffer from a desertion when his parents flee the tiger, but he is abandoned twice more, first when members of the wolf pack he has joined resolve to eject the “Man-cub” from the pack and conspire to kill him, and second when the “Man-Pack” subsequently rejects him and likewise plots his murder. Mowgli is thus recurrently prevented from calling a single group or tribe his own.
Critics generally divide The Jungle Books into the Mowgli stories—a series of linked tales—and the other stories, which, though varied, share certain themes. The Mowgli tales comprise more than half of the two Jungle Books, eight of fifteen stories. These are the Jungle Book stories that actually take place in the jungle. Each of Kipling’s stories in the two volumes begins with and is punctuated by a “song,” or poem, many of which were subsequently set to music. Thus the books couple the genres at which Kipling was most skilled, poetry and the short story. The sequence of the stories has never been fixed once and for all. When first published, each book mixed Mowgli and non-Mowgli stories together, with juxtaposed tales complementing or commenting on each other. For the Outward Bound Edition of 1897, Kipling rearranged the stories, clustering the Mowgli tales together in the first Jungle Book and organizing them chronologically. He also grouped “In the Rukh” with the other stories featuring Mowgli. This distribution of tales was repeated in the Sussex edition, organized at the end of Kipling’s life. The first American editions of the two books, reproduced here, correspond to the original arrangement of the stories; however, the language and phrasing both here and in the Sussex edition differ slightly in places from that of the first English editions.
While India remained a dominant focus in Kipling’s writing throughout his life, he never returned to his birthplace after his marriage. Significantly, Kipling had never been to the Seoni district of central India where the Mowgli stories are set. In fact, none of Kipling’s detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Indian jungle were based on personal experience. Kipling wrote to a friend in 1893 that he included in The Jungle Books everything he had ever “heard or dreamed about the Indian jungle.” He used multiple sources for his depiction of Indian animals, including Robert Armitage Sterndale’s Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon and Denizens of the Jungles. Kipling’s interest in tales of children raised by wolves may have been spurred by his father’s popular 1891 book, Beast and Man in India, which discusses the prevalence in India of “wolf-child stories.” Work on The Jungle Books offered Kipling an opportunity to collaborate with his father: Not only did Lockwood offer his knowledge of Indian wildlife, but he also illustrated his son’s volumes.
LAW AND DISORDER
Like his contemporary, American animal fabulist Joel Chandler Harris, whose “Uncle Remus” stories were popular in England in the 1880s, Kipling told animal stories that diverged from the tradition of moral English and American animal tales. In The Jungle Books Kipling generates a new breed of animal tale, one that combines the didacticism of earlier English animal stories with a new vision of nature influenced in part by the popularization of Charles Darwin’s ideas following the appearance of the groundbreaking On the Origin of Species (1859). The wolves that populate the Mowgli stories are not the denizens of Grimm’s fairytales or Aesop’s fables—that is, expressions of human foibles. They are unabashedly lupine: more hungry hunters than crafty deceivers of girls in red capes. Their primary focus in life is food, and food for them means frequent hunting. The Mowgli stories chime with the refrain “good hunting”—the phrase with which animals who follow what Kipling calls ‘Jungle Law“ hail their fellows. Most of the numerous ”songs“ in the books deal with hunting or with another sort of violence. The animals in The Jungle Books (and, in places, the humans) don’t only discuss hunting—they do it. They do so much of it that Henry James, a lone critical voice when the books first appeared, remarked in a letter to Edmund Gosse: ”The violence of it all, the almost exclusive preoccupation with fighting and killing, is ... singularly characteristic.“
Kipling’s wolves do, however, adhere to a strict code of ethical behavior, which Mowgli—and the hypothetical child reader—learn. The violence in the books is tempered by this code of Jungle Law. In fact, what is most striking about Kipling’s depiction of nature is that it is not a place of wild savagery but of sensible adherence to this law. For the Law of the Jungle is not simply a Darwinian “survival of the fittest,” but rather a complex set of precepts by which a society regulates its members. Kipling uses nature metaphors to describe the Law, suggesting that it simply grows in the jungle, like a plant: “As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back—/ For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack” (p. 193). The Law clearly “girdles” the pack, and as the stories show, it links together all the animals of the jungle. It seems that the Law compels the creatures to act in consort, like a single animal. In fact, the poem or song in which it is described, “The Law of the Jungle,” concludes with an image of the Law as a single beast. These lines also serve as an epigraph for The Second Jungle Book: “Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and mighty are they; / But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch and the hump is—Obey!” (p. 172). For Kipling, the central precept of this law, which establishes and maintains the social order, is submission.
Law is specifically contrasted with savagery in the story with which Kipling concludes the first Jungle Book, “Her Majesty’s Servants.” Here the law that is followed by animals has been created by men—the British military in India—and the rule of the British is glorified. In this story the narrator recounts a conversation among animals that he overhears on a night passed in a military camp where the Viceroy of India is meeting with the Amir of Afghanistan. As a young journalist, Kipling himself attended such an event. In the story, the Amir, described as “a wild king of a very wild country,” has brought with him an entourage of “savage men and savage horses” (p. 151). “Her Majesty’s Servants,” animals who serve England, grumble about these uncultivated horses who stampede each night through the camp, disrupting their sleep. Throughout the narrative, various beasts speak in turn about how they fight for the British in colonial wars, each asserting th
at his manner in battle is best. When a youthful mule asks why the beasts must fight at all, the troop-horse, who has been established as a superior fighting animal and “servant,” responds, “Because we are told to” (p. 162). This story and the first Jungle Book as a whole conclude with a clear message: Obey orders and all will be well. At the end of the tale, the narrator listens to another conversation, this time between a “native officer” and a Central Asian chief, who watch 30,000 British soldiers and their animals parade for the Amir, among them the beasts overheard on the previous night. When the chief marvels at the obedience of the men and animals, asking, “In what manner was this wonderful thing done?” the officer responds, “There was an order, and they obeyed” (p. 166). The story is then punctuated with the “Parade-Song of the Camp Animals”: The animals sing, “Children of the Camp are we, / Serving each in his degree” (p. 169). All in all, the lawlessness of “savage” beasts is contrasted with the orderly hierarchy of English-trained animals. Creatures ruled by the English are presented as models of self-regulation and submission. The animals seem to stand in for the Indian people whom the British govern. The rule—and the Law—of the English is thus hailed without ambivalence. This celebration of British rule in India can be seen in other Jungle Book stories as well, such as “The Undertakers” and “Letting in the Jungle.”
Animals in the Mowgli stories are classified as obedient to the Law or antagonistic to it, such as, respectively, the queen’s servants and the “savage” horses. Within The Jungle Books, the Law is in part defined by its opposition to the lawlessness of the latter group. In fact, the Law is first mentioned at the beginning of the first Jungle Book story when Shere Khan, a tiger, violates it. The wolves who are soon to adopt Mowgli assert that the transgressing tiger has “no right” to be hunting in their territory, and, more importantly, that he has no right to be hunting man, who is taboo as prey according to Jungle Law. The idea that the tiger is the prototypic lawbreaker recurs throughout the Mowgli stories. In “How Fear Came,” a tale that echoes the biblical story of the expulsion from Eden, the elephant Hathi tells the jungle creation story, in which a tiger is responsible for the “fall” of the Jungle People because he breaks the rules established by a God-figure; he kills first a buck and then a man “for choice,” thus bringing “death” and a pervasive “fear” into the jungle simultaneously. The introduction of fear means that animals of different species no longer mix freely together but instead fear each other. Obedience to the Law is associated here with divine ordinance and might, it seems, retrieve a lost Eden. The moments in the Jungle Book stories when men and animals work together harmoniously (there are many) point to this mythical time before the fall. By overcoming Shere Khan, Mowgli symbolically fights the forces of disorder and discord in the jungle, in this way asserting the rule of Jungle Law.
Many of the creatures classified as antagonistic to the Law are implicitly associated with the masses in English and American society. This is particularly the case with the Bandar-log—the Monkey People—and the Red Dog. Both groups are despised by the Jungle People, and this attitude is seconded by the narrator. In “Kaa’s Hunting,” the child Mowgli learns that he must not play with the Bandar-log who are, as he discovers, “outcastes” (p. 35). Perhaps the most denigrated group in The Jungle Books, the Monkey People are designated people with “no Law” (p. 35). The Red Dog are represented in a similar way; like the Bandar-log, they gather in masses, are considered “lawless,” and run rampant over vast areas—that is, they do not have a particular place (like Shere Khan, who breaks the law by leaving his hunting grounds). These descriptions—such as that of the “savage horses,” who are characterized as a “mob”—evoke contemporaneous depictions of the masses in the popular press and in works by writers such as Henry James and H. G. Wells.
Notably, many of the nonwhite people who appear in the Mowgli tales are grouped together with lawless animals. From the beginning to the end of The Jungle Books, the idea that these men are not to be trusted is asserted by various venerated characters. Mowgli’s mentor Bagheera, the black panther who was raised in captivity and who knows “the ways of men,” cautions that “[Mowgli‘s] own tribe” is to be “feared ”(p. 33). The wolf Gray Brother likewise shares his wisdom about men, suggesting that men are dishonest and dishonorable: “Men are only men, Little Brother, and their talk is like the talk of frogs in a pond” (p. 62). The distaste Mowgli’s surrogate parents and teachers have for humans and their culture is perhaps most evident at the conclusion of The Second Jungle Book, when Mowgli receives final advice from these wise elders of the jungle. Bagheera warns Mowgli against “Jackal-Men” (p. 374), and Baloo compares the “Man-Pack” to Mowgli’s feline nemesis, Shere Khan: “When thy Pack would work thee ill, / Say: ’Shere Khan is yet to kill.‘ / When the knife is drawn to slay, / Keep the Law and go thy way” (p. 373). Baloo thus encourages Mowgli to uphold Jungle Law rather than human law.
Mowgli’s experiences after he enters the “Man-Pack” reveal these warnings to have been well justified. He himself rails against the Indian villagers: “They are idle, senseless, and cruel; they play with their mouths, and they do not kill the weaker for food, but for sport. When they are full-fed they would throw their own breed into the Red Flower” (p. 237). It is interesting to note that the villagers and not the British are associated with killing “for sport.” Of course killing for sport—big game hunting—was a favorite pastime among Europeans in India. Seeking revenge against the “Man-Pack” for threatening his life and the lives of his foster parents, Mowgli commands Hathi the elephant and his sons to “let in the Jungle upon that village” (p. 237). Mowgli then leads the elephants and all the creatures of the jungle against the village. In this attack, Kipling not only highlights the evils of human civilization—at least as it is manifest in an Indian village—but he emphasizes the power of the hybrid outsider to combat these apparent ills of wanton cruelty and superstition.
Significantly, Kipling positions British “progress” on the same side as Jungle Law. The English in this story, though unseen, are presented as a force that, like Mowgli, is capable of effecting “justice”; Mowgli’s surrogate parents, Messua and her husband, flee the violence of the villagers and seek “a great justice” from the British in Kanhiwara. Mowgli tells them, “I do not know what justice is, but—come next Rains and see what is left” (p. 231). By the time the British arrive to punish the unjust villagers, the village will be leveled and abandoned: That is Mowgli’s “justice.” Mowgli can be seen here to express the hidden brutality of British “justice”; through the vehicle of this Indian boy, Kipling expresses the impulse to destroy a culture deemed lawless and corrupt, whose superstitiousness is shown in several stories to be not only absurd but pernicious. Kipling combines a Rousseauian Romanticism that deems all civilization corrupt and a jingoism that exempts British civilization from this censure.
Kipling’s preoccupation with the Law and his insistence on its centrality in the Mowgli stories has been seen by critics as a response to his impressions of American lawlessness. In his memoir and in letters of the period, Kipling alludes to his belief that American society was plagued by a distasteful and disturbing disorder. In 1893 he wrote to W. E. Henley that America has “no law that need be obeyed.” In another letter from this period he described America as “barbarism, barbarism plus telephone, electric light, railway and suffrage.” Though Kipling clearly associated America with lawlessness, the centrality of the Law in The Jungle Books can also be seen in the context of broader anxieties about lawlessness in British culture at the time. The Jungle Books were composed only twenty-five years after the publication of Matthew Arnold’s widely read Culture and Anarchy (1869). In this work, Arnold, whose writings Kipling first read and admired when he was in his teens, warns the English against worshiping freedom as an end in itself. Such worship, he concludes, leads to rampant anarchy—everyone merely “doing as one likes.” The conclusion of “Her Majesty’s Servants” echoes Arnold’
s charge. After the officer describes to the Asian chief the intricate hierarchy of power that organizes the parading men and animals, the chief replies, “Would it were so in Afghanistan ... for there we obey only our own wills” (p. 166).
Kipling firmly believed that the British Empire, like Jungle Law, produced order in a chaotic and godless world. At the same time, he believed that it promoted manliness and character in those who engaged in its civilizing mission, those who shouldered what he notoriously dubbed “the white man’s burden.” Jingoism was rampant in England in the 1890s, when Kipling rose to fame. He delivered his vision of a fascinating yet chaotically teeming India to eager British audiences, linking India to the heart of modernity’s “darkness”: social disorder. In The Jungle Books he provides an antidote, Mowgli, who combats disorder symbolically by ensuring that the animals abide by their own Law. Kipling distinguishes Mowgli from the other animals in his position outside the Law. Because Mowgli is not really a part of the jungle, he is not bound by Jungle Law; he only chooses to follow it. Whereas Arnold’s antidote for this plague of anarchy was high “culture,” Kipling’s is a voluntary acceptance of nature’s Law.
Jungle Books (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 3
