THE ECUMENICAL VISION
Though the Mowgli stories consistently denigrate “men” and their ways, the attitudes toward fraternal solidarity they express correspond to ideals of manliness and gentlemanliness commonly held during the Victorian period. For example, Mowgli’s wolf pack in many ways matches Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s idealized representations of bands of “brothers” who work together, following a set of strict principles. Through their adherence to such a code, these groups, including the soldiers in “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and the knights in the Arthurian poems, demonstrate honor. Unlike these examples, however, Kipling’s idealized male troop in the Mowgli stories is strikingly heterogeneous, the Jungle Law binding together members of different species. In 1889, several years before he began to work on the Jungle Book stories, Kipling imagined manly bonds forged across social divides in his well-known poem “The Ballad of East and West.” Here Kipling asserts, “there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, / When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!” The strength that Kipling emphasizes here is also stressed in descriptions of the binding nature of Jungle Law: “The strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack” (p. 193).
Like Tennyson’s brotherly bands, Kipling’s beasts team together around common engagement in violent activity. Moreover, the idea of manly solidarity in both Kipling and Tennyson is linked to ineluctable tragedy and loss. Arthur’s reign must end, as must Mowgli’s rule in the jungle, and the male solidarity that these figures embody must as a consequence be lost as well; at the end of The Jungle Books, Mowgli’s mentors are all aging or already dead. In Tennyson’s poems (and Arthurian legend), Arthur’s kingdom suffers corruption from within; similarly, many members of Mowgli’s wolf pack willingly betray the boy. The connection between possible loss and manliness is also made in the Jungle Book tale “Quiquern,” which sets a coming-of-age story among the Inuit in the Arctic. The tale’s epigraph asserts that the Inuit described in the story are “the last of the Men”; they are untainted and pure in their manliness because they live “beyond the white man’s ken,” but they are destined to dwindle (p. 298). This story, like the Mowgli tales, is filled with images of a rugged manliness. At the beginning of the story, the boy Kotuko longs to join the men in their hunting and in the rituals surrounding it, during which they gather in the Singing-House for their “mysteries.” These men keep the community alive by hunting; if they fail, “the people must die” (p. 306). The main activity of the males is hunting, and as in the Mowgli stories, canine and human hunters are paired. Kipling describes the boy and his dog, who is named after him, as the “fur-wrapped boy and savage, long-haired, narrow-eyed, white-fanged, yellow brute” (p. 305). In the end, boy and dog together help to save the village from starvation during a particularly brutal winter.
An important model for Kipling’s depiction of fraternal bonding was the male community of Freemasons. Kipling joined the Freemasons’ Lodge Hope and Perseverance No. 782 in Lahore in 1885 when he was nineteen, and through his life he embraced the Masons’ ecumenical vision. The wolf pack into which Mowgli is inducted with much ceremony is called the “Free People,” a title that evokes the Freemasons. Like the Masons, Kipling’s wolves refer to each other as “brother,” and their fraternity crosses species lines just as the Freemasons fraternity crosses race and class lines. At the Masonic lodge, which Kipling characterized in his memoirs as “another world,” Kipling had the opportunity to fraternize with a medley of men: “Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs members of the Aryo and Brahmo Samaj, and a Jew Tyler.” Of course, Kipling’s repeated reference to the “Masonic lions” of his childhood reading as a key influence on The Jungle Books also highlights the link between the Masons and the Jungle Book wolves.
These positive heterogeneous fraternities in The Jungle Books contrast with groups that might be described as anti-brotherhoods. “The Undertakers” centers around such a group, a trio of carrion eaters on intimate terms who discuss their feeding exploits. Unlike the “servants of the Queen” or the wolf brethren, these animals have no law to bind them to each other. Though they cluster together, each of the creatures—a crocodile, a crane, and a jackal—would rather have the good fortune to make a meal of the others than to converse. And in fact, at the end it is implied that two will feast on the remains of the third. The English in the story present a collective force, the force of “progress,” that makes the pickings of these creatures slimmer and that ultimately leads to the demise of the most powerful among them. The Mugger, a notoriously enormous crocodile, grumbles that human food is scarce since the English have built a railway bridge across his river and people no longer need to ford the river; the crane complains that the streets of Calcutta, newly cleaned by the English, leave him little meat.
Kipling presents the Mugger, who is the leader of this pack, as a formidable antagonist for the English. He brags that he achieved his great length and girth by feeding on bodies of those killed in the Indian Mutiny. Most specifically, the Mugger is the antagonist of a particular English child whom he tried to catch “for sport” as the boy escaped with his mother from the violence of the Mutiny. Here as elsewhere, killing “for sport” is associated with lawlessness. This child—now a man—not only has built the railway bridge under which the Mugger hunts, but, at the violent conclusion of the tale, shoots the colossal creature to pieces. The railway bridge, a symbol of British “progress,” ultimately leads to the Mugger’s demise (the man who shoots him stands on it); and it is the Mugger’s ignorance about “progress,” expressed primarily in his inability to fathom the railway, that leads to his downfall. The Mugger thinks that the train crossing his river is “a new kind of bullock” that he can devour if it falls off the bridge while he lurks beneath (p. 261).
Kipling generates a more complex vision of British “progress” and the role of “law” in his celebrated story “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat.” The tale tells of the defection from civilization of the prime minister of an Indian semi-independent state; Kipling describes Purun Bhagat as embracing the British conception of progress without reserve, effecting improvements by, among other things, establishing a school for girls and making roads. For his work he wins a knighthood and other British honors. Purun Bhagat abandons his position and material possessions to live among animals outside a small village in the Himalayas. In his voyage away from civilization, law plays a pivotal role. He embarks on his pilgrimage to seek “a Law of his own” (p. 203). As in the Mowgli stories, a law discernable only to a solitary soul in nature is presented as akin to—or at least on the side of—British progress.
At the end of this story, Kipling blends his vision of this law—that of a mystical power or holiness—with a vision of British progress, and provides a slight ironic distance between the two. When a group of animals comes to warn Purun of an imminent mudslide that will destroy the hillside on which he lives, he ultimately sacrifices his life in the act of saving the villagers who live below him and who, he says, have treated him with kindness, giving him good food daily. As he descends to the village to warn the people, he is described as “no longer a holy man, but Sir Purun Dass, K. C. I. E., Prime Minister of no small State, a man accustomed to command, going out to save life” (p. 211). The story ends after Purun dies from his exertion and the villagers make him their saint. Kipling writes: “But they do not know that the saint of their worship is the ... honorary or corresponding member of more learned and scientific societies than will ever do any good in this world or the next” (p. 213). While the societies may do no good, Purun clearly does, both as prime minister and as holy man. He can only do “good” as a radical outsider in isolation from human society, in the company of animals. Kipling here defines a sphere of “goodness” or ethical action that lies outside the realm of worldly activities and concerns. It is the realm of an outsider who—like Mowgli—follows a law of his own choosing and, to follow this law, unites with unlikely chums. Purun’s story mir
rors Mowgli’s in many ways. Although unlike Mowgli he abandons people rather than being abandoned by them, like Mowgli his isolation brings him a collection of animal companions, whom he dubs “brothers.” Moreover, his eyes, like Mowgli‘s, are characterized as tremendously powerful; he has “the eyes of a man used to control thousands” (p. 205). The “miracle” of Kipling’s title—akin to the wondrous nature of Mowgli’s feats—is Purun Bhagat’s communion with animals, which, the narrator stresses, is no miracle at all, only an effect of “keeping still,” and “never making a hasty movement” (p. 208). Both here and in the Mowgli stories, communication with animals leads to salvation and creates a superhuman—in one case a saint, in the other a demigod.
The ability to “do any good in this world” in “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat” and the Mowgli stories is linked to dual identity. Mowgli, like Purun, belongs to two worlds, jungle and village; he is called “the frog” by his wolf mother both for his lack of fur and for his amphibious nature. However, Mowgli is plagued by his own inward division: “As Mang flies between the beasts and the birds so fly I between the village and the jungle. Why? / ... These two things fight together in me as the snakes fight in the spring. The water comes out of my eyes; yet I laugh while it falls. Why? / I am two Mowglis, but the hide of Shere Khan is under my feet. / All the jungle knows that I have killed Shere Khan. Look—look well, O Wolves! / Ahae! My heart is heavy with the things that I do not understand” (p. 78). Mowgli is split between civilization and savagery, and this division, while tragic for him, grants him tremendous power. Kipling’s portrayal of man’s nature as inherently split mirrors contemporaneous representations of conflicting drives at the foundation of the self and the root of human civilization. During Kipling’s lifetime, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche famously described the self—and human civilization—as the site of opposing drives or forces. The representation of a self divided and thus forever in exile can also be linked to Kipling’s biography. Kipling described himself in letters as nowhere at home. In his writing Kipling invents compensations for this homelessness. Rootlessness makes Mowgli, like the eponymous hero of Kim, a “friend of all the world.” Most of Kipling’s Jungle Book protagonists—usually children or young creatures “below the age of caste”—possess the ability to cross boundaries between different “worlds,” a quality they share with the heroes of much classic fantasy literature for children. In The Jungle Books, Kipling’s heroes are celebrated for this ability to cross borders. Though ultimately Mowgli must leave the jungle of his childhood, he will remain like a child, it seems, in his ability to cross borders that adults cannot cross, borders between species and geographical spaces—village and jungle.
GROWING UP
Mowgli combines many prevailing images of childhood in Victorian and Edwardian culture: the playful trickster, the moral child, the savage child of nature, the unique outsider, and the savior child. These versions of the child hero emerge in British literature for both children and adults over the course of the nineteenth century. Oliver Twist, for example, considered the first child hero in the British novel, is an ostracized orphan, both an outsider and a moral child, producing moral behavior in others and behaving ethically. In The Jungle Books Kipling, like many authors of classic children’s literature, casts his heroes in the paired roles of outsider and savior. Only alien Mowgli can save the wolf pack from the menaces of Shere Khan and the Red Dog. Only Kotick the seal, another outsider, his difference marked by his whiteness, can lead his people to salvation—to “an island where no men ever come” (p. 90). The young mongoose, Rikki-tikki-tavi, likewise saves the human family that has adopted him from a vicious duo of cobras who occupy their garden. In the Jungle Book tales, salvation is often contingent on cross-species communication, as in “Quiquern,” in which a boy’s communication with two dogs helps him to save his village from starvation.
Kipling’s depiction of Mowgli’s maturation is molded by the ideas of both Romanticism and post-Darwinian scientific speculation. Kipling’s emphasis on the child’s affiliation with animals shows the influence of recapitulation theory, the late-nineteenth century’s most popular offshoot of Darwin’s thought. This highly influential theory of human development set forth the idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” that the development of an individual embryo or young of a species replays the development of the species as a whole; thus it was believed that children hark back to earlier “primitive” stages in the history of human evolution. At the time Kipling wrote his stories for children, recapitulation theory influenced the study of, and often the representation of, children in both England and America. Among its most potent axioms was the idea that a longer period of “savagery” in childhood leads to a more civilized adulthood and guards against dangerous “precocity.” The idea that boys are and, in fact, should be “savage” was promoted by proponents of recapitulation theory. In “Red Dog” Mowgli presents his own evolution as he develops from child to adolescent: “ ‘Mowgli the Frog have I been,’ said he to himself; ‘Mowgli the Wolf have I said that I am. Now Mowgli the Ape must I be before I am Mowgli the Buck. At the end I shall be Mowgli the Man. Ho!’ and he slid his thumb along the eighteen-inch blade of his knife” (p. 338). The evolution Mowgli describes is linked to his rise to power in the jungle. Mowgli’s sixteen years in “nature” make him a recapitulationist version of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, the boy raised in an enclosed “garden” apart from corrupt human civilization: an ideal “natural man.” Like Émile, Mowgli is allowed to play freely in nature, instructed only by the rules guiding the natural world and by direct experience with nature. Kipling makes it clear that Mowgli’s period in the jungle ultimately transforms him into a demigod. Mowgli’s transformation into “Mowgli the Man” in “Red Dog” is a prelude to his final and decisive departure from the jungle.
If The Jungle Books begin with an evocation of Kipling’s own abandonment in England as a child, they conclude with an evocation of Kipling’s return to his family; Mowgli’s exit from the jungle at sixteen mirrors Kipling’s exit from England at the same age and his reunion with “the family square” in Lahore. As in Kim, in the Mowgli stories Kipling creates a coming-of-age saga in which the protagonist seems to move toward joining normative adult society, but does so without losing the wildness of boyhood. This aspect of Kipling’s child heroes anticipates a tendency in modernist fiction. While nineteenth-century novels often focused on the development, or Bildung, of a central youth, tracing that character’s integration into society, the figure of the youth in modernist novels often resists such integration. In this resistance to growing up, Mowgli resembles J. M. Barrie’s eternal child Peter Pan. Like Peter Pan’s Neverland, Mowgli’s jungle is—for Mowgli—an arena of childhood innocence about sexuality. Moreover, like Neverland, it is a place outside of human society in which a band of brothers share adventures. Barrie’s “lost boys,” who, though they are not animals, don animal skins and live in a burrow, possess an unending childhood as long as they remain in Neverland. Mowgli remains master of the jungle—just as Peter is master of Neverland—until the final story of The Second Jungle Book, “The Spring Running,” in which he enters the world of adult sexuality. Sexuality is here presented as the only jungle language the growing boy cannot understand. At the precise moment that he can understand this language, he sees that he must leave the jungle.
The Jungle Books conclude somberly with advice given to Mowgli by his surviving mentors—Bagheera, Kaa, and Baloo—as he leaves the jungle. Their parting words, which describe how the boy will be “Prisoned from our Mother-sky,” conjure Wordsworth’s sorrowful account of maturation in “Intimations of Immortality”: “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy.” Their reference to “toil [he cannot] break” implicitly depicts Mowgli’s jungle childhood as an Eden that must inevitably be lost. Mowgli, like the adolescent Kipling, must enter the world of human work. In much late-Victorian and Edwardian writing, as here, childhood is represented
as a world of play, defined against the adult world of work.
KIPLING’S LEGACY
The Mowgli stories have had many imitators, the first appearing in the years just after The Jungle Books were published. In Something of Myself, Kipling observes, “My Jungle Books begat zoos of [imitators]. But the genius of all the genii was one who wrote a series called Tarzan of the Apes.... He had ”jazzed“ the motif of the Jungle Books and, I imagine, had thoroughly enjoyed himself.” Edgar Rice Burroughs, ten years Kipling’s junior, published the first book in his series, Tarzan of the Apes, in 1914. Tarzan, like Mowgli, remains an iconic figure; but he differs from Kipling’s jungle boy in his “noble” heritage, which, the stories suggest, make him innately superior to others. Just as Kipling focused on the common British soldier in his early stories about the camp life of the British military, in The Jungle Books he fixes his attention on an ordinary boy with extraordinary talent. While Burroughs asserts the superiority of his upper-class hero, Kipling celebrates the meteoric rise of a mere woodcutter’s son.
Other versions of the stories—plays, films, and spin-off books—have been produced over the decades. The Walt Disney Company alone has produced dozens of picture books featuring Mowgli and his cronies. The Jungle Book tales have been made into films several times. The first movie of the Mowgli stories was a live-action film directed in 1942 by Zoltan Korda, with Mowgli played by the Indian actor Sabu. Sabu had previously starred in Robert Flaherty’s film “Elephant Boy,” an adaptation of another Jungle Book story, “Toomai of the Elephants.” The Mowgli stories next appeared on screen in 1967, when Disney released the popular animated version, the last film that Walt Disney himself crafted. More recently, director Fumio Kurokawa created more than fifty episodes of a series based on the Mowgli stories for Japanese television.
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