Jungle Books (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Rudyard Kipling

  6 (p. 93) He went to the Gallapagos ... Cape of Good Hope: The Galapagos are a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Ecuador. South Georgia Island, Nightingale and Gough Islands (both of the Tristan da Cunha group), and Bouvet Island are located in the South Atlantic Ocean. The Orkney Islands are off the northeastern coast of Scotland. Emerald Island is in the South Pacific Ocean. The Crosset, or Crozet, Islands are in the southern Indian Ocean. The Cape of Good Hope is on the southwestern coast of South Africa.

  7 (p. 127) Afghan war of 1842: The First Afghan War (1838-1842) arose from Britain’s attempt to control Afghanistan’s government and to protect access to northern approaches to India.

  8 . (p. 127) the Emperor Theodore lying dead ... Abyssinian war medal: Britain invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1867 when Tewodros II, emperor of Ethiopia (1855-1868), referred to here as Theodore, imprisoned several British envoys. Tewodros committed suicide when he was defeated in 1868.

  9 (p. 134) great cleared flat places hidden away in the forests that are called elephants’ ballrooms. ... “And when didst thou see the elephants dance?”: Kipling’s father, Lockwood Kipling, describes this myth of the elephants’ dance in Beast and Man in India: A Popular Sketch of Indian Animals in Their Relations with the People (London and New York: Macmillan, 1891): “Colonel Lewin tells me of a belief in the Chittagong Hill tracts, that wild elephants assemble there to dance! Further, that once he came with his men on a large cleared place in the forest, the floor beaten hard and smooth, like that of a native hut. ‘This,’ said the men in perfect good faith, ‘is an elephant nuatch-khana’—ballroom.... I confess to a deep envy of the Assam coolie who said he had been a hidden unbidden guest at an elephant ball. Elephants are easily taught to dance by American and European circus trainers; and it is recorded by an American trainer that elephants off duty, left entirely to themselves, have been seen to rehearse the lessons they have learned. Let us believe, then, until some dismal authority forbids us, that the elephant beau monde meets by the bright Indian moonlight in the ballrooms they clear in the depths of the forest, and dance mammoth quadrilles and reels to the sighing of the wind through the trees and their own trumpeting, shrill and sudden as the highlander’s hoch! (pp. 249-250).”

  10 (p. 151) Rawal Pindi... the Viceroy of India... was receiving a visit from the Amir of Afghanistan: Rawalpindi, now part of Pakistan, was the site of an important British military station in British India. In 1885, while working there as a journalist for the Civil and Military Gazette, Kipling reported on a meeting between Viceroy Lord Dutton and Abdul Rahman, amir of Afghanistan.

  11 (p. 165) “Bonnie Dundee”: The reference is to a well-known song about the legendary Scottish Royalist and Jacobite commander John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee (1648-1689), who was nicknamed “Bonnie Dundee.” The most famous version of the song was written by Scottish poet Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832).

  THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK

  1 (p. 203) Simla: Because of its cool climate, the town of Simla, in Himachal Pradesh in the Lesser Himalayas of northern India, was a popular “hill station,” a place of retreat for the British during the summer months. Simla was the summer residence of the British government.

  2 (p. 214) A Song of Kabir: This is not a translation of a poem by Indian mystic philosopher and poet Kabir (1440-1518); rather it is a Kipling poem inspired by Kabir’s writings. Kabir opposed the caste system and religious sectarianism, a view shared by Kipling.

  3 (p. 220) will flash like a heliograph: An instrument that generates signals by reflecting sunlight off of mirrors, the heliograph was used by the British army in India.

  4 (p. 250) his Ally Sloper-like head: Kipling compares the crane’s appearance to that of Ally Sloper, a comic-strip character invented in 1867 by British novelist Charles Henry Ross (and drawn by Ross’s wife, Marie Duval). Ally Sloper is considered by many to be England’s first comic strip.

  5 (p. 264) “the season I think of ... the dead English came down, touching each other. I got my girth in that season... the broad waters by Allahabad —”: The Mugger is alluding to the Indian Mutiny (1857-1858), a widespread revolt against British rule in India, also called the Sepoy Rebellion (native soldiers were called se poys). As the Mugger’s feeding suggests, a massacre by the rebels was followed by an equally savage massacre by the British.

  6 (p. 275) The King’s Ankus: In this story, Kipling borrows the motif of deadly riches from English poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Par doner’s Tale,” in The Canterbury Tales (c.1386-1400). In that tale, three men, on a quest to slay Death, find a bushel of gold; because each desires the gold for himself, the men end up killing each other over it.

  7 (p. 298) Translation: This is not a “translation” but—like all of his epigraphs—Kipling’s own invention. Kipling both begins and ends “Quiquern” with what he says is translated verse; at the story’s end, the narrator claims the entire tale is a “translation” of pictures inscribed on ivory (see p. 320).

  8 (p. 338) “Mowgli the Frog have I been ... At the end I shall be Mowgli the Man”: Mowgli’s description of his own evolution recalls the nineteenth century’s most popular offshoot of English naturalist Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) thought: recapitulation theory. This highly influential theory of human development set forth the idea “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—that is, the development of an individual embryo or youth 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.

  9 (p. 375) Prisoned from our Mother-sky: These words, spoken upon Mowgli’s departure from the Edenic Jungle, recall English poet William Wordsworth’s ode “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1803-1806) : “Shades of the Prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing boy.”

  Inspired by The Jungle Books

  MUSIC

  Over the years, literally hundreds of Kipling’s works have been set to music. Of the many composers to interpret Kipling’s works, two—Charles Koechlin and Percy Grainger—devoted much of their professional lives to Mowgli’s musical fate.

  French composer Koechlin spent four decades (1899-1940) composing music based on Kipling’s stories. A pupil of Massenet and Fauré, Koechlin wrote a variety of works: symphonies and symphonic poems, as well as chamber and choral compositions. However, he is best known for his music inspired by The Jungle Books. The composer’s nearly lifelong process of creating these works involved sketches, revisions, performances, and more revisions. His complete Jungle Book cycle comprises four symphonic poems, including La loi de la jungle, La course de printemps, and Les Bandar-Log, and three contrasting songs. The symphonic poem Les Bandar-Log, perhaps Koechlin’s most famous piece of music, displays his fluency with both old and new styles, as well as his penchants for satire and dreamy, surrealistic imagery. The Song of Kala Nag uses frantic trumpeting to evoke Little Toomai’s elephants. A recording of Koechlin’s Jungle Book, with David Zinman conducting the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, won the 1994 Gramophone Award for Best Orchestral Recording.

  During the same period, Australian-born American composer Percy Grainger wrote and repeatedly revised his own Jungle Book cycle, to create what he considered to be among his best and most ambitious works: “My Kipling Jungle Book Cycle, begun in 1898 and finished in 1947, was composed as a protest against civilization.” Grainger did not publish the work until 1958, and a full recording did not appear until 1996. Of the twenty-two Kipling movements Grainger published, eleven ate dedicated to The Jungle Books. The songs—eight from The Jungle Books, two from Plain Tales from the Hills, and one from Many Inventions—all retain Kipling’s verse. Grainger’s melancholy, almost elegiac songs borrow heavily from folk tradition and present an impressive array of chorus/instrument combinations. Collectively they evoke the jungle’s emotional drama and a nostalgia for childhood innocence. Grainger wrote: “The worth of my music will never be guessed or its
value to mankind felt, until the approach to it is consciously undertaken as a pilgrimage to sorrows.”

  FILM

  Audiences have been enraptured by jungle films since the first Tarzan movie was released in 1918, so the deluge of Kipling adaptations is no surprise. The first screen version of The Jungle Books, which premiered in 1942, was directed by Zoltan Korda, brother of legendary director and producer Alexander Korda. Playing the part of Mowgli is India native Sabu, who made his debut in the Korda-produced Elephant Boy (1937), a film based on Kipling’s Jungle Book story “Toomai of the Elephants.” In Korda’s version, the jungle is a dark, terrifying, and dangerous place. The live animals featured in several scenes nearly steal the show with their displays of both tenderness and ferocity. A number of scenes are set in Mowgli’s village, a human jungle in which mankind’s greed is its undoing. Jungle Book was nominated for four Academy Awards: color Cinematography, Color Art Direction, Dramatic Score, and Special Effects.

  Disney’s final animated feature to be completed during Walt Disney’s lifetime was the immensely successful The Jungle Book (1967). In this version, a rather dimwitted Mowgli sings and dances with his cleverer animal friends, including Bagheera the panther (voiced by Sebastian Cabot) and Baloo the lazy, cuddly bear (Phil Harris). The coming-of-age “man-cub” meets more creatures in his forays into the brilliantly painted jungle: a band of marching elephants, the humorous, cockney-accented vultures, the deceptive serpent Kaa, and the murderous tiger Shere Khan (the silver-tongued George Sanders). For the most part, Kipling’s plot is reduced to a series of lively musical numbers; among the catchiest songs are “The Bare Necessities” and “I Wanna Be Like You.” Another of the film’s high points is King Louie (voiced by swing legend Louis Prima), the scheming orangutan who kidnaps Mowgli. The mass appeal of this 1967 cartoon gave rise to several sequels. In 1994 Disney released a live-action version of The Jungle Book, with an all-star cast that includes Jason Scott Lee, John Cleese, Sam Neill, and Cary Elwes. Directed by Stephen Som mers, this fast-paced action-adventure largely replaces the character development of Kipling’s animals with Mowgli’s romance with a British girl named Kitty and Juan Ruiz Anchia’s lush, beautiful photography. This film, in turn, led to a direct-to-video sequel with a new cast, The Second Jungle Book: Mowgli and Baloo (1997). In 2003 Disney revisited their 1967 film with an animated sequel, The Jungle Book 2, featuring the voices of Haley Joel Osment and John Goodman.

  Comments & Questions

  In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the works, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the works’ history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.

  COMMENTS

  London Quarterly Review

  The Jungle Books carry us into a new wonderland. The spell is never broken; Mowgli, the man cub, with his daring, his gentleness, and his strength, learns all the secrets of the jungle and becomes its master. His early adventures, “Kaa’s Hunting,” which brought ruin to the chattering monkeys; “The White Seal”; and above all the stories of the brave mongoose; and “Toomai of the Elephants,” are pictures unique in their interest. Young and old will be equally charmed with these tales. The Second Jungle Book is as spirited and fascinating as the first. “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat” is a wonderful study of Indian religious life, and also of the power of gentleness in taming all the creatures of the forest, whilst “Letting in the Jungle,” which describes the way in which Mowgli led the elephants to devastate the lands of the man pack who had served him so cruelly; the alligator’s terrible story, and “Red Dog,” the record of a life and death encounter with a pack of wild dogs, are full of spirit and make a reader’s pulses beat high. Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s unique gifts are nowhere shown more conspicuously than in his Jungle Books.

  —January 1896

  Atlantic Monthly

  In all the expressions of appreciation that Mr. Kipling’s Jungle Books still arouse, I wonder if any one has yet pointed out the change these works have quietly wrought in our attitude toward the rest of the animal world? Before these books, and since Darwin, we have believed, or have known vaguely that we ought to believe, that our “in‘ards,” both of body and of brain, are very much the same kind of “in’ards” as those of a cat or a monkey; and we have perhaps prided ourselves on our openness of mind in being ready to accept such lowly relatives without repugnance. What Mr. Kipling has done for us is to make us really know and feel that the larger part of our mental composition is of the same substance as that of our cousins the animals, with a certain superstructure of reasoning faculty which has enabled us to become their masters. Mr. Kipling, indeed, has expounded relationships in the psychology of the animal world as far-reaching as those which Darwin discovered in its morphology.

  —June 1898

  Edmund Wilson

  In the Jungle Books, the animal characters are each one all of a piece, though in their ensemble they still provide a variety, and they are dominated by a ‘Law of the Jungle,’ which lays down their duties and rights. The animals have organized the Jungle, and the Jungle is presided over by Mowgli in his function of forest ranger, so that it falls into its subsidiary place in the larger organization of the Empire. Yet the Jungle Books (written in Vermont) are not artistically off the track; the element of obvious allegory is not out of place in these fairy tales.

  —from Atlantic Monthly (March 1941)

  George Orwell

  It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person. It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a “nigger” with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling’s work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct—on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

  —from Critical Essays (1946)

  QUESTIONS

  1. Can the provisions of nature’s “Law” be specified? What are they?

  2. Can you draw up from The Jungle Books a list of what Kipling would consider sins?

  3. The Atlantic Monthly posits that Kipling imposes a “superstructure of reasoning” upon Mowgli, which differentiates man from Darwin’s beasts. Yet Kipling’s “man,” Mowgli, is quite simple. Also, it is the Bandar-log, the “Monkey People,” who are most lawless and treacherous and impossible to like. Is it not odd that a Darwinian like Kipling would so represent humans and the animals that are closest to humans? How is Mowgli’s character developed differently from those of the animal characters?

  4. In Civilization and Its Discontents Sigmund Freud argues that civilization, which humans constructed to preserve themselves, has come to seem like a cage, and that we secretly yearn to see it crumble. Is this idea at work in The Jungle Books?

  5. George Orwell, a writer best remembered for his political disposition, reveals a singular distaste for Kipling in his essay. It is significant to note that Kipling’s numerous political writings were nowhere near as commercially successful as his literature for children. But are The Jungle Books political after all?

  6. People with all kinds of attitudes toward imperialism and racism have testified to Kipling’s ability to engross them and to let them experience a sense of freedom and release by p
roxy through his characters. How does he do it?

  For Further Reading

  BIOGRAPHY

  Birkenhead, Frederick Winston Furneaux Smith, Earl of. Rudyard Kipling. New York: Random House, 1978.

  Carrington, Charles. Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. Revised edition. London: Macmillan, 1978.

  Gilmour, David. The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling. London: John Murray, 2002.

  Harrison, James. Rudyard Kipling. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982.

  Lycett, Andrew. Rudyard Kipling. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999.

  Mallett, Phillip. Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

  Ricketts, Harry. The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling. London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. Published in the United States as Rudyard Kipling: A Life, New York: Car-roll and Graf, 2001.

  Wilson, Angus. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works. New York: Viking Press, 1977.

  CRITICISM AND REFERENCE

  Gilbert, Elliot, ed. Kipling and the Critics. New York: New York University Press, 1965.

  Green, Roger Lancelyn. Kipling and the Children. London: Elek Books, 1965.

  , ed. Kipling: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971.

  Gross, John, ed. The Age of Kipling. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.

  Kemp, Sandra. Kipling’s Hidden Narratives. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988.

  Mason, Philip. Kipling: The Glass, the Shadow and the Fire. London: Jonathan Cape, 1975.

  McBratney, John. Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space: Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction of the Native-Born. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002.