Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books were immensely popular when first published and have remained so since. Though more modern interpretations question its vision of the colonial relationship, its nostalgia for the carefree days of childhood means it retains a certain charm intact. Written at a time when the relationship between humans and animals was changing, there is much else to enjoy in The Jungle Books besides the famous Mowgli stories.

Rudyard Kipling’s short story collections The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book were first published in 1894-5. They contain fifteen stories in all, eight of which concern Mowgli – a boy raised by wolves in the Indian jungle. Thanks to Disney, Mowgli’s adventures have been immortalised and have become what most people know of as ‘The Jungle Book’.  But the other seven stories in the collections offer plenty else to enjoy and ponder.

Most of the stories, including most of the non-Mowgli ones, are set in India where Kipling was born and spent his early childhood and some of his early adulthood. Almost all are centred on the lives of animals. There is an Aesop-like aspect to the stories in that they are stories of anthropomorphised animals with morals or at least deeper meanings attached. Most of the stories are interspersed with songs and poems or with songs that are referred to in the stories and shared at the end. Though some have a childlike aspect to them, they perhaps depict nature a little too ‘red in tooth and claw’ to truly be considered children’s stories by modern standards.

One of my favourites of the collection was The White Seal. Inspired by the work of American naturalist Henry Wood Elliott, it tells the life story of Kotick, a white seal born into an island rookery in the north Pacific. The seals there have been devastated by hunting by humans yet most of the seals seem to care little for how their population and locations have dwindled. They focus instead on maintaining their way of life and traditions with no appreciation of what the future holds.

Kotick instead makes it his life mission to find a new home for the seals where they will be safe from human predators. It is a goal that will take him many years and will see him travel over much of the Pacific. The context for Kipling’s story was the ongoing disputes between Canada and the USA over hunting rights to the seals and the newly emerging ideas of conservation, human-caused impact on the environment and species extinction. The story ends with a seal national anthem!  

The story Quiquern gives a vivid portrayal of the culture and the precariousness of life of the Inuit of the Arctic. The protagonist of the story is a young man named Kotuku. After a poor season leaves his village facing starvation, Kotuku journeys out to find food. He is putting his life at risk but faces little choice as their ability to survive the winter looks bleak. Coming with him on this daring journey is a young woman he has only recently met. Battling the elements, guided by their mythology, it becomes difficult for them to distinguish between what is real and what is madness induced by their extreme hunger and the conditions they are barely surviving.

Another of my favourite non-Mowgli stories was The Miracle of Purun Bhagat. It is the story of a man who rises to become Prime Minister of an Indian principality. The man belongs to the Brahmin caste and at the height of his career gives it all away to become a wandering ascetic holy man with only a shawl, a blanket, a walking stick and a begging bowl. Finding a disused temple he makes it his permanent home and lives years in silence supported by the offerings from a nearby village. He becomes one with nature until a warning he reads in nature compels him to take action for the first time in years.

The fame of Mowgli will probably remain the main draw to this collection.

Mowgli’s story begins when a human camp in the jungle is attacked by a tiger – Shere Khan. A baby boy is separated from his human family and is found by a wolf family who adopt him and protect him when Shere Khan comes looking for him. Shere Khan has been lame since birth and as a result is a poor hunter for a tiger. This compels him to hunt humans instead which attracts trouble for all in the jungle when humans come to intervene.

The Law of the Jungle, which never orders anything without a reason, forbids every beast to eat Man except when he is killing to show his children how to kill, and then he must have it outside the hunting-grounds of his pack or tribe. The real reason for this is that man-killing means, sooner or later, the arrival of white men on elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with gongs and rockets and torches. Then everybody in the jungle suffers. The reason the beasts give among themselves is that man is the weakest and most defenceless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him. They say too – and it is true – that man-eaters become mangy, and lose their teeth.

But the adoption of Mowgli is not a simple matter. The Law of the Jungle requires Mowgli to be accepted by the pack at a wolf council as soon as he can walk. But will anyone, other than his wolf parents, support Mowgli’s inclusion?

The only non-wolf permitted at the wolf council is Baloo. A sleepy brown bear, Baloo teaches all the new wolf cubs the Law of the Jungle. Baloo says he will speak for Mowgli.

Bagheera, a cunning black panther, also attends the meeting. Although not part of the council, Bagheera cites a bylaw that allows a cub’s life to be bought. Bagheera offers to buy Mowgli’s life for the price of a freshly-slain bull and the wolves accept.

And so, the adventures of Mowgli the man-cub begin. With the guidance of Baloo and Bagheera, Mowgli adheres to the Law of the Jungle. From kidnapping by monkeys, to exploring ruined cities hidden in the jungle and occasional encounters with the human world, Mowgli’s life combines a certain carefree liberty with the harsh realities of life in nature. The threat of Shere Khan is ever present and, as the years go by, he exerts his influence over the younger members of the wolf pack. Baloo, Bagheera and pack leader Akhela grow too old to protect Mowgli and the question of his true place in the world remains unanswered.

‘Wolf! Wolf’s cub! Go away!’ shouted the priest, waving a sprig of the sacred tulsi plant.

‘Again? Last time it was because I was a man. This time it is because I am a wolf.’

This Penguin Classics edition of The Jungle Books also includes the story In the Rukh as an Appendix. In the Rukh was the first Mowgli story Kipling wrote. Not normally included as part of The Jungle Books it features an adult Mowgli living in the Indian jungle but not ignorant of the world of men. Recognised for his wisdom of nature, Mowgli is hired by the British to work as a sort of park ranger but must overcome the prejudice towards him from other Indians. It can be read as a sort of sequel to The Jungle Books.

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865. Like many English children born in India during the Raj period, Kipling spent his early years effectively being raised by Indian servants and staff and spoke Hindi as his first language. At the age of five, he was abruptly sent to England for school. It was a harsh unloving environment where Kipling was subject to bullying and abuse.

Kipling would return to India and work as a journalist for a time and travel much of the country. His fiction often contains a theme of belonging to more than one culture or community without being fully accepted by either while finding no respect for the idea that one should be able to define one’s own identity regardless of the acknowledgement of others. This is certainly true for the Mowgli stories and is one of the appeals of his fiction to many. So too, the semi-autobiographical nostalgia for a carefree loving childhood and the heartbreak and trauma of being torn away from it.

Kipling has several sources for inspiration for these stories including from within his own family. Kipling’s father, for example, was an artist and an illustrator who wrote a book on relationships between animals and humans in India.

Kipling wrote in a variety of genres and became an immensely popular author internationally, perhaps the most popular English author since Dickens. His achievements are far too numerous and his influence far too broad for me to detail here but they culminated in Kipling being named the first English-language recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.

Unsurprisingly, for any work that was once very popular but belongs to a bygone era and crosses cultural lines, questions are inevitably asked about its appropriateness for modern audiences. I don’t give such arguments much time. I believe in the importance of understanding a work in the context of the time it was written and this does not to excuse it or advocate for its ideas. If the work loses popularity because people today cannot engage with it as people of the past had, so be it. But I am not in favour of banning works. I can understand the impulse to alter works of the past in an attempt to appeal to new generations but not if the original version becomes impossible to find. I will always prefer to experience the original form and try to understand it in context however difficult that experience might be.

There can be little doubt that Kipling was a Victorian and an Imperialist. It is not an excuse to say that, like all of us, Kipling was a product of his time in this regard. Equally, it is also a fair criticism to point out that he lived in an era where many of the ideas of race, sex and empire were being vigorously challenged but Kipling failed to see the strength of these arguments and in fact often fought against change. The question is to what extent is some of this is reflected in his writing.

Jan Montefiore, Professor of Twentieth-Century English Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury and author of a book on Kipling, says in the General Preface to this edition:

Yet although Kipling’s writing is certainly informed, and sometimes deformed, by his political views, it is by no means reducible to these. This can be seen in his masterpiece Kim (1901) and to a lesser extent in the two Jungle Books, colonial fictions in which ‘otherness’ is regarded with pleasure, not anxiety, just as the Just So stories deal with the ‘other’ world of the animal fable and the Puck books with the differences as well as the continuity of English history. The orphaned heroes Kim and Mowgli, never disciplined to the life of labour and duty whose virtues Kipling so often preached, are made free of the Jungle and the street-life of Lahore, apparently threatening places which are really magical worlds…

Montefiore goes on to cite examples from Kipling’s fiction where racists are mocked, native characters are given a complexity and vividness not afforded to the English ones but also where stereotypes are employed and the benevolence of British rule is assumed while a rejection of it is considered insane.

Similarly in the Introduction to this edition, Kaori Nagai – also a teacher at the University of Kent and an author of books on Kipling – cites the complex and contradictory insights into the colonial relationship contained in The Jungle Books. She argues that Mowgli’s jungle is an analogy for the British Empire with its spirit of fair play and lawfulness. But not all of the Jungle. In contrast, the monkeys of Bandar-log represent British fears of native revolt with the monkey’s being a racist representation of the worst native characteristics – idle, immoral, ungovernable, shameless, dirty. Perhaps even more obvious are those stories in The Jungle Books which clearly speak to the causes of the Mutiny of 1857 and the ongoing fear of a repeat. Although, she points out that these stories at least allow for alternative native interpretations of the Mutiny.

As both of these contributors point out, Kipling’s stories cannot be simply reduced to analogies of his political views as they contain contrary examples. For myself, I finished The Jungle Books with a conclusion that they contain much that is contrary. But on reflection I think what I thought was contrary could instead be interpreted as more evidence for the case. This is especially true if you consider the animals in the Mowgli stories to be colonised not colonist.

If the animals are colonist, then it is not clear what Shere Khan – the villain of these stories – represents. Given his desire to be the dominant force of the jungle, using threats and manipulations and subversion of the Law, does he represent a tyrannical aspect to colonialism that the good actor colonists – Baloo, Bagheera and Akela – struggle and fail to keep at bay?

Shere Khan was always crossing his path in the jungle, for as Akela grew older and feebler the lame tiger had come to be great friends with the younger wolves of the Pack, who followed him for scraps, a thing Akela would never have allowed if he had dared to push his authority to the proper bounds. Then Shere Khan would flatter them and wonder that such fine young hunters were content to be led by a dying wolf and a man’s cub. ‘They tell me,’ Shere Khan would say, ‘that at Council ye dare not look him between the eyes’; and the young wolves would growl and bristle.

If the animals are colonist, and Mowgli’s jungle represents an imperial fantasy, what do we make of its clear and repeated impotence? More than once when the system is in danger of being destroyed, the impulse is to concede, run and hide and it is left to Mowgli to inspire and work the unlikely victory.

Also, we can’t say all the animals are colonists or we have to explain the role of the monkeys.  

On the other hand, if the animals – all of them – represent the colonised and Mowgli alone represents the British colonisers, then Shere Khan’s role becomes clear as an ever-present threat of native violent rebellion against the colonisers. So too does Mowgli’s role make sense as a hero from the view advocating a beneficent imperial protector. By making all the animals natives we avoid any monkey differentiation too.

Mowgli’s jungle is presented as a space of friendship and hospitality, in which different nations and races coexist harmoniously under the ultimate authority of the White Man. Mowgli’s animal friends thus represent law-abiding colonial subjects who would not, and cannot, disobey the White Man who Mowgli as man (a species apart) stands in for. As John McClure puts it: ‘to be above yet to belong, to be obeyed as a god and loved as a brother, this is Kipling’s dream for the imperial ruler, a dream that Mowgli achieves.’ The use of animals, who can be tamed and who would not talk back in human tongues, facilitates the construction and perpetuation of such a colonial fantasy.

From the Introduction

But then, what do we make of the fact that the Jungle Law predates Mowgli, must be taught to him and of his struggles to adhere to it? Imperialists would have it that the law is colonialism’s greatest gift to the colonised yet this interpretation would make it the reverse.  

Such are the dilemmas of reading too far into this.

As Nagai points out, as well as the colonial relationship, The Jungle Books also speak to a relationship between humans and the natural world. The Jungle Books (1894-95) are among a family of other stories exploring this relationship, or with anthropomorphised animals, that were published in the same era – Black Beauty (1877), Peter Rabbit (1901), The Wind in the Willows (1908), Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Winnie the Pooh (1926). Unlike the portrayal of the colonial relationship, the relationship between humans and animals was subject to examination and change in Kipling’s work. The example already shared of The White Seal story being a notable one.

I do have a couple of minor quibbles of my own about The Jungle Books. I wish the Mowgli stories had more female characters. His wolf mother and human mother both have small but important roles but I wish at least one of the main animal characters also gave us a female voice. I also wish this edition was illustrated. Especially since past ones were, including the first edition in which Kipling’s artist father provided the illustrations.

Though there have been several adaptations; the 1967 Disney animated film is probably still the best known. It now comes with a disclaimer for possible negative depictions and stereotypes of people and cultures. I watched it again for perhaps the first time since childhood and found it a pleasant piece of nostalgia thought not without its problems such as its brevity, overly simple story and repetitiveness. Problematic but still not without its charms.

Charm is probably the main reason The Jungle Books has endured. Despite whatever the stories may have to say about the colonial relationship, the more universal and durable themes of the freedom of childhood and the trauma of its end, has made the stories relatable through the generations. So too the question of belonging for those of us with feet in more than one culture. It is also worth remembering there is more to enjoy in The Jungle Books than the more famous Mowgli stories.