The Jungle Books Read Online
| 1914 | On September 2, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Britain’s War Propaganda Bureau holds a sympo sium of leading British writers (including Arthur Conan Doyle, Ford Madox Ford, and H. G. Wells) to discuss how to forward the nation’s interests in the war. Kipling’s invitation is withdrawn because of his political views, but he is subsequently allowed to tour Britain’s army camps. This experience leads to the publication of The New Army in Training and, after a visit to the Western Front in 1915, France in War and a commissioned work on the Royal Navy, The Fringes of the Fleet (both published in 1915). Edgar Rice Burroughs publishes Tarzan of the Apes. |
| 1915 | Six weeks after enlisting in the Irish Guards, Kipling’s son, John, is killed during the Battle of Loos in France. His death will haunt Kipling for the rest of his life. |
| 1919- 1932 | Between intermittent travels during the next dozen years, Kipling continues to publish stories, poems, and historical works, including The Graves of the Fallen, and a book of verse, The Years Between, both published in 1919. |
| 1923 | He is elected rector of St. Andrews University, Scotland, and publishes The Irish Guards in the Great War. |
| 1924 | He publishes Land and Sea: Tales for Boys and Girls. He appears before 6,000 Boy Scouts at the Imperial Jam boree in England. |
| 1928 | A Book of Words: Selections of Speeches and Addresses Delivered Between 1906 and 1927 is published. |
| 1932 | Kipling publishes a volume of stories, Limits and Renewals. |
| 1936 | Kipling dies on January 18 of peritonitis and is buried in Westminster Abbey. |
| 1937 | Something of Myself, Kipling’s autobiography, is pub lished. |
| 1945 | The end of World War II accelerates the decline of the British Empire. |
Introduction
The term “jungle,” derived from the Hindi word jangala, entered the English language only in the eighteenth century; today it evokes dangerous terrain: impenetrable equatorial forests, menacing urban landscapes, and overall mayhem (as in, “it’s a jungle out there”). Even as jungles have gained a new designation—rain forest—and we have learned of their life-sustaining role in the biosphere, the word continues to conjure images of imperial adventure: the white man cutting his way through the brush to hunt big game, or Tarzan swinging from a vine. We owe our deep associations of jungles with mystery, threat, and the struggle for survival in large measure to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books, perhaps the most influential mythology of the jungle written in English.
Kipling composed The Jungle Books in the mid-1890s, just when he had reached the peak of his celebrity as a writer. The books were phenomenally popular and well received by critics when they first appeared in 1894 (The Jungle Book) and 1895 (The Second Jungle Book). The stories they include are marked not only by the events of Kipling’s life but by the interests and anxieties of late-Victorian culture, by prevailing attitudes toward empire, gender, nature, race, and children. Kipling’s jungle has been decoded by readers as both an allegory of empire and an allegory of childhood. It articulates a philosophy of human nature, a theory of education, and a distinct conception of the relationship between humans and the natural world. The Jungle Book tales also produce a powerful myth of male identity; they provided the inspiration for Robert Baden-Powell’s world-renowned organization, the Boy Scouts, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s perennially popular Tarzan series. Although the stories are marked by the culture in which they were produced, they remain popular and have been translated into dozens of languages, including Estonian, Welsh, Finnish, Japanese, Yiddish, and Telugu.
EARLY LIFE: BETWEEN INDIA AND ENGLAND
Throughout his life, Rudyard Kipling was a prolific writer of short stories, journalistic sketches, poetry, essays, and children’s literature. He also penned several novels and was a gifted illustrator of his own work. Although this body of work is diverse—including historical tales, comic sketches, and science fiction—much of his writing focuses on life in India, where he was born to British parents in 1865. Kipling spent two stretches of his life in India, from birth to age five, and from sixteen to twenty-three, and India’s unique geographical, political, and social landscapes were recurrently a point of departure for his literary imaginings.
By all accounts, Kipling passed his early years with his family in Bombay in comfort, praised and pampered. He and his younger sister, Alice (called “Trix”), were principally tended by a set of adoring servants, with whom they spoke Hindustani. These servants gave young Rudyard ample opportunity to move freely across linguistic, race, and class lines. At the start of his fragmentary unfinished memoir, Something of Myself (1937), Kipling recalls, “Meeta, my Hindu bearer, would sometimes go into little Hindu temples where, being below the age of caste, I held his hand and looked at the dimly-seen friendly Gods” (Kipling, Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings, p. 3; see “For Further Reading”). When Kipling returned to India in his teens, no longer “below the age of caste,” he again associated his own mobility with the pleasures of looking. He wrote, “I would wander till dawn in all manner of odd places—liquor shops, gambling and opium dens ... wayside entertainments such as puppet shows, native dances; or in and about the narrow gullies under the Mosque of Wazir Khan for the sheer sake of looking” (p. 33). This delight in crossing social boundaries can be seen in his stories for adults and also in the Jungle Book tales, in which characters not only cross lines between social groups but cross borders between species: After being abandoned by his parents, the child Mowgli, perhaps the best-known of these characters, enters a wolf pack, is educated by a bear, and befriends a panther and a python.
As he explains in his memoir, Kipling felt that his own parents abandoned him as a child.
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