The Jungle Book

A jungle Kipling had never seen

Almost everything a reader remembers about Mowgli's jungle was imagined in the snow. Kipling had left India for the last time at the end of 1891, and the Seeonee hills and the Waingunga River were places he knew only from books. Daniel Karlin, who introduced the Penguin Classics edition, points out that the Arctic stories, "The White Seal" among them, were built the same way.

Karlin also shows how freely Kipling bent his main source. Robert Armitage Sterndale had no good word for either the tiger or the panther. Kipling made Shere Khan a lame coward and Bagheera noble. Sterndale wrote that wolves took village children as a matter of course; in the book, only wolves corrupted by Shere Khan do it.

The wolf-children in Sleeman's reports were the opposite of Mowgli. In his accounts they ran on all fours and growled instead of speaking, and one boy was never known to laugh or smile. Mowgli walks upright, bathes every day, learns the animals' languages and cries when he has to leave. Karlin reads him as close to an exact inversion of the reports Kipling had been reading.

The Law, and who it serves

The Law of the Jungle in the book is almost the reverse of what the phrase now means. The Law is a code of order: the pack inspects every new cub, a hunter may not move to new ground without warning, and nobody kills man except in special cases. The reason the Law gives for that last rule is practical. Killing a man brings white men on elephants with guns, and then everybody in the jungle suffers.

The last story makes the imperial frame plain. Mules, camels, elephants and horses gossip in an army camp at Rawalpindi before a parade for the Viceroy of India and the visiting Amir of Afghanistan. Afterwards an Afghan chief asks how the beasts were made to obey. The Indian officer's answer runs up a chain of command from driver to Viceroy to Empress. The officer then adds that the Amir, whom the chief's people do not obey, must come to take orders from the Viceroy.

Readers in Kipling's lifetime saw both sides at once. The Swedish Academy's speech at the 1907 Nobel Prize called him an imperialist who had done more than any other writer to bind England to her colonies. In the next breath it praised the jungle books as fables loved by children in many countries. Marghanita Laski, quoted in the Kipling Society's notes, put the lessons bluntly: respect the family, the teachers and the overlords, and despise the talkers who never get anything done.

The white seal and the beaches where no man comes

"The White Seal" looks like a rescue story, and it ends with Kotick fat and happy on a sheltered beach. Karlin points out what sits underneath. The guide who leads Kotick there is Sea Cow, and the northern sea cow had already been hunted to extinction when Kipling wrote. The song that follows the story, "Lukannon", mourns seals shot in the water and clubbed on land.

Paris, 1899: Le Livre de la jungle

French readers met Mowgli through a Paris publisher. The Paris publishing house of the Mercure de France issued Le Livre de la jungle in 1899. The translation was by Louis Fabulet and Robert d'Humières, and the two men did The Second Jungle Book the same year. Fabulet made the first French translations of Kipling. In 1921, when the Sorbonne gave Kipling an honorary doctorate, Fabulet wrote to the Mercure de France to point out that he had introduced Kipling to France.