The Jungle Book

Author	Rudyard Kipling
Illustrator	John Lockwood Kipling (Rudyard's father)
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Series	The Jungle Books
Genre	Children's book
Publisher	Macmillan Publishers
Publication date	1894
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
ISBN	NA
Preceded by	"In the Rukh"
Followed by	The Second Jungle Book

The Jungle Book (1894) is a collection of stories by English Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling. The stories were first published in magazines in 1893–94. The original publications contain illustrations, some by Rudyard's father, John Lockwood Kipling. Kipling was born in India and spent the first six years of his childhood there. After about ten years in England, he went back to India and worked there for about six-and-half years. These stories were written when Kipling lived in Vermont.There is evidence that it was written for his daughter Josephine, who died in 1899 aged six, after a rare first edition of the book with a poignant handwritten note by the author to his young daughter was discovered at the National Trust's Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire in 2010.

The tales in the book (and also those in The Second Jungle Book which followed in 1895, and which includes five further stories about Mowgli) are fables, using animals in an anthropomorphic manner to give moral lessons. The verses of The Law of the Jungle, for example, lay down rules for the safety of individuals, families and communities. Kipling put in them nearly everything he knew or "heard or dreamed about the Indian jungle."[3] Other readers have interpreted the work as allegories of the politics and society of the time.[4] The best-known of them are the three stories revolving around the adventures of an abandoned "man cub" Mowgli who is raised by wolves in the Indian jungle. The most famous of the other stories are probably "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi", the story of a heroic mongoose, and "Toomai of the Elephants", the tale of a young elephant-handler. As with much of Kipling's work, each of the stories is preceded by a piece of verse, and succeeded by another.

The Jungle Book, because of its moral tone, came to be used as a motivational book by the Cub Scouts, a junior element of the Scouting movement. This use of the book's universe was approved by Kipling after a direct petition of Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouting movement, who had originally asked for the author's permission for the use of the Memory Game from Kim in his scheme to develop the morale and fitness of working-class youths in cities. Akela, the head wolf in The Jungle Book, has become a senior figure in the movement, the name being traditionally adopted by the leader of each Cub Scout pack.

Chapters

The complete book, having passed into the public domain, is on-line at Project Gutenberg's official website and elsewhere. Each of the even-numbered items below is an epigrammatic poem related to the previous story.

    "Mowgli's Brothers": A boy is raised by wolves in the Indian Jungle with the help of Baloo the bear and Bagheera the black panther, and then has to fight the tiger Shere Khan. This story has also been published as a short book in its own right: Night-Song in the Jungle

    "Hunting-Song of the Seeonee Pack"

    "Kaa's Hunting": This story takes place before Mowgli fights Shere Khan. When Mowgli is abducted by monkeys, Baloo and Bagheera set out to rescue him with the aid of Chil the Kite and Kaa the python. Maxims of Baloo.

    "Road Song of the Bandar-Log"

    "Tiger! Tiger!": Mowgli returns to the human village and is adopted by Messua and her husband who believe him to be their long-lost son Nathoo. But he has trouble adjusting to human life, and Shere Khan still wants to kill him. The story's title is taken from the poem "The Tyger" by William Blake.

    "Mowgli's Song"

    "The White Seal": Kotick, a rare white-furred Northern fur seal, searches for a new home for his people, where they will not be hunted by humans. The "animal language" words and names in this story are a phonetic spelling of Russian spoken with an Aleut accent, for example "Stareek!" (= Старик!) = "old man!", "Ochen scoochnie" (said by Kotick) = "I am very lonesome" = Очень скучный (correctly means "very boring"), holluschick (plural -i.e.) (= холостяк, pl. -и = "bachelor") (used in the story for "unmarried" young adult seals).

    "Lukannon"

    "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi": Rikki-Tikki the mongoose defends a human family living in India against a pair of cobras. This story has also been published as a short book.

    "Darzee's Chaunt"

    "Toomai of the Elephants": Toomai, a ten-year-old boy who helps to tend working elephants, is told that he will never be a full-fledged elephant-handler until he has seen the elephants dance. This story has also been published as a short book.

    "Shiv and the Grasshopper"

    "Her Majesty's Servants" (originally titled "Servants of the Queen"): On the night before a military parade a British soldier eavesdrops on a conversation between the camp animals.

    "Parade-Song of the Camp Animals" parodies several well-known songs and poems, including Bonnie Dundee.

 

 Characters

In alphabetical order:

    Akela – An Indian Wolf

    Bagheera – A melanistic (black) panther

    Baloo— A Sloth Bear

    Bandar-log – A tribe of monkeys

    Chil – A kite (renamed "Rann" in US editions)

    Chuchundra – A Muskrat

    Darzee – A tailorbird

    Father Wolf – The Father Wolf who raised Mowgli as his own cub

    Grey brother – One of Mother and Father Wolf's cubs

    Hathi – An Indian Elephant

    Ikki – An Asiatic Brush-tailed Porcupine (mentioned only)

    Kaa – Indian Python

    Karait – Common Krait

    Kotick – A White Seal

    Mang – A Bat

    Mor – An Indian Peafowl

    Mowgli – Main character, the young jungle boy

    Nag – A male Black cobra

    Nagaina – A female King cobra, Nag's mate

    Raksha – The Mother wolf who raised Mowgli as her own cub

    Rikki-Tikki-Tavi – An Indian Mongoose

    Sea Catch – A Northern fur seal and Kotick's father

    Sea Cow – A Steller's Sea Cow

    Sea Vitch – A Walrus

    Shere Khan— A Royal Bengal Tiger

    Tabaqui – An Indian Jackal

Adaptations

The book's text has often been abridged or adapted for younger readers, and there have also been several comic book adaptations.

Books

Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book is inspired by The Jungle Book. It follows a baby boy who is found and brought up by the dead in a cemetery. It has many scenes that can be directly linked back to Kipling, but with Gaiman's dark twist. Mr. Gaiman has spoken in some detail about this on his website.[6]

Live-action film

    "Toomai of the Elephants" was filmed as Elephant Boy (1937), starring Sabu Dastagir. In the 1960s there was a television series of the same name, loosely based on the story and film.

    Jungle Book (1942) – directed by Zoltán Korda, starring Sabu Dastagir as Mowgli.

    Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1994) – starring Jason Scott Lee as Mowgli.

    The Second Jungle Book: Mowgli and Baloo (1997) – starring Jamie Williams as Mowgli.

    The Jungle Book: Mowgli's Story (1998) – starring Brandon Baker as Mowgli.

    The Jungle Book, an adaptation that began production in September 2007 and continued for two years.

    Disney are working on another live action Jungle Book film with Justin Marks penning and another version with Steve Kloves writing for Universal Studios.

Animation

Disney's 1967 animated film version, inspired by the Mowgli stories, was extremely popular, though it took great liberties with the plot, characters and the pronunciation of the characters' names. These characterisations were further used in the 1990 animated series TaleSpin, which featured several anthropomorphic characters loosely based on those from the film in a comic aviation-industry setting.

    In 1967, another animated adaptation was released in the Soviet Union called Mowgli (Russian: Маугли; published as Adventures of Mowgli in the USA), also known as the 'heroic' version of the story. Five animated shorts of about 20 minutes each were released between 1967 and 1971, and combined into a single 96-minute feature film in 1973. It's also very close to the book's storyline, and one of the few adaptations which has Bagheera as a female panther. It also features stories from The Second Jungle Book, such as Red Dog and a simplified version of The King's Ankus. "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" has also been released in 1965 as a cartoon  and in 1976 as a feature film. The former made its way into the hearts of viewers and is even now sometimes aired by TV stations of the Former Soviet Union countries as a classic of Soviet animation. Interestingly, in keeping with Soviet ideology, the Colonial English family in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi has been replaced with an Indian family.

    Chuck Jones's made for-TV cartoons Mowgli's Brothers, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and The White Seal stick to the original storylines more closely than most adaptations.

    There was a Japanese anime television series called Jungle Book Shonen Mowgli broadcast in 1989. Its adaptation represents a compromise between the original stories and the Walt Disney version. Many of Kipling's stories are adapted into the series, but many elements are combined and changed to suit more modern sensibilities. For instance, Akela, the wolf pack alpha eventually steps aside, but instead of being threatened with death, he stays on as the new leader's advisor. Also, there is an Indian family in the series which includes Rikki-Tikki-Tavi as a pet mongoose. Finally at the series' conclusion, Mowgli leaves the jungle for human civilisation, but still keeps strong ties with his animal friends.

        The Japanese anime was dubbed in Hindi and telecast as Jungle Book by Doordarshan in India during the early 1990s. The Indian version featured original music by Vishal Bharadwaj (with words by noted lyricist Gulzar and Nana Patekar doing the voice over for Sher Khan), which made it quite popular among television viewers of that time.

        The anime was also dubbed in Arabic under the title "فتى الأدغال " (Fatā al Adghāl: Boy of the Jungle) and became a hit with Arab viewers in the 1990s.

Controversies

A letter written and signed by Rudyard Kipling in 1895 was put up for auction in 2013 by Andrusier. In this letter, Kipling confesses plagiarism in the 'Jungle Book'. "I am afraid that all that code in its outlines has been manufactured to meet 'the necessities of the case': though a little of it is bodily taken from (Southern) Esquimaux rules for the division of spoils," Kipling wrote in the letter. "In fact, it is extremely possible that I have helped myself promiscuously but at present cannot remember from whose stories I have stolen."