The Jungle Books

Rudyard Kipling
(1865–1936) was born in Bombay, the son of an Anglo-Indian professor of architectural sculpture. There he was brought up in the care of “ayahs,” or native nurses, who taught him Hindustani and the native lore that always haunted his imagination and can be seen reflected in
The Jungle Books
. At the age of six, he was sent to England. At twelve, he was sent to a school at Westward Ho!, the scene of
Stalky & Co.
In 1882, he returned to India and embarked on a career in journalism, writing the news stories as well as the tales and ballads that began to make his reputation. After seven years, he went back to England, the literary star of the hour. He married an American and stayed in Vermont off and on for several years in the 1890s. Then he returned to the English countryside, where he remained, except for a few trips abroad, for the rest of his life. The author of innumerable stories and poems, Rudyard Kipling is best known for
Soldiers Three
(1888),
The Light That Failed
(1890),
The Jungle Books
(1894–95),
Captains Courageous
(1897),
Stalky & Co.
(1899),
Kim
(1901), and
Just So Stories
(1902). Among many other honors, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.

 

Alberto Manguel
is a Canadian citizen born in Buenos Aires who settled in France. He is a member of the Canadian Writers' Union, PEN, and a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, and he has been named an Officer of the French Order of Arts and Letters. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Liège in Belgium and the Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, England. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Prix Médicis essay Prize (France) for
A History of Reading
, the McKitterick Prize (England) for his novel
News from a Foreign Country Came
, and the Grinzane Cavour Prize (Italy) for
A Reading Diary
. He also won the Germán Sánchez Ruipérez Prize (Spain) and the Prix Roger Caillois Prize (France) for the ensemble of his work, which has been translated into more than thirty languages.

Alev Lytle Croutier
, whose books have been translated into twenty-one languages, is the only woman novelist from Turkey to be published extensively worldwide. She is the author of the international bestseller
Harem: The World Behind the Veil
, novels such as
The Palace of Tears
and
Seven Houses
, and, for young readers, American Girl's
Leyla: The Black Tulip
.
The founding editor and editor-in-chief of Mercury House publishing company, she lectures frequently at universities, museums, and conferences.

THE
Jungle Books

 

 

 

 

RUDYARD KIPLING

With a New Introduction
by Alberto Manguel
and an Afterword
by Alev Lytle Croutier

SIGNET CLASSICS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Published by Signet Classics, an imprint of New American Library,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Introduction copyright © Alberto Manguel, 2013

Afterword copyright © Alev Lytle Croutier, 2005

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REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

ISBN 978-1-101-63772-2

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

I read the
Jungle Books
for the first time when I was ten years old. This was half a century ago, when I and my family had just returned to Buenos Aires after many years abroad. Even then, I was a voracious reader. Brought up by an English-speaking Czech nanny, having little contact with my brothers or my parents, changing lodgings frequently because of my father's job, I felt I had no roots except those offered by my books. I felt at home there, between the pages.

It is therefore not surprising that the adventures of Mowgli, a boy bereft of his parents and adopted by a loving but alien family of wolves, taught by various other creatures how to find his way in the world, appealed to me. Without being quite conscious of the fact, I felt that
The
Jungle Books
were a sort of mirror of my own condition. I often find such mirrors in books, even today.

Mowgli's Indian jungle, in spite of the threats and the dangers, was transformed, in my mind, into a paradisiacal environment in which Mowgli moved about with almost absolute freedom, curtailed only by the jungle's implacable and wise laws. Certainly, the Indian landscape of Kipling's childhood was, in his nostalgic memory, a species of paradise, a place he lost when he was taken to England by his parents and that he only regained much later, conjuring it up in his writing. But paradise regained is different from paradise lost in that we can no longer wander its paths innocently. The place may be the same, but when we return to it, we do so laden with the knowledge of the world, and instead of blissfully experiencing paradise in all innocence, we are now compelled to judge it from the distance of age.

Kipling called biography “higher cannibalism”; he didn't believe that a writer's life illuminated the writing, and in his verse “The Appeal” he asked his readers that “. . . for the little, little span / The dead are borne in mind, / Seek not to question other than / The books I leave behind.” And yet, in Kipling's own case, his life is so entwined with his work that the one sheds light upon the other and helps readers become aware of further, unsuspected dimensions in the text.

Kipling was born in India in 1865. Brought up by doting servants and indulgent parents, he was (as he himself acknowledged) a minuscule tyrant whose every whim was satisfied, ruling over a world of wonderful sights and sounds and smells in which almost nothing was forbidden. Therefore, when at the age of five, he and his three-year-old sister were taken to England and left at a coastal boardinghouse in Southsea without even a good-bye kiss (his mother was afraid that a loving farewell would upset the children even more), Kipling felt not merely expelled from paradise but condemned to an incomprehensible hell. Left in the care of a heartless puritanical woman and her weak husband, a retired seaman, Kipling spent five long years, bullied, tortured, and unloved, his eyesight deteriorating and his spirit close to being broken. Only after a visitor noticed the boy's pitiful plight were his parents summoned back from India; when his mother arrived and entered his room, the child's first gesture was to raise an arm to ward off the expected blow. The experience of the boardinghouse, horrible as it was, prepared him (he wrote in his autobiography) for life as a writer, “in that it demanded constant wariness, the habit of observation, and attendance on moods and tempers; the noting of discrepancies between speech and action; a certain reserve of demeanour; and automatic suspicion of sudden favour.”

Kipling did not return to India for several more years. After the boardinghouse experience, he was sent to school at the United Services College called Westward Ho!, an institution set up for Anglo-Indian boys, where Kipling became acquainted with the writings of the Latin poet Horace, the English art critic John Ruskin, poets such as Robert Browning and Walt Whitman, and many others who would become his lifelong loves.

Kipling arrived back in India in 1882, a mustachioed, bespectacled, cocky young man of seventeen, and immediately entered the offices of the
Civil and Military Gazette
of Lahore. At Westward Ho! he had begun to write poems, which he sent home to his parents in Bombay. As a surprise for his sixteenth birthday, his mother had had these privately printed under the title
Schoolboy Lyrics
. Five years later, Kipling, more certain now of his literary vocation, published a collection of occasional ballads,
Departmental Ditties
, made up to look like a government office file, tied with a bow of pink ribbon. In India, it was an immense success.

But it was a different kind of writing that was to mark Kipling's entry into the world of English letters. A new editor of the
Gazette
, Kay Robinson, decided to introduce to the paper a daily short feature on a popular theme, not to run more than two thousand words, and put Kipling to the task. Kipling immensely enjoyed writing these short pieces and they procured him immediate fame in the Anglo-Indian circles of Lahore, Bombay, and Simla, since the characters he described were easily recognizable and the anecdotes familiar to all.

Kipling later said that these stories wrote themselves, his pen taking charge and skating over the page, displaying what the public thought was a precocious knowledge of the world and was instead, in the mind of the inspired twenty-year-old, a profound intuition of poetic truth. His subjects were the romantic entanglements of the Anglo-Indians, the native adventures of the British soldiers, but also stories of Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and hundreds of others: the rich, fathomless, highly charged life of British India at the end of the nineteenth century. The experience of describing the complex mesh of a multifarious society would prove essential when, years later, Kipling sat down to write the
Jungle Books
.

Most of the stories were gathered in six little volumes that were then published for the Indian railway bookstalls; in 1888, one larger volume appeared with the title
Plain Tales from the Hills
, for which Kipling received £50. About a thousand copies were dispatched to England, where, for a time, they remained unnoticed, until the critic Andrew Lang read the book and declared that he had discovered a genius. The Allahabad newspaper
The Pioneer
decided to send the young man as a reporter to England, to write articles and travel sketches. He was barely twenty-three years old.

In England, Kipling received unanimous praise. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the most respected man of letters at the time, confided to a friend that of all the young writers, Kipling was “the only one with the divine fire.” The novelist Henry James called him “the most complete man of genius.” The author of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, Robert Louis Stevenson, declared that Kipling was “by far the most promising young man who has appeared since—ahem—I appeared.”

Plain Tales from the Hills
are, at their best, masterpieces of concision and understatement. They are bound by a general tone of restraint, an unwillingness to “show off,” coupled with an ironic tone that knows how one acid adjective suffices to lend the whole a different meaning. And a sudden aside, a misleading conclusion, suddenly steers a tale in an unexpected direction. There is a physical limitation, of course, in their writing: the need to fit the given space in a newspaper column, but the effect is never procrustean, never giving the sense of being incomplete. It is as if, in gathering scraps of gossip—a tale told at an officers' club or a ghost story at the market, a scandalous court case or social indiscretion—Kipling knew exactly how to boil them down to the core, to leave nothing but the pure essentials.

In his cautious autobiography,
Something of Myself
, which asks more questions than it answers, written when he was in his seventies and only published posthumously, Kipling revealed that much of his writing method consisted in deletion. “Take of well-ground Indian Ink as much as suffices and a camel-hair brush proportionate to the interspaces of your lines. In an auspicious hour, read your final draft and consider faithfully every paragraph, sentence and word, blacking out where requisite. Let it lie by to drain as long as possible. At the end of that time, re-read and you should find that it will bear a second shortening. Finally, read it aloud alone and at leisure. Maybe a shade more brushwork will then indicate or impose itself. If not, praise Allah and let it go, and
when thou hast done, repent not
.” These blackened spaces pull tight and lend strength to most of his writing.

In comparison with the laconic
Plain Tales
, the stories of the
Jungle Books
are much more exuberant and playful. It is interesting to note that while the cruel, melancholic
Plain Tales
were written during a period of youthful happiness and self-assurance, the
Jungle Books
were written during a difficult and stressful period in Kipling's life. In England, Kipling had met Caroline Balestier, the sister of his agent and friend, Walcott Balestier. Shortly afterward, Kipling and Carrie (as she was always known) married and set off on a world-tour honeymoon. But upon arrival in Japan, Kipling found out that the bank in which he had deposited all his money had gone broke and that he had been left penniless. Heartbroken, the couple decided to stay for a time with Carrie's younger brother, Beatty, who, like the rest of Carrie's family, lived in Brattleboro, Vermont. Beatty was a spendthrift and a drunk, and there were many quarrels between him and Kipling during the four years the Kiplings lived there, in a house built on Beatty's property. However, in spite of the tense family atmosphere, Kipling worked incessantly on his writing. Two daughters were born during the Vermont sojourn, Josephine and Elsie, and it was perhaps for them that Kipling began to imagine the
Jungle Books
.

No book has a single beginning. Inventing stories that his daughters might enjoy was no doubt one of Kipling's inspirations; another was a line in a novel by his friend Rider Haggard,
Nada the Lily
, in which a pack of wolves is described leaping up at the feet of a dead man lying on a rock. A third element of inspiration was the nostalgia Kipling never ceased to feel for his beloved India. So it was that, in the midst of the Vermont winter, Kipling began to conjure up the adventures of a boy brought up by wolves in the Indian jungle, learning to survive in a dangerous world of natural cataclysms and vicious foes.

For Kipling, children were heroes who sometimes—but not always—grew into honest, worthy adults, and it was in childhood that a person's best—and sometimes worst—qualities were to be found. Mowgli is clever, courageous, curious, generous—all qualities that, in the luckiest of circumstances, will make a good person. Like Kipling, Mowgli (the name means “Frog” in Hindi, because, as the mother wolf says when she first sees him, he is as hairless as a frog) spends his childhood in the one happy place he will be forced to leave. At the very end of the stories, Mowgli must say good-bye to his animal friends and teachers and return to “his people,” just as Kipling had to do when he was sent away from India to be educated in England. From then onward, Mowgli must learn to live in a village, among so-called “civilized human beings,” even if he knows that all his life, his heart will be in the jungle. For Kipling, that blissful jungle was India, and the dull village, England, the land of his parents. In a much later poem, “Chant-Pagan,” Kipling writes in the voice of a British soldier in India who is forced to return home to “civilization”:

Me that 'ave been what I've been—

Me that 'ave gone where I've gone—

Me that 'ave seen what I've seen—

'Ow can I aver take on

With awful old England again,

An' 'ouses both sides of the street,

An' 'edges two sides of the lane,

An' the parson an' gentry between,

An' touchin' my 'at when we meet—

Me that 'ave been what I've been?

The
Jungle Books
show a world as Kipling believed it should be, ruled by powerful and wise laws that are communal, practical, and unquestionable, obeyed by all who live there. As an Englishman in England, Kipling believed that some people—those who were white and spoke English—were better made out to rule. But in his writing, in the
Jungle Books
for instance, such racist assertions are contradicted. It is not the foreign white men but the native inhabitants of the jungle who know how to survive and who are their own best leaders. It is strange how mistaken an intelligent writer can be in real life, and how wise he can show himself in his fiction. In another poem, “We and They,” Kipling allows a child to wonder about these prejudices:

Father, Mother and Me

Sister and Auntie say

All the people like us are We,

And every one else is They.

And They live over the sea,

While We live over the way,

But—would you believe it?— They look upon We

As only a sort of They!

The
Jungle Books
became immensely successful, and sparked many imitations. The best-known was written by an American, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who changed the wolves into apes, set the story in Africa instead of India, made Mowgli white, and renamed him Tarzan.

But the
Jungle Books
are not only about Mowgli. Tucked away among the jungle tales proper are several that concern other humans, such as Toomai of the Elephants and Kotuko the Inuit, who lives in the Northern or Elder Ice, “beyond the white man's ken.” Other stories tell of different beasts: a seal, a mongoose, an old crane, a jackal, a crocodile. Though all of these thrilled me, none moved as much as the second tale in the second volume, “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat,” the story of an efficient Indian bureaucrat who after following the teachings of his English overlords and becoming Prime Minister of one of the semi-independent native States, leaves everything to become a holy man, with a begging bowl and an ochre-colored dress. “He did a thing no Englishman would have dreamed of doing,” Kipling writes, “for, so far as the world's affairs went, he died.” Like Mowgli's, the story of Purun Bhagat, who was once Purun Dass and a knight of the British Empire, is a story of learning and transformation. But while Mowgli travels from the natural world to that of human society, Purun Bhagat advances in the opposite direction, from civilization back to nature, to a state in which he can converse with the animals and be not against, not above, but in the world.