1Kipling-The Jungle Book (1894) - Chapter 1 Mowgli's Brothers Man! said Father Wolf, showing all his white teeth. Faugh! Are there not enough beetles and frogs in the tanks that he must eat Man, and on our ground too! The Law of the J ungle, 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 hunt 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 rocketsandtorches.Theneverybodyinthejunglesuffers.Thereasonthebeastsgiveamong themselvesisthatManistheweakestandmostdefenselessofalllivingthings,anditis unsportsmanlike to touch him. They say tooand it is true that man-eaters become mangy, and lose their teeth. The purr grew louder, and ended in the full-throated Aaarh!" of the tigers charge. Then there was a howlan untigerish howlfrom Shere Khan. He has missed, said Mother Wolf. What is it? Father Wolf ran out a few paces and heard Shere Khan muttering and mumbling savagely as he tumbled about in the scrub. The fool has had no more sense than to jump at a woodcutters campfire, and has burned his feet, said Father Wolf with a grunt. "Tabaqui is with him. Something is coming uphill, said Mother Wolf, twitching one ear. Get ready. The bushes rustled a little in the thicket, and Father Wolf dropped with his haunches under him, ready for his leap. Then, if you had been watching, you would have seen the most wonderful thing in the worldthe wolf checked in mid-spring. He made his bound before he saw what it was he was jumping at, and then he tried to stop himself. The result was that he shot up straight into the air for four or five feet, landing almost where he left ground. Man! he snapped. A mans cub. Look! Directly in front of him, holding on by a low branch, stood a naked brown baby who could just walkas soft and as dimpled a little atom as ever came to a wolfs cave at night. He looked up into Father Wolfs face, and laughed. Is that a mans cub? said Mother Wolf. I have never seen one. Bring it here. A Wolf accustomed to moving his own cubs can, if necessary, mouth an egg without breaking it, and though Father Wolfs jaws closed right on the childs back not a tooth even scratched the skin as he laid it down among the cubs. How little! How naked, andhow bold! said Mother Wolf softly. The baby was pushing his way between the cubs to get close to the warm hide. Ahai! He is taking his meal with the others. And so thisisamanscub.Now,wasthereeverawolfthatcouldboastofamanscubamongher children? I have heard now and again of such a thing, but never in our Pack or in my time, said Father Wolf. He is altogether without hair, and I could kill him with a touch of my foot. But see, he looks up and is not afraid. The moonlight was blocked out of the mouth of the cave, for Shere Khans great square head and 2shoulders were thrust into the entrance. Tabaqui, behind him, was squeaking: My lord, my lord, it went in here! Shere Khan does us great honor, said Father Wolf, but his eyes were very angry. What does Shere Khan need? My quarry. A mans cub went this way, said Shere Khan. "Its parents have run off. Give it to me. Shere Khan had jumped at a woodcutters campfire, as Father Wolf had said, and was furious from the pain of his burned feet. But Father Wolf knew that the mouth of the cave was too narrow for a tiger to come in by. Even where he was, Shere Khans shoulders and forepaws were cramped for want of room, as a mans would be if he tried to fight in a barrel. The Wolves are a free people, said Father Wolf. They take orders from the Head of the Pack, and not from any striped cattle-killer. The mans cub is oursto kill if we choose. Ye choose and ye do not choose! What talk is this of choosing? By the bull that I killed, am I to stand nosing into your dogs den for my fair dues? It is I, Shere Khan, who speak! Vocabulary Faugh: An exclamation of contempt, disgust, or abhorrence. Unsportsmanlike: unsporting behaviour, or ungentlemanly conduct; term used in many professional sports to refer to a particular player or team who has acted inappropriately and/or unprofessionally in the context of the game. Mangy: having a dirty or shabby appearance (wearing worn-out clothing and perceived as being unappealing to the eye). Purr: characteristic soft low murmuring noise that a cat makes when it seems to be contented. Howl: whining sound. Untigerish: unworthy of a tiger. Scrub: a tree or bush. With a grunt: with a half-nasal, half-throaty noise. Dimpled: chubby. Quarry: hunted animal. Characters Mowgli is featured prominently in first three of the J ungle Book's stories: "Mowgli's Brothers," "Kaa'sHunting,"and"TigerTiger."Thereaderfirstmeetshimasasmallnakedboy,justold enough to have learned to walk. He has wandered away from the village and is found by Mother and Father wolf, just in time to avoid being eaten by Shere Khan, the conniving, lame tiger. He is taken in by the wolf family and is raised by them and the wolf pack until he is a young man. He is sponsored by Baloo, the bear, and Bagheera, the black panther, and from them he learns all about the ways of the jungle. He learns how to hunt, how to converse in the different animal languages, survival techniques, and all about jungle etiquette. Shere Khan is a fictional tiger of the South Asian jungle, named after a Pashtun Prince (Sher Shah Suri, The Lion King or The Tiger King) Kipling encountered on his trips to Afghanistan. The word Shere translates to "Tiger" in Urdu/Hindi. Shere Khan is the chief antagonist in two of Rudyard Kipling'sJ ungleBookstoriesfeaturingMowgli.Despitebeingbornwithacrippledlegand 3derisivelynicknamedLungri(TheLameOne)byhisownmother,ShereKhanisarrogantand regards himself as the rightful lord of the jungle. It seems, however, that the only creature who looks up to him is Tabaqui, the cowardly, despised golden jackal. Raksha the Demon (or Mother Wolf as initially named) is a fictional character featured in Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli stories, collected in The J ungleBookandTheSecondJ ungleBook.Sheisa female Indian Wolf, member of the Seeonee pack, who while suckling her own cubs decides also to adopt a human "cub" that her mate Father Wolf has found wandering in the jungle, naming him "Mowgli" (which means "frog" in the Speech of the J ungle) because of his hairlessness. Defying the tiger Shere Khan, who is determined to eat the man-cub, she reveals that her name is Raksha (which means "protection") because of her ferocity as a fighter, and she will fight to the death for any of her cubs, natural or adopted. FatherWolf investigates a noise outside the cave den where his mate Raksha (Mother Wolf) is sucklinghercubs.InsteadofthetigerShereKhan,heisstartledtoseeanakedhumanbaby emerging from the bush. At Raksha's request he brings the "man's cub" to her and she decides to adopt him and name him Mowgli. Father Wolf plays very little part in the stories after this. He dies at about the same time as Raksha, when Mowgli is about 14 years old, and Mowgli mourns them and seals their bodies in their cave. Bagheera the black-toned Indian Leopard is an animal fictional character. The word Bagh means tiger in Hindi. Bagheera buys Mowgli's life with a freshly-killed bull and helps to raise him as one of the pack. Because his life has been bought by a bull, Mowgli is forbidden to eat cattle. None but MowglieverlearnthatBagheeraonceworeacollarandchain,explaininghisspecialinsight concerning Men. Baloo the sleepy brown bear teaches the cubs of the Seeonee wolf pack the Law of the J ungle. His most challenging pupil is the "man-cub" Mowgli. Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1968-1936) Englishshort-storywriter,poet,andnovelistchieflyrememberedforhiscelebrationofBritish imperialism, his tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. Kipling's father, J ohn Lockwood Kipling, was an artist and scholar who had considerable influence onhisson'swork,becamecuratoroftheLahoremuseum,andisdescribedpresidingoverthis wonder house in the first chapter of Kim, Rudyard's most famous novel. His mother was Alice Macdonald, two of whose sisters married the highly successful 19th-century painters Sir Edward Burne-J ones and Sir Edward Poynter, while a third married Alfred Baldwin and became the mother of Stanley Baldwin, later prime minister. These connections were of lifelong importance to Kipling. Much of his childhood was unhappy. Kipling was taken to England by his parents at the age of six and was left for five years at a foster home at Southsea. Kipling returned to India in 1882 and worked for seven years as a journalist. His parents, although not officially important, belonged to the highest Anglo-Indian society, and Rudyard thus had opportunities for exploring the whole range of that life. All the while he had remained keenly observant of the thronging spectacle of native India, which had engaged his interest and affection from earliest childhood. 4In 1892 Kipling married Caroline Balestier, the sister of Wolcott Balestier, an American publisher and writer with whom he had collaborated in TheNaulahka (1892). That year the young couple moved to the United States and settled on Mrs. Kipling's property in Vermont, but their manners and attitudes were considered objectionable by their neighbours. Unable or unwilling to adjust to life in America, the Kiplings returned to England in 1896. Besides numerous short-story collections and poetry collections such as TheSevenSeas (1896), Kipling published his best-known novels in the 1890s and immediately thereafter. His novel The Light That Failed (1890) is the story of a painter going blind and spurned by the woman he loves. Captains Courageous (1897), in spite of its sense of adventure, is often considered a poor novel because of the excessive descriptive writing. Kim (1901),althoughessentiallyachildren'sbook,mustbeconsideredaclassic.TheJungleBooks (1894 and 1895) is a stylistically superb collection of stories linked by poems for children. These books give further proof that Kipling excelled at telling a story but was inconsistent in producing balanced, cohesive novels. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Englishman to be so honoured. In South Africa, where he spent much time, he was given a house by Cecil Rhodes, the diamond magnate andSouthAfricanstatesman.ThisassociationfosteredKipling'simperialistpersuasions,which were to grow stronger with the years. These convictions are not to be dismissed in a word; they were bound up with a genuine sense of a civilizing mission that required every Englishman, or, more broadly, every white man, to bring European culture to the heathen natives of the uncivilized world.Kipling'spoemsandstorieswereextraordinarilypopularinthelate19thandearly20th century, but after World War I his reputation as a serious writer suffered through his being widely viewed as a jingoistic imperialist. The Jungle Books (1894 and 1895): collection of stories written by Rudyard Kipling while he was living in Vermont. All of the stories were published in magazines in 1893-4. The tales in the book (and also those in The Second J ungle Book which followed in 1895, and which includes five further storiesaboutMowgli)arefables,usinganimalsinananthropomorphicmannertogivemoral lessons.TheversesofTheLawoftheJ ungle,forexample,laydownrulesforthesafetyof individuals, families and communities. Kipling put in them nearly everything he knew or "heard or dreamedabouttheIndianjungle."Otherreadershaveinterpretedtheworkasallegoriesofthe politics and society of the time. The best-known of them are the three stories revolving around the adventuresofanabandoned'mancub'MowgliwhoisraisedbywolvesintheIndianjungle. Mowgli has been cited as a major influence on Edgar Rice Burroughs' character Tarzan. Plot Kipling then proceeded to write the stories of Mowgli's childhood in detail. Lost by his parents in the Indian jungle during a tiger attack, a human baby is adopted by the wolves Mother (Raksha) and FatherWolf,whocallhimMowglitheFrogbecauseofhislackoffur.ShereKhanthetiger demandsthattheygivehimthebabybutthewolvesrefuse.Mowgligrowsupwiththepack, hunting with his brother wolves. In the pack, Mowgli learned he was able to stare down any wolf, buthisuniqueabilitytoremovethepainfulthornsfromthepawsofhisbrotherswasdeeply appreciated as well. Bagheera (the black panther) befriends Mowgli, because both he and Mowgli 5have parallel childhood experiences, as Bagheera often mentions, he was "raised in the King's cages at Oodeypore" from a cub, and thus knows the ways of man. Baloo the bear, teacher of wolves, has the thankless task of educating Mowgli in The Law of the J ungle. Shere Khan continues to regard Mowgli as fair game, but eventually Mowgli finds a weapon he can use against the tiger fire. After driving off Shere Khan, Mowgli goes to a human village where he is adopted by Messua and her husband whose own son Nathoo was also taken by a tiger. Anthropomorphism Personification,awellestablishedliterarydevicefromancienttimes.Itextendsbacktobefore Aesop's Fables in the 6th century BC Greece and the collections of linked fables from India. As in beast fables, Kipling's characters represent certain traits, qualities, and values. For example, the wolves personify order. They have a code of law developed by a council that determines every aspect of life, from the rearing of young to interaction with the other animals. But the wolves are also capable of great compassion. Mother Wolf loves and protects Mowgli and fights for him to be accepted by the other wolves. In one episode a tribe of monkeys called the Bandar-Log kidnap Mowgli. These monkeys are the very antithesis of the orderly wolves; they are some of the most ignorantandlawlesscreaturesofthejungleandaredespisedbytheotheranimals.Mowgli's friends Bagheera the panther, Baloo the bear, and Kaa the rock pythoncome to his rescue.