“Having cast the skin,” said Kaa, “we may not creep into it afresh. It is the Law.”
“Listen, dearest of all to me,” said Baloo. “There is neither word nor will here to hold thee back. Look up! Who may question the master of the jungle? I saw thee playing among the white pebbles yonder when thou wast a little frog; and Bagheera, that bought thee for the price of a young bull newly killed, saw thee also. Of that looking-over we two only remain, for Raksha, thy lair-mother, is dead with thy lair-father; the old wolf pack is long since dead; thou knowest whither Shere Khan went, and Akela died among the dholes, where but for thy wisdom and strength the second Seeonee Pack would also have died. There remain nothing but old bones. It is no longer the man-cub that asks leave of his pack, but the master of the jungle that changes his trail. Who shall question man in his ways?”
“But Bagheera and the bull that bought me,” said Mowgli. “I would not—”
His words were cut short by a roar and a crash in the thicket below, and Bagheera, light, strong, and terrible as always.
“Therefore,” he said, stretching out a dripping right paw, “I did not come. It was a long hunt, but he lies dead in the bushes now—a bull in his second year—the bull that frees thee, Little Brother. All debts are paid now. For the rest, my word is Baloo’s word.” He licked Mowgli’s foot. “Remember Bagheera loved thee,” he cried and bounded away. At the foot of the hill he cried again long and loud: “Good hunting on a new trail, master of the jungle! Remember Bagheera loved thee.”
“Thou hast heard,” said Baloo. “There is no more. Go now, but first come to me. O wise little frog, come to me!”
“It is hard to cast the skin,” said Kaa, as Mowgli sobbed and sobbed with his head on the blind bear’s side and his arms round his neck, while Baloo tried feebly to lick his feet.
“The stars are thin,” said Grey Brother, snuffing at the dawn-wind. “Where shall we lair to-day? For, from now, we follow new trails.”
And this is the last of the Mowgli stories.
THE OUTSONG
This is the song that Mowgli heard behind him in the jungle till he came to Messua’s door again.
BALOO
For the sake of him who showed
One wise frog the jungle-road,
Keep the Law the man pack make—
For thy blind old Baloo’s sake!
Clean or tainted, hot or stale,
Hold it as it were the trail,
Through the day and through the night,
Questing neither left nor right.
For the sake of him who loves
Thee beyond all else that moves,
When thy pack would make thee pain,
Say: “Tabaqui sings again.”
When thy pack would work thee ill,
Say: “Shere Khan is yet to kill.”
When the knife is drawn to slay,
Keep the Law and go thy way.
(Root and honey, palm and spathe,
Guard a cub from harm and scathe.)
Wood and water, wind and tree,
Jungle-favour go with thee!
KAA
Anger is the egg of fear—
Only lidless eyes are clear.
Cobra-poison none may leech;
Even so with cobra-speech.
Open talk shall call to thee
Strength whose mate is courtesy.
Send no lunge beyond thy length;
Lend no rotten bough thy strength.
Gauge thy gape with buck or goat,
Lest thine eye should choke thy throat.
After gorging, wouldst thou sleep?
Look thy den is hid and deep,
Lest a wrong, by thee forgot,
Draw thy killer to the spot.
East and West and North and South,
Wash thy skin and close thy mouth.
(Pit and rift and blue pool-brim
Middle Jungle follow him!)
Wood and water, wind and tree,
Jungle-favour go with thee!
BAGHEERA
In the cage my life began;
Well I know the ways of Man.
By the broken lock that freed—
Man-cub ‘ware the man-cub’s breed!
Scenting-dew or starlight pale,
Choose no idle tree-cat trail.
Pack or council, hunt or den,
Cry no truce with Jackal-Men.
Feed them silence when they say:
“Come with us an easy way.”
Feed them silence when they seek
Help of thine to hurt the weak.
Make no bandar’s boast of skill;
Hold thy peace above the kill.
Let nor call nor song nor sign
Turn thee from thy hunting-line.
(Morning mist or twilight clear
Serve him, wardens of the deer!)
Wood and water, wind and tree,
Jungle-favour go with thee!
THE THREE
On the trail that thou must tread
To the threshold of our dread,
Where the flower blossoms red;
Through the nights when thou shalt lie
Prisoned from our mother-sky,
Hearing us, thy loves, go by;
In the dawns, when thou shalt wake
To the toil thou canst not break,
Heartsick for the jungle’s sake;
Wood and water, wind and tree,
Jungle-favour go with thee!
AFTERWORD
In the early morning, the rangers and gendarmes surrounded us, asking questions of everyone—even the children. No one could satisfy their queries. “Senay! Senay!” their voices echoed as they advanced through the forest with their dogs. “Senaaaay! Senaaaaaay!” Their calling was as haunting as the wolves’ the night before. Senay was nowhere to be found.
She and I had floated paper boats down a mountain stream just the previous afternoon. We had picked black-berries and been stung by yellow jackets. For this outing on Mount Yamannar, we were staying in bungalows. During the night the exasperated adults had piled tables and chairs against the door, to protect us from the wolves coming ever so close with each breath. None of us slept, feeling a tenuous separation between ourselves and the wolves, lying still, listening to the drawn-out howling.
We returned to the city but I was unsettled. My parents had told me that the wolves had stolen my friend.
“What will they do to her?” I asked.
“They will adopt her and she will live with them.”
I tried to convince myself that this was true, even with a tinge of envy that I was not the one kidnapped, the one privileged to live with the pack, but I also knew the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Somewhere inside. I feared that the wolves had eaten my friend Senay.
A couple of years later, The Jungle Books found its way into my hands and I would read these wild stories again and again. Little did I realize that these books would bring solace to my heart about my friend’s disappearance and my fear of the wolf would turn into great affection for this noble beast.
It is strange how the wolf has come to mean different things to different cultures. Revered as a deity or reviled as a devil, the poor beast has often paid with its life for crimes it did not commit. Stories and fables have depicted the wolf as a symbol of evil, a monster, a werewolf, the Antichrist—in short, the epitome of wickedness. Fortunately, counter legends portray it as a noble creature who enriches the human spirit, an ally as in Dances with Wolves; or a guide who leads humans out of darkness into light, as in the Ergenekon legends of Central Asia; or a soul mate as in Women Who Run with the Wolves; or a nurturer, as in the story of Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, who were raised by a she-wolf.
When I reread The Jungle Books now, I realize that they are essentially a collection of related stories, not a novel. Kipling’s syntax jumps without giving us the usual progressions but asserting them as separate stories unified by their setting: the jungle in the highlan
ds of India. Each story opens with a poem that seems to set the tone of the story.
They center around a foundling named Mowgli, whose parents have been killed by the tiger Shere Khan. Mowgli is raised by the wolves with the help of two other kind animals, Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther, who teach Mowgli the “Law of the Jungle,” the boundaries of ecological as well as moral equilibrium:
The herds are shut in byre and hut,
For loosed till dawn are we.
This is the hour of pride and power,
Talon and tush and claw.
Oh, hear the call!—Good hunting all
That keep the Jungle Law!
One has no right to go beyond these and must learn to respect the space. If the lion were to change his territory, the birds would be threatened by his presence and change their habitat. The boundaries between men and animals are just as clearly defined. Most jungle dwellers despise the tiger Shere Khan because he is entirely unsportsmanlike; instead of hunting wild beasts, he kills helpless domestic cows and is also prone to eating humans, the weakest and the most defenseless of all living things: “The Law of the Jungle…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 animals are individualized and anthropomorphized, so it is easier to identify with them. The wolves leave the pack when they are “married” and live in nuclear families (but when the cubs are grown, they must meet the pack once a month during the full moon and introduce the scent of their children so that the other wolves can recognize them). The jungle even has a tribunal; Mowgli has to get two signatures to be accepted into the tribe. The bear and the panther vouch for him and offer a dead bull in return for his acceptance. The lame tiger and the jackal are enemies. The friend and foe are black and white. Kipling has created an alternative society of the jungle, which counters the one that people live in: “Mowgli was now reasonably safe against all accidents in the jungle, because neither snake, bird, nor beast would hurt him.”
By the time he is prepubescent, the boy has already acquired a plethora of survival skills and overcome moral obstacles. In “Kaa’s Hunting,” Mowgli is attracted to the other primates because they physically resemble him, but Baloo tells him monkeys are lawless; they have no speech but use stolen words; they have no memory. The rest of the jungle doesn’t deal with them; they are outcasts confined to live in the ruins of an old temple and despise the jungle. The monkeys kidnap Mowgli because they want to exploit his skills—they want him to teach them how to weave sticks and canes together to protect them from bad weather. Mowgli sees that they are stupid and aimless, as if they have caught the dewanee, the madness. “[M]adness is the most disgraceful thing that can overtake a wild creature.”
Some of the stories that once were favorites still hold together, like “Tiger-Tiger!” which is an homage to the popular William Blake poem “The Tiger.” In this story, 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 is still on his trail. In the tradition of classic coming of age stories, his time has come to confront the monster—in this case, the tiger—as well as find his place among his own people.
Some of the stories bear no relation to Mowgli’s saga but concern other beasts of the jungle in other situations. In “Rikki-tikki-tavi,” a mongoose is swept away from his burrow during a terrible flood and is found by a little boy named Teddy. He becomes a pet and gets into all sorts of mischief. In “Toomai of the Elephants,” a ten-year-old boy who tends domestic elephants is told that he will never be a full-fledged handler until he has seen the elephants dance. When he actually witnesses this extraordinary event, we ourselves experience a mystical moment of grace through Kipling’s transcendent descriptive skill.
Since the film version of The Jungle Book was released, it is difficult to dissociate from the images of the loin-clothed actor Sabu and his animated jungle allies. Mowgli’s dilemma of whether to return to humanity or to remain in the jungle is glossed into a Hollywood treasure hunt, replete with temples in ruin overgrown with giant plants, excited cobras, and hundreds of extras darkened with makeup to resemble people of color. There are no real Indians in this version.
Few authors have had their work stifled by the current vogue for political correctness more than Kipling, whose works have fallen prey to taboo of the excesses of colonial times and exultation in the arrogant superiority of European civilization. Some critics have viewed The Jungle Books as a metaphor for the British Raj—a jungle version of “the white man’s burden,” the doctrine that considers the non-European cultures as unevolved and demonic and considers it an obligation for the civilized cultures to dominate the savages until they shape up:
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Although a belief in the virtues of imperialism and England’s manifest destiny to become a great empire was widespread at the time, the publication of this poem caused bombastic arguments, both pro and con—most notably from Mark Twain and Henry James. However, readers still loved Kipling’s romantic tales about the adventures of the English in strange and distant parts of the world and disregarded their political implications.
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, on December 30, 1865. His father was a professor at the Bombay School of Art and his mother came from a family of accomplished women—one aunt was married to the prominent Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. His early childhood, when he was raised by an ayah, brought him in direct contact with the Indian culture; his first language was Hindustani. When Rudyard was six, his parents, convinced that he should be educated properly in the mainland, sent him to a foster home in England, where he endured five miserable years of traditional beatings and inhumane discipline. The sudden change in environment and this horrible treatment caused chronic insomnia, which had a profound effect on Kipling’s literary imagination and productivity. His short story “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” his novel The Light That Failed (1890), and his posthumously published autobiography, Something of Myself (1937) allude to this period in his life. Finally, his parents removed him from this rigidly Calvinistic foster home and placed him in a private school where the English schoolboy code of honor and duty formed his social and political beliefs, especially as they involved loyalty to a group.
In 1883, Kipling returned to India and worked as a journalist. He published six volumes of short stories set in India, which he knew intimately and loved. His poetry collection Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) captured the zeitgeist vividly, conjuring up nationalistic urges. When Kipling married an American woman, Caroline Balestier, and settled down to live a respectable Puritan life in Brattleboro, Vermont, Willa Cather wrote that his future as an artist was endangered. “Ah, Mr. Kipling,” she mourned, matrimony “has shorn the wings of your freedom, and your freedom was your art.” Urging him to “go back to the East, flee out into the desert before it is too late,” she lamented, “Alas! There were so many men who could have married Mrs. Kipling, and there was only you who could write Soldiers Three.” Kipling had come to be regarded as the soldier’s author, because he had written so much from their point of view and had mastered their colorful slang. This in itself is a remarkable feat, considering that he had never participated in any military duty.
Though the jungle boy and the creatures who inhabit The Jungle Books were conceived in India during the author’s childhood, they were given birth in the unexotic setting of a small New England village: “It’s an uncivilized land (I still maintain it), but how the deuce has it wound itself around my heartstrings in
the way it has?” After a family feud, the Kiplings returned to England, settling down in Sussex, which was to replace India as the setting for much of his later work.
In 1907 Kipling won the Nobel Prize in literature “in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas, and remarkable talent for narration which characterized his writings.” However, the bravado of his writing took a turn when his son went missing in action in World War I. This tragic loss led Kipling to change from being the bard of the Empire to becoming the poet of bitterness and guilt. His works published in the years after the death of both his children, Josephine and John, display deep suffering, emotional stress, breakdown, and recovery. He became obsessive about obtaining and destroying letters he had sent—to protect his private life before his death. Having seen the slow crumbling of the Empire, a disenchanted Kipling died in 1936 and was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
For me, growing up in Turkey, reading The Jungle Books held no political overtones, just the mysterious and awesome world of the jungle, a respect for the wild, and a longing for adventure. It is ironic that Kipling created a “curry” of Indian culture and myth with the Western style of literature. In “Brushwood Boy,” (1898) one of my all-time favorite stories, he uses several Indian themes against the unemotional banality of life in the upper classes, distilling common Sanskrit myths into a Victorian costume drama.
Only after T. S. Eliot described Kipling’s poems as “great verse that sometimes unintentionally changes into poetry” did Kipling’s work receive a reassessment from other critics that revived his literary reputation to the merited level. The prejudices against the worldview of colonialism should not diminish our appreciation of this brilliant writer’s artistic achievements.
—Alev Lytle Croutier
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Other Works by Rudyard Kipling
Departmental Ditties, 1886 Poems