All the Mowgli Stories (Macmillan Collector's Library)

We meet nearly all the main characters in ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’, chronologically the first of the Mowgli stories. Father Wolf – Akela – is an indistinct figure of some authority, while Mother Wolf, later identified as Raksha, is better defined as she gets ‘ready for what she knew would be her last fight’. Shere Khan, the lame, cattle-eating tiger, is a sinister creature functionally reminiscent of Ruddy’s loathed guardian ‘Aunty Rosa’, while the tiger’s trouble-making lackey, Tabaqui the Jackal, who is regarded with contempt and disgust by the other creatures of the jungle, represents Aunty Rosa’s treacherous son, Harry. Akela comes into his own in ‘Red Dog’, but is otherwise a slightly remote chairman of the pack. It is Mowgli’s mentors that are most clearly described. Baloo, the sleepy brown bear (presumably a sloth bear, which is native to north and central India), has been described by Angus Wilson as ‘a bear and a housemaster’, which paints him as the superintendent of a boarding house at an English public (i.e. fee-paying) school. This is not wholly unfair; he teaches the wolf cubs and Mowgli the Law of the Jungle, and can reward or punish them at will. Bagheera, the glamorous black panther, is a more complicated, professorial character and displays his deep but unostentatious knowledge of the Law of the Jungle by buying Mowgli’s life at the cost of a newly killed bull. Mowgli learns much from the wise, sensible and worldly panther, in what are more like university tutorials than the lessons by rote that Baloo imparts. We can see shades of Cormell Price in Bagheera.

While Mowgli is still with the wolf-pack, he is stolen by the Bandar-log, the monkey people. There are several suspects in the frame for these deeply unattractive, irresponsible, self-aggrandizing anarchists. They could represent human society as a whole or, at a pinch, the recently emerged Indian Congress movement. Whichever or whatever they may be, Kipling has an eye for the behaviour of the macaque monkeys which inhabit northern India, which can be by turns kleptomaniac, greedy, hysterical and vicious. (Not unlike mankind in general or political parties in particular.) The great enemy of the Bandar-log is Kaa, the huge, old and experienced rock python, who embodies jurisprudence in the Law of the Jungle. It is he who, when roused, takes revenge on the Bandar-log in ‘Kaa’s Hunting’ and rescues Mowgli, while Baloo and Bagheera play bit parts; it is he who advises Mowgli in the destruction of the Chole pack in ‘Red Dog’ and teaches Mowgli the superficiality and dangers of material possessions in ‘The King’s Ankus’.

In spite of the exciting nature of the stories, running through them is a vein of melancholy and loss, of the abandoned outsider that seems to stem from Kipling’s childhood. As well as Mowgli, parentless children crop up in several of Kipling’s works, especially in other Jungle Book stories, as well as in Kim and The Light That Failed. Professor Harry Ricketts points out that Mowgli is thrice abandoned: once when he is forced from his human parents by Shere Khan; once when he rejects the wolf-pack at the end of ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’; and again when Baloo and Bagheera urge Mowgli to find a new trail at the end of ‘The Spring Running’. When we meet Mowgli in ‘In the Rukh’, he is a self-sufficient seventeen-year-old – the age that Kipling was when he started work. The rukh is government-managed forest rather than true jungle, and Mowgli is master of it, able to come and go as he pleases, becoming virtually invisible, as Ruddy was when he immersed himself in Punjabi culture in night-time expeditions to the backstreets of Lahore during the hot season. But Mowgli has been tamed. He is tamed by the delights of a thirteen-year-old bride, fatherhood and the promise of a government pension. We must presume that the woodland wedding was legal; on the age of consent the Law of the Jungle is silent.

Of the Law of the Jungle and, indeed, of the jungle itself, something should be said. The Law is never fully described, but it is quite different from the current meaning of dog-eat-dog anarchy. ‘The Law of the Jungle’ verse, between ‘How Fear Came’ and ‘Tiger! Tiger!’, describes the Law only as it applies to the wolf. As such, it seems to promote a proto-fascist society, especially in the closing couplet:

Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and mighty and many are they;

But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch and the hump is—Obey!