Another notable permutation of The Jungle Books appears in Robert Baden-Powell’s scouting literature and rituals. Kipling met Baden-Powell, originator of the Boy Scouts, in the 1880s in Lahore, and they became close friends. When Baden-Powell shaped the framework of his Boy Scouting and Cub Scouting movement in the first decades of the twentieth century, he pilfered pieces of Kipling’s stories. The 1908 booklet that introduced the movement, “Scouting for Boys,” included a summary of Kim, and “The Wolf Cub’s Handbook,” composed in 1916 for a junior branch of the Scouts, incorporated a condensed version of the Mowgli stories. The overall conception of the movement—a fraternity that crosses national boundaries and, as Baden-Powell emphasized, promotes “manliness” and “character” in boys—bears a close resemblance to Mowgli’s brotherhood of beasts. Many terms and names from The Jungle Books became a part of Cub Scouting vocabulary: for example, “Law of the Pack,” “Akela,” “Wolf Cub,” “Grand Howl,” “Den,” and “Bagheera.” Moreover, certain ideals expressed in Kim and The Jungle Books are emphasized in all of Baden-Powell’s literature on scouting—for instance, the idea that one must obey a law that governs a brotherhood, the ideal of self-sufficiency, and the ideal of intimate knowledge of the natural world. Kipling himself became directly involved in the movement. He wrote the official Boy Scouts’ song, “A Boy Scouts’ Patrol Song,” the content and cadence of which evokes the Law of the Jungle: “There’s just one law for the Scout / And the first and the last, and the present and the past, / And the future and the perfect is ‘Look Out!’” In 1923 Kipling published Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides, the same year that he appeared before 6,000 Cub Scouts at the Imperial Jamboree.
The critical reception of Kipling’s writings has fluctuated dramatically since the publication of The Jungle Books. After the turn of the century, while Kipling continued to receive public honors, including the Nobel Prize in 1907, and while he continued to have a wide and enthusiastic audience of “common readers,” the literary establishment lost interest in him. In 1919, writing in The Athenaeum, T. S. Eliot called him “very nearly a great writer” (Eliot’s essay, along with those by Trilling and Orwell, noted below, are republished in Kipling and the Critics, edited by Elliot Gilbert). Edmund Wilson, who in a 1926 review praised Kipling for his influence on the modernists (“Kipling’s Debts and Credits,” New Republic, October 6, 1926), famously noted in 1941 in The Wound and the Bow that he had been “dropped out of modern literature.” However, Kipling was not only ignored but ruthlessly ridiculed. In the last decades of his life, he was caricatured by Max Beerbohm and mocked in reviews by Virginia Woolf and Robert Graves. Kipling’s politics played a key part in this rejection. After the publication of The Jungle Books, Kipling returned to England, where he remained for the rest of his life, and where he increasingly became active in politics. After the death of his daughter Josephine in 1899 and his own nearly fatal illness at the same time, his political views became more rigid. He ardently promoted the British cause in the Boer War, and he remained a passionate advocate of Britain’s imperial ventures, strictly against Indian Home Rule, and an adamant foe of Liberals. Upon Kipling’s death in 1936, George Orwell, in the New English Weekly, called him “the prophet of British imperialism in its expansionist phase.” In the decades that followed, Lionel Trilling wrote in The Liberal Imagination that Kipling “did more than any writer of our time to bring the national idea into discredit”; and Wilson, famously labeling Kipling the writer “that nobody read,” asked, “How was it that the early Kipling, with his sensitive understanding of the mixed population of India, became transformed into the later Kipling, who consolidated and codified his snobberies instead of progressively eliminating them as most good artists do, and who, like Kim, elected as his life work the defense of the British Empire?” (see “The Kipling That Nobody Read”).
Though during Kipling’s lifetime and after critics have been censorious, readers have been consistently laudatory. In Kipling’s obituary, Orwell affirmed that Kipling was still “the most widely popular English writer of our time.” Kipling has remained a much-loved writer. A 1996 BBC poll declared “If” Britain’s favorite poem. Moreover, he remains a fixture in the contemporary popular imagination. Phrases from his prose and poetry, such as “the white man’s burden,” have become commonplaces.
Further, Kipling’s work has recently returned to favor in literary and academic circles. Kipling tales, including a story from The Jungle Books, are included in the widely read Longman Anthology of British Literature. Moreover, many contemporary writers, including Aung San Suu Kyi, Maya Angelou, and Arundhati Roy, have cited Kipling as an important influence. Interestingly, postcolonial writers generating new literary idioms have found in Kipling a powerful resource and source of inspiration, despite his questionable politics. While responses to Kipling remain complex, most readers avow the power of his writing. Salman Rushdie writes that Kipling has the “power” to “infuriate or entrance”; Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul writes of Kipling, in An Area of Darkness: “No writer was more honest or accurate, no writer more revealing of his self or society;” and W. H. Auden has asserted in the poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” that Kipling’s sheer abilities as a writer will redeem him before the eyes of the world:
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views.
Lisa Makman is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Michigan. Her teaching and research focus on Victorian culture and children’s and adolescent literature. She has published articles focusing on children’s writers including George MacDonald, Beatrix Potter, Roald Dahl, and A. A. Milne. She has also written on contemporary human rights issues as they relate to children in the developing world. At present, she is completing a book exploring transformations in the real and symbolic roles played by children in late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century British culture.
The Jungle Book
Now Rann, the Kite, brings home the night That Mang, the Bat, sets free—
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!
Night-Song in the Jungle.
Mowgli’s Brothers
It was seven o‘clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hillsa when Father Wolf woke up from his day’s rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in the tips. Mother Wolf lay with her big gray nose dropped across her four tumbling, squealing cubs, and the moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they all lived. “Augrh!” said Father Wolf, “it is time to hunt again”; and he was going to spring downhill when a little shadow with a bushy tail crossed the threshold and whined: “Good luck go with you, O Chief of the Wolves; and good luck and strong white teeth go with the noble children, that they may never forget the hungry in this world.”
It was the jackal—Tabaqui, the Dish-lickerb—and the wolves of India despise Tabaqui because he runs about making mischief, and telling tales, and eating rags and pieces of leather from the village rubbish-heaps. They are afraid of him too, because Tabaqui, more than any one else in the jungle, is apt to go mad, and then he forgets that he was ever afraid of any one, and runs through the forest biting everything in his way. Even the tiger hides when little Tabaqui goes mad, for madness is the most disgraceful thing that can overtake a wild creature. We call it hydrophobia, but they call it dewaneec—the madness—and run.
“Enter, then, and look,” said Father Wolf, stiffly; “but there is no food he
re.”
“For a wolf, no,” said Tabaqui; “but for so mean a person as myself a dry bone is a good feast. Who are we, the Gidur-log [the Jackal People], to pick and choose?” He scuttled to the back of the cave, where he found the bone of a buck with some meat on it, and sat cracking the end merrily.
“All thanks for this good meal,” he said, licking his lips. “How beautiful are the noble children! How large are their eyes! And so young too! Indeed, indeed, I might have remembered that the children of kings are men from the beginning.”
Now, Tabaqui knew as well as any one else that there is nothing so unlucky as to compliment children to their faces; and it pleased him to see Mother and Father Wolf look uncomfortable.
Tabaqui sat still, rejoicing in the mischief that he had made, and then he said spitefully:
“Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting-grounds. He will hunt among these hills during the next moon, so he has told me.”
Shere Khan was the tiger who lived near the Waingunga River,d twenty miles away.
“He has no right!” Father Wolf began angrily. “By the Law of the Jungle he has no right to change his quarters without fair warning. He will frighten every head of game within ten miles; and I—I have to kill for two, these days.”
“His mother did not call him Lungri [the Lame One] for nothing,” said Mother Wolf, quietly. “He has been lame in one foot from his birth. That is why he has only killed cattle. Now the villagers of the Waingunga are angry with him, and he has come here to make our villagers angry. They will scour the jungle for him when he is far away, and we and our children must run when the grass is set alight. Indeed, we are very grateful to Shere Khan!“
“Shall I tell him of your gratitude?” said Tabaqui.
“Out!” snapped Father Wolf. “Out, and hunt with thy master. Thou hast done harm enough for one night.”
“I go,” said Tabaqui, quietly. “Ye can hear Shere Khan below in the thickets. I might have saved myself the message.”
Father Wolf listened, and in the dark valley that ran down to a little river, he heard the dry, angry, snarly, singsong whine of a tiger who has caught nothing and does not care if all the jungle knows it.
“The fool!” said Father Wolf. “To begin a night’s work with that noise! Does he think that our buck are like his fat Waingunga bullocks?”
“H‘sh! It is neither bullock nor buck that he hunts to-night,” said Mother Wolf; “it is Man.” The whine had changed to a sort of humming purr that seemed to roll from every quarter of the compass. It was the noise that bewilders wood-cutters, and gipsies sleeping in the open, and makes them run sometimes into the very mouth of the tiger.
“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 Jungle, 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 rockets and torches. Then everybody in the jungle suffers. The reason the beasts give among themselves is that Man is the weakest and most defenseless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him. They say too—and 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 tiger’s charge.
Then there was a howl—an untigerish howl—from 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 wood-cutters’ camp-fire, so he 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 world—the 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 man’s cub. Look!”
Directly in front of him, holding on by a low branch, stood a naked brown baby who could just walk—as soft and as dimpled a little thing as ever came to a wolf’s cave at night. He looked up into Father Wolf’s face and laughed.
“Is that a man’s 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 Wolf’s jaws closed right on the child’s back not a tooth even scratched the skin, as he laid it down among the cubs.
“How little! How naked, and—how 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 this is a man’s cub. Now, was there ever a wolf that could boast of a man’s cub among her 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 Khan’s great square head and shoulders 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 man’s cub went this way,” said Shere Khan. “Its parents have run off. Give it to me.”
Shere Khan had jumped at a wood-cutter’s camp-fire, 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 Khan’s shoulders and fore paws were cramped for want of room, as a man’s 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 man’s cub is ours—to 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 dog’s den for my fair dues? It is I, Shere Khan, who speak!”
The tiger’s roar filled the cave with thunder. Mother Wolf shook herself clear of the cubs and sprang forward, her eyes, like two green moons in the darkness, facing the blazing eyes of Shere Khan.
“And it is I, Raksha [the Demon], who answer. The man’s cub is mine, Lungri—mine to me! He shall not be killed. He shall live to run with the Pack and to hunt with the Pack; and in the end, look you, hunter of little naked cubs—frog-eater—fish-killer, he shall hunt thee! Now get hence, or by the Sambhur e that I killed (I eat no starved cattle), back thou goest to thy mother, burned beast of the jungle, lamer than ever thou camest into the world! Go!”
Father Wolf looked on amazed. He had almost forgotten the days when he won Mother Wolf in fair fight from five other wolves, when she ran in the Pack and was not called the Demon for compliment’s sake. Shere Khan might have faced Father Wolf, but he could not stand up against Mother Wolf, for he knew that where he was she had all the advantage of the ground, and would fight to the death. So he backed out of the cave-mouth growling, and when he was clear he shouted:
“Each dog barks in his own yard! We will see what the Pack will say to this fostering of man-cubs. The cub is mine, and to my teeth he will come in the end, 0 bush-tai
led thieves!”
Mother Wolf threw herself down panting among the cubs, and Father Wolf said to her gravely:
“Shere Khan speaks this much truth. The cub must be shown to the Pack. Wilt thou still keep him, Mother?”
“Keep him!” she gasped. “He came naked, by night, alone and very hungry; yet he was not afraid! Look, he has pushed one of my babes to one side already. And that lame butcher would have killed him, and would have run off to the Waingunga while the villagers here hunted through all our lairs in revenge! Keep him? Assuredly I will keep him. Lie still, little frog. O thou Mowgli,f—for Mowgli, the Frog, I will call thee,—the time will come when thou wilt hunt Shere Khan as he has hunted thee!”
“But what will our Pack say?” said Father Wolf.
The Law of the Jungle lays down very clearly that any wolf may, when he marries, withdraw from the Pack he belongs to; but as soon as his cubs are old enough to stand on their feet he must bring them to the Pack Council, which is generally held once a month at full moon, in order that the other wolves may identify them. After that inspection the cubs are free to run where they please, and until they have killed their first buck no excuse is accepted if a grown wolf of the Pack kills one of them. The punishment is death where the murderer can be found; and if you think for a minute you will see that this must be so.
Father Wolf waited till his cubs could run a little, and then on the night of the Pack Meeting took them and Mowgli and Mother Wolf to the Council Rock—a hilltop covered with stones and boulders where a hundred wolves could hide. Akela,g the great gray Lone Wolf, who led all the Pack by strength and cunning, lay out at full length on his rock, and below him sat forty or more wolves of every size and color, from badger-colored veterans who could handle a buck alone, to young black three-year-olds who thought they could. The Lone Wolf had led them for a year now. He had fallen twice into a wolf-trap in his youth, and once he had been beaten and left for dead; so he knew the manners and customs of men.
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