Five-minute digest
The Jungle Book
Summary
The Jungle Book is a collection of seven animal stories, each followed by a song or poem. The first three tell of Mowgli, a man's cub raised by wolves in the Seeonee hills of central India. In Mowgli's Brothers, a baby strays from a woodcutters' camp into the cave of Father and Mother Wolf after the lame tiger Shere Khan has bungled his attack on the camp. Mother Wolf, whom Mowgli later calls Raksha the Demon, defies the tiger and keeps the child. At the Council Rock, where the old leader Akela presides over the Pack, Baloo the brown bear speaks for the cub, and Bagheera the black panther buys his life with a freshly killed bull. Ten years on, as Akela grows old and the young wolves listen to Shere Khan, Bagheera sends Mowgli to steal fire, the Red Flower, from a village. When Akela misses his kill and the Pack turns on him, Mowgli drives off Shere Khan and the rebels with a burning branch, weeps for the first time, and goes down to live among men. Kaa's Hunting steps back to Mowgli's schooling under Baloo, who teaches him the Law of the Jungle and the Master Words of each people. The lawless Bandar-log, the monkey people, carry him off to the Cold Lairs, a ruined city; Baloo and Bagheera enlist Kaa, the great rock python, who scatters the monkeys and then holds them helpless with his hunger dance. In Tiger! Tiger! Mowgli is taken in by Messua, a village woman who believes he may be her lost son, and herds the village buffalo. Warned by Gray Brother, he traps Shere Khan in a ravine between two charging herds and kills him, but the hunter Buldeo calls him a sorcerer and the villagers drive him out with stones. He spreads the tiger's hide on the Council Rock and resolves to hunt alone with his four wolf brothers. The remaining stories leave Mowgli. The White Seal follows Kotick, a white fur seal of Novastoshnah in the Bering Sea, who sees the yearly killing of young seals and searches the oceans until the Sea Cow leads him to an untouched beach, then fights his own people to make them follow him there. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi tells how a young mongoose, adopted by an English family in Segowlee cantonment, defends the boy Teddy against the cobras Nag and Nagaina. In Toomai of the Elephants, a ten-year-old elephant driver's son rides the great elephant Kala Nag by night into the Garo hills and sees the elephants dance. Her Majesty's Servants overhears camels, mules, horses, bullocks and elephants arguing in a rain-soaked camp at Rawal Pindi before a review for the Amir of Afghanistan. The stories appeared in magazines in 1893-94 and were collected by Macmillan in 1894; The Second Jungle Book followed in 1895.
Top Lessons
Living under a Law
Baloo teaches Mowgli that the jungle is not lawless: hunters must give warning, must not kill man, and must keep faith in the Pack. The Bandar-log, who boast but have no law and forget everything, show what happens to a people without one. Kipling's jungle prizes obedience, training and duty as the ground of freedom.
Belonging to two worlds
Mowgli is cast out by the young wolves because he is a man and by the villagers because he talks with wolves. His tears at the end of the first story show that he is truly human, and his song in Tiger! Tiger! says that his heart is heavy with things he does not understand. The stories treat the pain of not fitting anywhere honestly and with sympathy.
Courage in small bodies
Rikki-tikki fights two cobras far larger than himself, and Little Toomai goes where grown hunters have never been. Kipling admires courage joined to training and quick wits, not mere size.
One who looks for a better way
Kotick is the only seal who asks questions about the killing and keeps searching for an answer when the others laugh at him. When he finally finds the safe beach, he has to fight before his own people will listen. The story honors persistence in a good cause.
Verified Quotes
“And what is a man that he should not run with his brothers?”
Frequently cited
“That is only tears such as men use”
Frequently cited
“We be of one blood, ye and I”
“Look well, O Wolves. Have I kept my word?”
“I am the only white seal that has ever been born on the beaches, and I am the only seal, black or white, who ever thought of looking for new islands.”
Frequently cited
“It is the hardest thing in the world to frighten a mongoose, because he is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity.”
“no man has ever seen the elephants dance”
“If you don’t trust your man, you may as well run away at once.”
Medical Lens
A children's animal book with a few points of interest for a medical reader. The opening pages describe the jackal Tabaqui and note that a jackal seized by dewanee, the madness, is feared by every animal; Kipling's narrator glosses it as hydrophobia, the period's name for rabies, a disease familiar and dreaded in nineteenth-century India. In Kaa's Hunting the python's hunger dance holds the monkeys, and very nearly Baloo and Bagheera, in a helpless trance, a literary picture of fascination or mesmerism as the 1890s imagined it. Mowgli's first tears, which he takes for dying, make a gentle scene about the bodily expression of grief. These are incidental details, not medical themes.
- Mowgli's Brothers, opening
Father Wolf and the narrator explain that a jackal with dewanee, hydrophobia, is the most feared creature in the jungle.
- Kaa's Hunting, at the Cold Lairs
Kaa's hunger dance in the moonlight entrances the Bandar-log, who walk toward him against their will.
- Mowgli's Brothers, ending
Mowgli sobs for the first time and asks Bagheera whether he is dying.