The Jungle Books written in the 1890s (Kipling’s American period so to speak) were, perhaps still are together with Kim,
the most popular of Kipling’s works, mainly because of Mowgli, the baby
abandoned in the jungle by his parents (terrified by the sudden advent
of the tiger), reared by Father and Mother Wolf, mentored by Baloo the
bear and Bagheera the panther, who grows up to become Master of the
Jungle. The Jungle Books are actually a collection of
miscellaneous short stories with varied characters and settings but
Kipling thought of them as stories about Mowgli who appears in eight of
the fifteen stories in the two volumes. In the first volume the first
three stories are about Mowgli; in the second volume the first four
stories are about Mowgli and it concludes with the last Mowgli story,
“The Spring Running,” in which he finally leaves the Jungle and the
creatures he knows and loves. This paper argues that the Panchatantra (and the Jataka Tales) perhaps served also as the model for Kipling’s style in The Jungle Books and compares and contrasts The Jungle Book with the Panchtantra.
Prof.
Mythili Kaul is retired from the Department of English, University of
Delhi, India. She may be contacted at mythilikaul@yahoo.co.in.