Kipling wrote his Indian jungle fables in a Vermont house, partly for his daughter
Every Cub Scout pack leader who answers to the name Akela is borrowing a wolf from Rudyard Kipling. The stories that gave the movement its junior wing were written far from India, in a home Kipling owned in Dummerston, Vermont, and he later admitted he had helped himself freely to other people's tales.
Kipling was born in Bombay, now Mumbai, and spent his first six years there before a decade back in England and a return to India for roughly six and a half years of work. The stories of The Jungle Book appeared in magazines in 1893 and 1894 and were gathered into a single collection in 1894, with drawings by his father, John Lockwood Kipling, among others. There is evidence he wrote them for his daughter Josephine, who died of pneumonia at six in 1899; a first edition bearing his handwritten note to her turned up at Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire in 2010.
The tales are fables, with animals standing in for people. Kipling drew on Indian sources such as the Panchatantra, which contains an older mongoose-and-snake story resembling Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, and the Jataka tales. Shere Khan takes his name from the Afghan emperor Sher Shah Suri, and Mowgli may owe something to William Henry Sleeman's reports of children raised by wolves. Baloo is simply the Hindustani word for bear. The settings are hazy: Seoni in Madhya Pradesh is named repeatedly, though Kipling never went there.
Critics keep returning to two themes. Harry Ricketts saw Mowgli's repeated loss of parents and his many would-be foster families as an echo of Kipling's own sense of abandonment as a boy left in the care of a Mrs Holloway. The novelist Angus Wilson pointed out that the law of the jungle is hardly Darwinian, since the animals observe a truce at the water-hole during drought. Others, such as Jopi Nyman in 2001, read the book as part of an imperial vision of Englishness.
Its reach has been enormous. Robert Baden-Powell, a friend of Kipling, built the Wolf Cubs around the stories with the author's approval, and the composer Percy Grainger based a song cycle on them. The book has run to more than 500 print editions and appears in at least 36 languages. A sequel with eight more stories, five of them about Mowgli, followed in 1895.
Source: The Jungle Book
