Boy From The Jungle

Everybody remembers Rudyard Kipling, not as a super-patriotic Tory, but as creator of the loveable Jungle Book, writes RUSKIN BOND in an introductionRudyard Kipling made his name with his ‘barrack- room’ verse and short stories, first published in Indian newspapers. He then wrote two novels: The Light That Failed, which failed; and Kim, which was a glorious success. But it was with The Jungle Book, and its successor, The Second Jungle Book, that Kipling really entered the land of the immortals. Mowgli, jungle boy,wolf-boy, friend and companion of wild creatures with whom he grew up, is now a part of almost every young reader’s literary experience. Mowgli combines innocence with a natural intelligence. His familiarity with jungle love, his camaraderie, and his inborn human rationality help him to survive the rigours of jungle life and to get the better of his sworn enemy, Shere Khan the tiger. Kipling did not spend much time in the Indian jungles. He was essentially a city man — Lahore,Allahabad, Simla, and the big railway junctions. Most of his jungle love came from his father, Lockwood Kipling, who had spent most of his life in India, and whose book, Beast And Man In India, provided Rudyard with themes and background material for his jungle stories.This was especially the case with the story ‘Toomai Of The Elephants’ which together with ‘Rikki-Tikki- Tavi’ is one of the most appealing and popular of Kipling’s stories for children; for we must remember that not all of The Jungle Book is Mowgli; there are, in fact, only three Mowgli stories in this, the first Jungle Book; the remaining four belongs toThe Second Jungle Book. ‘Toomai’ was so popular that in 1937 the great documentary film-maker Robert Flaherty came to India to film the story. He found a real elephant-boy to play the part of Toomai. This was Sabu, a simple but gifted youth from the jungles of Mysore.The resultant film, Elephant Boy was such a success that Sabu was taken to England, where he acted as Mowgli in The Jungle Book (1942).Hollywood beckoned, and Sabu achieved stardom without ever losing his charm and grace; but he died young, unable to cope with the fast life and materialism of this glamourous new world. We do not know if Kipling’s Mowgli made a success of his return to civilisation. Real wolf-boys seldom did. There were instances, in Kipling’s time, and after, when children were found roaming in the forests, apparently brought up by wild beasts. But these were usually poor undernourished creatures,moving around on all fours, unable to speak or communicate with humans.Rescued from the wild, they did not survive for long. So Kipling’s notion of a wolf-boy was a very romantic one.He wrote The Jungle Book and Kim when he was living in ‘exile’ in America, unhappy there, and missing the India where he had lived and worked for seven years. Not only was he a misfit in America,but it was there that he lost his daughter, the little girl for whom he had written the Just So Stories. Only one book came out of his American experience, the short novel Captains Courageous; but it was during these unhappy four or five years that he did most of his best works,and almost all of it looking back upon his time in India: Kim,The Jungle Books, the Just So Stories, the stories in Many Inventions… By the time Kim was published (1904), he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.He was to write many more stories, verse and travelogues,but somehow he could never recapture the magic that went into the two Jungle Books and Kim. One can write of a great love only when one has been parted from it. In his later years, Kipling was reviled as an imperialist and a reactionary. Singing the praises of the Empire, he sang out of season, and he paid for it. By the time he died (1936), he was out of favour and out of fashion, even in his own land. But as one columnist in a New York paper wrote:‘What difference does it make if he is an insufferable Tory? He wrote The Jungle Book. Has everybody forgotten that?’ And today, that is what everybody remembers.Not Kipling,the super patriot, but Kipling the creator of Mowgli, Bagheera,Kaa,Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,Kala Nag,and Little Toomai… Little Toomai, who had seen what no man had seen before — the dance of the elephants at night, alone in the heart of the jungle! Rupa Publications India Pvt Ltd for Paper Boat