Mowgli

Mowgli
Mowgli by John Lockwood Kipling (father of Rudyard Kipling). An illustration from The Second Jungle Book (1895)
First appearance	"In the Rukh" (1893)
Last appearance	"The Spring Running" (1895)
Created by	Rudyard Kipling
Information
Nickname(s)	Man-cub, Frog
Species	Human
Gender	Male
Family	Raksha and Father Wolf (foster parents); Messua (foster mother)

Mowgli ( /ˈmaʊɡli/) is a fictional character from India who originally appeared in Rudyard Kipling's short story "In the Rukh" (collected in Many Inventions, 1893) and then went on to become the most prominent and memorable character in his fantasies, The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book (1894–1895), which also featured stories about other characters.^[1]

The Mowgli stories, including In the Rukh, were first collected in chronological order in one volume as The Works of Rudyard Kipling Volume VII: The Jungle Book (1907) (Volume VIII of this series contained the non-Mowgli stories from the Jungle Books), and subsequently in All the Mowgli Stories (1933).

In the Rukh describes how Gisborne, an English forest ranger in India at the time of the British Raj, discovers a young man named Mowgli, who has extraordinary skill at hunting and tracking, and asks him to join the forestry service. Later Gisborne learns the reason for Mowgli's almost superhuman talents: he was raised by a pack of wolves in the jungle.

Kipling then proceeded to write the stories of Mowgli's childhood in detail. Lost by his parents in the Indian jungle during a tiger attack, a human baby is adopted by the wolves Mother (Raksha) and Father Wolf, who call him Mowgli the Frog because of his lack of fur and his refusal to sit still. Shere Khan the tiger demands that they give him the baby but the wolves refuse. Mowgli grows up with the pack, hunting with his brother wolves. In the pack, Mowgli learned he was able to stare down any wolf, but his unique ability to remove the painful thorns from the paws of his brothers was deeply appreciated as well.

Bagheera (the black panther) befriends Mowgli, because both he and Mowgli have parallel childhood experiences, as Bagheera often mentions, he was "raised in the King's cages at Oodeypore" from a cub, and thus knows the ways of man. Baloo the bear, teacher of wolves, has the thankless task of educating Mowgli in The Law of the Jungle.

Shere Khan continues to regard Mowgli as fair game, but eventually Mowgli finds a weapon he can use against the tiger — fire. After driving off Shere Khan, Mowgli goes to a human village where he is adopted by Messua and her husband whose own son Nathoo was also taken by a tiger. We never find out for certain if Mowgli is the returned Nathoo, although a hint that he might be is provided in the Jungle Book story "Tiger! Tiger!" where we learn that the tiger who carried off Messua's son was lame, just as Shere Khan is lame. On the other hand, while Messua would like to believe that her son has returned, she herself realises that this is unlikely.

While herding buffalo for the village Mowgli learns that the tiger is still planning to kill him, so with the aid of two wolves he traps Shere Khan in a ravine, where the buffalo trample him. The tiger dies and Mowgli sets to skin him. Seeing this, Buldeo, a jealous hunter goads the villagers into persecuting Mowgli and his adopted parents as sorcerers. Mowgli runs back to the jungle with Shere Khan's hide but soon learns that Buldeo and the villagers are planning to kill Messua and her husband, so he rescues them and sends elephants, buffalo and other animals to trample the village and its fields to the ground.

In later stories in The Second Jungle Book Mowgli finds and then discards an ancient treasure (The King's Ankus), not realising that men will kill to own it; and with the aid of Kaa the python he leads the wolves in a war against the dhole (Red Dog).

Finally, Mowgli stumbles across the village where his adopted human mother (Messua), is now living, which forces him to come to terms with his humanity and decide whether to rejoin his fellow humans (The Spring Running).

Play adaptations

Kipling adapted the Mowgli stories for The Jungle Play in 1899, but the play was never produced on stage and the manuscript was lost for almost a century. It was finally published in book form in 2000.^[2]

Influences upon other works

Only five years after the first publication of The Jungle Book, E. Nesbit's The Wouldbegoods (1899) included a passage in which some children act out a scene from the book.,^[1] p. 204.

Mowgli has been cited as a major influence on Edgar Rice Burroughs' character Tarzan. Mowgli was also an influence for a number of other "wild boy" characters; see Feral Children in Mythology and Fiction.

Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson used the Mowgli stories as the basis for their humorous 1957 science fiction short story "Full Pack (Hokas Wild)". This is one of a series featuring a teddy bear-like race called Hokas who enjoy human literature but cannot quite grasp the distinction between fact and fiction. In this story a group of Hokas get hold of a copy of The Jungle Book and begin to act it out, enlisting the help of a human boy to play Mowgli. The boy's mother, who is a little bemused to see teddy bears trying to act like wolves, tags along to try to keep him (and the Hokas) out of trouble. The situation is then complicated by the arrival of three alien diplomats who just happen to resemble a monkey, a tiger and a snake. This story appears in the collection Hokas Pokas! (1998) (ISBN 0-671-57858-8), and is also available online: Prologue and Story

The Jungle Book and Cub Scouting

Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting, based Cub Scouting on a story in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book called "Mowgli's Brothers". Cub Scouts know it as "The Story of Akela and Mowgli". The words "Law of the Pack," "Akela," "Wolf Cub," "Grand Howl," "den," and "pack" all come from the Jungle Book.

In American Scouting, parts of the story are found in the Wolf Cub Scout Book, the Bear Cub Scout Book, and the Cub Scout Leader Book.

The Name Mowgli

In the stories, the name Mowgli is said to mean "frog". Kipling made up the name, and it "does not mean 'frog' in any language other than the language of the forest."

Kipling stated that the first syllable of "Mowgli" should rhyme with "cow" and is pronounced this way in Britain, while in America it is almost always pronounced to rhyme with "go".

Mowgli stories by other writers

The Third Jungle Book (1992) by Pamela Jekel (ISBN 1-879373-22-X) is a collection of new Mowgli stories in a fairly accurate pastiche of Kipling's style.

Hunting Mowgli (2001) by Maxim Antinori (ISBN 1-931319-49-9) is a very short novel which describes a fateful meeting between Mowgli and a human hunter. Although marketed as a children's book it is really a dark psychological drama, and ends with the violent death of a major character.

Movies, television and radio

The best known of all portrayals of Mowgli is the musical version in Disney's The Jungle Book (1967), where he is voiced by Bruce Reitherman, son of the film's director Wolfgang Reitherman; and The Jungle Book 2 (2003) in which Mowgli is voiced by Haley Joel Osment. Around the same time – from 1967 to 1971 – five Russian short animated films were made by Soyuzmultfilm, collectively known as Adventures of Mowgli. Chuck Jones's 1977 animated TV short Mowgli's Brothers, adapting the first story in The Jungle Book, is the adaptation that sticks most closely to the original plot and dialogue.

There has also been a Japanese animated TV series Jungle Book Shonen Mowgli based on the Mowgli series and a US live-action series, Mowgli: the New Adventures of the Jungle Book.

There was also a BBC radio adaptation in 1994, starring actress Nisha K. Nayar as Mowgli, Freddie Jones as Baloo and Eartha Kitt as Kaa. This has been released on audio cassette and has been re-run a number of times on digital radio channel BBC 7's Little Toe Show.

• Classics Illustrated #83 (1951) contains an adaptation of three Mowgli stories.
• Between 1953 and 1955 Dell Comics featured adaptations of six Mowgli stories in three issues (#487 [1], #582 [2] and #620 [3]).
• Some issues of Marvel Fanfare feature adaptations of the Mowgli stories by Gil Kane. These were later collected as an omnibus volume.
• P. Craig Russell's Jungle Book Stories (1997) collects three stories, actually adapted from The Second Jungle Book, which originally appeared between 1985 and 1996.

See also

Children's literature portal

• Works of Rudyard Kipling
• Feral children in mythology and fiction
• The Jungle Book characters
• Mowgli Syndrome

Other meanings

'Mowgli' and similar can also mean:

• MoWGLI Mathematics On the Web: Get it by Logic and Interface
• Mobile Office Workstations using GSM Links
• A 5-piece music band from Merseyside
• A radiography integration server
• A rock music band
• Mowgli C. Assor: a Network Security Engineer for the Office of the CIO at the Ohio State University
• Mowgli Windos: he helped to develop Poser 3

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "Kipling's Boy's" in Roger Sale, Fairy Tales and After: from Snow White to E.B. White" Harvard Univ. Press, 1978. ISBN 0674291573
2. ^ The Jungle Play: UK paperback edition: ISBN 0-14-118292-X

External links

• In the Rukh: Mowgli's first appearance from Kipling's Many Inventions
• The Jungle Book Collection and Wiki: a website demonstrating the variety of merchandise related to the book and film versions of The Jungle Books, now accompanied by a Wiki on the Jungle Books and related subjects