Mowgli
Encyclopedia
Mowgli is a fictional character from India who originally appeared in Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...

's short story
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

 "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
The Jungle Book
The Jungle Book is a collection of stories by British Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling. The stories were first published in magazines in 1893–4. The original publications contain illustrations, some by Rudyard's father, John Lockwood Kipling. Kipling was born in India and spent the first six...

and The Second Jungle Book
The Second Jungle Book
The Second Jungle Book is a sequel to The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. First published in 1895, it features five stories about Mowgli and three unrelated stories, all but one set in India, most of which Kipling wrote while living in Vermont...

(1894–1895), which also featured stories about other characters.

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
All the Mowgli Stories
All the Mowgli Stories is a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling. As the title suggests, the book is a chronological compilation of the stories about Mowgli from The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book, together with "In the Rukh"...

(1933).
In the Rukh describes how Gisborne, an English forest ranger in India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

 at the time of the British Raj
British Raj
British Raj was the British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947; The term can also refer to the period of dominion...

, 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
Indian Wolf
Indian wolf and Iranian Wolf are two common names for Canis lupus pallipes, a subspecies of grey wolf which inhabits western India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and southern Israel. Some experts have suggested at least some C. lupus pallipes populations be re-classified a canid species...

 Mother (Raksha
Raksha (Jungle Books)
Raksha the Demon is a fictional character featured in Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli stories, collected in The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book...

) and Father Wolf, who call him Mowgli the Frog because of his lack of fur and his refusal to sit still. Shere Khan
Shere Khan
Shere Khan is a fictional tiger of the Indian jungle. He is the chief antagonist in two of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book stories featuring Mowgli. Shere Khan is named after an Afghan Prince Kipling encountered on his trips to Afghanistan...

 the tiger
Tiger
The tiger is the largest cat species, reaching a total body length of up to and weighing up to . Their most recognizable feature is a pattern of dark vertical stripes on reddish-orange fur with lighter underparts...

 demands that they give him the baby but the wolves refuse. Mowgli grows up with the pack, hunting
Hunting
Hunting is the practice of pursuing any living thing, usually wildlife, for food, recreation, or trade. In present-day use, the term refers to lawful hunting, as distinguished from poaching, which is the killing, trapping or capture of the hunted species contrary to applicable law...

 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
Bagheera
Bagheera the black-toned Indian Leopard is an animal fictional character in Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli stories in The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book...

 (the black panther
Black panther
A black panther is typically a melanistic color variant of any of several species of larger cat. Wild black panthers in Latin America are black jaguars , in Asia and Africa they are black leopards , and in North America they may be black jaguars or possibly black cougars A black panther is...

) 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
Udaipur
Udaipur , also known as the City of Lakes, is a city, a Municipal Council and the administrative headquarters of the Udaipur district in the state of Rajasthan in western India. It is located southwest of the state capital, Jaipur, west of Kota, and northeast from Ahmedabad...

" from a cub, and thus knows the ways of man. Baloo
Baloo
Baloo is the fictional bear featured in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book from 1894 and The Second Jungle Book from 1895.-Name and species:He is described in Kipling's work as "the sleepy brown bear"...

 the bear
Bear
Bears are mammals of the family Ursidae. Bears are classified as caniforms, or doglike carnivorans, with the pinnipeds being their closest living relatives. Although there are only eight living species of bear, they are widespread, appearing in a wide variety of habitats throughout the Northern...

, teacher of wolves, has the thankless task of educating Mowgli in The Law of the Jungle
The Law of the Jungle
"The Law of the Jungle" is an expression that means "every man for himself", "anything goes", "might makes right", "survival of the strongest", "survival of the fittest", "kill or be killed", "dog eat dog" and "eat or be eaten".- The Jungle Book :...

.

Shere Khan continues to regard Mowgli as fair game, but eventually Mowgli finds a weapon he can use against the tiger — fire
Fire
Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material in the chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products. Slower oxidative processes like rusting or digestion are not included by this definition....

. 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
Ravine
A ravine is a landform narrower than a canyon and is often the product of streamcutting erosion. Ravines are typically classified as larger in scale than gullies, although smaller than valleys. A ravine is generally a fluvial slope landform of relatively steep sides, on the order of twenty to...

, 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 elephant
Elephant
Elephants are large land mammals in two extant genera of the family Elephantidae: Elephas and Loxodonta, with the third genus Mammuthus extinct...

s, buffalo and other animals to trample the village and its fields to the ground.

In later stories in The Second Jungle Book
The Second Jungle Book
The Second Jungle Book is a sequel to The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. First published in 1895, it features five stories about Mowgli and three unrelated stories, all but one set in India, most of which Kipling wrote while living in Vermont...

 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
Kaa
Kaa is a fictional and exceptionally long Python molurus from the Mowgli stories written by Rudyard Kipling. Kaa is one of Mowgli's mentors and friends. He, Baloo and Bagheera sing for Mowgli "The Outsong" of the jungle. First introduced in the story "Kaa's Hunting" in The Jungle Book, Kaa is a...

 the python he leads the wolves in a war against the dhole
Dhole
The dhole is a species of canid native to South and Southeast Asia. It is the only extant member of the genus Cuon, which differs from Canis by the reduced number of molars and greater number of teats...

 (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.

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., p. 204.

Mowgli has been cited as a major influence on Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter, although he produced works in many genres.-Biography:...

' character Tarzan
Tarzan
Tarzan is a fictional character, an archetypal feral child raised in the African jungles by the Mangani "great apes"; he later experiences civilization only to largely reject it and return to the wild as a heroic adventurer...

. Mowgli was also an influence for a number of other "wild boy" characters; see Feral Children in Mythology and Fiction
Feral children in mythology and fiction
Feral children, children who have lived from a young age without human contact, appear in mythological and fictional works, usually as human characters who have been raised by animals...

.

Poul Anderson
Poul Anderson
Poul William Anderson was an American science fiction author who began his career during one of the Golden Ages of the genre and continued to write and remain popular into the 21st century. Anderson also authored several works of fantasy, historical novels, and a prodigious number of short stories...

 and Gordon R. Dickson
Gordon R. Dickson
Gordon Rupert Dickson was an American science fiction author.- Biography :Dickson was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1923. After the death of his father, he moved with his mother to Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1937...

 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
Teddy bear
The teddy bear is a stuffed toy bear. They are usually stuffed with soft, white cotton and have smooth and soft fur. It is an enduring form of a stuffed animal in many countries, often serving the purpose of entertaining children. In recent times, some teddy bears have become collector's items...

-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
Scouting in the United States
Scouting in the United States can refer to Scouting associations that are recognized by one of the international Scouting organizations, as well as independent groups that are considered to be "Scout-like" or otherwise Scouting related.-Scouting for boys:...

, 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
The Third Jungle Book
The Third Jungle Book by Pamela Jekel , originally illustrated by Nancy Malick, is a collection of new stories about Mowgli, the feral child character, and his animal companions, created by Rudyard Kipling and featured in Kipling's The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book .The stories are...

(1992) by Pamela Jekel (ISBN 1-879373-22-X) is a collection of new Mowgli stories in a fairly accurate pastiche
Pastiche
A pastiche is a literary or other artistic genre or technique that is a "hodge-podge" or imitation. The word is also a linguistic term used to describe an early stage in the development of a pidgin language.-Hodge-podge:...

 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
The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company is the largest media conglomerate in the world in terms of revenue. Founded on October 16, 1923, by Walt and Roy Disney as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, Walt Disney Productions established itself as a leader in the American animation industry before diversifying into...

's The Jungle Book
The Jungle Book (1967 film)
The Jungle Book is a 1967 American animated film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios. Released on October 18, 1967, it is the 19th animated feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series. It was inspired by the stories about the feral child Mowgli from the book of the same name by...

(1967), where he is voiced by Bruce Reitherman
Bruce Reitherman
Bruce Reitherman is an American filmmaker and former child actor and singer. He is the son of the late Disney animation director Wolfgang Reitherman.- Life and work :Reitherman was born in Burbank, California...

, son of the film's director Wolfgang Reitherman
Wolfgang Reitherman
Wolfgang Reitherman , also known and sometimes credited as Woolie Reitherman, was a famed Disney animator and one of Disney's Nine Old Men.-Personal life:...

; and The Jungle Book 2
The Jungle Book 2
The Jungle Book 2 is a 2003 American animated film produced by the DisneyToons studio in Sydney, Australia and released by Walt Disney Pictures and Buena Vista Distribution. The theatrical version of the film was released in France on February 5, 2003, and released in the United States on February...

(2003) in which Mowgli is voiced by Haley Joel Osment
Haley Joel Osment
Haley Joel Osment is an American actor. After a series of roles in television and film during the 1990s, including a small part in Forrest Gump playing Tom Hanks' title character’s son, Osment rose to fame with his performance as Cole Sear in M...

. Around the same time – from 1967 to 1971 – five Russian short animated films were made by Soyuzmultfilm
Soyuzmultfilm
Soyuzmultfilm is a Russian animation studio based in Moscow. Over the years it has gained international attention and respect, garnering numerous awards both at home and abroad. Noted for a great variety of style, it is regarded as the most influential animation studio of the former Soviet Union...

, collectively known as Adventures of Mowgli. Chuck Jones
Chuck Jones
Charles Martin "Chuck" Jones was an American animator, cartoon artist, screenwriter, producer, and director of animated films, most memorably of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts for the Warner Bros. Cartoons studio...

'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 Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese animated TV series
Anime
is the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation". The definition sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons....

 Jungle Book Shonen Mowgli
Jungle Book Shonen Mowgli
is an anime adaption of Rudyard Kipling's original collection of stories, The Jungle Book. It aired in 1989, and consists of a total of 52 episodes.-Music:...

based on the Mowgli series and a US live-action series, Mowgli: the New Adventures of the Jungle Book.

There was also a BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 radio adaptation in 1994, starring actress Nisha K. Nayar as Mowgli, Freddie Jones
Freddie Jones
Frederick Charles "Freddie" Jones is an English character actor.Jones was born in the town of Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, the son of Ida Elizabeth and Charles Edward Jones. He became an actor after ten years of working as a laboratory assistant with a firm making ceramic products,...

 as Baloo and Eartha Kitt
Eartha Kitt
Eartha Mae Kitt was an American singer, actress, and cabaret star. She was perhaps best known for her highly distinctive singing style and her 1953 hit recordings of "C'est Si Bon" and the enduring Christmas novelty smash "Santa Baby." Orson Welles once called her the "most exciting woman in the...

 as Kaa. This has been released on audio cassette and has been re-run a number of times on digital radio channel BBC 7
BBC 7
BBC Radio 4 Extra, formerly known as BBC 7 and BBC Radio 7, is a British digital radio station broadcasting comedy, drama, and children's programming nationally 24 hours a day. It is the principal broadcasting outlet for the BBC's archive of spoken-word entertainment...

's Little Toe Show.
  • Classics Illustrated
    Classics Illustrated
    Classics Illustrated is a comic book series featuring adaptations of literary classics such as Moby Dick, Hamlet, and The Iliad. Created by Albert Kanter, the series began publication in 1941 and finished its first run in 1971, producing 169 issues. Following the series' demise, various companies...

    #83 (1951) contains an adaptation of three Mowgli stories.
  • Between 1953 and 1955 Dell Comics
    Dell Comics
    Dell Comics was the comic book publishing arm of Dell Publishing, which got its start in pulp magazines. It published comics from 1929 to 1973. At its peak, it was the most prominent and successful American company in the medium...

     featured adaptations of six Mowgli stories in three issues (#487 http://www.p-synd.com/wild/jbcomic1-big.jpg, #582 http://www.p-synd.com/wild/jbcomic2-big.jpg and #620 http://www.p-synd.com/wild/jbcomic3-big.jpg).
  • Some issues of Marvel Fanfare
    Marvel Fanfare
    Marvel Fanfare is the title of two comic book series published by Marvel Comics. Both versions of Marvel Fanfare were anthology, showcase titles featuring a variety of characters from the Marvel universe.-Volume One:...

    feature adaptations of the Mowgli stories by Gil Kane
    Gil Kane
    Eli Katz who worked under the name Gil Kane and in one instance Scott Edward, was a comic book artist whose career spanned the 1940s to 1990s and every major comics company and character.Kane co-created the modern-day versions of the superheroes Green Lantern and the Atom for DC Comics, and...

    . These were later collected as an omnibus volume.
  • P. Craig Russell
    P. Craig Russell
    Philip Craig Russell , also known as P. Craig Russell, is an American comic book writer, artist, and illustrator. His work has won multiple Harvey and Eisner Awards...

    's Jungle Book Stories (1997) collects three stories, actually adapted from The Second Jungle Book
    The Second Jungle Book
    The Second Jungle Book is a sequel to The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. First published in 1895, it features five stories about Mowgli and three unrelated stories, all but one set in India, most of which Kipling wrote while living in Vermont...

    , which originally appeared between 1985 and 1996.

See also

  • Works of Rudyard Kipling
    Works of Rudyard Kipling
    -Books:* The City of Dreadful Night * Departmental Ditties * Plain Tales from the Hills * Soldiers Three...

  • Feral children in mythology and fiction
    Feral children in mythology and fiction
    Feral children, children who have lived from a young age without human contact, appear in mythological and fictional works, usually as human characters who have been raised by animals...

  • The Jungle Book characters
  • Mowgli Syndrome
    Mowgli Syndrome
    Mowgli syndrome is a term used by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty in her 1995 book Other Peoples' Myths: The Cave of Echoes to describe mythological figures who succeed in bridging the animal and human worlds to become one with nature, a human animal, only to become trapped between the two worlds, not...


Other meanings

'Mowgli' and similar can also mean:

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
    Wiki
    A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...

    on the Jungle Books and related subjects
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