Child Mowgli Climbing

Before Being a Child, Mowgli Was a Young Man

Kipling presents Mowgli to his readers for the first time not as a child, but as a young man. In the short story “In the Rukh” (“In the forest”), contained in the 1893 collection Many Inventions, Mowgli enlists as a British forestry official. Kipling describes him as a very experienced guy in the Indian jungle. […]

The Jungle Book

Why Did Kipling Write ‘The Jungle Book’

Born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1865 to British parents, Joseph Rudyard Kipling lived in India until the age of six. When, after a period of study in England, he returned to India, he worked as a writer and editor for a newspaper. Later on he said that it was in that period that he […]