Mowgli and his wolf-mother - an illustration from the first Jungle Book (Macmillan's Children Edition 1983)
The release of Disney's latest film of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book reminded me of an intriguing fact: the hero of the stories, Mowgli (who had been raised by wolves and could talk to the jungle animals) made his first appearance in a story about foresters and forestry.
Kipling's short story In the Rukh was published [See Endnote 1] in 1893, a year before the publication of the first of the Jungle Books. It introduced Mowgli through his relationship with Gisborne, a forestry officer working for the Indian Forest Service, and ends with Mowgli taking up an appointment in the Forest Service as a Forest Guard [2]. The story was so well-received, especially in England, it moved Kipling to write the two famous Jungle Books, They are still celebrated today, well over a century later.
In the Rukh is interesting from several angles. Not only does it present Mowgli and his unique situation, but it puts him firmly in the setting of late 19th Century India, a time when the British Raj was in full swing, and especially at the time when systematic forest conservation was first being established in India.
In 1857, in the wake of the Sepoy Mutiny (known these days in India as the First War of Independence), the British government took over the administration of India from the East India Company. They inherited a shocking mess in the forests of the sub-continent. These had been ruthlessly exploited by the Company and its contractors, the principal interest of whom was making money. The East India Company had almost no thought for the future, no consideration of the local people, and little interest in reforestation or protection. All of this changed radically after the British Government took control.
One of their first initiatives was to establish an Indian Forest Service. This was mostly staffed with French and German-trained foresters (no British-trained foresters being available at the time) and Army officers. They set about putting in place a management system that would see the forests properly cared for, indeed rejuvenated and expanded, and they pioneered new approaches to timber resource conservation, the rehabilitation of degraded land, the reforestation of eroding water catchments, and the development of plantations (mostly for firewood, the principal fuel of the Indian villagers). The forestry systems they developed spread eventually to the rest of the English-speaking world, including Australia [3].
This is the context in which Kipling sets his story In the Rukh and introduces us to his remarkable creation Mowgli. The Jungle Books are therefore the prequel to In the Rukh although the latter was conceived and written first.
In the Rukh has a remarkable opening paragraph ... by which I mean remarkable to foresters like me, not used to reading about themselves and their work in glowing terms:
Of the wheels of public service that turn under the Indian Government, there is none more important than the Department of Woods and Forests. The reboisement of all India is in its hands; or will be when Government has the money to spend. Its servants wrestle with wandering sand-torrents and shifting dunes wattling them at the sides, damming them in front, and pegging them down atop with coarse grass and spindling pine after the rules of Nancy. They are responsible for all the timber in the State forests of the Himalayas, as well as for the denuded hillsides that the monsoons wash into dry gullies and aching ravines; each cut a mouth crying aloud what carelessness can do. They experiment with battalions of foreign trees, and coax the blue gum to take root and, perhaps, dry up the Canal fever. In the plains the chief part of their duty is to see that the belt fire-lines in the forest reserves are kept clean, so that when drought comes and the cattle starve, they may throw the reserve open to the villager’s herds and allow the man himself to gather sticks. They poll and lop for the stacked railway-fuel along the lines that burn no coal; they calculate the profit of their plantations to five points of decimals; they are the doctors and midwives of the huge teak forests of Upper Burma, the rubber of the Eastern Jungles, and the gall-nuts of the South; and they are always hampered by lack of funds.
But since a Forest Officer’s business takes him far from the beaten roads and the regular stations, he learns to grow wise in more than wood-lore alone; to know the people and the polity of the jungle; meeting tiger, bear, leopard, wild-dog, and all the deer, not once or twice after days of beating, but again and again in the execution of his duty. He spends much time in the saddle or under canvas—the friend of newly-planted trees, the associate of uncouth rangers and hairy trackers—till the woods, that show his care, in turn set their mark upon him, and he ceases to sing the naughty French songs he learned at Nancy and grows silent with the silent things of the underbrush.
We soon meet the other main character of the story, Forest Officer Gisborne. He is at his forest station in the rukh ("rukh" is a Hindi word which roughly translates as "the bush" in Australian vernacular, anywhere outside utban and farming country). One night a runner, "breathless and gasping" arrives at Gisborne's station with the news that one of Gisborne's Forest Guards has been attacked and killed by a tiger. The villagers have recognised from the footprints of the tiger that he is the animal they know as "the Red One", and they fear that the attack on the forestry officer portends future attacks in the village. Gisborne, although he does not hunt for pleasure, decides he must find and shoot the tiger … disposing of tiger and leopard man-eaters, or of rogue elephants, was part of the Indian forester’s job.
Just as he is preparing to go, Gisborne noticed:
... a man was walking down the dried bed of the stream, naked except for the loin-cloth, but crowned with a wreath of the tasselled blossoms of the white convolvulus creeper. So noiselessly did he move over the little pebbles, that even Gisborne, used to the soft-footedness of trackers, started.
This turns out to be Mowgli, who immediately offers to guide Gisborne to where the killer tiger is lying up, and to assist him to approach and kill it. This he does, and Gisborne is deeply impressed by Mowgli’s jungle skills.
As he gets to know him, Gisborne is further impressed by Mowgli's intimate knowledge of the forest and of the jungle wildlife. He welcomes Mowgli into his house and befriends him. As the story unfolds, Mowgli demonstrates, over and again, an astounding ability to command the wildest of wild animals. Even the panther and the water buffalo understand perfectly what he wants of them, and they obey him with alacrity.
Modern readers, of course, especially if they have read The Jungle Book or seen the earlier movies, know the story, but Gisborne does not. He considers Mowgli to have mystical, supernatural powers, to be "possessed" by some jungle spirit. But he quickly sees the value of having Mowgli at his side in his forestry work, and he offers Mowgli a job as a Forest Guard. Mowgli at first demurs.
At this stage Kipling introduces Muller, the Inspector-General of Forests for all of India, who is Gisborne's boss. He is an ‘old India hand’ and understands many of the mysteries of the jungle. On this fateful occasion, Gisborne has had a long day at work, visiting one of his Forest Rangers, inspecting plantations and arranging some burning-off. In the evening, he comes across Muller by accident, at his camp in the rukh. Muller is on one of his ad hoc inspection tours:
The gigantic German who was the head of the Woods and Forests of all India, Head Ranger from Burma to Bombay, had a habit of flitting batlike without warning from one place to another, and turning up exactly where he was least looked for. His theory was that sudden visitations, the discovery of shortcomings and a word-of-mouth upbraiding of a subordinate were infinitely better than the slow processes of correspondence, which might end in a written and official reprimand—a thing in after years to be counted against a Forest Officer’s record. As he explained it: ‘If I only talk to my boys like a Dutch uncle, dey say, “It was only dot damned old Muller,” and dey do better next dime. But if my fat-head clerk he write and say dot Muller der Inspecdor-General fail to onderstand and is much annoyed, first dot does no goot because I am not dere, and, second, der fool dot comes after me he may say to my best boys: “Look here, you haf been wigged by my bredecessor.” I tell you der big brass-hat bizness does not make der trees grow.’
Gisborne introduces Muller to Mowgli and recounts some of Mowgli's amazing exploits in commanding and communing with wild jungle animals. “I fancy the chap’s possessed in some way" Gisborne remarks.
Muller, on the other hand, immediately recognises Mowgli as a child of the forest, another one of whom he had met thirty years before. "There is no possession" he says, "but it is most wonderful - normally they die young, these people". Muller then motions for Mowgli to approach, and he inspects his knees and elbows, noting the calluses and scratches. He knows that Mowgli had grown up walking on all fours and immediately understands his strange ways and powers.
Muller then makes Mowgli a proposal:
"Now listen thou". Muller faced Mowgli and returned to the vernacular. "I am the head of all the rukhs in the country of India and others across the Black Water. I do not know how many men be under me—perhaps five thousand, perhaps ten. Thy business is this,—to wander no more up and down the rukh and drive beasts for sport or for show, but to take service under me, who am the Government in the matter of Woods and Forests, and to live in this rukh as a forest-guard; to drive the villagers’ goats away when there is no order to feed them in the rukh; to admit them when there is an order; to keep down, as thou canst keep down, the boar and the nilghai when they become too many; to tell Gisborne Sahib how and where tigers move, and what game there is in the forests; and to give sure warning of all the fires in the rukh, for thou canst give warning more quickly than any other. For that work there is a payment each month in silver, and at the end, when thou hast gathered wife and cattle and maybe children, a pension. What answer?"
After deliberation, Mowgli eventually accepts the offer. Kipling’s story concludes with Mowgli living out his days working for Gisborne as a Forest Guard and helping him with every aspect of conservation … but he never abandons the jungle, in which he lives with his wife and son, and he continues his friendships and adventures with the jungle wildlife.
The story about Mowgli recounted in In the Rukh, so appealed to readers that Kipling returned to the character and elaborated on it in The Jungle Book stories, first published in 1894-5. They became his most well-loved works. The Jungle Book fables go back to Mowgli's life before he learned to speak English and before he met Gisborne and Muller and explain why he helped Gisborne to track down and kill the rogue tiger. The villain in the Jungle Book stories is the fearsome tiger Shere Kahn, who objected to Mowgli's presence (and prestige) amongst the jungle animals and sought to capture and kill him.
Like nearly everone of my generation, I have a copy in my bookcase
In the first Jungle Book, Kipling describes Mowgli’s initial contact with humans before he meets Gisborne and Muller. In the chapter ‘Tiger! Tiger! Kipling writes “Now we must go back to the first tale” and we read:
When Mowgli left the wolf’s cave after the fight with the Pack at the Council Rock, he went down to the ploughed lands where the villagers lived … he hurried on, keeping to the rough road that ran down the valley, and followed it at a steady jog-trot for nearly twenty miles, till he came to a country that he did not know.
Arriving tired and hungry at a village gate, Mowgli sat down and when a man came out he pointed to his mouth to show that he wanted food.
The man stared, and ran back up the street of the village, shouting for the priest, who was a big, fat man dressed in white, with a red-and-yellow mark on his forehead. The priest came to the gate, and with him at least a hundred people, who stared and shouted and pointed at Mowgli …
…” What is to be afraid of?” said the priest. “Look at the marks on his arms and legs. They are the bites of wolves. He is but a wolf-child run away from the Jungle”.
Mowgli is then taken into the house of one of the village women, and adopted, and it is here that he learns to speak English.
Thus, Mowgli’s meeting with Forester Gisborne, described in In the Rukh, has occurred after his first contact with humans described subsequently in The Jungle Book. When Mowgli met Gisborne he could already speak English, and he understood human ways.
It is interesting to speculate whether Kipling had the whole thing already in his mind before he started writing. Whatever, the important thing for Kipling was that both In the Rukh and the first Jungle Book were enormously popular, so much so that Kipling wrote and published The Second Jungle Book only a year later. The popularity of the two Jungle books has survived: many of the stories are published in anthologies to this day, to say nothing of being made into popular films, and they are remembered with nostalgia by the men and women all over the world who read and were fascinated by the stories when they were children, and who have never forgotten Mowgli and his jungle friends (and foes).
Sadly, political correctness has raised its ugly head. Mowgli's association with forestry and his work as a Forest Guard is never mentioned today, indeed is written out of history completely in the most recent Disney film. I would never have heard of In the Rukh had I not seen a reference to it in an early forestry journal and then looked it up on the internet.
Rudyard Kipling: poet, novelist, journalist and folklorist.
Speaking of political correctness, poor Kipling himself has become controversial these days, being portrayed as a jingo colonialist and a supporter of the “evil” British Empire. Incredibly, his famous poem If is described as “racist” by university students in England who demolished a wall on campus on which the poem had been inscribed.
I can’t see it. I re-read If again this morning, and I still can’t see it. I am not prepared to judge Kipling by the standards of foolish English undergraduates, and I make no apologies for enjoying his novels and poems, especially the classics like The Road to Mandalay. Closing my eyes, the lines and rhythms come back to me …
…for the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say:
“Come you back you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay;
Come you back to Mandalay where the old Flotilla lay ….”
Or I recall those memorable lines about the British Army officer killed on the North-west Frontier (Afghanistan):
A scrimmage in a Border Station –
A canter down a dark defile –
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee Jezail –
The crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride
Shot like a rabbit in a ride …
I read the Jungle Books as a child and came to know, love and relish the various animals in Mowgli’s world (Baloo the bear, Bagheera the panther, and so on), and I can remember playing ‘Kim’s Game’ with my brother and sisters – our Grandfather considered it good memory training – and later reading the book itself [6].
I am also grateful to Kipling for paying tribute to the work of India’s pioneering foresters. Although they didn't always get it right (as judged by contemporary standards) there was much to admire in the forest conservation model developed in India in the late 19th Century. The Forest Service had been created as one of the four initial arms of the new Imperial Civil Service (the other three being the Police, the Army and the Civil Administration), and was the first of its kind anywhere outside continental Europe, and the first to grapple with the management challenges of tropical forests. Most of the initial appointments to the Service were from France or Germany, or at least had been trained in French or German universities, and they had to learn almost everything from scratch. But they were tough, enterprising men who understood the basic principles of forest conservation and were prepared to live and work in the bush. This is exemplified by Kipling's Inspector-General Muller and his advice to young Gisborne near the end of In the Rukh (which I render here into ordinary English from the music-hall Germanic English Kipling has him speaking).
If I find you, Gisborne, sitting in your bungalow and hatching reports to me about the plantations instead of riding the plantations, I will transfer you to the middle of the Bikaneer Desert to reforest it. I am sick of reports and chewing paper when we should be at work out in the forest.
Now that's my idea of an Inspector-General of Forests!
End Notes
1. In the Rukh is a long story, and wanders about, but this does not diminish its literary importance as the precursor of The Jungle Book It can be read in its entirety at :
2. "Forest Guard" was the lowest rank in the sub-professional staff of the Indian Forest Service. Forest Guards were always native Indians. Promotion to Forest Ranger could follow, but not to the ranks of the professional forest officers who became the senior officers of the Forest Service and who had been trained at University or in the Army. The same titles and arrangement applied in the Western Australian Forests Department (where I worked as a forest officer) right up until the mid-1980s.
3. There is a full account of the early development of forestry in India in my book Foresters of the Raj (York Gum Publishing, 2013)
4. `"Reboisement" is a French word, meaning reforestation, or sometimes afforestation, and its use in India reflects the fact that so many of the first professional forestry officers in India had been trained at the famous forestry school at Nancy in France.
5. Kipling clearly modelled the character of Muller on Berthold Ribbentrop, the real-life Inspector-General of Indian forests in the late 1890s, at the time Kipling was writing the Mowgli stories. As a young man, Ribbentrop moved to India from Germany and took up a position as a forest officer. Ultimately he succeeded William Schlich as Inspector-General (head of the Indian Forest Service) after Schlich became Professor of Forestry at Oxford. There is a biographical essay on Ribbentrop in Foresters of the Raj, including an account of his visit to Australia and his devastatingly critical report on forestry in Victoria in the 1890s.
6. “Kim’s Game” was described in Kipling’s book Kim, as part of the training of a spy. Twenty random objects (a fork, a thimble, a cup, an orange etc) are laid out on a tray. You are given a few seconds to memorise them, and then the tray is removed, and you have to enumerate the collection. It was an effective training exercise; I remember that I became better at it the more often I played.
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