Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) is today most well-known as the writer of The Jungle Book. He was born in India to British parents. The stories he heard and his childhood experiences heavily influenced his writing. Like most British children whose parents were living in India, he was sent back to England for his education. He wrote for adults and children. He was a journalist, short-storyist, novelist and was particularly known in his time as a poet. He was one of the most renowned writers of his time, the youngest winner and first English language winner of the Nobel prize in Literature. He was particularly innovative with the short story as used for children.

The Jungle Book was written during a period of his adult years when he lived in the United States. It was first published in 1894. The title is most associated with the stories of Mowgli, an abandoned boy who grows up in the jungle and is raised by animals. Not all the stories feature Mowgli, for example, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is the story of a mongoose who saves a family by defeating two cobras. Many elements of the stories come from Indian fables, such as those of the Panchatantra, which you may recall from our conversations about fairy tales and fables as a collection of virtue stories featuring anthropomorphized animals.

In 1902, Kipling published another story collection, the Just So Stories, featuring short humorous stories about the characteristics of animals or early humans.

READ: The Elephant’s Child; or How the Elephant Got its Trunk

Kipling wrote from a colonialist perspective and his reputation has been as an unapologetic believer in colonialism as a system. Both as a person and through the popularity of his writing he came to signify the quintessential Imperial writer. Most famously this is seen in his poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” from which the phrase comes. This is the first stanza:

Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

1899

The poem was published at the same time as the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) and was seen as an encouragement of the U.S. annexation of the Philippines. Kipling’s pro-Imperial stance and how that can be interpreted in his literary writings have generally been taken as a given and is a large part of why he has fallen out of favor. Some scholars, however, have pointed to a certain amount of irony and warning that appear in this poem and other works about imperialism, arguing that there is more complexity to his thinking. Without a doubt, however, for many of his contemporary writers and other writers of the 20th century he was a deeply influential literary figure.