The Jungle Book

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussions of racism and racist violence.

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, in 1865 to English parents. In his autobiography, Kipling recalls his childhood in India fondly, describing how he was raised in a bilingual household: “one spoke ‘English,’ haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in” (Kipling, Rudyard. Something of Myself. London: Macmillan, 1937). At the age of five, Kipling was sent to live in England, but he disliked his strict, Evangelical caretakers and described his time there as torturous. When Kipling completed his education in England, he returned to India and became a newspaper editor in Lahore. He began publishing stories, eventually relocating to the literary center of London, and then to Vermont in the United States, where he wrote and published The Jungle Book. Kipling’s multilingual childhood and his subsequent feeling of alienation and hybrid cultural identity is reflected in many of the stories in The Jungle Book.

In 1899, Kipling published a poem commenting on the potential for American military intervention in the Philippines entitled “The White Man’s Burden.” This poem exemplifies his