Mowgli (, MOW-glee) is a fictional character and the protagonist of the Mowgli stories featured among Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book stories. He is a feral boy from the Pench area in Seoni, Madhya Pradesh, India, who originally appeared in Kipling's short story "In the Rukh" (collected in Many Inventions, 1893) and then became the most prominent character in the collections The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book (1894–1895), which also featured stories about other (on the basis of Marwar king Rao Sihaji) characters.
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Name and inspiration
In the stories, the name Mowgli is said to mean "frog", describing his lack of fur. Kipling later said "Mowgli is a name I made up. It does not mean 'frog' in any language that I know of."
Part of Kipling's inspiration for the story of Mowgli is believed to have been William Henry Sleeman's account of six cases in India in which wild children had been raised by wolves. That account was first published in the first volume of Sleeman's Journey Through the Kingdom of Oude in 1848-1850 (1858) and reprinted in 1852 as An Account of Wolves Nurturing Children in Their Dens, by an Indian Official and in The Zoologist (1888 12 (135): 87-98). One most notable feral child was found in the wolf's den at the Bulandshahr district in 1867 and subsequently brought to the Sikandra orphanage at Agra, where he was given the name Dina Sanichar.
Kipling's Mowgli stories
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 (1933).
"In the Rukh" describes how Gisborne, an English forest ranger in the Pench area in Seoni at the time of the British Raj, discovers a young man named Mowgli, who has extraordinary skills in hunting, tracking, and driving wild animals (with the help of his wolf brothers). He asks him to join the forestry service. Muller, the head of the Department of Woods and Forests of India as well as Gisborne's boss, meets Mowgli, checks his elbows and knees, noting the callouses and scars, and figures Mowgli is not using magic or demons, having seen a similar case in 30 years of service. Muller also invites Mowgli to join the service, to which Mowgli agrees. Later, Gisborne learns the reason for Mowgli's almost superhuman talents; he was raised by a pack of wolves in the jungle (explaining the scars on his elbows and knees from going on all fours). Mowgli marries the daughter of Gisborne's butler, Abdul Gafur, and conceives a son with her.
Kipling then proceeded to write the stories of Mowgli's childhood in detail in The Jungle Book, which serves as a prequel to In the Rukh. Lost by his parents as a baby in the Indian jungle during a tiger attack, he is adopted by the Wolf Mother, Raksha and Father Wolf, who call him Mowgli (frog) because of his lack of fur and his refusal to sit still. Shere Khan the tiger demands that they give him the baby but the wolves refuse. Mowgli grows up with the pack, hunting with his brother wolves. In the pack, Mowgli learns he is able to stare down any wolf, and his unique ability to remove the painful thorns from the paws of his brothers is deeply appreciated as well. To make up for his lack of fangs and claws, he wears a neck knife.
Bagheera, the black panther, 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" from a cub, and thus knows the ways of man. Baloo the bear, teacher of wolves, has the thankless task of educating Mowgli in "The Law of the Jungle".
Shere Khan continues to regard Mowgli as fair game, but eventually Mowgli finds a weapon he can use against the tiger – fire. 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. It is uncertain if Mowgli is actually the returned Nathoo, although it is stated in "Tiger! Tiger!" that the tiger who carried off Messua's son was similar to the one that attacked Mowgli's parents. Messua would like to believe that her son has returned, but she herself realises that this is unlikely.
Play adaptations
Rudyard Kipling adapted the Mowgli stories for The Jungle Play in 1899, but the play was never produced on stage. The manuscript was lost for almost a century. It was published in book form in 2000.
In 2013 Mowgli was portrayed in Mary Zimmerman's The Jungle Book Musical, played by Akash Chopra
Influences upon other works
Only six 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.
Mowgli has been cited as a major influence on Edgar Rice Burroughs who created and developed the character Tarzan. Mowgli was also an influence for a number of other "wild boy" characters.
Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson 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-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 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) and is also available online.
Films, television and radio
The 1942 live-action film version starred Sabu as Mowgli.
Disney's 1967 animated musical film version, where he is voiced by Bruce Reitherman, son of the film's director Wolfgang Reitherman (David Bailey was originally cast in the role, but his voice changed during production, leading Bailey to not fit the "young innocence of Mowgli's character" at which the producers were aiming), and its sequel, The Jungle Book 2 (2003), in which Mowgli is voiced by Haley Joel Osment (Jake Thomas auditioned for the role prior to Osment's casting). On three special animated segments for the VHS releases of the Jungle Cubs (1996-1998) animated TV series, Mowgli is voiced by Tyler Mullen. In the 2023 short Once Upon a Studio Mowgli's singing voice is provided by Phoenix Reisser.
Around the same time – from 1967 to 1971 – five Russian short animated films were made by Soyuzmultfilm, collectively known as Adventures of Mowgli.
Of all the various adaptations, Chuck Jones's 1977 animated TV short Mowgli's Brothers, adapting the first story in The Jungle Book, may be the one that adheres most closely to the original plot and dialogue.
There has also been a 1989 Japanese animated TV series Jungle Book Shonen Mowgli (where Mowgli is voiced by Urara Takano in the Japanese and Julian Bailey in the English Dub) based on the Mowgli series.
There was also a BBC radio adaptation in 1994, starring actress Nisha K. Nayar as Mowgli, Freddie Jones as Baloo and Eartha Kitt as Kaa. It originally aired on BBC Radio 5 (before it became BBC Radio 5 Live and dropped its children's programming). Subsequently, it has been released on audio cassette and has been re-run a number of times on digital radio channel BBC 7 (now BBC Radio 4 Extra).
Classics Illustrated #83 (1951) contains an adaptation of three Mowgli stories.
Between 1953 and 1955 Dell Comics featured adaptations of six Mowgli stories in three issues (#487, #582 and #620).
