Kipling wrote it in Vermont
The Jungle Book was written in 1893 and 1894 in Brattleboro, Vermont, where Kipling was living with his American wife in a house he had built, surrounded by snow. He was writing India from four thousand miles away and about twenty years after leaving it.
He had been born in Bombay and spent his first six years there, then was sent to England to a foster family who treated him badly, then returned to India as a teenager to work as a journalist in Lahore. So the JUNGLE of the book is assembled from early childhood memory, adult reporting, Indian folk tales, and a good deal of imagination. The animals are accurate; the geography is vague on purpose.
It is not one story, and MOWGLI is only half of it
The book is a collection of separate tales with poems between them, and only three of the seven are about MOWGLI. The most famous of the others is Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, about a mongoose defending a family from cobras, which children who have only seen the films tend not to know exists.
The MOWGLI stories are also darker than their reputation. He is not raised in a happy jungle idyll — he is fought over, exiled from the WOLF PACK, rejected by the human village as a witch, and ends up belonging to neither. The famous line about the strength of the PACK being the wolf works both ways: it is a book about how groups protect you and how they turn on you.
The Cub Scouts took the names
Robert Baden-Powell needed a scheme for boys too young for Scouts and asked Kipling, a friend, if he could use the book. The result in 1916 was the Wolf Cubs, and the borrowing was wholesale: the adult leader is still AKELA, the packs are still called packs, and the youngest section of Scouting worldwide is built on a novel about a boy raised by animals.
Some groups still use BALOO, BAGHEERA and KAA as leader names, and the Grand Howl ceremony comes straight from the book. It is an unusual afterlife for a piece of fiction — roughly a hundred years of real children being organised according to the rules of an imaginary WOLF PACK.
The animals, and one thing to say about Kipling
The grid holds MOWGLI the MAN CUB and his teachers, the BEAR BALOO and the black PANTHER BAGHEERA; the TIGER SHERE KHAN, who is lame in one foot and hunts cattle because he cannot catch faster prey; the PYTHON KAA; the MONKEY people under KING LOUIE, who was invented for the 1967 film and is not in the book; plus the ELEPHANT, the VINES, the HONEY, the LAW and INDIA itself.
Kipling was a great writer who also wrote in support of empire, and some of his other work makes for uncomfortable reading now. Teachers usually handle it by reading the stories and being honest about the man, which is a reasonable approach to most authors. For the real creatures behind the characters, our rainforest animals page sticks to the biology.