There is a peculiar fact at the centre of the most famous jungle story ever written in English: its author had not been to the jungle. Rudyard Kipling wrote The Jungle Book in Vermont in the early 1890s, drawing on gazetteers, hunting memoirs and a childhood in India that had ended when he was five. The Seoni hills he set it in were, to him, a place on a map and in other men's books.
That does not make the setting imaginary. Seoni is real, the forest is real, and much of it now falls inside Pench Tiger Reserve — where the sal and teak, the langur, the gaur and the tigers are all present exactly as the stories suggest.
Bombay, and a childhood that ended abruptly
Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, the son of an art-school teacher, and spent his first years in a household run largely by Indian servants — he later wrote that he thought and dreamed in the vernacular before he did in English. At five he was sent to England and boarded with a family who treated him badly. He returned to India at sixteen to work as a journalist in Lahore, which is where the writing began in earnest.
The India in his work is therefore a compound: real early sensory memory, real adult reporting, and a great deal of second-hand material worked up with enormous skill.
Reading him honestly
Kipling was an imperialist, and not incidentally. He argued for empire in his verse and his journalism, and some of what he wrote is genuinely ugly. Travelling with his work does not require agreeing with him; it requires reading him with your eyes open. He is also, inconveniently for everyone, a superb writer about India's landscape and animals, and Kim is one of the great novels of the road.
We think the honest position is the interesting one: read him, use him as a way into the country he described, and take the argument with him seriously rather than pretending it is not there.
The country itself
Pench and its neighbours — Kanha and Bandhavgarh in the same central belt — are among the best tiger habitats in India, and the reason is conservation work, not literary association. Kanha in particular is credited with saving the barasingha, the swamp deer, from extinction. A journey here is a wildlife journey first and a literary one second, which is the right order.
The dry months from March onward concentrate animals at water and give the strongest sightings; the green months after the monsoon reopening are quieter and far more beautiful. We compose either, with private vehicles and naturalists who know the individual tigers by name.
Questions, Answered
Where is The Jungle Book set?
In the Seoni hills of central India, in present-day Madhya Pradesh. Much of that landscape now lies within Pench Tiger Reserve.
Did Rudyard Kipling visit the jungle he wrote about?
No. He wrote The Jungle Book in Vermont, drawing on gazetteers, hunting accounts and his own Indian childhood and journalism. He had not visited the Seoni forests themselves.
Can you see tigers in Pench?
Yes. Pench has a healthy tiger population alongside leopard, gaur, sloth bear and very good birdlife. Sightings are never guaranteed anywhere, but the central Indian reserves offer among the best odds in the country.
Was Kipling born in India?
Yes — in Bombay in 1865. He spent his early childhood there, was sent to England at five, and returned at sixteen to work as a journalist in Lahore.