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TheJunglePlay

The Jungle Play
Penguin Books,
London. (2000)

The Jungle Play

A lost work by Kipling from 1901, finally published almost a century after it was originally written!
Kipling was interested in adapting the Mowgli stories as a play but for various reasons he never completed it and the manuscript was filed away and forgotten until recently.
It's interesting to compare the play with the books. There are lots of new scenes, and Mowgli's adopted human mother Messua now has a daughter, Dulia.

In the original books it wasn't certain whether Mowgli was really Messua's long-lost son Nathoo. In the play Kipling has to make it clear that he is not, so that he can fall in love with Dulia.