Mowgli

Fictional human from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book

Appears in 8 videos · 8 passages.

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani uses Mowgli as the generic name for feral children, children raised by she-wolves or "wolf children"1 2. He notes that The Jungle Book romanticizes the most famous of them3, and he uses the figure to raise a question that recurs from one session to the next: being born human is not enough to be human. His wording varies. Sometimes he says that every baby becomes a wild child again4, or that it is a little Mowgli in potential5, and sometimes that human children are not born like Mowglis6. Either way, what makes a human being is not a matter of mere birth. He also points out that the animals look away from Mowgli's human gaze7. More recently, he brings up wolf children in connection with the innocence of nature, which he sets against naturalist ideology8.

Summary produced automatically from 8 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Who is this?

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.

Read the article on Wikipedia

Text: Wikipédia, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Portrait: John Charles Dollman, Public domain