Rikki-Tikki In A Nutshell

A sweltering jungle-covered land. Danger and intrigue lingering between ancient city alleys.
Action and riches waiting for the most courageous of manly men.
As a journalist for the Civil and Military Gazette in India (Intro.9-10), Rudyard Kiplingspun
popular tales of the "mysterious" land the British had come to know as the Orient. His tales
"impress[ed] upon the minds of Englishmen at home the almost divine necessity of maintaining
the British Empire" (source), meaning, of course, India.
So, naturally, Kipling was in India when his muse struck, right? He stared out his window at the
rich jungle canopy and imagined what was occurring in that vast wilderness just beyond his
grasp.
Eh, not exactly.

Actually, he was living in Vermont when he began writing The Jungle Books, one of his most
famous works. In 1892, Kipling began projecting his mind away from the frigid Northeast winter
and back to the warm tropics of India (source). He wrote these fantasies as short stories and sold
them to various magazines. By 1894, he had written enough of the stories to combine them into a
collection, which was titled The Jungle Books.
Nestled amongst these imaginings of wolf cubs and tigers was a story about a little mongoose.
Titled "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi," after the story's furry protagonist, the story was a classic hero's tale
shrunken down to critter size. In it, the warrior mongoose Rikki-tikki matches himself in a
mythic battle against the devilish cobras Nag and Nagaina in the back yard of an Indian
bungalow.
Although never as famous as Jungle Book alumnus Mowgliwhose combined tales take up
eight of the total Jungle Books talesRikki-tikki has done fairly well for himself. Along with
"Toomai of the Elephants," "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" is one of the fewJungle Books short stories to not
feature Mowgli, yet still gain enough recognition to be printed outside the collection.
And Kipling's story about a mongoose's backyard battle remains in print to this day. One hundred
years after its first printing, "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" remains an inseparable part of the Jungle
Books collection and has found a life of its own on many a child's bookshelf. Considering the
average mongoose only lives to be twenty, Rikki-tikki is beating the odds in a major way.