"Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" is a short story in the 1894 short story collection The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling about adventures of a valiant young Indian grey mongoose. [1] It has often been anthologized and published several times as a short book. Book 5 of Panchatantra , an ancient Indian collection, includes the mongoose and snake story, an inspiration for the "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" story.
After an intense seasonal thunderstorm, an Indian mongoose named Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (from his chattering vocalizations) becomes the pet of an English family residing in India after they save him from drowning. He becomes friendly with some other creatures inhabiting their garden. However, the cobras, named Nag (the male) and Nagaina (the female), are angered by the human family's presence in their territory and fear Rikki as a threat when they meet him for the first time. Scared at first, Rikki soon learns that a mongoose's quest is to track down and slay any snake he or she can find, and fends them off after a short skirmish. That same day, a young dust-brown snake named Karait threatens to bite the family's child, Teddy. This infuriates Rikki into challenging Karait, unaware the smaller snake is as venomous as a cobra and faster. Despite the risk, Rikki emerges victorious and kills the snake, saving the child, before presenting the slain foe to the father as proof of the mongoose's victory.
Later that night, Rikki hears Nag and Nagaina plot to kill the family to take over the house for their hatchlings and drive Rikki away. Nag enters the house's bathroom before dawn to make his ambush. Rikki, however, makes the first move and ambushes Nag from atop a vase in the darkness. The ensuing struggle awakens the family, and the father appears to kill Nag with a shotgun blast while Rikki bites down on the hood of the struggling male cobra. [2]
The following morning, a grieving Nagaina attempts revenge against the humans, cornering them as they have breakfast on a veranda. She is however distracted by the wife of Darzee the tailor bird (Darzee is singing about Nag's death) while Rikki destroys the cobra's unhatched brood of eggs, except for one. He carries it to the porch where Nagaina threatens to bite little Teddy while his parents watch helplessly. Rikki furiously challenges her and lures the cobra away from the family, giving the father enough time to grab Teddy away and keep him close. Rikki then reveals that it was he who put Nag down before the father opened fire on him.
Nagaina recovers her egg during the intense battle and tries to retreat homeward, but is pursued by Rikki from the house to the cobra's underground nest, where an unseen final battle occurs, although few mongooses dare to enter cobra nests, as they mostly tend to avoid them. Fearing the worst, Darzee mourns what he thinks to be Rikki's death via song. Minutes later, Rikki emerges triumphant from the hole, declaring Nagaina dead and that she will never come out again, and Darzee changes his tune from anguish to elatement. With the immediate threat defeated, Rikki dedicates his life to guarding the garden, resulting in no snake daring to show its head on its walls.
Director Alexandra Snezhko-Blotskaya shot an animated short film of this story titled Рикки-Тикки-Тави (Rikki-Tikki-Tavi) in 1965 in the Soviet Union, at the film studio Soyuzmultfilm. Ten years later, Chuck Jones adapted it for a half-hour television special in the United States, with Orson Welles narrating and providing the voice of Nag. [3] The same year, Aleksandr Juridic and Nan Nashville directed a live-action feature film entitled Rikki-Tikki-Tavi . [4]
In the anime television series, Jungle Book Shōnen Mowgli , Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is a supporting character who is the pet of an Indian family and is a heroic defender of them.
In the CGI series The Jungle Book , Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is an occasional character who is a friend of Mowgli.
The story was adapted as a picture book of the same name in 1997 by Jerry Pinkney.
This is a bibliography of works by Rudyard Kipling, including books, short stories, poems, and collections of his works.
Mowgli is a fictional character and the protagonist of 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" 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 characters.
The Jungle Book (1894) is a collection of stories by the English author Rudyard Kipling. Most of the characters are animals such as Shere Khan the tiger and Baloo the bear, though a principal character is the boy or "man-cub" Mowgli, who is raised in the jungle by wolves. The stories are set in a forest in India; one place mentioned repeatedly is "Seeonee" (Seoni), in the central state of Madhya Pradesh.
Kaa is a fictional character from The Jungle Book stories written by Rudyard Kipling. He is a giant snake who is 30 feet long.
The common tailorbird is a songbird found across tropical Asia. Popular for its nest made of leaves "sewn" together and immortalized by Rudyard Kipling as Darzee in his Jungle Book, it is a common resident in urban gardens. Although shy birds that are usually hidden within vegetation, their loud calls are familiar and give away their presence. They are distinctive in having a long upright tail, greenish upper body plumage and rust coloured forehead and crown. This passerine bird is typically found in open farmland, scrub, forest edges and gardens. Tailorbirds get their name from the way their nest is constructed. The edges of a large leaf are pierced and sewn together with plant fibre or spider silk to make a cradle in which the actual nest is built. Punjab tailor birds produce shiny red eggs, but became extinct around 1975 due to laying their eggs in fields used to grow fodder crops.
Nagini may refer to:
Nag or NAG may refer to:
"Mowgli's Brothers" is a short story by Rudyard Kipling. Chronologically, it is the first story about Mowgli although it was written after "In the Rukh", in which Mowgli appears as an adult.
Ophiophagy is a specialized form of feeding or alimentary behavior of animals which hunt and eat snakes. There are ophiophagous mammals, birds, lizards, and even other snakes, such as the Central and South American mussuranas and the North American common kingsnake. The venomous king cobra is also named for this habit.
Rudyard Kipling's The Second Jungle Book: Mowgli & Baloo is a 1997 American adventure film starring Jamie Williams as Mowgli, with Roddy McDowall and Billy Campbell in supporting roles. It is a live action adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. The film was adapted for the screen by Bayard Johnson and Matthew Horton.
Nagaina is a genus of jumping spiders that was first described by George and Elizabeth Peckham in 1896. The name is derived from Nagaina, a character from Rudyard Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Other salticid genera with names of Kipling's characters include Bagheera, Messua, and Akela.
The Indian grey mongoose or Asian grey mongoose is a mongoose species native to the Indian subcontinent and West Asia. It is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List.
The Jungle Book is an Italian-Japanese anime adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's original collection of stories, The Jungle Book. It aired in 1989, and consists of a total of 52 episodes.
The Jungle Book is a 3D CGI animated television series co-produced by DQ Entertainment International, MoonScoop, Ellipsanime Productions, ZDF, ZDF Enterprises, TF1 and Les Cartooneurs Associés. It is based on the Rudyard Kipling book of the same name.
Mowgli's Brothers is a 1976 television animated special directed by American animator Chuck Jones. It is based on the first chapter of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. The special was narrated by Roddy McDowall, who also performs the voices of all the male characters in the film. June Foray was the voice of Raksha, the Mother Wolf. It originally aired on CBS on February 11, 1976.
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is a 1997 retelling of Rudyard Kipling's classic story by Jerry Pinkney about a mongoose that protects a family from two cobras. The book won a Caldecott honor in 1998 for its illustrations.
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is a 1975 Soviet-Indian family film directed by Nana Kldiashvili and Aleksandr Zguridi.
Filmmakers and others have made many adaptations of The Jungle Book stories by Rudyard Kipling. The stories, inspired by Kipling's life in India, were published in the 1894 The Jungle Book and its 1895 sequel, The Second Jungle Book.
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi may refer to:
Rikki Tikki Tavi public domain audiobook at LibriVox 
