Jungle Books: Stories set in the Indian forests
Editor’s Note: In this beautiful list of forest-themed books, Amritesh starts with the literal and arrives at myths and legends, gothic ecology, and the sociological margins in the forests. There’s a tiger telling his own tale and the perspective of a tree at the brink of destruction.
Written by: Amritesh Mukherjee is a reader, writer and journalist—mostly in that order. Covering literature, cinema and art through his writings, he's fascinated by the stories that shape our world. You can follow him on his Insta and X account.
The Indian forest has rarely been just a setting. In fiction, as in life, it becomes something else: an inheritance, a frontier, a mirror, a wound. It shelters fugitives, hides spirits, speaks in myth and memory, and bears histories that don’t make it to the textbook. This is a list of ten works that are set in or shaped by India’s forests. Some draw from folklore and oral traditions, others from personal experience, political conflict, or environmental change.
Each work opens a door into a forest dense with foliage and meaning, be it ecological, political, spiritual, or personal. Together, these books remind us that to write the jungle is to write about everything it touches: animal and human, seen and unseen.
Jungle Nama by Amitav Ghosh: The forests of the Sundarbans have long shaped Amitav Ghosh’s fiction. In ‘Jungle Nama,’ he returns to them in verse. This is a retelling of the Bon Bibi legend, a tale passed down through Bengali oral traditions, in which a poor boy, Dukhey, is betrayed by his uncle Dhona and left for dead in the jungle. Hunted by the tiger-spirit Dokkhin Rai, Dukhey remembers his mother’s advice: call on Bon Bibi, and she will come.
Amritesh’s take: Ghosh retells this folktale in rhyming couplets of 24 syllables, drawing from the dwipodi poyar meter of the Johura Nama. It’s a parable of balance, of appetite checked by discipline, of harmony between human and forest. The verse mirrors the moral logic of the tale, where order must be restored through rhythm and restraint. The book is illustrated by Salman Toor, whose monochrome visuals flesh out the menace (and magic) of the Sundarbans aptly. For those drawn to sound, the audiobook adaptation, narrated and composed by Ali Sethi, is unmissable.
In the Jungles of the Night by Stephen Alter: What if the most intimate truths about someone are unreachable by fact? Stephen Alter’s novel imagines Jim Corbett from the inside out through fiction. It’s told in three parts: before, during, and after India. It follows Corbett as a teenage fern collector in colonial Nainital, a wartime veteran turned reluctant tiger hunter, and finally as an ageing writer in Kenya, trying to make peace with the country he left behind.
Amritesh’s take: Alter uses fiction to press against the facts, to ask what isn’t known, what wasn’t written down. Why did Corbett leave India after Independence? What did he believe in? How did he live with what he had taken? Across these pages, familiar motifs from Corbett’s own writing reappear: stillness, scent, soil, patience. But so do things he rarely wrote about: loss, affection, failure, fear. The book isn’t interested in defending or indicting its subject, instead offering a forest of competing truths and leaving the reader to walk through it.
The Mystery of the Black Jungle by Emilio Salgari, translated from Italian by Nico Lorenzutti: This is the forest rendered as gothic ecology. Corpses rot in poisoned water, fakirs murmur incantations by firelight, heroines appear in white silk and gold armour, and moonlit bamboo groves hide eyes that never blink. Salgari’s India was entirely imagined, constructed from colonial journals and European orientalist fantasy. The result is a strange tension existing between ethnographic precision (lists of trees, tools, and tribal traits) and wild narrative invention (hypnotic snakes and forced sacrifices).
Amritesh’s take: Like much colonial-era adventure fiction, the forest here is both a trap and a theatre. It hides a vast criminal network, merges superstition with spectacle, and positions indigenous belief as something to be feared or eliminated. Even when the novel indulges in anti-colonial posturing or inter-racial romance, it does so within a world built on binaries: pure vs polluted, West vs East. Salgari’s imagined India is richly described but suspended outside the reach of politics or time. It is a record of an idea, a vision of the Indian jungle as a threat and a moral test. Its importance is in how it reveals the lenses through which India was once read.
Funeral Nights by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih: Few novels feel this close to the act of speaking. When a group of academics travels to the forest village of Nongshyrkon to witness an ancestral funeral ritual, Ka Phor Sorat—the last of its kind, perhaps—they arrive too early. Stranded for days in a forest village in the West Khasi Hills, they wait by telling stories. Funeral Nights is a story of that waiting, born out of the stories exchanged around firelight, of love, loss, corruption, ritual, politics, mythology, and everyday absurdity. What emerges is less a plot-driven novel than a sprawling oral history, one where memory and imagination trade places.
Amritesh’s take: Structured like ‘The Arabian Nights’ and mirroring the scale of ‘Moby Dick,’ Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s novel is a thousand-page reckoning with Khasi identity. As characters debate migration, ritual, politics, and kinship, you also find shapeshifters, rain demons, gods of stomach aches, and children named Odometer and Dicklick. This is not a linear novel by any means, for it loops and branches. It’s a book best entered slowly, like a forest path.
My Husband and Other Animals by Janaki Lenin: Some people move to the countryside for quiet. Not Janaki Lenin and Rom Whitaker, though, who moved in with emus, red ants, crocodiles, cobras, Russell’s vipers, and a tree frog that claimed their toilet as its private spa. ‘My Husband and Other Animals,’ a collection of essays originally published in The Hindu, documents a life lived less alongside and more within the animal world. Rom, a legendary herpetologist and founder of the Madras Crocodile Bank, may be the protagonist, but the sharp, amused and occasionally exasperated voice is always Janaki’s.
Amritesh’s take: Their farm, just outside Chengalpet, feels like a living laboratory, where leopards and opinionated shrews make the rules. The stories avoid a linear order, instead accumulating like forest growth: a little tangled, full of unexpected arrivals. It’s a portrayal of a kind of domestic ecology, where life is built by adjusting to nature and its terms instead of taming it, as the forest spills into bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms and lives.
A Tiger for Malgudi by RK Narayan: This is not your usual jungle story. There are no hunts, no heroes, no triumphs of man over beast. What you get instead is the life of a tiger as seen from the inside, a life shaped by slow, bewildered adaptation. Narayan’s novel follows Raja, a tiger whose life unfolds across stages: the wild, the circus, the film set, the town, and eventually, the hermitage. Each setting reflects a different human delusion, whether it’s control, entertainment, conquest, fear, or salvation.
Amritesh’s take: While the novel is told from Raja’s point of view, it doesn’t seek to anthropomorphise so much as reorient the gaze. Instead of thinking like us, the tiger thinks around us, through us, sometimes past us. There is confusion and later, clarity that comes with distance. Everything Raja sees, from circus stunts and shock collars to movie gimmicks and Save the Tiger campaigns, is cruelty, yes, but incoherence even more so. Subversive, comic, and often melancholic, the novel asks what it means to live a full life, no matter the form or the cage.
Rain in the Mountains by Ruskin Bond: At first glance, Rain in the Mountains is a collection of reflections via poems, sketches, journal notes, stories and essays, centred on life in the Himalayan foothills. But beneath that lies a different project. In that project, Ruskin Bond’s forest is assembled through fragments, through the repeated act of returning to the same path, the same window, the same stream, a world taking shape over time, a world that might not be grand or pristine but is lived-in.
Amritesh’s take: He writes of birds and weather, of neighbours and tin roofs, of snowfall and monkeys, of tea made on cold mornings, of old lampposts and brief friendships. It’s a book of weather and waiting, of noticing the changes that arrive with the gathering of clouds, of observing the tilting of light or when a bird reappears after months. The forest is no metaphor here; it’s just what’s outside the window.
Flute in the Forest by Leela Gour Broome: The world of the book might be quiet, but is never empty. Its protagonist, Atiya, is thirteen, limping from a childhood polio attack and living in a forest sanctuary with her father, a man who banished music from their home ever since her dancer mother left. Her classmates tease her, her future feels uncertain, and her comfort lies in the forest, which is familiar and alive, brimming with secrets.
Amritesh’s take: One of those secrets is a flute, played by an unseen figure deep in the jungle. Her search for its source leads her to Ogre Uncle, a gruff old man and an ill-tempered recluse with a gift for music. The music she learns begins to soften what earlier seemed immovable: the frozen silence of her father, the pain of abandonment, the absence of expression, and even the fury of a rogue elephant named Rangappa. This is a story about finding belonging in the unlikeliest of places and the beauty of discovering and playing your own tune.
The Araya Woman by Narayan, translated by Catherine Thankamma: This is a novel at the social and ecological margins. Told through the life of Kunjipennu, a woman from Kerala’s Malayarayar Adivasi community, it begins with treehouses and jackfruit-leaf spoons, with forest lore and seasonal farming. But as the years pass, the forest changes: it’s taxed, policed, harvested, and renamed, as a habitat becomes a real estate resource, and the people who lived closest to it are slowly pushed out.
Amritesh’s take: Narayan writes with sparse prose, bordering on the unsentimental. Forest fires, crop failures, caste-based extortion, moneylenders exploiting illiteracy, temple authorities demanding taxes from those they discriminate against, police enforcing laws of faraway lands, and the gradual loss of autonomy with displacement rebranded as development are parts of daily life. In telling this story, Narayan reclaims representation itself. ‘The Araya Woman’ is a story of memory, of what the land remembers, and everything it has been made to forget.
The Forestborns by Vardhini Amin: Can we imagine the world as trees might see it? In this novel set in the Sahyadri forest, trees are spirited, social beings whose souls, or vruhas, emerge at night to glide through the canopy. When poachers threaten to raze an ancient sandalwood grove, Siah, a young spirit, will try everything to save her grove. Her counterpart is Avni, a human child still mourning the father she lost in a forest fire. As they attempt to preserve what matters to them, and perhaps to us, their story collides.
Amritesh’s take: The anthropomorphic story gives its non-human characters recognisably human fears and loyalties. But it raises a bigger question of whether we must always reshape the wild in our image to care about it. Does empathy require resemblance, or can it exist without embodiment? Ultimately, The Forestborns bears witness to the slow violence around us, to everything we stand to lose, to everything that’s already vanishing.
