Bagheera
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Bagheera the black panther is an animal fictional character in Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli stories in The Jungle Book (coll. 1894) and The Second Jungle Book (coll. 1895).
- Bagheera is also the name of a genus of Jumping spiders, named after the character.
Originally born in captivity in the menagerie of the Rajah of Oodeypore (Udaipur), Bagheera begins to pine for his freedom after his mother dies. Once he is mature and strong enough he breaks the lock on his cage and escapes into the jungle, where his ferocity and cunning win him the respect of all its other inhabitants, except Shere Khan the tiger. Bagheera reveals all this to Mowgli later. None but Mowgli ever learns that Bagheera once wore a collar and chain.
When Father Wolf and Raksha of the Seeonee (Seoni) wolf pack adopt the human "cub" Mowgli and the pack demands that the new cub should be spoken for, Bagheera buys Mowgli's life with a freshly-killed bull and helps to raise him as one of the pack. Because his life has been bought by a bull, Mowgli is forbidden to eat cattle (coincidentally, just as the Hindu villagers of the region are also forbidden).
Bagheera shares in many of Mowgli's adventures as he grows, but eventually the time comes when the man-cub becomes a man and has to return to human society. Bagheera frees Mowgli of his debt to the wolf pack by killing another bull, and Mowgli returns to his adopted human mother Messua.
In many adaptations of the story, i.e simplified children's book versions, ones issued as a "tie-in" to a film version, Bagheera is female.
Altering the gender of a key character, particularly one from male to female when virtually all of the characters are male, is not unusual. One example is in the a 1999 television adaptatation of Watership Down.
Some say that altering such important aspects of a book's content as the gender of a key character is too huge a change and is done needlessly in the name of political correctness while others say it makes the work more interesting, varied and offers an alternative view, as well as being less exclusive.
Bagheera is strange though, as he has been referred to as female in many different adaptations, including book adaptations of the Disney version where Bagheera is still male. This may be because the Jungle Book has a mainly all-male cast, with the exception of minor characters such as the human girl Shanti and Mother Wolf, both of whom have no lines in the Disney movie. This may have been done to make the story more appealing to girls, though the need to do so is highly questionable.
One reason that Bagheera is chosen to be female may be the role he plays in the Disney version of the story. He is the sensible voice of reason to the fun-loving and occasionally foolish Baloo (ironically, in the book it is Bagheera who argues that Baloo is too strict with Mowgli) and acts somewhat like a parental figure to Mowgli. This is a role which is often taken by a female character.