Where in India is the Seeonee Hills that is mentioned in the book The Jungle Book'?

0n 9th August 1892, after a truncated honeymoon, Rudyard Kipling and his wife Caroline arrived at her family home in Brattleboro,Vermont where they were to live for some four years. In the first eighteen months he wrote The Jungle Book which was published in May 1994.

The first story of The Jungle Book is "Mowgli's Brothers" which describes the entry of the infant Mowgli into his wolf family. Originally this tale was set in Rajputana [now Rajasthan], an area that Kipling knew very well and had described in Letters of Marque. However before publication he moved the site to an area in the Central Provinces [now Madhya Pradesh] named after a small town called Seoni. (see the Map of 'Kipling's India') This was an area which Kipling never visited but he had friends who had gone there on vacation.

Kipling described Mowgli's jungle whilst sitting at his desk in Vermont supported by a number of relevant reference books. He was writing fiction and can only be described as 'a creator of myths' in the sense that the term could also be applied to the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

However by moving the site of Mowgli's jungle to an area he had never seen he was unwittingly creating a situation in which two substantial myths were able to rise and flourish. The two myths and the truth about them have both emerged very slowly over very many years causing much speculation and debate in the Kipling world.