In Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, the monkey tribe is called the Bandar-log.
The Bandar-log appear most prominently in “Kaa’s Hunting,” one of the Mowgli stories. They are portrayed as restless, boastful monkeys who have no organized law or lasting social discipline. They kidnap Mowgli and carry him to the Cold Lairs, abandoned ruins where they expect him to admire their supposed cleverness.
The name comes from Hindi: bandar means “monkey,” while log means “people” or “folk.” Kipling uses the term as a collective label rather than as the name of one biological species. That distinction matters because the story treats the Bandar-log as a fictional social group, not a precise zoological classification.
Readers sometimes mix them up with the Seeonee wolf pack, which adopts Mowgli, or with Kaa, the python who helps rescue him. The Bandar-log are antagonistic in this episode, while Kaa is an ally whose knowledge of the ruins and the monkeys proves decisive.