In Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, the elephant leader is Hathi.
Hathi is the dignified leader of the jungle elephants and appears in stories including “How Fear Came” and “The King’s Ankus.” He represents great age, memory, authority, and the older laws of the jungle. In “How Fear Came,” Hathi recounts the ancient story of the first tiger and explains how fear entered the animal world.
Hathi’s name is drawn from Hindi, in which hāthī means “elephant.” Kipling’s use of an Indian term helps anchor the collection in the linguistic and cultural setting of colonial-era India, even though the stories are literary fantasies rather than field guides.
A common mix-up is Kala Nag, the elephant in Kipling’s separate story “The Undertakers” and in the collection The Second Jungle Book. Disney’s 1967 animated film does include Colonel Hathi, a comic elephant character, but that version is more militaristic and theatrical than the solemn elephant leader of the original tales.