Just like you, I have Thoughts about Jungle Book, the new live-action movie based on both Rudyard Kipling's original tales of a little boy raised by wolves in the Seonee Jungle, as well as the original Disney animated film from 1967.
The original Jungle Book film was a part of the collective consciousness of Indian children watching a Disney feature for the first time. Which is why I always thought it came out in the 1990s rather than two decades before I was born. It appealed to me so much more than Snow White, or Cinderella, which I had also watched around the same time; and not just for the talking animals or the catchy songs.
It was this young character who looked so much like me – brown and skinny in red underwear, his hair falling long and shaggy into his eyes. It was the landscape, so familiar with tall trees and jungle vines, rather than the pines and grass of foreign forests. It was even the animals – a bhaloo, a bagh, a tiger called Shere Khan, a python called Kaa.
(Of course, I objected violently to the idea of an orang-utan of all creatures in the middle of an Indian jungle, but that was just Disney's fanciful touch. Pedantic readers will be happy to note that in the live action version, the ape is now a Gigantopithecus; which was a sort of prehistoric creature that lived several thousand years before Mowgli did, but who's counting?)
But enough of the movies
In 1990 – and I know this because the book is inscribed in loving tipsy capitals – I was given a copy of The Jungle Books, emphasis on the 's' at the end, by Rudyard Kipling. My copy has survived these 26 years without significant damage – the dust cover is still on, the pages still crisp, but once you flip through it, you can see how many times I read it by the random stains on pages, by the way the spine sags a little when you open it.
Kipling has a complicated relationship with India. You may remember debates about a poem he wrote called The White Man's Burden, which basically moans and complains about how hard it is to colonise a country when the natives are restless but how you must keep calm and carry on nonetheless. There are arguments that he meant well, that this was what he truly believed, or that—as an article on The Victorian Web posits, “Jingoism was rampant in Britain in the 1880s and '90s, as it was, indeed, up until 1915; but Kipling, though he was frequently parodied as such, was by no means the most rabid of the jingos.”
If you look beyond the poem, and some of his other more rabid work, you'll find he was the best kind of children's author – not patronising, a rich storyteller and, as The Jungle Books and Just So Stories are proof of : someone very interested in wildlife.
Interestingly, The Jungle Books were originally to be based in Rajasthan, but Kipling moved them to Madhya Pradesh, to a small town called Seoni, which he himself did not know very well. The Kipling Society has a useful article on Mowgli's jungle, including the fact that Kipling wrote it – not sitting in a machaan or around a village fire, as you would imagine – but in Vermont, where he had just arrived with his new bride, Caroline.
He used reference books to get the jungle details correct, and as one of them was Seonee or My Life on the Satpura Range, a memoir by Robert Armitage Sterndale, it probably led to Kipling's spelling of Mowgli's jungle. Further, the article adds, that Kipling actually did the first draft setting it entirely in Rajputana (as Rajasthan was known then), only later editing it to put in Seonee and the Waingunga river wherever geographical markings were, which made him look like he knew Seonee really well, rather than having never visited.
What the books say
For all that, the text has not lost its charm – even though the 1967 film seems dated and racist now, and the new film has much to improve upon. Mowgli's wolf brothers are real wolves, snarling and big, fierce hunters, not little puppies that nip at his heels. Bagheera and Baloo are his teachers and mentors, and Sher Khan is his enemy, yes, but a majestic one. The animals, in short, have dignity and are not anthromorphised at all, something a reader appreciates.
In the movies, Bagheera finds the man cub, but in the book, it's in the story Mowgli and His Brothers that the origin story is born, where:
The bushes rustled a little in the thicket, and Father Wolf dropped with his haunches under him, ready for his leap. Then, if you had been watching, you would have seen the most wonderful thing in the world—the wolf checked in mid-spring. He made his bound before he saw what it was he was jumping at, and then he tried to stop himself. The result was that he shot up straight into the air for four or five feet, landing almost where he left ground.
"Man!" he snapped. "A man's cub. Look!"
Directly in front of him, holding on by a low branch, stood a naked brown baby who could just walk—as soft and as dimpled a little atom as ever came to a wolf's cave at night. He looked up into Father Wolf's face, and laughed.
"Is that a man's cub?" said Mother Wolf. "I have never seen one. Bring it here."
A Wolf accustomed to moving his own cubs can, if necessary, mouth an egg without breaking it, and though Father Wolf's jaws closed right on the child's back not a tooth even scratched the skin as he laid it down among the cubs.
"How little! How naked, and—how bold!" said Mother Wolf softly. The baby was pushing his way between the cubs to get close to the warm hide. "Ahai! He is taking his meal with the others. And so this is a man's cub. Now, was there ever a wolf that could boast of a man's cub among her children?"
When the wolves look him over at the Pack Council, it is Baloo, teacher to the wolf cubs and Bagheera who vouch for him. It also Bagheera who “buys” him as it were, with a buffalo, so that the wolves let him live. And it is also here that Mowgli learns to be both a man and a wolf – and in my edition anyway, there's no mention of underwear, red or otherwise. We also learn Bagheera's back story:
Bagheera stretched himself at full length and half shut his eyes. "Little Brother," said he, "feel under my jaw."
Mowgli put up his strong brown hand, and just under Bagheera's silky chin, where the giant rolling muscles were all hid by the glossy hair, he came upon a little bald spot.
"There is no one in the jungle that knows that I, Bagheera, carry that mark – the mark of the collar; and yet, Little Brother, I was born among men, and it was among men that my mother died—in the cages of the king's palace at Oodeypore. It was because of this that I paid the price for thee at the Council when thou wast a little naked cub. Yes, I too was born among men. I had never seen the jungle. They fed me behind bars from an iron pan till one night I felt that I was Bagheera – the Panther – and no man's plaything, and I broke the silly lock with one blow of my paw and came away. And because I had learned the ways of men, I became more terrible in the jungle than Shere Khan. Is it not so?"
"Yes," said Mowgli, "all the jungle fear Bagheera – all except Mowgli."
"Oh, thou art a man's cub," said the Black Panther very tenderly. "And even as I returned to my jungle, so thou must go back to men at last – to the men who are thy brothers – if thou art not killed in the Council."
"But why – but why should any wish to kill me?" said Mowgli.
"Look at me," said Bagheera. And Mowgli looked at him steadily between the eyes. The big panther turned his head away in half a minute.
"That is why," he said, shifting his paw on the leaves. "Not even I can look thee between the eyes, and I was born among men, and I love thee, Little Brother. The others they hate thee because their eyes cannot meet thine; because thou art wise; because thou hast pulled out thorns from their feet—because thou art a man."
Also, Mowgli has to learn to walk among all the jungle people, and so he has to learn all their languages.
"Master Words for which people?" said Mowgli, delighted to show off. "The jungle has many tongues. I know them all."
"A little thou knowest, but not much. See, O Bagheera, they never thank their teacher. Not one small wolfling has ever come back to thank old Baloo for his teachings. Say the word for the Hunting-People, then – great scholar."
"We be of one blood, ye and I," said Mowgli, giving the words the Bear accent which all the Hunting People use.
"Good. Now for the birds."
Mowgli repeated, with the Kite's whistle at the end of the sentence.
"Now for the Snake-People," said Bagheera.
The answer was a perfectly indescribable hiss, and Mowgli kicked up his feet behind, clapped his hands together to applaud himself, and jumped on to Bagheera's back, where he sat sideways, drumming with his heels on the glossy skin and making the worst faces he could think of at Baloo.
"There – there! That was worth a little bruise," said the brown bear tenderly. "Some day thou wilt remember me." Then he turned aside to tell Bagheera how he had begged the Master Words from Hathi the Wild Elephant, who knows all about these things, and how Hathi had taken Mowgli down to a pool to get the Snake Word from a water-snake, because Baloo could not pronounce it, and how Mowgli was now reasonably safe against all accidents in the jungle, because neither snake, bird, nor beast would hurt him.
"No one then is to be feared," Baloo wound up, patting his big furry stomach with pride.
There's more richness, but for the sake of brevity, I've only quoted three passages. Further, there's Mowgli going into the man village and meeting his fellow humans, there's the whole tale of how he brought down Shere Khan and every story is interspersed with poetry, like The Road Song of the Bandar-Log for example, which goes:
All the talk we ever have heard
Uttered by bat or beast or bird –
Hide or fin or scale or feather –
Jabber it quickly and all together!
Excellent! Wonderful! Once again!Now we are talking just like men!
Let's pretend we are... never mind,
Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!
This is the way of the Monkey-kind.
Or read it for the other wonderful stories that are not about Mowgli – The White Seal talks of an albino seal called Kotick who leads his clan to freedom from the furriers. Rikki Tiki Tavi is about a brave mongoose, a pet to a British family, who kills all the cobras in their garden, and finally, the last of the Mowgli stories, when he is seventeen, and finally, finally realises he needs to return to humankind.
This is not a Disney movie – it's far more wonderful and terrible than that – and it's better for it.
Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of five books, most recently a collection of short stories titled Before, And Then After and a novel titled Split.