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37 pages

English

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Why did Rudyard Kipling, an Englishman, manage to get the details and atmosphere of the Jungle Book so beautifully and authentically? This book explaisn the real meaning of Kipling's most famous work.

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Publié par	The Real Press
Date de parution	01 avril 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780993523922
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Secret History of the Jungle Book
How Mowgli could save the world

Swati Singh

THE REAL PRESS
www.therealpress.co.uk
Swati Singh is a research scholar living in Gurgaon in India, working on Rudyard Kipling and colonial discourse at the University of Rajasthan. The idea for writing this book came up via a chance meeting on the Jaipur-Delhi train, and realising in conversation with a fellow passenger how Kipling still excites interest.

To my father, my first teacher.

Chapters

Foreword

Chapter 1 . Between the lines

Chapter 2 . The man behind The Jungle Books

Chapter 3 . Who is Mowgli?

Bibliography

Foreword

Human beings are born story tellers. It is the ability to articulate oneself through a commonly evolved speech pattern that distinguishes mankind from all other animals. Stories too have their own way of just happening to you on their own. One never knows when, on a particular day and in a seemingly innocuous moment, a story just happens.
This story began in India, on a railway platform with two strangers from two parts of the world, each going her own way, who found themselves in the same coach – and sharing the same berth in a railway carriage – discussing an author who happened to connect their worlds.
It was on a Jaipur-Delhi train that East met West and they got along discussing their different worlds, only to discover that their worlds were not so different after all. East and West, it seemed, were reconciled and at peace finally— forgiving and accepting of the excesses of the past. The author who provided these two worlds with a common ground to talk on was none other than Rudyard Kipling— an Indian born writer of British origins, and one of the greatest storytellers of all times.
And here we are again, discussing Kipling and his amazing story of childhood fantasy in an Indian jungle.

Chapter 1
Between the lines

The year 2015 marked 150 years of Kipling, and also 120 years of Kipling’s The Jungle Book ( 1894) and its sequel The Second Jungle Book (1895). The ‘Jungle Book’ series is primarily remembered by all of us for the antics of the wolf child Mowgli and other characters of the jungle immortalized by Walt Disney in the animated version of the books. The Jungle Book.
This is particularly so of Mowgli, who continues to excite interest and interpretation even today, so much so that the latest animated Mowgli in a new avatar hits screen on the 15 April 2016.
Kipling wrote The Jungle Book series in Brattleboro, Vermont, in the USA, oceans away from the land and the people he was writing about. But any reader of the Jungle Books would be struck with wonder to see the vivid imagination with which Kipling brings alive the flora and fauna, as also the vernacular dialects of Indian speech. Kipling’s description of the Indian spring in the story Spring Running from The Second Jungle Book is one of the finest representations of the Indian climate and landscape by any writer. Kipling’s pictorial and sensuous description of the Indian Spring goes as follows:

“In an Indian Jungle, the seasons slide one into the other almost without division… Spring is the most wonderful because she has not to cover a clean, bare field with new leaves and flowers, but to drive before her and to put away the hanging-on, over-surviving raffle of half-green things which the gentle winter has suffered to live, and to make the partly dressed stale earth feel new and young once more. And this she does so well that there is no spring in the world like the jungle spring”.

The rhythm and intimacy of Kipling’s description, the careful choice of words, gives to the beauty of this prose passage the grace and vitality of poetry. But the passage has been chosen to illustrate the deeply personal relationship that Kipling shared with the country of his birth, India.
The stories in The Jungle Book also follow a folk-tale like structure, more reminiscent of the Indian way of storytelling, with a moral hidden in each story, coming through innocuously to the reader. Critics have wondered if these stories take root in the fables and folklore that Kipling heard as a child from his Portuguese ayah and Hindu bearer as he remembered in his autobiography, Something of Myself . The fable like tone of the stories in The Jungle Books almost echoes the subconscious influence of the Indian folklore that Kipling must have heard time and again in his childhood.
For most of us, The Jungle Book remains an enduring memory of our childhoods. Kipling was weaving magic and fantasy when he wrote The Jungle Books years ago, dedicating them to his beloved daughter Josephine, who unfortunately died young. The Jungle Books took the world of letters with surprise and widespread admiration. Even the harshest critic of the ‘imperialist’ Kipling could not help but behold in wonder the magic that Kipling had weaved in Mowgli’s story.
Later, The Jungle Books were read for the themes of imperialism and colonisation, but the early reception for them was largely positive and was also overwhelming. While The Jungle Books as a whole are a collection of numerous beast fables, it was mostly the Mowgli stories which caught the attention of the world.
In fact, Kipling wrote the Mowgli stories backwards, which is to say that the character of Mowgli was first envisaged as a young man. The first Mowgli story was In the Rukh , a short story which appeared in the collection Many Inventions, published in 1893. It was from here that Kipling went back in time and imagined the wonderful life that the man-cub Mowgli must have lived as a child and the result was the Mowgli stories in The Jungle Books .
In his autobiography, Something of Myself, Kipling says: “After blocking out the main idea in my head, the pen took charge and I watched it begin to write stories about Mowgli and animals which later grew into The Jungle Books ”. With these comments, Kipling added to the magic and fascination that forms the world of The Jungle Books .
It is a curious fact that, even today, The Jungle Books in original, as well as in translations and adaptations, remain the first introduction to India for a large part of the world. Sam Miller, in his A Strange Kind of Paradise: India through Foreign Eyes , says: “An impressive case can be made for Kipling as a writer who invented the idea of India as a land of childhood, a place of innocence and wonder.”Miller gives the experience of his own family as an example and says how it was Disney’s 1967 animated Jungle Book movie video that caught his young son’s attention and curiosity, just as the first film that his mother saw and loved was the 1942 live action Jungle Book movie by the Korda Brothers. With this candid admiration of Kipling, Miller puts in perspective the widespread popularity that The Jungle Books have enjoyed, and the kind of influence they have continued to exert down the years.
Kipling’s The Jungle Books attracted the attention not only of critics and readers, but also of the Western screenplay writers, who saw in it a potential story exploring the ‘exotic’ East of popular imagination. They were not mistaken, because The Jungle Book indeed draws on the myths and fables of India where it is set and gives to it a unique perspective.
The first adaptation of The Jungle Books was done by the Hungarian Korda brothers who brought to movie screens in 1942 Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book in Technicolor . This adaptation was a live action adventure and was told in the narrator’s voice of Buldeo , the hunter of Kipling’s book, to a visiting British memsahib . The narrative mostly focuses on Buldeo as he chases Mowgli through the forest. This adaptation took bits and parts from the first and the second Jungle Books , mixing Mowgli’s miraculous childhood among wolves with the story about the treasure guarded by an old white python which actually appeared in The Second Jungle Book , playing on all the available stereotypes of India as the land of wild beasts and fabulous treasures, while keeping close to the original Kipling story.
The real breakthrough in the history of screen adaptations of the Jungle Books came with the Walt Disney Animation Studio’s 1967 cartoon film version of the same. It was the nineteenth feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series directed by Wolfgang Reitherman and the last film to be personally supervised by Walt Disney himself.
The film was a huge success and grossed over $73 million in the United States in its first release and as much again from two re-releases. In 1994, Disney released a live action remake of The Jungle Book starring Bruce Reitherman as Mowgli. Disney released a theatrical sequel to its first Jungle Book movie in 2003 as The Jungle Book 2 . This sequel was not Kipling’s The Second Jungle Book , but a continuation of the first Disney movie with a rather similar story line.
Disney is once again releasing a remake of the 1967 animated movie in a 3D live-action format with Jon Favreau as director and introduces the Indian origin child actor Neel Sethi as Mowgli. This movie releases on the 15 April 2016.
Warner Brother’s production too has a Jungle Book movie in the pipelines titled Jungle Book: Origins set for release on 6October 2017. The multiple remakes and adaptations point to the popularity as well as the unexplored potential for story telling inherent in The Jungle Books .
An interesting anecdote that is common trivia about the making of the 1967 animated Jungle Book movie by Disney is its initial conceptual-isation by Bill Peet, one of the long-standing animators and screenplay writers associated with the Disney Studio who first thought of animating The Jungle Book into a movie. Th