As Mowgli completes 40 years of screen life, we look at the beastie boy through a new lens, one that goes beyond his innocuous identity of a lad in the woods, albeit with a very contemporary hair style. For instance, he’s definitely less blatantly colonial than Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan of the Apes and the fact that Mowgli is not white but a brown ‘native’ is a twist in the tale.

Names like Baloo, Bagheera, Shere Khan and Kaa, further suggest he’s in an Indian forest, fuelling contemporary readings and literary critiques of Kipling, which indicate that he did have a fascination for the exotic Orient.

Jungle Book was not just Kipling’s wild dreaming but a subtext of political allegory. Looking beyond the promises of a better future, song and dance routine, the traits of the ape king, Louis, can be found in any of our sinister politicians. Shere Khan’s cunning and strong-arm politic tactics is very Mum’bhai’, a la Shootout at Lokhandwala. And Mowgli’s wide-eyed boy wonder has a lot in common with Rowling’s accidental hero Harry Potter, save the scar and the British accent.

If the original Kipling is a dark journey, littered with difficulties, Walt Disney’s adaptation makes it lighthearted and apparently exuberant. Case in point, Mowgli’s security blanket comes in the shape of a big garrulous Baloo, with a range that will make Pavarotti turn in his grave. Disney probably lifted the hairy creature from an enchanting encounter by India’s performance bears.

While French animators Crisse, Marc N’Guessan and Guy Michel have recast Bagheera as a spirited black woman warrior.

If we were to cast the pantheera in a human role, a certain Piggy Chops would be our undisputed winner.

After all it’s important to read and recast

a tale told by an albeit cool but decidedly white moviemaker.

Creating a new kind of Indian pop-culture animators like Ajit Rao, are looking for Non-Disney ways of telling stories. “While working on a graphic novel on the Ajanta Caves, I found it hard to come up with alternatives that were truly Indian.”

“Our folk tales need to be packaged in an exciting way, as say Tolkein or a Rowling who can just churn a cauldron of images. We are restricted to Amar Chitra Katha which is not very well researched, now it’s up to us to come up with new tropes,” says Rao.