Mowgli turns 40

As Mowgli, the man-cub, 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. The man-cub is 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. However, while Burroughs was a man of his time, trying to write pulp fiction in a post-war era, the author of The Jungle Book was Rudyard Kipling who, after a novel like Kim, could be called a more polished writer. Having said this, he was a poet of the empire with a fascination for the exotic Orient.

The Jungle Book is not a wild Kipling dream but has a subtext of political allegory. While Burroughs’ slightly raw though vivid approach can be seen as racist and sexist in the 21st century, it is hard to knock down Kipling’s man-cub since he did crave for a Utopian world that is almost Zionist in its setting. If the original Kipling is a dark journey, Walt Disney’s adaptation makes it lighthearted and apparently exuberant.

“There have been several re-readings of Disney’s characters and creations. One often wonders how seriously to take these writings. However, his adaptatiton of Kipling’s classic has resulted in a more popular set of clichés than the book itself,” says M Jayashankar, a visiting professor at Mumbai’s Nirmala Niketan.

Both the ‘bad guys’ in Disney’s The Jungle Book are quintessential representation of exotic India. While Kha, the python, has the ability to be hypnotic and mysterious with a knowledge of tantra and several humorous references to the Great Indian Rope Trick, Sher Khan, the tiger, is another Indian cliché replete with dark powers that originate from the Orient, a symbol of preternatural potency and power.

Art critic John Berger, in his critique on Disney, points out that the late animations icon plays up the spectacle of zoos and by attributing human qualities to them, Disney actually moves away from the real characters and creates popular myths around them.

Ajit Rao, an Indian animator who is working on a graphic novel on the Ajanta caves, is exploring Indianness in animation and folklore. “Our own knowledge of Indian folklore is scant. Most of our exposure is through western eyes. So is our own understanding Indianised or westernised?” asks Rao.

“Colonial images like Disney’s need to be broken, but one has to quote existing images to get into the popular mindset,” points out the artist. Citing a non-Disney example, he says the image of Prthiviraj Kapoor as Akbar is more acceptable than the real Akbar, who didn’t even speak Urdu. “Our folk tales are not packaged in an exciting way as, say, Tolkein or Rowling who can just churn out a cauldron of images. We are restricted to Amar Chitra Katha which is not very well researched,” says Rao.