My family took me to the movie theaters to see the new, heavily animated live-action Jungle Book in 2016. It was a Jon Favreau-directed remake of the 1967 Disney film, which adapted Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 Jungle Book, itself a collection of stories of animals in the Indian jungle.
The Jungle Book is a relatively well-known story, thanks to the Disney film and a dubbed Japanese TV show from the 1990s. Many people, Indians, and others know of Mowgli and his adventures in the jungle with Baloo the bear, Bagheera the panther, and Shere Khan the tiger. Most of us can probably sing along to at least a few lines of “Bare Necessities,” myself included.
I guess I grew up with it: I remember watching the TV show at my grandparents’ flat in Mumbai. I think I’ve read some of the associated Jungle Book comics. Among Indian children, I’m not alone. The 2016 Jon Favreau adaptation earned nearly a billion dollars at the box office, so this isn’t a story the world is new to.
It’s a fine tale, even a beloved one. What’s not to like?
That would be the original author himself, Rudyard Kipling. Readers have probably encountered the phrase “the white man’s burden.” A common shorthand for racist imperialism, though unironically bandied around by U.S. intellectuals and writers in 2003 on the way to war in Iraq, “The White Man’s Burden” is actually the title of a poem Kipling wrote in 1899, encouraging the U.S. to colonize and civilize the Philippines.
Like many Britons in his time, Rudyard Kipling – otherwise a celebrated author and poet – was an imperialist. But not every imperialist gets to claim credit for the phrase that more or less defines Western imperialism as we understand it today: “the white man’s burden.”
Kipling grew up in colonial India and hung around there for much of his adult life. Many of his books are set there, including some of his best and most beloved works. For all his professed love of the country, he was still a colonizer. He’s on record praising the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, calling the man who ordered the killing of 400 Indians by British numbers – 1500 or more by Indian National Congress numbers – “the man who saved India.” (The British government still has not formally apologized for the massacre.)
And if that’s bad, then writing a whole poem justifying the white man’s need to civilize the Philippines is also bad, and quite racist, at that. This claim isn’t projecting today’s anti-imperialist values backward onto an era where “that’s just what people believed”: many of Kipling’s white contemporaries in the U.S., including Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie, denounced the U.S. occupation of the Philippines.
But ideas have power. Before “The White Man’s Burden” was even published, Kipling sent it to his friend Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New York, who approvingly forwarded it to his friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Kipling intended to encourage the U.S. government to take over the Philippines; he was not shy about his love of British imperialism, either.
In 1907, Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel Committee recognized that “his imperialism is not of the uncompromising type that pays no regard to the sentiments of others.” The “others” being referred to here were South Africa’s white Boer (today, Afrikaner) population. But “quite naturally,” said the Committee, “during the Boer War Kipling sided with his own nation, the English” – who set up some of the world’s first mass concentration camps to subdue the Boers.
The Committee also noted how much of a lively writer Kipling was:
“His marvellous power of imagination enables him to give us not only copies from nature but also visions out of his own inner consciousness. His landscapes appear to the inner vision as sudden apparitions do to the eye. In sketching a personality he makes clear, almost in his first words, the peculiar traits of that person’s character and temper. Creativeness which does not rest content with merely photographing the temporary phases of things but desires to penetrate to their inmost kernel and soul is the basis of his literary activity.”
This is some heavy praise. But the Nobel Committee wasn’t alone: both critics and admirers acknowledged Kipling’s talent. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first post-independence prime minister, apparently counted Kipling’s Kim among his favorite books. V.S. Naipaul, from the Caribbean but of Indian descent, remarked that “nobody has written as accurately about Indians” as Kipling did.
Evidence of Kipling’s talent abounds, and the newest iteration of The Jungle Book proves that, as a writer and a poet, Kipling is alive and well in the public imagination. He continues to charm children and adults alike with his stories of the Indian jungle, and not just in the Western world.
Indeed, the 2016 Jungle Book film was one of Hollywood’s best showings in India ever. Its Hindi dub had a star-studded cast of Bollywood actors – and I mean star-studded, considering it included Irrfan Khan and Priyanka Chopra and Om Puri. The story was simple, and Indians loved the film. Irrfan Khan, who played Baloo in the Hindi dub, argued that, “even though the book was originally written in English, The Jungle Book is an Indian story at heart. Also, its overall theme of good winning over evil is universal, which is seen in other cultures.”
This is just a story about a boy learning the “laws of the jungle” from animal mentors. But can I, you, or anyone separate this beloved story from its author, a man who wanted to civilize nonwhites?
Nehru and Naipaul and Khan have all come to some sort of understanding. My parents and grandparents did, too. The Jungle Book and Kipling’s other works are a part of all their upbringings, literary and otherwise. And, I guess, it’s a part of mine.
But their understanding doesn’t mean at all that artful works like The Jungle Book can or should be separated from their creator. Salman Rushdie puts it best: “I have never been able to read Kipling calmly.” As in, it’s complicated.
“It’s complicated” still feels like a maddeningly unsatisfying answer. But, for what it’s worth, maybe it’s better to know that an author is complicated – and to feel conflicted about reading them – than not to know at all. Lots of works in the U.S.’s shared English curricula are written by people just as morally suspicious as Kipling. No doubt other countries sanitize their curricula, too.
Yet we read on and read people like Kipling anyway. Maybe it’s not worth tallying up the good and the bad. But it’s certainly worth knowing them if only to better understand the author, their works, and the world in which they saw themselves.
And what’s the alternative? Getting rid of Kipling and The Jungle Book from our collective Anglophone consciousness won’t dismantle the imperialism that still exists today in our global economic and social arrangements, systems in which you and I and anyone else who may cringe at “The White Man’s Burden” nonetheless perpetuate through passivity.
Keeping Kipling and The Jungle Book in our collective Anglophone consciousness, on the other hand, probably won’t make white saviorism as it exists today – in development economics and in armies of NGOs and charities – any worse than it already is.
Indeed, Kipling wasn’t the only one who thought that white men carried the burden to civilize; he just wrote it into a catchy poem. Others did, and still do, the work of civilizing. The U.S. could just as easily have colonized the Philippines and occupied Iraq without quoting Kipling along the way.
This doesn’t absolve Kipling of what he did. He still coined the shorthand for racist imperialism by being a racist imperialist. But his ideology is a public fact. I know now what Kipling’s role in imperialism was, and knowing is far better than blissfully appreciating The Jungle Book without acknowledging that such a beloved work would never have existed without the British Empire.
South Asians, like other non-white peoples, are already burdened by a perpetually complicated relationship with the white man’s imperialism, simply because it happened. Kipling or not, that legacy isn’t going away anytime soon. Might as well acknowledge and discuss it. “It’s complicated” is the best answer I have.