Rudyard Kipling and The Jungle Books

Author of The Jungle Books and several other works, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born to English parents in India during the heyday of the British Empire.  Having just this week finished The Jungle Books for the first time, I like them better than the Disney animated classic I grew up with, or that film's live-action and CGI remake from 2016. As is usually the case, the book version is richer and more complex. And not just more complex, the book version of The Jungle Book is more complicated.  It would arguably never have been written for us to enjoy if not for the British Empire having colonized India. And that is not to say that all the noted abuses of colonialism were worth it just so you and I could read a good story - or series of stories, as it turns out. But it is to say that colonialism like good novels is more complicated than modern readers usually want to entertain. More than spices and finished goods are traded internationally. The marketplace of ideas, history, and culture is also in play. Kipling wrote The Jungle Books because he was born smack dab in the middle of a very diverse and rich marketplace of ideas. And I can't help wondering if Mowgli is actually the man-cub Rudyard surrounded by animals of various kinds, being perceived just another kind of animal himself even within the moniker of "man-cub." In the jungle of India, the red flower is fire. But the red flower scaled up could just as easily be Western instruments of war like the latest firearms and gunships.  And just like Mowgli dealt with two very different cats - one Bagheera who mentored and protected him, and one Shere Khan who wanted to kill him before he could grow into full manhood - so also, one imagines British Indian children by turn instructed by wise, kind, gentle Indians and threatened by angry, territorial, bitter Indians who wanted the foreign devils to leave. Again, life and history are like a good novel. Or a good novel is like life and history. And we are the better for embracing the complexity and richness rather than deconstructing and reducing it to overly simplistic tropes and self-serving narratives. The British Empire wasn't all good, but it wasn't all bad either. As with all human endeavors, we are a mixed bag, and so also by extension is everything we do and touch a mixed bag. But Kipling's The Jungle Books is a good read, and I enjoyed it thoroughly - only all the more rather than less for its richness and complexity.