One of the things that made the Lahore of my childhood half-magical was the fact that it was home to Kim’s Gun on Mall Road, the very same gun as was described in Rudyard Kipling’s novel. I found this deeply cool and my parents used the little tidbit to convince me that The Jungle Book, my favourite Kipking story, was in fact set in my own city, which made me a slightly pudgier Mowgli and “wasn’t that fabulous?”
It was. I forgave the city its congestion, its power cuts and woeful lack of McDonalds in the 90s in large part because I believed Lahore was an embryonic Disneyland just waiting to hatch. The fact that the names of the characters from The Jungle Book were familiar ones in Urdu made this whole thing a sure deal (I still don’t know what Ka’a means, though). My innocent hope was swiftly crushed when I went to the Lahore Zoo on a field trip and realised that Bhaloo should have died in the movie rather than end up in those cages.
Mowgli and friends from 'The Jungle Book'
The anthropomorphisation of Indian animals in The Jungle Book is what got everybody's goat
Traumatised as I was to see a “Where are they now?” expose of my beloved characters at the Lahore Zoo (R.I.P. Col. Haathi, who knew you would become a go-kart called Suzie?), the story remained one of my favorites. So it was with great excitement and fear that I went to see the live-action version of The Jungle Book this past weekend with my niece and nephew in Washington, D.C. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it yet, but it is Awesome. Capital-A-tears-streaming-down-your-face-I-want-to-live-in-the-jungle-in-an-orange-speedo-kind-of awesome.
After Disney’s last live-action failure, the star-studded but dimly-lit Cinderella, I didn’t have very high hopes for a movie that I expected would turn out to be a bit like ‘Life of Pi.’ Instead, it was the perfect mix of nostalgia, visual mastery and tight storytelling, and I loved every minute of it. It’s not a musical and I think you should know this going in. It does have some nods to the original soundtrack (one of the best Disney ever came out with), like when Bill Murray’s Baloo does a short rendition of “The Bear Necessities” or when Scarlet Johansson’s Ka’a whispers “Trust in Me”; even King Louis, voiced by Christopher Walken, has a macabre and widly fun rendition of “I wanna be like you.”
There was a dark side to Kipling's colourful portrait of India - his racism
Much has been written over the years about the problems of Kipling’s own racism, which is free-flowing and venomous when you read some of his journalism from his time in India. A lot more has also been said of the colonial undertones and racist overtones of King Louis’ song from the Disney movie, seen by some academics as an overt longing for good old racial hierarchies. There is some sense to being able to call out the story and animation for things like that, more in an academic setting than any other, but it always felt like the anthropomorphisation of Indian animals is what got everybody’s goat (couldn’t resist). For a kid raised among images of Octopus drag-queen villians (#UrsulaForever), that didn’t really bother me.
I want to say “to each his own” when it comes to these shout-outs of appropriateness in contemporary culture. But by now there are four different academics on my timeline who have penned long Facebook statuses about how they are not going to see the movie “in protest” (I think Disney will survive) because it wasn’t shot in India and that in itself is some kind of racism. To them I say sod off, you nit-picking, micromanaging kill-joys. It’s a movie about talking tigers and wolves that take care of kids. Where exactly on the film sets of Mumbai or the riverbanks of the Ganges did you think it would be possible to pull that off? It’s not as if India doesn’t have a robust movie industry itself that would suffer from this story not being - I want to say ‘shot’ but I think the word is ‘animated’ - there. Plus, this is going to do no end of good for tourism in India anyway, something we in Pakistan are sorely going to lose out on (do you know how much Mughal India nostalgia money we are losing out on BTW? Do you?! Billions! They locked Anarkali in a tomb for crying out loud, that’s an HBO series right there).
One of these critics even compared his outrage with The Jungle Book being shot in California to when The Reluctant Fundamentalist movie was shot in Delhi and not in Lahore. I get it - it’s frustrating that Lahore for all its beauty is not the natural setting for international block-busters, but there is now a simple and sad reason why. To shoot a major international movie in Pakistan is hard because, well, there’s other kinds of shooting here to worry about.
My outrage at the academics aside, I encourage you to watch the movie because it’s fun, different and familiar all at the same time. The only issue I had with it was the sad loss of the vulture characters, but I’ll get over it and the kids didn’t really notice anyway.
Before I go, let me just deliver a series of slow claps for all the parents out there. I have been helping take care of my niece and nephew this week, and although I don’t do much more than drop them at school and buy them some treats (something about me being in charge of kids makes me mortally terrified for all involved), it has given me an idea of just how very hard child-rearing is. It requires strength, grace, love and above all patience, on a near-constant level, for the rest of your life. I am in awe of people who do it and so, on behalf of yours kids, thank you for putting up with so much so much of the time. It’s very nice of you. Now go and watch The Jungle Book.
