Stephen Alter reimagines Rudyard Kipling’s tale of Mowgli
Author: Stephen Alter
Rohit Mahajan
This little book, numbering barely 200 pages, in the guise of a simple story of a child rescued from a forest in India in 1960 touches on large themes such as identity, colonialism, religious imposition, caste, displacement, rebellion and reconciliation; the attempt by a Christian missionary to ‘civilise’ the ‘noble savage’, and the displacement of soul and culture caused by it, form the core of the story of the ‘boy’ adopted by the missionary, Elizabeth Cranston.’
‘Jungle Book’.
The boy has a secret history, too, of which he has no memory — if he did have a memory, he seems to know no human language to tell his story. He was found in a forest in Uttar Pradesh, bringing to Elizabeth’s mind the story of Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. Elizabeth names him Daniel, but likes to call him Mowgli; she is struck by the curious, instinctive feeling Daniel/Mowgli has for animals, and by an amazing incident when, instead of being frightened by a sadhu’s elephant, he scrambled up on its back. This seems to have given her a pause for thought — didn’t the Bible teach her that “God created man in his own image and gave him ‘dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth”? She is puzzled that the boy “feels as comfortable with other species as he does with his own kind”.
The boy suffers much due to displacement and ‘otherness’ — from being a ‘feral’ foundling of the jungle, made fun of by other orphans at the missionary school, he becomes Daniel Cranston, attracting jealousy, and ridicule, for being rewarded with adoption for being particularly disadvantaged; further displacement occurs when he’s taken to the USA by Elizabeth, wrenching him away from a place he had become accepted in, pitching him into an unknown world where no one could relate to him and he had to invent plausible backstories for himself. He rebels against Elizabeth, breaking away from her, for he resents his autonomy being snatched away, for “the quiet condescension in her manner… all gentle and sweet but laced with underlying expectations that I would do as I was told”. He didn’t want “anything to do with her church” and didn’t “believe in God”.
Stephen Alter’s voice is a counterpoint to that of Kipling, a colonial era writer who promoted British ideas of morality through the original Jungle Book. Kipling wrote at a time when colonialism was deeply enmeshed with religion, and the belief in man’s ‘dominion’ over other animals was deep; Alter writes now when Christianity is rapidly receding from the Western world, and science has dug up overwhelming evidence to show that all living beings — man, other animals, even plants — have a common ancestor. Animal-worship is irrational, but the ferocious hatred for it, or for idol worship, in Abrahamic religions isn’t particularly rational — possibly it has something to do with the scarcity of grand, majestic wildlife in the land of their origin? Most other cultures had a deep, often spiritual relationship with nature and wildlife — it can be seen even now in Asia, Africa, or the Inuit people of Alaska or the Aboriginal people of Australia. Alter, son of American missionaries, is “ambivalent” about the motives of missionaries; in this book he makes Elizabeth declare, regarding a temple, that “praying to an elephant isn’t the worst thing someone can do. Surely, it’s no cause for damnation”, and that “I don’t think I actually believe in Hell”.
Where the sympathies of Alter — an atheist who sees spiritualism in nature — lie isn’t difficult to gauge in this fable.
