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All nominations will be made using the Nomi nation Form downloaded from Ananda Mandir’s website. For copies of nomination form, please contact Subrata Bhaumik and /or Pronoy Chat terjee at the following email addresses. Com pleted forms should be supported by the submit ted piece(s) of work of the young author
The Problem with Kipling’s “The Jungle Book”
By Tathagata Ghosh
Recently, a comedian by the name of Hari Kondabolu has brought into focus the dubious portrayal of an Indian character, Apu, on the long-running television show, The Simpsons. The character of Apu in this show is a caricature of an Indian storeowner. According to Kondabolu, this character has promoted racial stereotyping of Indians. Lines uttered by Apu have been used to bully Indian children. According to a documentary,‘The Problem with Apu’, made by Kondabolu, much to the dismay of some professional Indian actors, they were even instructed to speak like Apu for the roles they were auditioning.
This struck a chord in me. A couple of years back, I had given a talk on ‘The Jungle Book’, the famous Disney movie of 1967at my Toastmasters Club. The talk I had given was critical of the portrayal of the ‘Indian’ characters in that movie. How could there be a problem with it? Everybody seems to love The Jungle Book, and I have never heard of anybody say anything negative about it. Then why did I feel otherwise?
The Jungle Book was one of my favorite Disney animated movies when I first saw it in the US. When my older daughter was young, we bought the VHS tape and watched it many times. I always enjoyed it and loved the well-defined characters and the fabulous songs. I watched it again after a decade when my younger daughter was growing up. The magic was still there but somehow I had started to make an association of the characters to real characters, and I began to realize that apart from token Indian character of Mowgli, a rather generic boy, none of the characters were truly Indian. They were actually well defined British and American characters with Indian names. These are my interpretations. Others may interpret differently.
The first character that stood out was Col. Haathi. Apart from his name, he was a typical British military officer. Having read a lot of novels by British authors, I felt he was one of those endearing, avuncular, British colonels who could have popped in a P.G. Wodehouse novel with a proper British handle.Baloo, the bear, was an American drifter with a golden heart and bravado to match. He could have stepped out of Mark Twain novel. Sher Khan was a complex character, seemingly a dangerous British/ Euro villain, suave and deadly. He stalks through the entire movie with stealth and menace. King Louie must have been modelled on one of the black jazz musicians of the 20th century. There is an undeniable racial profiling through the entire movie. It is completely disguised to the point where if this is the first time you are reading it, you are completely unaware of this. To be fair to Rudyard Kipling though, there was no King Louie in his original tale and all he referred to was bandar-log (monkey-people). To avoid controversy, Disney also had an Italian jazz artist called Louis Prima do the voice-over for King Louie, but the character was patterned after Louis Armstrong, the top jazz talent at that time. To better understand ‘The Jungle Book’, we need to go back to the milieu from where these characters were derived. These stories were written by Rudyard Kipling, a Britisher, in the last part of the 19th century. The British were completely and totally in command of India. The interesting fact is that Rudyard Kipling lived in the US when he wrote the story and had never visited the forest that he mentions in the story. He had spent some time in India as a child with his parents and went back later when he was an adult. It is not important nor necessary for an author to have visited the area that he writes about but that could account for the absence of the Indian characters. It is also curious that the name Mowgli is just a made-up name and not really an Indian name. In fact, there are theories that this is an allegorical fable and Mowgli did not at all represent an Indian character but in fact represented the British, and Sher Khan symbolized the Mughal rule in India that was dismantled by the British.
The ‘The Jungle Book’ was a Rudyard Kipling creation but the popular portrayal and the overarching influence though is that of Hollywood. The multitude of characters that fill up the screen, each distinct, each memorable, but none of them are Indian because Hollywood was not familiar with Indian characters at that point in time. There were no Indian actors, just a sporadic community of Indians who had probably emigrated as scientists and engineers who had never made contact or had an impression on Hollywood in 1967. It would be hardly fair to blame Hollywood for not having any Indian characters in the Jungle Book.
Disney has gone all over the world to try to be inclusive or maybe trying to be exotic. They went to Agrabah and to Africa, but the characters remained bound to American sensibilities and American humor. Can we blame Disney for that? The genie that we had read about in our youth did not have any resemblance to the genie played by Robin Williams who was one of the most interesting characters in Disney’s version.
The problem with movies with universal appeal is that the people who see the movies have strong feelings about the people portrayed in that film. They draw equivalences to the people they see and treat people from that part of the world based on perception formed from the movie. So, many people’s impressions of Indians were formed from seeing ‘The Jungle Book’. Which character would they think was an Indian one? Unfortunately, any character they picked would not have been representative. That was the problem with the Apu character in The Simpsons. Kids of Indian origin had people mocking them with the Apu accent. Indians who are not very fluent in English speak in many different accents, but I have not heard anybody speaking in the odd accent of Apu voiced over by Hank Azaria. Soon enough though you have hundreds of people speaking in the Azaria accent to imitate an Indian speaking. His voice-over was one of the dozens of character voice overs he did for the show of various characters. Hank Azaria has acknowledged that his characterization was based on Peter Seller’s characterization of an Indian.
When I watched an episode with Apu in it, it did not seem that The Simpson’s creators wanted to denigrate Indians. But that did not hinder the kids in the schools and colleges to co-opt that accent for purposes of bullying their Indian-American schoolmates.
One of the more positive portrayals of Indian characters is the very recent one by Priyanka Chopra in Quantico. In that role, she is shown as smart and sexy and caught up in intrigue and drama, and she does wonders for the Indian psyche by her positive portrayal. Indian American girls have a role model who is more like them and not some dowdy unintelligent character. Even before that, Kumar, in Harold and Kumar movie series, played by Kal Penn, injected coolness factor to an Indian character. On the other hand, it may have caused some nightmares to Indian parents when they saw the version of a hardpartying American Desi kid who seemed to be more the norm than the outlier.
When I travelled throughout the US doing computer consultancy jobs, I realized that people treated us with biases based on their perceptions of who an Indian was. In many of the places, we were the first Indians they had met in their lives, and it would seem that they showed us respect or disrespect based on unreliable sources, the movies or television shows. It is possible some of these perceptions were formed based on ‘The Jungle Book’. That was their earliest vision of India and Indians. Nothing could be further from reality.
of 2017. Naturally, when I found out that Mayurakshi would be shown at NABC 2018, I knew I would have to be at the screening.
At the appointed hour, I made a beeline to the conference room designated as the movie theater. Things were running a bit late, so I got to see parts of a discussion session, mainly Q&A with the audience, where the panelists included Sabyasachi Chakraborty and Prosenjit Chatterjee. The movie showing began shortly afterward. It is the touching tale of a son (Prosenjit) living abroad who returns home briefly to look after his demented father (Soumitra Chattopadhyay). Written and directed by Atanu Ghosh, the film moves at a decent clip and has a minor twist in that Mayurakshi does not refer to the well-known river at all. I thought of how Soumitra, the hero of my youth, has transitioned well over time to the role of an elderly parent. NABC 2018: A Sampler’s Diary | continue from page 4
Illegal Parking in circular driveway of temple has to be STOPPED! I know it is a longer walk from parking lot but that is our parking design. There are three car parking back of the front house and few cars can be parked on front house driveway to the garage! Once these are filled, everyone (!) has to park at the parking lot!
Most often it is our own people who park illegally! I urge all of you to respect allowable parking space. If not, we are going to call police for TOWING! Let us cooperate and try to avoid this! Let us all be a good CITIZEN and follow the law! No one wants car to be TOWED! It is our community home and let us follow parking rule!
