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A review by christine_zomo
The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling
5.0
For those that don’t know the history of how Kipling came up with and across the ideas for his fable stories, they are derived from the Sanskrit tales of the Panchatantra and the Jātaka Tales; also translated into Persian (first century C.E.), then Syriac, then Arabic (after the Islamic conquests); titled Kalila and Dimna. This is the source of using animals in an anthropomorphic manner to teach moral lessons, that then spread around the world, perhaps first in the West as Aesop’s Fables. There is a lovely fairly recent translation of Kalila and Dimna (or Kalileh va Dimneh) from Persian to English by Ramsay Wood available on Amazon kindle.
You can get a glimpse of the background on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle_Book
Kipling did admit this in a letter to a friend, American author Edward Everett Hale:
“The idea of beast-tales seems to me new in that it is a most ancient and long forgotten idea. The really fascinating tales are those that the Bodhisat tells of his previous incarnations ending always with the beautiful moral. Most of the native hunters in India today think pretty much along the lines of an animal's brain and I have "cribbed" freely from their tales.”
And as reported in The Guardian newspaper:
"In fact, it is extremely possible that I have helped myself promiscuously but at present cannot remember from whose stories I have stolen."
So his stories are not, in fact, a ‘reflection of colonialist thinking,’ as so many reviewers here seem to ascribe. The ideas actually predate Western colonialism by about 4000 years.
You can get a glimpse of the background on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle_Book
Kipling did admit this in a letter to a friend, American author Edward Everett Hale:
“The idea of beast-tales seems to me new in that it is a most ancient and long forgotten idea. The really fascinating tales are those that the Bodhisat tells of his previous incarnations ending always with the beautiful moral. Most of the native hunters in India today think pretty much along the lines of an animal's brain and I have "cribbed" freely from their tales.”
And as reported in The Guardian newspaper:
"In fact, it is extremely possible that I have helped myself promiscuously but at present cannot remember from whose stories I have stolen."
So his stories are not, in fact, a ‘reflection of colonialist thinking,’ as so many reviewers here seem to ascribe. The ideas actually predate Western colonialism by about 4000 years.