Of all the stories that came out of colonial India, the tale of the man-cub, Mowgli, has an everlasting hold on the imagination. It continues to be recreated again and again on screen, mostly without irony, even though when Kipling makes his animals holler out the “law of the jungle” — might makes right — we know only too well where that is coming from.
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Stephen Alter’s Feral Dreams gives TheJungle Book a thorough shake-up. It trails no cloud of candyfloss sentimentality about man or beast: instead, it takes a hard look at some pressing and persistent concerns through Mowgli’s story — loss of fauna through poaching, our presumptions in trying to think and feel with animals, caste prejudices which never go out of fashion in India, and the power structures which must colour all claims of love.
Mowgli, reintegrated into human society and now a middle-aged guy working in MIT, is the narrator. Although he spent his early years in the forests, he retains no memory of it. His adoptive mother, the Christian missionary Elizabeth Cranston, gives him his Jungle Book story, imagining him as a child brought up by elephants and langurs.
Her unfinished typescript forms the first part of Feral Dreams . She writes like the conservationist that she is, conjuring up the life of the forest with empathy, looking at human intruders as the wary animals might. But even her p.o.v. cannot go unchallenged, especially in the light of later events.
Miss Cranston rescues the wild orphan, adopts him, gives him a name (Daniel, while Mowgli remains the secret name only she calls him by) and an identity, but he is not quite taken in. As he says, “Nobody had asked me if I wanted to become Miss Cranston’s son.” He never quite accepts her as his mother and drifts apart as he grows older.
While we see Daniel’s point, we also wonder whether he is being too hard-hearted. This uncertainty, whether pertaining to human relationships or to human-animal interactions, is the only certainty in Feral Dreams . In that sense, Feral Dreams is a post post-colonial, post post-modern novel if there ever was one, but without the pyrotechnics that tend to accompany such experiments.
It is oddly convincing in its understatedness.
Feral Dreams: Mowgli and His Mothers; Stephen Alter, Aleph, ₹599
anusua.m@thehindu.co.in
