REVIEW: The Last Victory

REVIEW
The Last Victory: The Imperial Agent II
Timeri N. Murari
Penguin
Rs 399
Pp 432
ISBN: 0143065726
Paperback

Blurb
It is October 1910 and the lovers Kim and Parvati are fleeing across India, escaping forces beyond their control. They know that great changes are afoot—the Mahatma’s ideas are gaining ground and the Indian National Congress is about to change remarkably with the entrance of Jawaharlal Nehru. Ahead lie turbulent times that will reveal the ruthlessness of the Empire and give rise to the promise of independence.

Kim and Parvati’s lives criss-cross those of many known and unknown Indians who believe in the Indian nation, and they too are swept into the very centre of the struggle for independence, where they must confront their terrifying tormentors.

Taking off from The Imperial Agent, where Timeri Murari masterfully recreated Kipling’s free-spirited and idealistic hero, Kimball O’Hara, The Last Victory is a thrilling account of Kim’s life—from the uncertainty of youth to an illuminating maturity mirrored only by the brilliance of a new India.


Review
High voltage drama Hindu
Exploring this novel is somewhat like opening a carefully preserved album of beautiful images and wondering if they'll survive the harsh light of scrutiny. Any work of fiction that dares to toy with the historical past risks courting that danger. And the final days of the Raj, in particular — the subject of The Last Victory— has inspired so many memorable tomes that yet another novel, which gives it pride of place would, one imagines, invite more intense critical attention than most.

But Timeri N. Murari's grand Raj production (for that is how this sequel to The Imperial Agent comes across) will probably get away unscathed. Its meticulously researched historical backdrop notwithstanding, the book adroitly escapes being judged by the criteria that would apply to a historical novel. The thoroughness of this research is evident as the author weaves his suspense-charged fictional episodes around real-life events — among them, World War I and the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre — and smoothly incorporates personalities like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru into his narrative, making them come alive in imagined sequences, even if there is a tendency towards stereotyping in the delineation of such characters as General Reginald Dyer of Jallianwallah Bagh notoriety who vows to “teach the bloody wogs a lesson they'll never forget”.

Mowgli gets hi-tech in new series

Children's favourite jungle hero Mowgli, Baloo the bear and panther Bagheera will soon return to the small screen in a new hi-tech avatar.

The BBC will broadcast the new adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's classic The Jungle Book, which has been made in India [ Images ] at the cost of 8 million pounds.

It is the first animated version of the stories since the hugely popular 1967 Disney feature film but has been created by computer instead of being hand-drawn.

The BBC bought the programmes in a 1 million pounds deal with Indian independent production company DQ Entertainment.

The 52-part series will air on Children's BBC later this year.

This new adaptation of Kipling's The Jungle Book is being billed as an "action adventures comedy for 21st century kids" and is already on air in France, Australia and Germany.

Full report here Rediff

The original

That news of an inscribed first edition of The Jungle Book has created so much buzz is a reminder of the enduring thrill of rediscovering Rudyard Kipling and his work. The copy recently discovered by librarians in Cambridgeshire bears the inscription: “This book belongs to Josephine Kipling for whom it was written by her father, May 1894.” Josephine died five years later at the age of six, and for Kipling’s readers the inscription deepens an understanding of the deep family attachments that informed his work. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, participated in early editions of The Jungle Book and of Kim as an illustrator.

The biographical sketches are in fact not mere asides in reading Kipling. Even in his lifetime (he was born in 1865 and died in 1936, neatly overlapping with the dominant phase of the British Empire) and especially after India’s Independence he was at the heart of a bitterly polarised post-colonial culture war. For his enthralled readers, however, it was by tracing his fidelity to experience and history that a more complicated and enormously inclusive middle ground was found.

Kipling’s may have been a remembered India but his reporter’s discipline and personal experience informed these two books to a degree that continues to amaze.

Full report here Indian Express

The Kipling conundrum

Fears of a storm of belated anti-British Raj feeling have scuppered plans to erect a new shrine to Rudyard Kipling in part of the Mumbai house where his father once lived. Would Kipling care? Almost certainly not.

Firstly, Kipling was a man who felt he needed no public acclamation beyond the cash register. During his lifetime he declined all political recognition. His house in Sussex, Batemans, is already a museum, and that would probably have been enough for him.
Secondly, this rebuff could only pale alongside all the other discourtesies repeatedly heaped upon his head, especially in Old Blighty, where his oeuvre still hangs as a skeleton in the British literary closet. Repeated attempts to rehabilitate him have failed not with the public, who adored him them and indulge him now but with the liberal-academic intelligentsia, whom he hated and who loathed him in return. For them his support for the British Empire at its proudest has been impossible to overlook, and he has had to be pardoned repeatedly by generations of critics and fellow writers. W H Auden only felt able to forgive him for writing well.
And he did write well. But what exactly was he writing? Was Kipling really a paid-up imperialist racist?
It’s hard to know, because Kipling used such an extraordinary range of voices across his prodigious output that it is extremely difficult to tell what his opinions really were. He spoke from the points of view of men and women of all social classes, both British and Indian, and expressed opinions true to his characters.
The dusty old excuse, that Kipling was no more than a man of his times can certainly be brought out again to explain some of his racial attitudes. He knew that colour was a strong marker in his society, and he counselled that men and women, both dark and fair, should marry within their hue and caste. But this makes him no more a racist than many middle-class Indian parents today who want their children to find partners within traditional lines of acceptability.
Unusually for a Victorian author, he had surprisingly little sense of the superiority of either Western or Christian values. Speaking in the voice of a (habitually) racist British soldier in Gunga Din, he willingly concedes that Gunga Din is the better man. In The Ballad of East and West the British soldier can find no fault in Kamal, his Pathan opponent.
Full report here The Times of India

Rudyard Kipling, the travel scribe

Seventy-four years after the death of the Indian-born British author and poet Rudyard Kipling, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, his reputation is still hotly debated. This is partly because of his support for British imperialism, and his chronicling of the British Raj.
The controversy over Kipling led recently to the abandonment of plans to transform the house in Mumbai in which he was born in 1965 into a Kipling museum. Instead, the house is to become home to a collection of paintings by local artists.
The house is on the campus of Sir J J Institute of Applied Art, of which Rudyard’s father Lockwood Kipling was the first dean. There were worries that to establish a Kipling Museum there might lead to political uproar.

Mukund Gorashkar, head of the project to renovate the house for the JSW Foundation, was quoted in the London-based Daily Telegraph as saying: “If we tried to convert it into a Kipling museum simply because Kipling was born there, that would ruffle quite a few feathers. In the political storm, you may find that the conservation effort would be set aside.”
The Chairman of the Kipling Society Sharad Keskar reportedly said: “You have a fairly ignorant officialdom in India who don’t know much about Kipling apart from that he was an imperialist or part of the Raj. Officially he’s still persona non grata. I think that is changing, but it’s rather a slow change.”
The shelving of the plan for a Kipling Museum happens to coincide with the publication by London publisher I. B. Tauris of “Kipling Abroad: Traffics and Discoveries from Burma to Brazil”, introduced and edited by the prominent British biographer Andrew Lycett. The book was launched last week at the Nehru Center in central London with a talk by Lycett followed by a reception and book signing. Lycett has already done invaluable work in providing a more nuanced and rounded view of Kipling through his biography of the author published to critical acclaim in 1999.
For “Kipling Abroad”, he has selected excerpts from Kipling’s work – including stories, poems, letters and journalism – to highlight his gifts as a travel writer who roamed the globe to an extraordinary extent.
Kipling was a great recorder of places. “Not just the physical places, but their peoples, their quirks, their smells – indeed the total experience of being at a particular place... He was such a brilliant observer of the world around him,” Lycett writes.

Full report here Saudi Gazette

Kipling's Indian legacy

Plans for a museum in Rudyard Kipling's Mumbai home commemorating the writer have been shelved following concerns that a memorial to the renowned imperialist and chronicler of the British Raj would be politically unpalatable. But is it time for Indians to reappraise him. 

Nearly 75 years after his death, the poet and author Rudyard Kipling remains as celebrated and controversial as ever.

The man who created the popular image - or myth - of the British Raj, has gone through somewhat of a renaissance in modern Britain. His poem If - for so long virtually ignored by poetry experts and anthologies alike - topped a BBC poll as the greatest poem of all in 1995.

And in 2002, when his works came out of copyright, a flurry of cheap editions of Kipling's poetry and novels proved a popular attraction. But, for Indians, the man praised by George Orwell as "a good bad poet" remains a divisive figure.

Full report here BBC

Jungle Book reaches Germany

Hyderabad-based animation, gaming and entertainment company DQ Entertainment (DQE) has partnered with German broadcaster ZDF and its distribution and licensing arm ZDF Enterprises to reincarnate Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book for the first time in high definition television series and television feature format.

The budget of the project is pegged at approximately €9 million (Rs 606.53 million) and will be funded through pre-sales and co-production deals across the globe.

The Jungle Book deal will be led by DQE wherein the company will hold the majority global rights including television, distribution, home video, VoD, publishing and licensing and merchandising. As co-producers, ZDF/ ZDF-E will have the right to appoint executive producers for the project with full editorial and distribution rights for Europe (excluding French, English and Irish territories), Middle East and Latin America.

"This is a major milestone for the growth of DQE's home grown IP initiatives, and represents a bold step forward in terms of international production, licensing and distribution for our company," said DQE Group chairman and CEO Tapaas Chakravarti. To exploit the product in France and other French territories, DQE has collaborated with French broadcaster TF-1 Broadcasting and its distribution and licensing arm TF-1 Enterprises.

London-based NBC Universal, meanwhile, has been given the responsibility for distribution of the project's home video in territories such as UK, France, Australia, New Zealand and Japan while it is in advance negotiations for other territories also.

"Joining hands with ZDF Group of companies from Germany, TF-1 Group of companies from France and NBC Universal, London has added tremendous strength to the production of this brand Jungle Book," Chakravarti said. "This has almost guaranteed very strong distribution for all platform of television, video, VOD and merchandising in entire Europe, Middle East and Latin America while, Asian nations and North America are joining hands shortly," added Chakravarti.

According to DQE, the company is currently in talks with other European and international distributors for co-production and acquisition deals for the forthcoming series. The book will be visually translated into a 52 episode animated series wherein the first season of the 52x11 minute series will be delivered by 2010. This will be followed by a 60-minute TV feature.

Said ZDF international co-productions and acquisitions for children's and youth programming - head Nicole Keeb, "Jungle Book is a classical property and with its modern 3D adaptation perfectly fits into ZDF's programming. We particularly like the idea that Mowgli and his friends will come to life in their homeland: India."