Writing my own Jungle Book
Dea Birkett heads for the very centre of India as she tracks Rudyard Kipling’s Shere Khan
THE jungle alarm sounded. Three dusty-brown sambar deer lifted their heads from the grass and trumpeted. The red-faced macaque monkeys ceased squabbling and began to bark. A pair of leaping jackals halted in their tracks and howled. Our guide, naturalist Avijit Dutta, said: ‘It’s the alarm call that lets you know a predator is around. You can hear the other animals’ fear.’
We were on the track of f tigers in Pench National Park, Madhya Pradesh – the setting g for Rudyard Kipling’s classic c Jungle Book. A century and a half after his birth, I was onn a guided tour to discover the e India that had formed and inspired him. In Pench, I wanted to find not a real-life tiger but Shere Khan – the e ferocious furry striped star r of his popular Victorian tale.
My journey had begun a thousand miles away on the coast in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), where Kipling was born. He wouldn’t recognise this modern city with a population of 22million and less green space per person than anywhere on Earth. But tucked between the halfbuilt skyscrapers, the colonial city still peeks out. The 18th Century St Thomas Cathedral, where baby Rudyard was baptised in 1865, is the oldest surviving colonial building.
Young Rudyard played on the campus of the still-existing Sir J.J. School of Art, where his father was dean. The Kipling home is a green wooden house with peeling paint and creaking shutters. Some dispute it’s the same building he lived in for his first five years, claiming the original was a bungalow since demolished. But it’s certain this spot inspired one of Kipling’s best-known characters, the boy spy Kim, whose fictional home was modelled on the campus.
Kipling’s father taught sculpture. His students carved peacocks and mythical beasts on the spires of the monumental Victoria Station (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, a Unesco world heritage site used by three million passengers a day).
IBOARDED the 6.15am train to Aurangabad with a copy of Angus Wilson’s 1977 biography The Strange Ride Of Rudyard Kipling to read during the eighthour journey. Hawkers jumped on at each stop, selling warm potato pakora and deep-fried bhaji. Tea-sellers balanced silver urns of pipinghot, sweet milky tea on their heads.
Kipling often wrote about travelling by train. The scenes rattling past me had barely changed in 150 years. The ploughed fields were dotted with millet stalks to feed the cattle; a bright red sari flashed past as a woman bent to pick buds from a cotton bush; wobbling, wooden-wheeled ploughs were pulled by bullocks with brightly painted horns; a gaggle of gaunt teenage boys splashed in a stagnant stream.
Aurangabad was the closest station to Ajanta where, in the 2nd Century BC, 30 caves were dug deep into a cliff, every inch intricately carved and painted with Buddhist imagery. They took 500 years to complete, were enjoyed as a place of pilgrimage for two centuries, then lost for more than 1,000 years until rediscovered in 1819.
Ajanta is still a working Buddhist temple, so we padded barefoot up the huge stone staircases between the giant carvings of Syrian lions and Chinese dragons. Did Kipling remove his shoes here too, on his long trip inland to the jungle? We drove on to Jalgaon and took an overnight train to Nagpur, the geographical centre of India with four carved horses to mark the spot. From Nagpur it was a four-hour drive to Jamtara Wilderness Camp on the edge of Pench National Park. Jamtara is glamping in the jungle, with colonialstyle square khaki tents and fourposter beds draped with mosquito nets. The camp was built by the grandson of Kailash Sankhala, founder of the Project Tiger conservation movement. Ten years ago, there were fewer than 1,500 wild Bengal tigers. Now the numbers have increased by about half, and around 100 of them live in Pench.
I had to lift my tent flap at 5am to have the best chance of a sighting. Tigers sleep for 20 hours a day, longer if they’ve had a good feed, and are most active at dawn. The guide, Avijit, and his fellow naturalist Anand drove us into the jungle.
Avijit told us to use our ears. A tiger close by causes a commotion as each animal sends out its own unique alarm call.
My list of animals to spot was a little unusual. I didn’t want typical safari sightings but characters from The Jungle Book – Kaa the rock python, Hathi the elephant, Tabaqui the jackal, Ko the crow, Mao the peacock, Bandar-log the anarchic langur monkeys – and Shere Khan the tiger. A jackal trotted across our path. ‘Tabaqui!’ I cried.
We continued on into the jungle as it woke, stopping every few miles to switch off the engine and listen. Indian bison – the largest cattle in the world – lumbered out from behind the teak trees. A family of five wild boar trotted primly along in front of us. Monkeys dropped from the trees, some with babies clinging to their backs. Langurs! The Bandar-log on my list!
A group of sambar deer were close by. ‘Monkeys and deer are often spotted together,’ said Avijit. ‘The monkeys have better sight and the advantage of height in the trees. The deer have a good sense of smell. They watch out for each other.’
In the distance, crashing through the undergrowth, the Pench antipoaching team was patrolling on elephant back. Hathi – the elephant from The Jungle Book! The park has an ‘elephant bakery’ where massive bread pancakes are cooked for the animals on a huge openair hotplate. ‘Once elephants were used to hunt tigers. Now they’re used to protect them,’ says Avijit.
Evidence of tigers was everywhere. We found two sets of the distinctive five-toed front pawprints, but Avijit said they had been walked over by other animals so must be a few hours old. We stopped at a pile of poo. Avijit picked it up and sniffed. ‘Not fresh,’ he said. ‘From last night.’
AS SOON as we heard an alarm, however distant, we’d start up the Jeep and rush towards it. Perhaps a tiger or pack of wild dogs was nearby, or even a leopard. We stopped and listened again, and again, and again. But we didn’t spot a tiger.
Shere Khan may have eluded us. But I’d seen a part of India that Kipling must have witnessed – Victorian Mumbai, the view from my train window, the other Jungle Book characters that Kipling wrote about. My 1,000-mile journey had revealed an India that, until then, I’d thought survived only in his story books.
On my final rail journey from Nagpur back down to Mumbai, I finished reading The Strange Ride Of Rudyard Kipling and made a shocking discovery. Kipling’s bestknown work might have been set in the Pench jungle, but it was all created in the great author’s vivid imagination.
He never went there.
Disney’s new version of The Jungle Book will be released in the UK on April 15.