Kipling and the visual: illustrations and adaptations

This chapter on Kipling and illustrations and adaptations will examine this author's extraordinary deployment of the visual particularly in the way his work has been continually recirculated. Though Kipling went to great efforts to control how his texts reached the public, they soon took on their own life. He acknowledged this when he read Edgar Rice Burrows’s Tarzan books and saw Tarzan as a ‘jazzed’ version of Mowgli. This study is based on recent re-evaluations of the relation between text and images. These have brought about a shift in the way illustrations and cinematic adaptations are seen. No longer are they viewed as secondary and ancillary to the ‘original’, at best translating or interpreting the text. Instead, they are now considered as part of an interchange of eras, styles, nations, and subjects. Kipling’s texts were, from the start, often accompanied by illustrations, where these were by Kipling himself, his father or professional illustrators. New illustrated editions have continued to be published with different illustrations, a practice that has changed the way Kipling's works have been interpreted. Cinematic adaptations of Kipling’s work can, similarly, be addressed with an attention to how meaning has been made from Kipling’s texts, rather than in terms of a film’s fidelity or otherwise to the original work. Films discussed here include Stephen's Gunga Din, John Houston’s The Man Who Would Be King and, of course, Disney’s and Korda's versions of The Jungle Book .