“The pity of the Monkey People!” Baloo snorted. “The stillness of the mountain stream! The cool of the summer sun!”
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (1894)
Dev Patel is a fan-favorite choice to play the next James Bond. Why would anyone want to impose such a burden on the man?
The British actor has long been, as Siddhant Adlakha puts bluntly, “Hollywood’s go-to casting choice for characters hailing from India.” He has managed to break away from that image in recent years with two period pieces, both roles usually played by white men: The titular character in The Personal History of David Copperfield (2020) and as Sir Gawain in The Green Knight (2021).
Patel expressed his feelings about playing “white” roles in a 2020 conversation with Indiewire:
“Professionally, I’ve existed in a bit of a no man’s land, sort of neither here nor there,” Patel said. “What you do as an actor is, you want to be able to explore. The very nature of our job is to be able to step into different skins and be other people. This is the truest of that form.”
This “colorblind” approach to characters, however, fails to make new meaning out of casting a person of color. Certainly there is great magnanimity in unapologetically casting an actor of Indian descent as a Victorian novelist and an Arthurian knight of the Round Table. But there’s a missed opportunity of leaving Great Britain’s imperialist legacy with India as subtext and not foregrounded text. Surely a Patel-starring James Bond movie would be just that — a brown Bond, with no real commentary or introspection.
Patel’s feature-length writing and directing debut, Monkey Man (2024), feels like not so much an audition for Bond as an attempt at reclaiming a narrative long ago tainted by colonialist literature. And though Ian Fleming often romanticized “the empire on which the sun never sets,” I don’t think Monkey Man is in conversation with his work.
No, Patel takes aim at Rudyard Kipling, Mr. “White Man’s Burden” himself, who was famously the voice of British expansionism.
Monkey Man follows Patel’s unnamed character “Kid” on a journey that loosely mirrors the adventures of the Hindu demigod Hanuman. In bustling Yatana, a fictional analog of Mumbai, Kid seeks to avenge his mother’s death against two politically-charged targets — tyrannical police commissioner Rana Singh (Sikandar Kher) and religious leader Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande). He eventually makes his way up to working in the grimy clandestine gentleman’s club that Singh frequents, but he funds his operation by fighting in an underground arena as “The Beast.” Wearing a monkey mask, he battles larger-than-life opponents named after characters from The Jungle Book while lorded over by South African sleazebag Tiger (Sharlto Copley).
The Jungle Book (the book, not the Disney movie) is a collection of stories by the English author Rudyard Kipling. Most of the stories follow Mowgli, the boy or “man-cub” raised by wolves in the jungles of India. Mowgli’s friends include Bagheera the panther, Baloo the bear and Kaa the python, while his great enemy is the tiger Shere Khan.
A major theme in the anthology is orphaned characters, such as Mowgli and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, embracing found families and overcoming powerful foes. Kipling also emphasizes respecting law and order for the sake of a functioning social contract.
You have to understand Kipling to understand the messages in his work. He considered himself to be a man of two worlds: An Anglo-Indian, he was neither British nor Indian.
As Georgetown University explains:
Kipling was born in Bombay and into the difficulties of identity faced by all Anglo-Indians. For the early years of his life, he spoke more Hindustani than English, having spent most of his time with the family nanny. After attending school in England. Kipling returned to India a man shaped by several cultures. The hybrid nature of his own cultural contacts is reflected in Kipling’s preoccupation with characters who attempt hybrid existence. These characters attempt to bridge the discontinuities in the social order of India with an exertion of strong individualism.
Kipling was also very much a byproduct of a third land: South Africa. He first visited there in 1891 and then, after befriending Cecile Rhodes in 1897, lived there every winter from 1898 to 1908. Rhodes was, of course, Prime Minster of the Cape Colony in South Africa from 1890 to 1896 — amongst other things. His time in office would reverberate well into the 20th century, with the Franchise and Ballot Act of 1892 disenfranchising many non-white voters, the Glen Grey Act of 1894 limiting the amount of land Africans could own, and two pass laws in 1896 helping mine-owners control the movement of Black miners.
“This was Kipling’s hero, his ‘dreamer devout,’ whose greatest quality, Kipling felt, was his imagination, to whom he was utterly devoted, and with whom he shared a belief in a Pax Britannica,” says Tanya Barben of The Kipling Society. And though Kipling may have felt comfortable and attuned with many cultures, he still believed that non-Western countries should lack autonomy and submit to the benevolent oversight of white men.
Monkey Man‘s subplot at Tiger’s Temple seems to be Patel working through his feelings on Kipling and his own conflicted identity. The son of Kenyan immigrants of Gujarati Indian descent, Patel was not in touch with his heritage growing up and was even ashamed of it. As he told the Hindustan Times in 2016:
“As someone who hadn’t been to India as a young man and tried to hide (his Indian ethnicity) for a long time, when I went there for Slumdog, it kind of opened my mind to a whole new level of consciousness and acceptability of who I am.”
Part of Indian heritage is Kipling’s inescapable sway over how the world views the country and how Great Britain views itself. His biographer, Andrew Lycett, is confident Kipling “believed in Britain’s innate superiority” and that he would have been for Brexit, the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union in 2020. A third of UK citizens believe in that superiority and are not only nostalgic for the days of Empire, but believe Britain’s colonies were better off for being part of the Empire!
Monkey Man is responding to this context. As Kid faces each foe, Patel is deconstructing Kipling and Britain’s influence to rebuild the story as truly Indian, free of the shadow of imperial oppression.
First there’s the Beast, our hero the Kid. His backstory is not dissimilar to that of Mowgli. The Kid tells Sita (Sobhita Dhulipala) not that he grew up in a rural village but in the forest. He lost his parents at a very young age. And a pivotal moment in his life is choosing between being a man or an animal.
The difference between Mowgli and the Kid is the latter chooses to be a monkey, not a man. And man, did Kipling hate monkeys.
Almost all of the animals in The Jungle Book — from the wolves that raise Mowgli to the elephants and his friends Baloo and Bagheera — are considered “Jungle People.” The exception is the “Bandar-Log,” the Monkey People.
Mowgli is at first fooled by them when they treat him kindly. They say Mowgli is their brother without a tail and will one day lead them. Baloo is outraged to hear Mowgli has been with the Bandar-Log and expresses his disdain:
“Listen, man-cub,” said the Bear, and his voice rumbled like thunder on a hot night. “I have taught thee all the Law of the Jungle for all the peoples of the jungle—except the Monkey-Folk who live in the trees. They have no law. They are outcasts. They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep, and wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They are without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten. We of the jungle have no dealings with them. We do not drink where the monkeys drink; we do not go where the monkeys go; we do not hunt where they hunt; we do not die where they die.”
What’s fascinating about the Bandar-Log is how they are said to gain sympathy from the gullible through trickery. They can only imitate but never truly understand civilized society.
The metaphors of the Jungle People as the British and the Monkey People as everyone under their rule is undeniable. The National Post summed this ideology up succinctly in 2016:
[I]t is hard not to see uncomfortable parallels between Kipling’s rejection of the Monkey-Folk who live outside the Law and his dismissal of all those who wanted to throw off the yoke of the British Empire, whether in Ireland, South Africa or India.
This argument that certain kinds of peoples are too naïve, simple or barbaric to govern themselves and must be ruled for their own good is a common refrain of conquerors. From slavery in the United States to apartheid in South Africa to genocide in Palestine, the powerful justify their actions by convincing themselves their enemies are less-than-human.
Copley’s Tiger is one of the few white characters in the movie and can function as a stand-in for Kipling. He weaves the stories around each fighter and rigs the matches for who goes down in which round. When he reintroduces the Kid during the “Return of the Beast” bout, he orates on how he caught the “Kong” in Africa — which is a tale loaded with its own racial connotations.
Copley first worked with Patel on Chappie (2015), which was written and directed by South African filmmaker Neil Blomkamp. Blomkamp’s films District 9 (2009), Elysium (2013) and Chappie all deal with themes of segregation, class conflict, the military-industrial complex and overpolicing. Appropriately enough, Patel first thought of Blomkamp to direct Monkey Man, but ultimately decided the project was too personal to hand off to someone else.
During the “Return of the Beast,” the Kid has a rematch with King Cobra. The first fight of the movie sees King Cobra tear the Kid apart, as the former throws the fight and lets himself be brutalized for a bigger payout. When they face each other again, Kid takes King Cobra out with one swift kick.
Cobra could be inspired by a few Kipling stories. There’s the two snakes, Nag and Nagaina, that Rikki-Tikki-Tavi has to overcome. There’s also the White Cobra of “The King’s Ankus” in The Second Jungle Book (1895). That snake warns Mowgli that a bejeweled ankus is “death” and proves to be so when greedy men kill each other over it.
This story shares a similar theme with Monkey Man, in which Kid goes from craving money for his own obsessions to giving it away to the impoverished hijra community that helped him. The hijra have historically been viewed as a sacred “third gender” in India, but like many of the country’s traditions they were criminalized and stripped of legal protection by British colonial authorities.
What’s more important is who Kid fights next. He doesn’t have a rematch with Shere Kahn, the second fight of the movie and a stand-in for Mowgli’s nemesis. Instead he fights “The Bear,” a surrogate for Baloo.
Baloo represents Western civilization. In the book he is the only other creature allowed at the Wolf Pack Council and he teaches wolf cubs the Law of the Jungle. When Kid as Monkey Man defeats the Bear, he is dismantling Kipling’s Jungle People and reframing the history of the Monkey People. No longer are they the Bandar-Log, but can instead trace their lineage back to Hanuman, the powerful and heroic leader of a grand monkey army.
Patel has a lot to contend with in Monkey Man. He tackles Hindu nationalism, sex trafficking, the Indian government’s treatment of the LGBTQ community, police corruption and much more. But before that he has to exorcise the British empire from his story.
The Bartcave 