INDIAN CHILDREN OF THE JUNGLE IN 1939.

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• published: 11 May 2015
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Children of the Jungle was produced in 1939 by the film division of the British-owned Times of India newspaper. The cinematography is by Marcus Bartley, who is credited as ‘newsreel cameraman’ for the paper, and he would later go on to achieve recognition for his camerawork on such Indian feature films Swarga Seema (1945) (‘Marcus Bartley’). The film was written and produced by Stanley Jepson, editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, one of the newspaper’s sister publications. Jepson was one of the prime movers of Bombay’s first film club, the Amateur Cine Society, founded in 1937 (Mazumder). The film was edited by Sarvattam Badami, director of over 30 films for Sagar Movietone, the distributors of the first talking pictures in India (‘The Firsts of Indian Cinema’). Badami would later play a leading role in setting up the newsreel section of the film division for the first government of independent India (Vittal, 2007, 75). The film is concerned with the practices of the various forest tribes of central India. Its first half focuses primarily on the hunting activities of the Gond people, who constitute the largest of central India’s tribes. The second half features some elements of the wedding rituals undertaken by the Bhil tribe (for comprehensive accounts of these rituals see Sirshalkar, 2004, 296-304; Koppers and Jungblut, 1946, 5-33). The film also recounts some of the history of the Bhils, noting that during the early nineteenth century they were ‘the desperados and marauding bandits of Khandesh’. It claims that they were ‘pacified’ by General James Outram, who founded the Khandesh Bhil Corps in 1825 (for further details see Russell, 2009, 375).