Abstract
In 1937, British producer Alexander Korda released Elephant Boy, a film drawing on Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Toomai of the Elephants’, a story about a young Indian orphan and his pachyderm companion.1 Though the production was fraught with artistic and financial differences between Korda and its director, the filmmaker Robert Flaherty, it became a great success on release in the British and American markets. That success was largely due to the film’s young star, Sabu. Much like Kipling’s Toomai, Sabu was an Indian orphan, who had been handpicked as the lead whilst Flaherty was filming on location in India. When Korda eventually revoked on funding for the project, Sabu was brought to England by the crew to finish the film at Korda’s London Films studios. Sabu soon became one of the studio’s biggest stars, appearing first in Elephant Boy, followed swiftly by The Drum (1938), Thief of Bagdad (1940) and Jungle Book (1942). This essay will explore how the biographical stories that circulated around Sabu resulted in constructing an easily identifiable persona shaped by well- known imperial stereotypes and orientalized notions of India. It will also debate to what extent the circulation of this familiar image, personified through Sabu as orphaned child of empire, provided reassurance in the fraught decade before Indian independence in 1947 and the period of subcontinental migration to Britain that followed.
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Notes
Charles Drazin, Korda: Britain’s Movie Mogul (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002), pp. 178, 179. Unfortunately for Korda Elephant Boy cost £150,000 to produce.
For the seminal work on British cinema- going practices in the 1930s see Jeffrey Richards, Age of the Dream Palace: Cinemagoing and Society, 1930–1939 (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).
John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Dover, NH: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 256.
For more on these themes in the cinema of empire see Jeffrey Richards, Visions of Yesterday (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
Brian Taves, The Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical Adventure Movies (Meridian, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1993).
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994).
For recent discussions of Sabu and his films see, for example, Sarah Street, Black Narcissus (New York: I. B. Taurus, 1995).
Prem Chowdhry, Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema: Image, Ideology, and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
Frances Flaherty and U. Leacock, Sabu the Elephant Boy (London: Dent, 1937), pp. 20–1.
Jack Whittingham, Sabu of the Elephants (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1938), p. 50.
Judith Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 161.
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© 2013 Jacqueline Gold
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Gold, J. (2013). ‘Civilizing Sabu of India’: Redefining the White Man’s Burden in Twentieth-Century Britain. In: Nasta, S. (eds) India in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392724_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392724_12
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