‘Civilizing Sabu of India’: Redefining the White Man’s Burden in Twentieth-Century Britain

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.