Analysis Of The Elephant Boy

Sabu Dastagir was born the son of a third generation Elephant Driver on January 24th, 1924

in Mysore, India. Sabu’s mother passed away in 1924 not long after his birth and Sabu was

predominantly raised by his father, Selar Shaik. It was his father’s untimely death in 1931, that

led Sabu and his brother to be taken into the service of Maharajah of Mysore as a stable boy.

Lucky for Sabu, the young boy was spotted by Osmond Borrandaile while location hunting for

the film The Elephant Boy that the youth procured his first major role.

The Elephant Boy was a film that producer Alex Korda had based off of Rudyard Kipling’s

story Toomai of the Elephants. Sabu and his brother, Dastigir, were flown to England in

1937 to complete the picture and became wards of the

Korda’s film adaptation of Toomai and the Elephants served as a

perfect example of Britain’s fascination with the exotic in British Colonial territories

such as India. Much of Sabu’s role in the film was an exoticized representation

of what Westerners thought of India and their peoples, displaying Sabu with a turban

and accentuated Indian accent. In 1942, Sabu made his last feature film with Korda in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.

Sabu played the lead protagonist, Mowgli, a young boy abandoned by his parents and raised

by wolves in the Jungle. The film went on to be a critical success with Sabu earning praise for

his youthful despite infantalized portrayal of the character. The role of Mowgli would later cast a

shadow on much of Sabu’s adult film career in which the actor would desperately try to shed his

jungle boy image despite being fetishized by Western audiences.

With Universal, Sabu was cast in the titular role in The Thief of Baghdad as Abu, a remake