Jungle Boys, Babus and Camp Orientals The Liminal Personae of the Film Star Sabu

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Jungle Boys, Babus and Camp Orientals The Liminal Personae of the Film Star Sabu A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Field of Performance Studies By Jyoti Argadé EVANSTON, ILLINOIS June 2009

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©Copyright by Jyoti Argadé 2009 All Rights Reserved

ABSTRACT

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Jungle Boys, Babus and Camp Orientals: The Liminal Personae of the Film Star Sabu Jyoti Argadé

This dissertation analyzes the film performances of Sabu to connect perceptions of Indianness across the multiple geographies of colonial India, Britain and the United States. Sabu was an Indian child star featuring in popular British and Hollywood films including Elephant Boy (1936), The Jungle Book (1940), Thief of Bagdad (1940) and Arabian Nights (1942). Drawing from nineteenth century ethnologies, colonial literature and early ethnographic film, I locate Sabu’s performances of jungle boys, babus and camp orientals as a citational terrain to map, chart, and measure the impact of ethnology, US legislation policy and British colonial discourse on emergent performances of Indianness on each side of the Atlantic. I argue that the historically ambivalent legal classifications of South Asians as “Hindoo,” Caucasian, white or Other constitute, inform and frame Sabu’s filmic characters. What I demonstrate in my analysis of his portrayals is that the circulation of a culturally ambivalent and racially liminal set of subcontinental “Oriental” personae on the Indian male body mirrors the racial ambiguity of South Asians as “passable” citizens during a period of anti-Asian legislation. A major component of my argument is that South Asian American identity cannot be theorized as a binary product of the host country, America, and the home nation, India. Rather, central to understanding South Asian diasporic formations in the United States is an analysis of their migration at the axes of British colonialism, Indian nationalism and American citizenship. Locating this dissertation within the interdisciplinarity of Performance Studies, I draw upon historical political economy, postcolonialism, diaspora theory and historiography to augment

4 my understanding of Sabu’s portrayals among Indian, British and American audiences. In doing so, I not only engage the politics of his migration, the global circulation of his iconicity and the complex orientalism(s) that frames his representations, I also utilize a critical performance lens to recuperate his embodiments of colonial masculinities as crucial sites of discourse in Asian American, Gender and Film Studies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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Academic pursuits often call for a nomadic lifestyle. Journeying from one location to the next, across three continents, three countries and five cities, all the while lugging a laptop, binders and a small library of books wherever I went, my experience of “home” has at times been transient and displaced, and in other instances, home has emerged in the most solidifying ways. What has been constant across Brooklyn, Chicago, London, Greensboro, NC and Pune, India has been the outpouring of warmth, love and camaraderie from friends, family and mentors who repeatedly remind me that I have many homes across the world. Without their support and belief in me, this dissertation would have not been possible. My growth as a scholar reflects the enduring guidance of my co-chairs, Professor Susan Manning and Professor E. Patrick Johnson. From the first drafts of my prospectus to the completion of the dissertation, Professor Manning has offered critical and practical advice on the art of writing, the importance of organization and the balance between scholarship and practice. Her humor, understanding and patience afforded me the space to discover my own process and commitment to the task. Professor Johnson helped me visualize the endpoint when it seemed miles and miles away. His ongoing engagement with my work, coupled with his detailed eye and encouragement, pushed me ahead at full steam to finish a project that he reminded me would be one milestone in a life of many. I am also grateful to Professor Margaret Drewal whose helpful references and insightful comments shaped key theoretical lines of inquiry. Professor Mary Zimmerman agreed to serve as a reader later in the process. To her, I express my sincere gratitude. Funding from multiple sources across Northwestern University supported various stages of writing and research. The Lilla A. Heston Dissertation Year Fellowship from the Department of Performance Studies funded early archival research in London and New York. A Graduate Fellowship from the Asian American Studies Program secured the opportunity to teach and test my

research questions in a classroom environment. Additional monies from the Department of

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Performance Studies, the Asian American Studies program, the Center for International and Comparative Studies, the Department of African American Studies and The Graduate School funded integral conference presentations that refined the direction of my work. Due thanks are also owed to the departmental staff of Rare Books and Special Collections at Columbia University’s Butler Library who graciously answered many questions regarding the content and scope of Robert J. Flaherty’s 92 Boxes of papers. Leah Albert and Margarita De la VegaHurtado of the International Film Seminars permitted access to the Flaherty archives. Andrew Kirk of the Victoria and Albert Theatre Museum in Olympia, London introduced me to several performances and spectacles on India in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Britain. Many of his references prompted additional queries that I hope to explore in future scholarly endeavors. I cannot begin to express my indebtedness to Martin Stockham, the director of Gemini Pictures in Teddington, London. His generosity of spirit, resources and time pervade the entirety of this dissertation. I would not have had access to the multiple photographs, articles, interviews and film clips necessary for this project had he not graciously opened the doors of his production studio to me and my onslaught of inquiries. Marilyn “Honey” Sabu granted me a rare interview in 2002. Her memory of her husband, Sabu the film star, is vital to my research, and I am grateful for the time she devoted to speaking with me. Some of my most cherished moments of learning surfaced through encounters with a lively and talented group of Performance Studies scholars both inside and outside the classroom. Amber Day, Coya Paz, Michelle Hayford, Jeffrey McCune, Christine Dunford, Meida McNeal, Öykü Potuoglu-Cook, Renee Alexander Craft, Mshai Mwangola, Tamara Roberts, Rashida Braggs, Elaine Peña, Priscilla Renta, Rafi Crockett and Mark West form a group of academics, artists and activists whose ingenuity continues to inspire and uplift me. Amber Day provided succor, intellectual tête-à-

têtes, editorial discernment, mouthwatering gourmet meals, companionship, laughter and many

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commiseration sessions throughout the dissertation process. Her partner, Patrick McEvoy, brought our anxieties into perspective with his enthusiasm, humor and wit. Central to this project’s completion has been the constancy of my close ally and “DFF,” Coya Paz. Our almost daily conversations through the final stages of writing helped me strengthen my arguments, brainstorm through obstacles and theorize issues of race, class, gender and citizenship in nuanced and enlightening trajectories. More importantly, these dialogues also demonstrated the true meaning of friendship in ways that I will never forget. Words cannot relay my appreciation for the inimitable Alan Shefsky whose erudition, quips and thoughtfulness sustained me through graduate school. Often, his administrative élan quelled many snafus just in the nick of time. Jeffrey Tompkins kindly read through several chapter drafts, offering useful copyediting suggestions and a faithful ear to structural and conceptual concerns. Professor Nitasha Sharma provided focus, structure and clarification at a crucial stage when the immensity of writing overrode my awareness of the dissertation’s larger goals. I am truly thankful for her kindness and astute advice. From California to Chicago and from New York to London, my friends have celebrated my triumphs and successes and lifted me up in times of struggle and frustration. I can verily say that I am extraordinarily blessed to have the brilliant, loving and creative force of friends that I do. Lea Pinsky, Swapna Tamhane, Ashu Rai, Shelly Bahl, Shalini Kantayya and Lori Jarrett have nourished me with their loyalty, humor, love and intelligence over many years. With sage guidance, compassion and soulful words, Brandon Ross pointed me towards the “bigger picture” and reminded me of the lessons embedded in the path towards completion. Julie Bleha, Amy Brill, Wangechi Mutu, Tai Jimenez, Timothy Hill, Michael Floyd, Vipal Monga, Charlotte Holst-Douglass, Chris Lee, Vidur Kapur, Shambhavi Saraswati, Eduardo Contreras, Nitin Madhav, Richard Wright,

Cat Henry, Luke Haddock, Vinaya Kelkar, Lakshmi Iyer, Sharrif Simmons, Lisa and Tom Woods,

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and LeAura and Coleman Alderson have collectively reinforced the importance of fostering relationships that nurture collaboration, intellectual exchange, social activism and spiritual growth. Finally, my deepest gratitude is reserved for my family who has been the mainstay of this dissertation’s progress. When I returned to my hometown of Greensboro, NC to complete my final chapters, I discovered that Sabu, my primary subject of inquiry, entered Greensboro’s Army Air Force Basic Training Center in 1944 before departing for WWII. I took this piece of history as a sign that I was writing precisely where I was supposed to be. My eldest brother, Pralhad, his wife, Madhavi and my charming niece, Sanjana, fed, amused and comforted me in Charlotte, NC when they recognized I needed a break more than I realized. My brother, Rahul, my sister-in-law, Stacie, and my adorable nephews, Nikhil and Matteo, provided numerous escapes to their Virginia home where mirth, good food, fine wine and choice cinema awaited me. Swati Argadé, my twin sister and dearest confidant, identified the value of this dissertation from the very start and pushed me to consider critical questions that emerged from productive debates on popular culture, South Asian identity and the aesthetics of representation. Lastly, and most significantly, my mother, Veena P.T. Argadé and my father, Dr. Shyam D. Argadé, have been models of spiritual assistance, wisdom and love. Passionate conversations with my father on colonial discourse, the politics of resistance and his memories of living in India when the nation won its 1947 independence sparked instances of momentum that clarified the thrust of retracing conflicted histories. My mother’s blissful meals, razor-sharp humor and tales of nationalist leaders’ visits to my grandparents’ home kept me fed, laughing and curious about my family’s past. Their unwavering faith in me through difficulties, blocks and breakthroughs helped me believe, especially in moments of doubt, that I would achieve my goals. To my parents, I dedicate this dissertation.

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For my parents, Veena P.T. Argadé and Shyam D. Argadé

Table Of Contents

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Abstract. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 List Of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Chapter One: Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14 Chapter Two: Sabu The Elephant Boy: The Quest For Authenticity and the “Discovery” of a Star.. .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Robert Flaherty, Alexander Korda and Rudyard Kipling: Boys and their Beasts and the Conception of a Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Ways of Viewing “Authenticity:” Ethnology, Imperialism and Popular Culture . . . . . . . . . 48 The Reception of The Elephant Boy (1936) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Columbiad Visions and the “Discovery” of India: An Expedition’s Quest for the Orient....62 Mysore’s Real India and the Projection of National Desires . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 The “Discovery” of Sabu and the “Test” of Authenticity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Manufacturing Sabu. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Chapter Three: Who Gets To Be A Citizen? The Racial Ambivalence of Indians in America . . . . . 88 The Limits Of Periodization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 The “Old” Diaspora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 American or Un-American? Constituting White Citizenship and “Alien-ating” the Other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Burden or Boon? “Court”-ing Caste for Newfound Freedoms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .119 White to Some, Brown to Others: “Passing” for American and the Malleability of Whiteness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Bhagat Singh Thind: Becoming American and the Fiction of the “Common Man”. . . . . . 136 Chapter Four: Sabu as Babu and Boys in the Jungle: Cosmopolitanism and Strategizing the Stereotype. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 Citational Terrains and Metonymic Entities: Performing the Space between “Excess” and “Lack”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 The Strategies and Pleasures of “Cross-Viewing” Stereotypes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 Jungle Boys, Wolf-Boys, Imperial Boys: In-Between the Jungle, the Village and Civilization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 Alexander Korda’s Production of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1942). . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 Sabu as Babu: “Mimic Men” though the Ages and the Citationality of Colonial

11 Masculinity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 Intermediating Empire on the Border of India in The Drum (1938). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 Chapter Five: Sabu As Abu In Thief Of Bagdad (1940): Unveiling The Excess and the Camp Oriental. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 Technicolor Orients and the Queer “Excess” of the East. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 Queering the Oriental and the Desires of Triangulation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218 Conclusion: The Afterlife Of Sabu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 Appendix Sabu Filmography and Roles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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Fig. 1. Sabu at a publicity event in London with his son, Paul and wife, Marilyn in 1951. Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures. Teddington, London, UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15 Fig. 2. Sabu parked outside Korda’s “star” factory at London Film Studios in 1938. Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures. Teddington, London, UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 Fig. 3. Sabu on a publicity stamp issued by the United States Army, 1943. Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33 Fig. 4. Flaherty’s film crew shooting on location in Mysore State, India on the set of The Elephant Boy in 1935. Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Fig 5. Sabu the Elephant Boy as a Military Man during WWII, 1944. Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures. Teddington, London, UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .87 Fig. 6. Sabu parading through North London for the Harringay Circus after returning from America as a star. Courtesy Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Fig. 7. A “lack” of civilization was often accompanied by a “lack” of clothing for this child star. This portrait was taken while Thief of Bagdad (1940) was in production. Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .159 Fig. 8. The lavishness of Sabu’s garb connotes the “excess” of a Maharaja’s birthright. Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .160 Fig. 9. Sabu selling war bonds in 1943. Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .164 Fig. 10. Sabu with Kaa, the rock snake, from The Jungle Book (1942). Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .177 Fig. 11. Sabu as Prince Azim in The Drum, 1938. Photograph of Painting, Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .196

13 Fig. 12. The Thief (Sabu), the Princess (June Duprez) and the Prince (John Justin) in Thief of Bagdad (1940). Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214 Fig. 13. Sabu scaling a giant web on his way to thieving the “all-seeing-eye in Thief of Bagdad (1940). From Powell and Pressburger Images of Thief of Bagdad. http://www.powellpressburger.org/Images/40_ToB/index.html . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .217 Fig. 14. John Justin and Sabu between takes on a ledge in the Grand Canyon. Their homosocial play offscreen likely translated into homoerotic chemistry onscreen. Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .223 Fig. 15. Sabu on the underside of a “Dixie Consumers” ice cream lid for the film, Thief of Bagdad (1940). From Powell and Pressburger Images for Thief of Bagdad, http://www.powellpressburger.org/Images/40_ToB/index.html . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228 Fig. 16. Cover of Harringay Circus Brochure, during his London Circus Tour (1951-1952); author’s collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .232 Fig. 17. Sabu’s endurance as the archetypal sidekick and his subjection to canine affiliations . . . . . . . . . . . 238

CHAPTER ONE

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Introduction When they would want special pictures of him, they’d want him to wear his turban. He had an unknown little touch, and when he’d want to show it, he would do that… We’d go into a nightclub at night ... that’s when the nightclubs were the old ones where they had orchestras and we’d sit down and have dinner and things. We went to Zeros and they’d turn down the lights when he entered. Then they’d start playing the drums, and then this voice would come out and say, ‘Sabu.’ Sabu had a little ocelot … on his shoulder and it just loved Sabu, it would just hang on to Sabu. And Sabu would walk into the nightclub, y’know? He had this grin that was just impish, they’d love to have him make that entrance… and he’d have on his turban with his tux and everything. He would make quite an entrance. He was an American, but he played his Indian-ness up.1 -- Marilyn “Honey” Sabu, 2002 Costumed in gentlemanly garb and crowned by his signature turban in a 1950s Hollywood nightclub, the international film star Sabu (24 January 1924 – 2 December 1963) performs a transnationalism that valorizes difference and challenges constructions of American identity. That Sabu would display his “unknown little touch [. . .] when he’d want to show it” corresponds to a strategic deployment of the national, gendered and racial categories that shaped him into a star. Indeed, the “excess” of the exotic cat on his shoulder, coupled with his hybrid outfit and the accompaniment of Zero’s drums, enacts a self-fashioned orientalism that exposes historical iterations of ethnic otherness (see fig. 1).

Marilyn “Honey” Sabu, personal interview with Sabu’s wife, 8 Dec. 2002. The transcription above is inspired by Dwight Conquergood’s “Ethnopoetic” method of translating field notes. 1

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Fig. 1. Sabu at a publicity event in London with his son, Paul and wife, Marilyn in 1951. Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures. Teddington, London, UK.

Born Selar Sheikh of Muslim parents in the Kanakpura jungles of what is now Karnataka, South India, Sabu has a biography that Martin Stockham says is “one of the most intriguing in the history of cinema” (Korda 94). The details of his life vary from one account to the next, but most underscore the “rags to riches” story of a boy who ascended to international stardom overnight. “Discovered” in the Maharaja of Mysore’s elephant stables in July 1935, Sabu was “found” by Osmond Borradaile, the cinematographer for The Elephant Boy (1936). Produced by the British film mogul Alexander Korda, this Rudyard Kipling adaptation was directed by the American maverick Robert Flaherty, often called the “father of documentary and ethnographic cinema” (Rony 99). Once Flaherty cast The Elephant Boy’s titular role, Korda’s publicity machine went to work transforming Selar Sheikh into a star. In the spring of 1936, the “renamed” Sabu set sail from Bombay to London where celebrity, photo shoots and press conferences awaited his arrival. When asked about the origins of Sabu’s name, the actor’s widow, Marilyn, answered that Korda named the

16 boy after an “Arabian fairy tale.” 2 The name, “Sabu,” derives from the Arabic word, al-Sabu, which in popular etymology means “beast.”Sab alludes to Abu Haraya, a narrative in Islamic mythology that refers to the wolf who lost his prey (Lecker 34). While there is no evidence that Korda actually conceived Sabu’s name from the Abu Haraya, it is notable that six years after his “discovery,” the British filmmaker cast Sabu as Mowgli, the lupine hero of Kipling’s renowned Jungle Books (18941895). On arriving in London, Korda insured the boy’s life for £50,000; artists painted Sabu’s portraits; sculptors cast his bust; and, zoos invited him to inaugurate their exotic animal exhibits across Britain. His older half-brother, Sheikh Dastagir, a taxi driver in Mysore, accompanied the boy to Europe where he served as Sabu’s guardian. British papers reported that Sabu was often seen on Korda’s studio lot racing around in a miniature sports car (see fig. 2). In April 1936, Kipling’s widow, Caroline Balestier, met him at The Elephant Boy premiere in Leicester Square just months after her husband’s death. In the following years while living in England, the adolescent boy starred in glorifications of the British Crown, appeared in fantasies inspired by Arabian Nights’ Orients and featured in Rudyard Kipling adaptations that sensationalized Sabu as a “real” jungle boy in the press. Often playing a “sidekick” to the white hero, he appeared as an affable savage child or an effete prince who was powerless before British colonial authority. Many a time he portrayed what could be termed Orientalist stereotypes. At other times, especially when he was the lead star, his characters seemed too ambivalent to support Orientalist paradigms. As I argue throughout this dissertation, the off screen cosmopolitanism he displayed, as shown in the anecdote above, destabilizes any durability

2

Marilyn “Honey” Sabu, personal interview, December 8, 2002.

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Fig. 2. Sabu parked outside Korda’s “star” factory at London Film Studios in 1938 Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures. Teddington, London, UK.

ascribed to his filmic caricatures, and conceivably, gestures towards a mockery of the Orientalism that instilled his roles. His most celebrated role as Abu in Thief of Bagdad [sic] (dir. Korda, 1940) took him to Hollywood in 1940 soon after WWII began in Europe. Once the Thief’s filming was finished, Sabu settled in California with his brother, Sheikh. This decision to settle in America at the age of sixteen played a pivotal moment in Sabu’s life wherein he began performing his American-ness through a pursuit of citizenship. After featuring in Korda’s production of The Jungle Books (1942) and Universal Studio’s Arabian Nights (1942), productions based on Kipling’s Mowgli and the quintessential Oriental text, A Thousand and One Nights, Sabu joined the US Army Corps in 1943, fought in WWII as a ball gunner and returned to America as one of the most decorated war heroes in Hollywood. As a member of the “Hindoo” race, Sabu was not “white,” and thus, the government deemed him inassimilable by US naturalization code. However, federal conscription

laws granted citizenship to immigrants typically ineligible for citizenship if they met military

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standards and joined the army. On January 4th, 1944, just months after joining the armed forces, Sabu was naturalized as a United States citizen. When Sabu returned from the war, the caliber of his roles began to dwindle. He no longer headlined as the lead. Once Hollywood studios began to replace the 1930s genre of “exotic” adventures with movies more inclined towards post-WWII social realism, Sabu’s career as an “exotic” in fantasy films diminished. For the remainder of his life, he made an average of a film per year in low-cost productions, ending with A Tiger Walks (1964) opposite Robert Mitchum. Some of Sabu’s films, including White Savage (1943) and Cobra Woman (1944), later became B-film classics with the camp icon, Maria Montez, billed as the female lead. In 1952, Sabu returned to London as the main act in the Harringay Circus, performing elephant tricks for hundreds of thousands of people during the holiday season. That same year, he returned to India for the first time since leaving in 1936 to produce and act in Baghdad, a film that never achieved distribution outside of India. In the early years of Bollywood’s burgeoning national industry, Baghdad was the only Indian collaboration he attempted throughout his film career. The remainder of Sabu’s life was spent in Los Angeles playing B-film “exotics” onscreen while living a bourgeois American life off screen. In addition to making cameos, playing small supporting roles and drawing film audiences with the familiarity of his name, the actor pursued other business ventures including real estate development, horse breeding and retail furniture. Living in America, the actor led a stable life, but encountered several misfortunes that involved an arson attack on his home in 1951, a paternity suit with a British dancer that he won, but settled out of court in 1953, and the violent 1960 death of his brother who was shot in the furniture store that both brothers owned and managed. When Hollywood’s “Walk of Fame” was inaugurated in 1960, Sabu was one of the first to receive a star on the famous boulevard alongside other Asian American

actors including the Chinese American starlet, Anna May Wong, and the Japanese actor, Sessue

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Hayakawa. Indeed, by Hollywood standards, Sabu was a star. As an actor, rancher, circus performer, hotrod racer, and businessman, Sabu signified, performed and fashioned the immigrant’s “American Dream” for twenty-three years before dying from a heart attack two months before his fortieth birthday. Marilyn “Honey” Sabu says her husband “died in my arms.”3 Although many of Sabu’s biographical details are interspersed throughout my discussion below, this dissertation is not a biography. Indeed, while I trace the representations of his on and offscreen life, my intention is not to further objectify Sabu’s body or his Otherness. Instead, I use Sabu’s performances of Indian-ness and the Orient during the late 1930s and the early 1940s to examine representations of Indian masculinity in the British and American popular imaginaries. It must be made clear that the interiority of Sabu’s life and personhood is ultimately unknowable, and although I do refer to the manner in which his body performs Orientalist discourses, colonial narratives and American citizenship, the crux of my discussion engages and highlights the representational modes through which his performances were constituted by producers and the media. Moreover, I also address happenings in his offscreen life to unpack his performances of American-ness as one of less than 2400 Indian immigrants living in the US at the time of his 1940 arrival (Visweswaran 15). Throughout this work I locate his colonized, Orientalized and Americanized representations as a citational terrain to map, chart, and measure the impact of ethnology, US legislation policy and British colonial discourse on emergent performances of Indianness on each side of the Atlantic. What I demonstrate is that the circulation of a culturally

3

Marilyn “Honey” Sabu, personal interview, 8 Dec. 2002

ambivalent and racially liminal set of subcontinental “Oriental” personae on the Indian male body

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mirrors the national ambiguity of South Asians as potentially assimilable citizens during a rigid period of anti-Asian US immigration policies. A major component of my argument is that South Asian American identity cannot be theorized as a binary product resulting from the host country, America, and the home nation, India. Rather, central to understanding South Asian diasporic formations in the United States is an historical positioning of their migration at the axes of British colonialism, Indian nationalism and American citizenship. Performance Studies is a unique field from which to explore these concerns of identity, migration and the signifying body. As Performance Studies scholar Shannon Jackson points out, the etymological root of performance means to “bring into being” or “to furnish” (8). The “analysis” of performance, she continues, “incorporates critical theories of social interaction, of the relationship between space and subjectivity, of human behavior as signifying practices, and of the material and embodied basis of identity formation” (8). The act of “discovering” Sabu, of “bringing him into being” in the summer of 1935, was a performance in and of itself. The filmmakers were not merely searching for a Kiplingesque “jungle boy” while the international press and its spectators anticipated his “discovery.” Robert Flaherty and his team also rehearsed, staged and performed an ethnographic hunt/expedition/safari across the wild jungles and opulent kingdoms of India to “furnish” authentic representations of Indian-ness to the West. After all, the object of their quest was a “real” Elephant Boy inspired by Kipling’s imperial imagination. If as Judith Butler suggests, performativity is a “citational practice” that exposes the genealogy of constituting the gendered subject (1993; 2) -- which in this particular study closely engages racial, ethnic and national formations as well -- then Sabu’s embodiments of Empire and the Orient betray an inheritance of colonial, imperial and ethnological discourses that shape local and global constructions of Indian masculinity. Because identity is historically formed and one’s location

of “telling” is always variable, the discursive histories embedded into his performances destabilize

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any fixity or authenticity ascribed to his personae (Lowe 70-74). Approaching Sabu’s performances as a citational terrain -- a corporeal topography that charts lines of descent, cultural irruptions and signs of transnationalism – unmasks the colonial and orientalist discourses that frame the diasporic subject formation he fashions on and off screen. How we define cultural identity not only relies on the space and time of narrating the historical moment, but also depends on how we approach the performance of identity as a series of embodied acts framed by multiple histories and locations. Utilizing a performance lens that privileges the body purposefully bridges Performance Studies with other disciplines that acknowledge the body as a site of knowledge. Drawing from the fields of South Asian, Asian American, Gender, Film, and Cultural Studies, I employ historical political economy, postcolonial criticism, diaspora theory and historiography to augment my understanding of Sabu’s performances in India, Britain and America. To address lines of inquiry that engage his filmic popularity, the politics of his migration, the Orientalism that framed him, America’s relationship with India, and the contours of his queer depictions, I necessarily locate Sabu’s performances at the intersections of the above fields to theorize the discourses that constitute his iconicity. Some central questions that guide this dissertation are what can Sabu’s performances in popular culture tell us about the way Indians were understood in the popular imaginary when a dearth of Indians lived in the United States? Also, if spectators possess a “limited” number of ways to respond to cultural texts, as John Fiske in Understanding Popular Culture attests, what meanings did Sabu’s producers reinforce? What symbols of queerness, alterity, or patriotism did audiences reject or accept? How did the few South Asians living in the United States during the 1930s and 40s respond to his Orientalist caricatures when arguably, the majority of Indians in America sympathized with the anti-colonial resistance of the “Quit India” movement?

22 To be clear, when switching between naming Sabu’s identity as “South Asian” or “Indian,” my intention is not to homogenize the subcontinent’s diversity under the term South Asian or conflate South Asia with India. I am well aware of India’s hegemonic influence over the region and the economic, cultural, and geopolitical dominance that India possesses in relation to its neighboring nations. Since its “initial articulation” in 1968, the geography of South Asia has come to include the nations of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives (Shankar and Shrikanth 15). Current debates on “South Asia” as a category address the solidarity of this regional grouping, particularly in light of divisive nationalisms that some members of the South Asian diaspora carry to the host country. These divisions include, but are not limited to, the political violence in Kashmir, the Indian government’s management of the insurgency in northern Sri Lanka and the negotiation of communal tensions across India’s sub-regions between Muslims, Hindus and Christians. Other scholars criticize how “South Asian” suppresses the diversity that is intrinsic to the region (Bahri 25-48; Shankar 49-66; Sheth 169-98). Further, in view of the multiple histories, languages and cultures encompassed by “South Asian,” the friction between generalizing one’s identity as South Asian versus a more specific nationality such as Goan, Bangladeshi or Maharashtran always bears a risk. However, when Sabu arrived in the United States, India’s partition from Pakistan had not yet occurred, albeit negotiations of its creation between the Indian National Congress and the All India Muslim League began as early as 1930 (Wolpert 316-317). Britain still ruled over India; many of the aforementioned nationstates had not yet formed; and though Sabu was Indian, he was a citizen of nowhere. As his army records show before he attained citizenship in 1944, his passport discerned him as a “British subject of Indian origins.”4 Thus, when I use the term Indian to describe Sabu’s nationality, I use it within a

4

Sabu Army Records, World War II File, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK.

context of the formation of the Indian nation-state and its pre-partioned geography before India’s

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1947 independence. After 1947, I address Sabu as South Asian. Moreover, because Sabu’s earlier performances (Elephant Boy (1938); The Drum (1938); The Jungle Books (1942)) were guided by imperial ideologies that used British colonial backdrops as their settings, locating Sabu as Indian emphasizes that Indians were “a primary racial other in a colonial system deeply fixated on India” (Shukla 35). Thus, the racialization of Indians partly derived from colonial subject formations amidst regional, linguistic and religious structures. As I argue throughout this project, the actor’s performances of Indian-ness cite literary and visual representations from the British colonial archive, and in turn, rely on imperial references to define Indian identity in the US popular imaginary when a present absence of Indians was scattered across the nation. Next, locating Sabu as South Asian highlights the ambiguity associated with the processes of racializing South Asians in the US which is discussed at length in chapter three. As John Eperjesi posits in relation to the transient constructions of Asia in the United States’ imaginary, “a powerfully ambiguous word is much more interesting and effective than a precise one” (5). Moreover, positioning him as South Asian also accommodates his Islamic roots, and though unproven, possible political solidarities with the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh, predominantly Muslim nations. Finally, identifying Sabu as an Asian installs him as an historical figure in Asian American discourse and Asian American cinema, wherein previously, his critical presence in scholarship has not been asserted alongside major Asian American stars including Sessue Hayakawa (1889-1973), Ann May Wong (1905-1961) and Philip Ahn (1911-1978). Using the term South Asian to describe Sabu’s ethnicity places him in conversation with other Asian Americans in mid-twentieth century

cinema and engages the impact of anti-Asian immigration policies on the projection and

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performance of South Asian identity on the silver screen. While film scholarship generally overlooks a discussion of Sabu’s film roles in critical texts on Orientalism and film including Visions of the East, Unthinking Eurocentrism and Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness, it was the industry’s celebrity “machine” that recognized Sabu and other Asian American “Orientals” as “stars” with lasting embossments on Hollywood Boulevard’s celebrated “walk of fame.” In recent years, insightful scholarly works have explored the aforementioned East Asian actors in relation to Hollywood’s construction of Asian-ness that reflect the political climate brought forth by American diplomatic policies in the wake of Pearl Harbor, WWII, the Korean War and the threat of “Yellow Peril” (Chung; Feng; Miyao). As these scholars make clear, US economic interests in China, Japan, Korea and the territorialization of the Philippines were a direct response to America’s urgent demand for competition in foreign markets as the empires of France and Britain tightened their hold on their colonies leading up to WWII (Eperjesi; Palumbo-Liu). The legacies of Manifest Destiny that prompted the United States to move westward beyond California’s borders and towards the Pacific Rim resulted in the annexation of Hawaii and the colonization of the Philippines. America’s expansion towards the East and the migration of Asian workers to the West are duly linked, as David Palumbo-Liu argues, to America’s modernity. The country’s twentieth-century wars with Asia and these conflicts’ effects on migration and domestic policy formulated America’s definition of itself as a modern state. Legislation excluding those deemed inassimilable at varying times was contingent on capitalist and political interests in the Pacific. While the Philippines functioned as a US protectorate and military and economic base for US surveillance over the Pacific, Filipinos were admitted across American borders. However, once the US “granted” the Philippines independence in 1932, the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 restricted the admission of Filipinos

across US borders to fifty persons per year. This 1934 law consolidated anti-Asian sentiment,

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barring Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Filipino immigration, marking a significant attempt to uniformly bar Asian immigration (Palumbo-Liu 33). While America’s and other European empires’ interest in East Asia was motivated by economic interest, US trade pursuits with India were trumped by Britain’s rule and commercial control over its prized colony. The primary distinction between the British and American empires is that the Crown focused on colonizing India, the Middle East, the West Indies and Africa while the United States was focused on China, Japan and Korea. England’s vested interest in the subcontinent manifested as a form of “direct colonialism” from the beginning of the nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth centuries (Eperjesi 19). As a nascent nation-state in the early nineteenth century, the United States in contrast was ill-equipped to compete with Western European empires and thus ill-positioned to establish colonies in continental Asia. Hence, for many Americans during the Victorian era and into the twentieth century, India came to be understood through Britain’s exports of commercial goods from India, literatures gleaned from its relationship with the Orient and colonial knowledge published in Christian missionaries’ travelogues. Early twentieth century Orientalist dance by Ruth St. Denis, Evelyn and Beatrice Kraft, and La Meri also informed perceptions of India, but their mystical, spiritualist and ethnological visions were primarily choreographed across their own white American female bodies amid an absence of Indian women living in the US (Martin; Srinivasan 2003). As I argue throughout this project, with the absence of visible Indian bodies and a presence of transcendentalist and British colonial views of India through the first half of the twentieth century, for many Americans, the “idea” of India was disparate from the material realities of India’s quest for nationalist identity and positioned as contradictory fragments of fantasy and coloniality or opulence and primitivity within the popular and literary imaginary.

The American popular literary imaginary, Malini Johar Schueller writes, was integral to the

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formulation of white imperial citizenship during the nineteenth century in the United States. Through the writings of the transcendentalists, Thoreau and Emerson, and the poetry of Whitman, Indian bodies may not have been corporeally visible, yet the presence of a “raced” Orientalized body was always extant. And though the historical materiality of India posed a problem for many writers, as Schueller suggest, the way that many writers solved this problem was by suspending India and its people in antediluvian time. Schueller writes, “The embodiment of the [American] nation as strong and unified, heading the westerly movement of civilization away from India, demanded therefore that India be located in the absolute past” (148). A key quality of Sabu’s performances was a “denial of coevalness” that visualized him as a “temporally distant” object of a previous civilization (Fabian 34). His most celebrated depictions of the Orient located him either in a space of colonial longevity that denied the contemporaneous anti-colonial realities of India. Or, his British producers suspended him in Orientalist fantasies that were millennia old. These European fantasies about the East, however, are not just trivial fictions about the Orient, as Edward Said suggests (Orientalism 6). Rather, they derive from a “system of knowledge about the Orient” that reveals more about the Western epistemological definitions of a postEnlightenment Self than any “truth” or “authenticity” regarding the Orient. In Said’s pioneering work, which is integral to my readings of Sabu’s filmic performances, the postcolonial theorist defines “Orientalism” as “the whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved in) any occasion when that peculiar entity the Orient is in question” (Orientalism 3). Yet, instead of analyzing Sabu’s performances as mere Orientalist indications of a Western construction of Self through a conception of the East, I contend that Sabu rather performs both the East and the West. His performances of imagined Oriental geographies move “betwixt and

between” mutually constitutive territories, signifying a cultural hybridity that transgresses the

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dualistic framework of Said’s postcolonial concept. Since Orientalism’s 1978 publication, several critics have questioned the limits of the Manichean dichotomy that establishes the Western self and the Eastern other as fixed entities and have warned of the potential essentialisms that may result from such a binary (Aijaz; Bhabha; Clifford; Spivak, “Subaltern”; Young). Certainly, the work achieved in more recent epistemological debates of the Self in postcolonial discourse reveals the mobility and shifting contingencies of the Self’s construction. Orientalism’s harshest critics claim Said’s discussion falls short of recognizing subaltern agency, anti-colonial strategies, and historiographical projects that not only address the elision of native histories but also expose “native” control of their own representations. Said addresses these critiques in subsequent texts, namely Culture and Imperialism, through a strategy of contrapuntal reading which allows “a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts” (51). This contrapuntal method – a term derived from the musical theory of counterpoint in which strongly differentiated melodies are juxtaposed to each other -acknowledges the realm of disparate voices, histories and discourses present in the reading of a text while accommodating subaltern resistance against hegemonic forces.5 My reading of Sabu’s body as

In his reading of Kipling’s Kim (1905), Said highlights India’s First War of Independence of 1857, a conflict that the British Government adversely discerned as the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, as a crucial historical event that imbued the Nobel Laureate’s fiction and poetry with its imperialist rhetoric. Satellites across colonial Indian organized a revolt against the British government and its military officers after rumors spread that the East India company lined its bullet casings with the lard of cows and pigs. This insensitivity to religious code deeply offended Hindus and Muslims who comprised the majority of the infantry and were trained to use their mouths to separate the casings from bullets when loading their guns. Following this epic revolt, the British government tightened its rule on their “jewel of the crown” by restricting the powers of the princely states, increasing surveillance of insurgent activity and heavily taxing regional consumption of local goods. Said argues that while native anti-colonial resistance is left unmentioned in a text like Kim, it is important to read colonial texts in light of processes of decolonization, which the 1857 revolt instigated. Said writes, “This doesn’t take any aesthetic force away from them or is not meant to treat them lightly as 5

an amalgam of colonial masculinities, imperial discourses and ethnological praxis engages Said’s

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contrapuntal approach in combination with Bhabha’s theory of hybridity and Butler’s concept of performativity to accommodate the complexities that Sabu represents as an Oriental persona, a hybrid transnational subject and a gendered entity presupposed by colonial discourse. Said argues that Orientalist texts progressively attained legitimacy through “restorative citations of antecedent authority.” From as early as 1709, when the Arabist Antoine Galland translated (and arguably fabricated) A Thousand and One Nights from Persian to French, writers of “Arabian Nights” tales rewrote and pieced together previous texts just as a “restorer of old sketches might put a series of them together for the cumulative picture they represent” (Orientalism 176-177). Said continues, “In the system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient, or some previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these” (Orientalism 177). In Sabu’s Oriental portrayals, a panoply of roles which made him a star, the actor embodied these layers of topos, references and citations, and arguably emerged as a metonym for not only India, but for the East as well. Reading Sabu’s body as a layering of texts, or a palimpsest, engages what Gayatri Spivak defines as the “palimpsestic narrative of imperialism,” which encompasses a colonial archive of documents, statements, and events (“Subaltern” 281). While there can never be an “origin” to the archive per se, only shifting discursive domains that “specify” these “discourses in their own duration” (Foucault 129), a genealogical attempt to unpack the derivations of Sabu’s constructions leads to an understanding of how Indian-ness was inflected by British colonial formations and in imperialist propaganda. It’s a much graver mistake to read them stripped of their affiliations with the facts of power which informed and enabled them” (Said 1994, 195). In the same vein, while Sabu’s films are charged with camp, fantasy and adventure, the overt dramatization of racial, gendered and colonial hierarchies must be read with an awareness of the anti-colonial nationalism and anti-Asian immigration policies that facilitated their production.

turn, shaped Indian subjectivity during a period of Asian exclusion in the US. If there was such a

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dearth of Indians living in the country at the time, what literatures and cultural meanings did Americans use to register an idea of India in the popular imaginary? How were Sabu’s boyish personae read alongside Mahatma Gandhi, the “little brown man,” whose “passive” masculinity emboldened him as India’s “Father of the Nation?” Further, if Chinese, Japanese and Korean populations were linked to an encroaching “Yellow Peril” that “threatened” the homogeneity of the United States population, did the lack of threat posed by India’s absent presence in the United States affect the reception of Sabu as an affable, charming and identifiable character? Lastly, if Sabu’s life derived from a diasporic trajectory from South India to London and from Europe to New York, how can we begin to understand Indian diasporic subject formation at the intersections of three continents connected by an ocean? To theorize Sabu’s personae at the convergence of British, Indian and American geographies, I employ Gayatri Gopinath’s framework of the “Brown Atlantic,” an expansion of Paul Gilroy’s influential theory of the “Black Atlantic” (70). As a transnational space of belonging, cultural production and exchange for South Asians navigating their way through the diaspora across several continents, the “Brown Atlantic” serves as a cultural “contact zone” wherein cultures interact, collide and negotiate unequal levels of domination and subjection experienced in the aftermaths of colonialism, slavery and neocolonialism under which some groups and individuals benefit and others endure. (Pratt 4). As Gilroy argues in his seminal text, the chronotope of the ship symbolizes the mobility of people across space and time by means of “mobile elements that stood for shifting spaces in between the fixed places they are connected” (64). Gilroy’s allegory of the ship invokes visions and historical memories of the Middle Passage in which the discontents of modernity (genocide, slavery, colonialist expansion) instigated the migration of colonized, enslaved and indentured people across the world. The shared and disparate experiences of laborers, slaves

and indentures moving across the sea, Gilroy contends, also fomented political and aesthetic

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movements, nationalisms, emancipations and anti-colonial struggles that bridged individuals’ diasporic identities to points of national (and imagined) origins. Certainly, the transcultural spaces of the “Black” and “Brown” Atlantics differ based on the historical-specificities of migrant routes, the politics of exchange between the metropoles, colonies and New Worlds, and the nationalism(s) that linked and differentiated race and ethnicity across African and subcontinental regions. What these “Atlantics” share, however, is the potential for understanding identity relationally and variably, beyond a limited dialectic between Self and Other, and towards a theory of identity that both transcends and encompasses the boundaries of geography and nation while acknowledging the global trade of commodities that propelled these brown and black migrants across the sea. Reading Sabu’s representations across histories and geographies engages the colonial discourse from which his Oriental performances emerge, and also points to how the mutually constituted categories of race, gender, caste and nation shift in relation to the historical moment of crossing India’s, Britain’s and America’s borders. When watching Sabu perform an Oriental juggler in Arabian Nights (1942) or a sycophantic prince of the Khyber Pass in The Drum (1938), it becomes exceedingly clear that his performances of masculinity, coloniality and Indian-ness stem from intercultural transactions between America, Great Britain, India and a generalized Orient. Recent scholarship on South Asian American subjectivity theorizes these types of “transactions” by South Asian cultural producers as productive sites through which to negotiate diverse identifications to the homeland that exist across multiple spaces and times (Desai; Gopinath). As I will show throughout this project, Sabu’s cultural negotiations operate across a complex of overlapping subject formations. Victor Turner’s theory of liminality is particularly apt here for mapping the actor’s movements “betwixt and between” the obliques of masculinity/femininity,

boy/man, human/animal, agent/object, American/British, Indian/South Asian and so forth.

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Kipling’s imperial boys – after whom the actor’s filmic personae were initially modeled for The Elephant Boy -- are symbolic creatures of the limen. Including Toomai, Kim and Mowgli, Kipling’s boys, Don Randall asserts, are figures set upon the thresholds that stand between opposing identities and worlds; these thresholds – all of them pertinent to the ideological mapping of empire -- are presumed to mark the distinction between animal and human, early childhood and full adulthood, between nature and culture, barbarity and civilization, between white and dark, East and West, colonizer and colonized [. . .] A figure positioned amid various cultural worlds and embodying a multivalent liminality, the hybrid adolescent acts as a ‘go-between’, as a mediator negotiating and ultimately inscribing the terms of ideologically pertinent distinctions. (17) As a “go-between” moving across “opposing identities and worlds,” and at the height of celebrity throughout his adolescence, Sabu embodied various cultural milieus that “initiated” his entry into Hollywood cosmopolitanism. Indeed, the publicity that framed Sabu as a “real” elephant boy and ward of an Indian maharaja, for instance, imbued his roles with an authenticity that troubled the distinction between his off and onscreen personae. The boy’s departure from the Maharaja of Mysore’s kingdom, his “renaming” from Selar Sheikh to Sabu, and his journey by sea to Britain and to the US characterizes Turner’s description of a passenger’s initial detachment from an individual, group or nation during the first ritual stage of “separation” (94). Extending Turner’s seminal elaboration of Arthur Van Gennep’s rites de passage, the “initiate as migrant” elegantly marks Sabu’s own passage through the diaspora. The actor’s national, social and cultural transformation from a mahout of the jungles to a Hollywood icon demonstrates how his journey across the Atlantic was not merely geographic, but was also

32 symbolically connected to a matrix of intercultural, colonial and geopolitical discourses that structure the subject formations of Indians migrating and settling across the world. Developing his ritual theory from fieldwork conducted with Zambia’s Ndembu people, Turner’s second stage, called “transition,” comprises the “margin,” “limen” or “intervening liminal period” wherein the initiate “is no longer classified and not yet classified” (94-96). Turner clarifies his theory of liminality as “intercultural” in scope, emerging through a “structure of positions” that are societally and culturally recognized (96). When Sabu arrived in America via England, not only was Sabu’s racial classification dubious as outlined above, he was also a citizen of nowhere. A British subject of Indian origins, his ambiguous nationality deprived him of citizenship, and thus the right to vote, in England, India and the US. This offscreen racial and national ambivalence, I argue, was re-imagined, reworked and inscribed onto his portrayals of Indian masculinity onscreen. His citizenship was “neither here nor there [. . .] betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremony” (Turner 95). Following Turner’s definition of liminality, Sabu’s citizenship, race and nationality slipped through “a network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space” (95). This process of “naturalization,” as Joan Jensen points out, possesses a “very ritualistic quality” through a symbolic transformation from alien to citizen status (246). Although the government ultimately naturalized Sabu, his liminality endured even after becoming a citizen. Classified racially as a “Hindoo” while transitioning from Islam to Christianity, the ambiguity of his racial/ethnic identity would only be resolved in 1980, seventeen years after his death when the US census created the category of Asian Indian. Moreover, although his off screen life encompassed personae ranging from war hero to Hollywood star and from entrepreneur to horse rancher, his onscreen characters and circus appearances relied on racialized portrayals of Oriental others. Shaped by British, American and Indian national/colonial histories and

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Fig. 3. Sabu on a publicity stamp issued by the United States Army, 1943. Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK.

sociocultural formations, his “in-between-ness” offers dynamic strategies to destabilize the systems and structures of power he inhabited and through which he was perceived. Arguably, Sabu’s class mobility and his willingness to fight in WWII, played a larger role than race in“Americanizing” him from a foreigner to a domestic national. Aihwa Ong theorizes that new immigrants often experience either a “whitening” or “blackening” effect depending on their class status, thereby replacing race with more legible socioeconomic categories (77-86). Because of his class ascension, Sabu could afford the consumption of an upper class American lifestyle with his large disposable studio income. His progression towards citizenship, I propose, reflects aspects of Turner’s interpretation of Gennep’s third ritual stage of reincorporation, albeit Sabu never fully achieves its completion. Also called “reaggregation,” this stage involves a process of integrating the initiate back into a fixed and stable condition where s/he “is expected to behave in accordance with certain customary norms and ethical standards” (94). In light of recent theorizations on diasporic subject formation, attempts to fix or stabilize one’s process of assimilation are at odds with the

34 ongoing process of mediating cultural and ethnic practices with identity (Braziel and Mannur; Hall; Lowe; Radhakrishnan). Indians’ gestures to assimilate and conform to mainstream America are in constant negotiation with “cultivating Indian-ness,” which “takes on a reactive, strategic character once it is pried loose from its nativity” (Radhakrishnan 123-124). In the process of cultivating one’s own Indian-ness” a cultivation of “American-ness” occurs as well, which perhaps structured Sabu’s decision to join the army and self-reflexively perform his loyalty to the United States. In the months leading to Sabu’s 1944 naturalization, the US government capitalized on the actor’s celebrity and dispatched him to thirty cities across the US and Mexico to sell war bonds for the Treasury Department (Leibfred, “Sabu” 453). The United States Army even issued a publicity stamp with Sabu dressed in a military uniform as part of the Army’s wartime campaign (see fig. 3). In an interview about his military service, Marilyn Sabu praised her husband for selling the most amount of bonds while he was in the Special Services, but his awards didn’t satisfy him. While he was here, he became such a strong American. America was his country and he wanted to fight for it. He [got] special permission to go into the fighting services [. . .] and they put him in the air force. He started as a private and worked his way up to Staff Sergeant. He went over the South Pacific as a ball gunner and he won several medals. He won the Distinguished Flying Cross, the air medal with the three leaf clusters, and a unit Presidential Citation. He came home a hero.6 It may appear that Sabu’s patriotism typifies a narrative of Asian American assimilation in which a “loss of the ‘original’ culture [is exchanged] for the new ‘American’ culture” (Lowe 62). However, I read Sabu’s newfound nationalism as part of a complex “history of survival” for Asian Marilyn “Honey” Sabu, interview with producers for Sabu, The Elephant Boy (1993), Mar 1992, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK. 6

35 Americans that Lisa Lowe contends is less about an uncritical adoption of American custom than a negotiation of unequal power relations and the effects of hegemony (67). Thus, by Turner’s theory, though Sabu might “behave in accordance” with established social codes by joining the army, naturalizing and publicizing the ethnic diversity of US nationals, I aim to show that his performance of Asian American-ness (decades before the category even came into vogue) grew from the disavowal/desire for Oriental exoticism and the management of race and masculinity at the onset of WWII when America fought fascism abroad yet denied racial integration among its own people. When asked whether he was either Indian or American in a Hollywood press conference in 1944, just days after returning to the United States from WWII, Sabu’s reply was, “I’m from India, but I’m American, of course. It sure is good to be home.”7 The actor’s navigation of multiple nationalities and subject positions, I argue, framed his ability to craft personae that were both Indian/Oriental and American/Occidental. Though Sabu was naturalized in 1944 only after he pledged to join the army, what impelled him to identify so strongly as an American? How did he perform a sense of Indian-ness in his offscreen life? With which cultural practices did Sabu fashion an Indian American identity? Why did US audiences identify with him while Indian audiences disengaged from his depictions during World War II? And finally, what do Sabu’s performances of Kipling’s tales and Arabian Nights’ lore reveal about mid-twentieth century forms of American Orientalism? *

*

*

Through an exploration of Sabu’s off and onscreen liminal personae, my dissertation demonstrates the utility of performance methodologies and theories to expose how the transnational trade of commodities is inscribed, reiterated and narrativized not only on the movie screen but also

7

Sabu: The Elephant Boy, dir. Martin G. Stockham, documentary film, VHS, Gemini Pictures, 1993.

36 on the body. Indeed, this historical process of exchange hardly ends with spices, teas, silks, literature and software; it is reified through the cultural production of representation and signifies the assembly of power, subjectivity and signification. Using a critical performance lens, I read these cultural significations and processes of exchange by locating Sabu’s body as a performative site of discourse. Following from E. Patrick Johnson’s critical study on performances of black authenticity, I engage performance studies as an “interdisciplinary research practice,” and thus, utilize a number of films, archival sites, photographs, personal interviews, press reviews, production notes, letters, imperial literatures and web sites to engage how Sabu performs Indian-ness at the axes of British colonial discourse, popular culture, ethnographic filmmaking and American citizenship (7). Coupled with historiography and performance analysis, I extend Janet Staiger’s theoretical approach of drawing on the history of the interactions between “real readers and texts, and actual spectators and films” (23). Because many of Sabu’s films “seemingly” support dominant imperial ideology, I offer resistant, “contrapuntal” readings that employ the analytical approaches of key theorists including Homi Bhabha, Josephine Lee, Susan Manning, Jose Muñoz, Edward Said and Marta Savigliano. My research sites include Gemini Pictures, a production house owned by film scholar, director and producer, Martin Stockham of Teddington, London, UK. Based on the documentary, Sabu the Elephant Boy, he made for the UK’s Channel 4, and the books he has written on Alexander Korda’s films, Stockham owns a plethora of interviews, World War II records, photographs, news clippings and film footage on Sabu that has been integral to my understanding of Sabu’s off screen life, the marketing of his personae in Britain and Hollywood and his popularity around the world. While in London, I also visited the Victoria and Albert Theatre Museum Archives in Olympia to analyze the British theatrical legacies of Sabu’s representations of Indian-ness. I examined performances of colonial babus and imperial princes at the Savoy Theatre and on Drury Lane to

measure how iterations of these late Victorian Orientalist caricatures reflect the coloniality that

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frames Sabu’s popular onscreen characters in the US. In New York, I studied hundreds of documents on the 1936 production of The Elephant Boy at the Robert J. Flaherty Papers at Columbia University’s Special Collections in Butler Hall. The correspondence, travelogues, diaries, scripts, press reviews and production notes on this historic film were imperative to the writing of this dissertation, particularly to the second chapter. This chapter, entitled Sabu the Elephant Boy: The Quest for Authenticity and the “Discovery” of a Star, historicizes the “discovery” of the eleven-year-old boy in the Maharaja of Mysore’s elephant stables in 1935. Possessed with a child’s charisma, intelligence and a talent for animals, Sabu ultimately won the part after Robert Flaherty and his expedition hunted India for the most “authentic” boy they could find over several months. Korda, consequently, attained and constructed a Kiplingesque persona he knew could sell. Ultimately, Flaherty and Korda conceived a cosmopolitan figure whose modernity contrasted with the primitivism narrativized in The Elephant Boy’s role. This 1935 moment not only cites a legacy of ethnological viewing practices that converge at the axes of imperialism, ethnology and popular culture. The launch of Sabu into the Anglo/American popular imaginary also begins to expose the liminal significations ascribed onto Sabu’s body that render him as an intermediary of multiple genders, nationalities, ethnicities and castes. My dissertation’s third chapter, Who Gets to Be a Citizen? The Racial Ambivalence of Indians in America, highlights Sabu’s circulation in an economy of Asian masculinities in the United States. The primary intervention this chapter makes is an engagement of the discursive gap in South Asian American history that anti-Asian US legislative policies effectively enabled. The 1888 Chinese exclusions laws were extended to all Asians with the passage of the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone, which prevented Asian migration to the US, excepting those from the US protectorates of Guam and the

Philippines. Not until 1943 and 1946 would the Luce-Celler repeals of the “barred” legislation

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occur. “Barring” this constellation of geographies from US borders resulted in the category of “Asian,” giving rise to definitions of Asian-ness and the individual Asian American ethnicities contained within the term (Palumbo-Liu 33). Although the 1917 legislation prevented Asians from migrating to the country, the law did not deny citizenship to Asians; it was the courts that decided the terms of naturalization. In 1923, a year before Sabu was born, The United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind ruled that although Indians were Caucasian by scientific standards, the law of the “common man” deemed them non-white and thus ineligible for citizenship. Soon after this historic ruling, almost 5600 Indians returned to India through 1946 (Visweswaran 15). The effect of this exclusion in South Asian American discourse is a periodization of two “foundational” moments in South Asian immigrant history that are called the “old” and “new” diasporas (Gopinath; Mishra; Visweswaran). The “old” illustrates the early nineteenth century migration of mostly Punjabi Sikh men to the West coast where they worked as agriculturalists, lumbermen and railroaders. The “newer” diaspora describes a wave of immigrants who came to the US after the landmark 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act opened its borders to “white-collar” workers across Asia in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. I argue that these periodizations of the “old” and “new” do not address the subject formations of those Indians, including Sabu, who lived in the United States between these established migrant histories. The fourth chapter, Sabu as Babu and Boys in the Jungle: Cosmopolitanism and Strategizing the Stereotype, focuses on Sabu’s performances of Jungle Boys and Babus in Alexander Korda’s films, The Jungle Book and Drums. One of the primary aims of this chapter is to connect the legacies of colonial discourse, the “excess” of the Orient and imperial literatures to Sabu’s performances of Indian/Oriental masculinity in Hollywood and Euro/American cinema. Aiming to complicate the Orientalist stereotypes perpetuated by his performances, I offer resistant readings to

39 demonstrate how the liminality of his racial, gendered and national locations offers multiple modes for underrepresented subjects to write themselves into the texts he enacts. In the fifth chapter, Sabu as Abu in the Thief of Bagdad: Unveiling the Excess and the Camp Oriental, I position the actor as a camp oriental to emphasize his status as a camp icon and to explore the relationship between the excess of camp and the excess of the Orient. Here, I employ Susan Manning’s theory of “cross-viewing” and José Muñoz’s approach of “disidentification” in order to rewrite the script of Oriental objectification by exposing the cultural logic of the Universal white subject for whom Sabu’s Orientalist films were ostensibly made. Camp as a strategy, derived from Sabu’s performances of queer orientals, betrays the “anxious repetition” required to perform Eastern stereotypes, and thus brings the viewer to experience the transparency of the Orient’s façade which the West often shapes and subjugates across bodies, geographies and relationships for the film-viewing world (Bhabha). This final chapter continues the arguments made in the previous sections that highlight the construction of Sabu’s cosmopolitanism, the ambivalent perception of Indian men’s racial and ethnic identities in the United States and the conditions of his liminal personae that bring spectators to view and read him from a multitude of subjectivities. Following this chapter is a brief conclusion that discusses the posthumous iterations of Sabu’s personae in popular culture since 1963. The spectrum of Oriental and colonial archetypes that Sabu embodied on and off screen -before, during and after de-colonization -- offers a critical body of work for reading South Asian diasporic subject formation, colonial masculinity and the relationship between ethnology and cinema in mid-twentieth century Anglo/American popular culture. Sabu’s films transported his audiences to bustling kasbahs, feral jungles, and sultans’ palaces without having to leave their cinema seats or interact with the subjects on screen. Sabu’s “palette” of racialized performances extends what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett terms a “gallery of nations” in which exhibitions of ethnographic

specimens and their environs immerse the viewer in a touristic experience of distant worlds and

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people (38). While the ethnic and gendered stereotyping of his characters is overtly Orientalist and at times questionable, my overall concern does not extend a moral critique of these depictions. Rather, I contend his performances offer an analytic framework to historicize the relationship between performances of American citizenship, US orientalism and popular modes of ethnological exhibitionism. Examining how he performs colonial, imperial and Oriental identities, I ask, which modes of representation from exhibitions, Orientalist theatre, and early ethnographic film inscribe Sabu’s embodiments of primitivism, citizenship, and effeminate masculinity? How is the visual consumption of Sabu’s representations complicated by anti-Asian immigration policies in the United States in the decade before India’s independence? Finally, how does the sustained liminality of his personae destabilize the Orientalist narratives that his depictions deliver?

CHAPTER TWO Sabu the Elephant Boy: The Quest for Authenticity and the “Discovery” of a Star

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In 1943, after Sabu enlisted in the US Army Air Corps, newspaper headlines across the United States read, “Elephants Taboo for Sabu, Now in Army Air Forces,” “Sabu Piloting Car Instead of Elephants,” and “From ‘Elephant Boy’ to B-24, ‘Belly Gunner’ for Sabu.”8 Whether described as “piloting pachyderms,” “grooming airplanes,” or entering a “mechanized age where yesterdays’ elephant boy today is driving a station wagon,” the mention of elephants was never far removed from Sabu’s name. The durability of this “bestial” hybrid association, achieves a similar liminal effect as Tarzan of the Apes, for instance, or Amala and Kamala, the wolf-girls of India.9 The associations of elephants with the utterance of Sabu has such endurance that one writer in the 30 June 1993 edition of London’s Daily Mail wrote, “It is difficult even today, to see an elephant without Sabu’s name lurking somewhere in the back of one’s mind” (Paterson 39). Although Sabu had entered the “mechanized age,” eighteen years after his 1935 “discovery” as an elephant boy, his modernity could only thrive through a recuperation of his caste, class and ethnic origins. This recuperation of authenticity, I argue, was a consequence of how his stardom was discovered,

8

Sabu Press File, World War II, 1943-1944, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK.

Amala and Kamala are two of the most famous cases of “savage children” found in the Indian jungles with habits and mannerisms that indicated they were nurtured by wolves in the wild. Found in 1921 in Midnapore, eighty miles outside of Calcutta, the girls were described as half savage and half human, baring their teeth and nails to the crowds of spectators who visited them. Michael Newton suggests that when Kamala and Amala’s “discovery” hit the skeptical West, the reception of their appearance followed a sensationalized legacy of jungle children raised by animals across India (Newton 192). After all, Rudyard Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, wrote a book called Beast and Man in India (1891) about the phenomena of savage children in India’s wild two years before Kipling published his first Mowgli story, “In the Rukh” in 1893. Kipling’s Jungle Books (1895-1896), featuring his popular Mowgli stories, followed two years later. Although The Elephant Boy focuses on the story of Toomai, the son of an elephant trainer, it is striking that the mythology of Sabu, in which he was born and raised among elephants in India’s jungles, draws parallels between Kipling’s Mowgli, Kipling’s Toomai and the “commonplace” discovery of savage Indian children raised by animals in the wild. See Benzaquén, 2006; Newton, 2002. 9

rehearsed and performed. Indeed, his star persona arose from a manufactured complex of desires

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that projected ethnological, imperial, and national narratives across his eleven-year-old body during the making and marketing of The Elephant Boy (1936). As I will show, though his producers suspended the actor in a “classic” Orientalist dichotomy that positioned the East as Other to reinforce Western constructions of the Self, this complex set of competing desires, instead, resulted in the creation and circulation of a liminal, cosmopolitan, diasporic subject interpellated and iconized as Sabu.

Robert Flaherty, Alexander Korda and Rudyard Kipling: Boys and Their Beasts and the Conception of a Story Sabu was “discovered” in the Maharaja of Mysore’s elephant stables by The Elephant Boy’s cinematographer, Osmond Borradaile, in July of 1935.10 The British authorities had established a pattern of throwing Mahatma Gandhi and his “Quit India” followers in jail for their civil disobedience across the plains, deserts, coasts and mountains of India. Winston Churchill had rejected the Government of India Act of 1935, claiming that Britain’s new constitution for India gave Indians too much political power (Wolpert 316). The British Raj deployed its plan to arbitrarily carve the country into eleven territories by language and custom, a division that would inevitably lead to interethnic hostilities. While anti-colonial leaders of an inchoate nation rallied the Indian people in the hopes of building an independent, self-sufficient state based on modern, liberal and democratic principles, Robert Flaherty, the world-renowned American documentarian, hoped to make an idyllic, picturesque movie in India’s primeval jungles that captured the tender affection and

Letter to John B. Mayers, Director of Publicity, London Films from Robert Flaherty, 7 August 1935. Box 35, Flaherty Collection, Columbia University, New York. 10

undying love between a boy and his elephant. Any contemporary allusion to India’s nationalist

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struggle would elude Flaherty’s quest to show his “authentic” version of India to the world. In order to realize his quest, Flaherty needed a fitting Indian boy, a cooperative elephant and the ideal jungle locale to shoot his film. Flaherty’s concept would follow from his previous nonfiction approaches that aimed for a sense of truthfulness in his characters’ relationships with their extreme natural environments. Often called the “father of documentary and ethnographic cinema,” the filmmaker was known for his film expeditions to uncharted, virgin terra incognita where he set up his cinema “colonies,” employed native labor and documented the “universal” struggle between “man and nature” as seen in Nanook of the North (1922), Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age (1926) and Man of Aran (1934) (Rony 99; Shohat 41-43).11 Released just a year before The Elephant Boy’s production began, Man of Aran (1934) was set in a fishing village on the Republic of Ireland’s craggy western coast. With Mikeleen Dillane, a pre-pubescent boy as its lead, the film features an Irish family’s story of survival as they struggle against the region’s violent climates, fish in Aran’s turbulent sea and grow potatoes on its barren rocky cliffs. Continuing in a similar vein, Flaherty hoped to make another “coming of age” film about a little boy’s rite of passage into the inheritance of his family’s employ, but this time it would be set in an Indian jungle with an Indian boy and his elephant as its leads. Flaherty always cast his films with ideal ethnic “types” in mind, and it is a well-

Many film scholars credit Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) as the first ethnographic film in the history of cinema. However, it is Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age (1926), and not Nanook, Flaherty’s seminal 1922 film on the Inuit of the Hudson Bay, that inspired John Grierson, the leader of the documentary movement in Britain, to describe Flaherty as the “Father of Documentary” (Rotha 79). Franz Boas, the “Father of American Anthropology,” whose first monograph was titled The Central Eskimo (1888), applauded Flaherty’s 1922 achievement in the North Atlantic and encouraged collaborations between anthropologists and filmmakers to make films with scientific and commercial appeal. Two years following Moana, a romantic tale on ritual initiation, manhood and rites of passage among Samoans, Margaret Mead published her first full-length anthropological work, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). After all, Flaherty’s works of the “age d’or” of documentary filmmaking coincide with the period’s intellectual zeitgeist that fomented the relationship between aesthetics, anthropology and “primitive” cultures. See Barsam, 31; Rony, 99-126; Ruby, 69-89. 11

44 known fact that he used artifice to convey “truth” by inviting the subjects of his films to perform their “real” lives. His oft-cited quote, “One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit,” exemplifies the contradictions in his aesthetic quest for ethnic and cultural authenticity (qtd. in Rony 116). After promoting Man of Aran in the US, Flaherty flew to London to publicize his documentary in Britain where the cast of Aran awaited the premiere. While there, Flaherty conferred with Alexander Korda to discuss his next project shooting wild elephants in the Indian jungle. Korda, an accomplished director and producer of British and Hollywood cinema, surmised he could exploit Flaherty’s fame to make a movie with an adventurous, expeditionist sensibility. Hailed as the “Emperor of British Film,” Korda was a “star maker” who often congregated with a constellation of celebrities including Marlene Dietrich, Douglas Fairbanks, Charles Laughton, Merle Oberon,12 Rex Harrison, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh (Rotha 163). As a “maverick” of the film world and in need of a wealthy producer’s financing, Flaherty welcomed Korda’s invitation to join his glamorous circle (Kulik 187). Together, they decided to make a screen adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s eleventh story from the first Jungle Books (1894), a quixotic imperial tale called “Toomai of the Elephants.” The story would follow the adventures of a boy named Toomai and his pet elephant, Kala Nag, on a keddah, or elephant hunt with “real” mahouts, or elephant trainers, through an Indian jungle. Under the authority of Kipling’s character, Petersen Sahib, an experienced elephant hunter appointed by Her Majesty, the expedition would track the whereabouts of elephants herds in order

12 Alexander Korda was married to Merle Oberon when he produced The Elephant Boy. A movie starlet of the thirties and forties in England, Korda’s third wife was half-Indian and originally from Bombay, yet she publicly masked her heritage to play roles reserved for European ladies opposite such renowned stars as Laurence Olivier and Joseph Cotten. For details about Merle Oberon’s hidden Asian Indian ancestry, see http://www.abc.net.au/tv/documentaries/stories/s657300.htm.

45 to capture, domesticate and train them to build roads, bridges and buildings for the British colony. Toomai would ultimately lead the white men to their pachydermal prey. While on his expedition across India, Flaherty intended to stage a real keddah and “discover” his cast -- a “true to life” elephant boy as Toomai, a giant Indian elephant as Kala Naga and a rugged Anglo-Indian elephant hunter to play the Sahib.13 Korda committed his cinematographer, Osmond Borradaile, to film the expedition, the hunt and terrain with Flaherty. In Life through a Lens, Borradaile claims, “…the original story for Elephant Boy was Flaherty’s brainchild, [but] Korda soon insisted that Rudyard Kipling’s Toomai of the Elephants be incorporated into the script” (69). Conversely, David Cunynghame, a production manager at Korda’s London Films studios, contends that the idea for an adaptation of “Toomai and the Elephants” was in development since Korda first met Flaherty in 1929 in Los Angeles (Kulik 187-188). In Frances Hubbard Flaherty’s Elephant Dance, a children’s book about the Flahertys’ adventure across India during the making The Elephant Boy, Robert’s wife explains that the film’ concept began with the relationship between a boy and his pet, but under different ethnic conditions: We set about to write a story. The first one we wrote was of a Spanish boy and it was based on an actual happening – the pardoning by public acclaim of a famous Spanish fighting bull in the bull-ring. Our story, following the adventures of the two together, developed a devotion of the boy for the bull up to his pride and agony in the final life-or-death scene. But we were uncertain whether we could make him so convincing in his lovability as to be sufficiently appealing and sympathetic. With what animal […] would it be easier to do this? Why of course, with that great

The term, “Anglo-Indian” typically denotes a white, English speaking person living or settled in India during the colonial period. “Sahib,” derived from Urdu, is a polite title of address often reserved for a white man in the colonial imagination. Today, it assumes respect for any male elder. 13

lumbering, antediluvian pet […] the elephant! Our story shifted instantly to India.

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What more intriguing than the adventures of a little Indian boy on a big Indian elephant in the jungles of India with all the jungle creatures? (Elephant Dance 14) Their transfer of the narrative from a Spanish bullring to an Indian elephant’s jungle augments the prosaic western practice of associating the elephant with India’s princely dynasties, its tropical geographies, and the mystical aura of Ganesh, the revered Hindu elephant-headed god (Shukla 29; Prashad 28). In that revelatory moment of substituting the story’s bull with an elephant, Frances’ metonymic regime remained unchanged. Whether they chose to allegorize an Indian elephant in a turbulent anti-colonial Indian era, or a bull in Franco’s fascist Spain less than a year before the Spanish Civil War’s start, they would ultimately detach the beast and boy from their contemporaneous national climates to not only foster synecdochic associations to India and Spain, respectively, but to enhance the ethnographic objects’ authenticity and transcendence of modernity (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 20). Despite the narrative’s conceptual development, whether The Elephant Boy’s idea was born from Korda or Flaherty’s imagination is of less importance than how the film from its inception reflected the competing ethnographic and imperial desires of its makers. Flaherty envisioned a story about the elemental lives of tribal mahouts, or elephant trainers, in the jungle with their pachyderms. Korda wanted to create another imperial film representing “the strengths of the British nation combined with the advantages of transnationalism” that would, in turn, make the film marketable to multiple Western nations (Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire 55). While Flaherty’s intentions were more romantic, and aimed towards an intimate exploration of mahouts’ and elephants’ ‘“primitive” lives, Korda was more interested in extending Kipling’s ideologies to glorify the benevolence of the British Raj. Edward Said describes Kipling’s narrative world as a space where

47 natives accept colonial rule so long as it is the right kind. Historically, this has always been how European imperialism made itself palatable to itself, for what could be better for its self-image than native subjects who express assent to the outsider’s knowledge and power, implicitly accepting European judgment on the undeveloped, backward or degenerate nature of its own society? (Culture 180). In the above passage, Said refers to the ideologies of power embedded in the narrative structure of Kipling’s novel Kim (1901). Published six years earlier, Kipling’s “Toomai of the Elephants” heralds a similar imperial effect. The story’s omniscient narrator underscores the Indian boy’s deference to Petersen Sahib, a white colonial official whose knowledge of elephants inspires Toomai’s ambitions as a laborer in service of the Crown: He did not know much of white men, but Petersen Sahib was the greatest white man in the world to him. He was the head of all Keddah operations – the man who caught all the elephants for the Government of India and who knew more about the ways of elephants than any living man. (Kipling; Jungle Books 131) Any “living man” in Kipling’s imperial imagination included Toomai’s father and the surrounding community of mahouts who could only hope to attain the authority and knowledge of the white Sahib. Yet, as Said makes clear in Culture and Imperialism, imperial texts like Kipling’s, and I would add, screen adaptations derived from Kipling’s works, demand “contrapuntal” readings that, in this particular scenario, engage the contemporaneous metropolitan anxieties and the gradual destabilization of imperial power across the subcontinent in the decade before India’s 1947 independence. In order for Flaherty and Korda to make a film about elephants and a boy in the jungles of India, these storytellers necessarily assembled a structuring absence of India’s anti-colonial nationalist realities by attending to the timelessness of its wildlife, the natives’ willingness to serve the Empire, and the foreign rulers’ duty to inspire, develop and civilize its Indian subjects. However,

48 the Orientalist paradigm from which Sabu initially emerged could ultimately not contain the cultural ambivalence born of relocation, assimilation and the politics of his hybridity.

Ways of Viewing “Authenticity” Ethnology, Imperialism and Popular Culture Flaherty’s vision of making films stemmed from designs “to show the former majesty and character of [indigenous] people, while it is possible – before the white man has destroyed not only their character but the people as well” (qtd. in Ruby 89). In this sense, Flaherty’s aesthetic not only contrasts from Korda’s dramatizations of colonial encounters, but also connotes an anthropologist’s structural aims to document the obscurity of primitive cultures before they disappear forever. This form of “salvage ethnography” that developed during the early 1900s, Fatimah Tobing Rony explains, addressed the inevitable demise of “ancient,” “savage,” and “tribal” cultures in the wake of modernity’s discontent. The modes of representation derived from “salvage ethnography,” she continues, often bridged the scientific with the popular and impacted depictions of autochthonous people from the Inuit to Native Americans and from aborigines to tribal savages in imperial expositions, World’s Fairs, and early cinema (Rony 91). The urgency of “capturing” a culture or a person for posterity in its “originary” form instills the cultural referent with an artifactual quality. Thus, when Flaherty’s team finally “found” Sabu and filed him in Western cinema’s archive, he was temporarily “salvaged” from the adulteration that modernity would ultimately effect. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam argue that the occularcentric tendencies of anthropological discourse imbued Western cinema’s representations of foreign cultures and spaces with “indexical credibility,” that evidenced “not only the existence of others, but also of their actually existing otherness” (106). As many scholars of film and visual culture have noted, “ways of seeing” racialized and colonized others onscreen grew from spectatorial habits shaped by a range of

entertainments, viewing pleasures and distancing devices that mobilized racial difference through

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ethnological hierarchies, imperial narratives and Euro/American nationalisms (Breckenridge; Corbey; Feng; Griffiths; Prakash; Rony; Shohat and Stam). Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the 1930s, imperial exhibitions framed colonial natives as “objects on display” through discourses of science, aesthetics and anthropology. Natives became increasingly “exhibitable” across elite, academic and popular forums from ethnological societies to museums and from in situ panoramas to circus “freak” shows. As Alison Griffiths notes in her historiography of viewing practices in museums, exhibitions and cinema halls, beholding racial, ethnic and national specimens of difference advanced from a spectacularized risk of live objects “staring back” in a colonial exhibition hall, for instance, to the safety of a darkened movie theatre where the appearance of “consumable versions of the indigene satisfied a desire to ‘see’ cultural difference in a narratively coherent, non-threatening, and potentially thrilling way” (36). By the 1930s, when ethnological exhibitionism began to decline as criticism of imperialism, colonialism and racism increased, ethnological spectacles of “savages,” “tribes,” and “primitives” raised ethical and moral questions of representing racial Otherness. Alongside numerous scientific, pseudo-scientific and popular publications on anthropology, the emergence of ethnographic films and colonial narrative cinema adapted and replaced the voyeuristic function of live anthropological displays (Corbey 358). The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century plot structures embedded in imperial expositions, World’s Fairs and museum exhibits narrativized the “descent of man” from barbaric, tribal and savage civilizations to the “heroic achievements” of white European societies (Corbey 260). “These well known-plots” as seen in the 1893 Midway Plaisance or in P.T. Barnum’s “Ethnological Congress,” Raymond Corbey explains, were “flexible and capable of incorporating disparate elements, of outdoing alternative readings [and] are as pervasive in 19th Century

civilizatory, imperialist, missionary, and scientific discourses as in the spectacles and pictures that

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were governed by these discursive activities” (260). Orientalist “plots” extended and incorporated the anxious ideologies of Empire to hierarchical representations of racial difference in colonial and ethnographic 1920s and 30s cinema. The ethnological connotations of Flaherty’s style of filmmaking, coupled with the imperialist creed that Korda exalted through works including Sanders of The River (1935) and Things to Come (1936) merge at the point of The Elephant Boy’s production. This 1936 work exemplifies, quite literally, how the ascent of anthropology, imperialism and cinema were discursively linked to the racialization of colonized Indian bodies and the formation of racial/ethnic categories across the Empire’s popular imagination. Indeed, though their desires for the film contrasted, Flaherty and Korda’s collaboration also rehearsed and furthered the development of anthropology’s contact with narrative cinema in contradictory and complementary ways. Employing “classic” Orientalist strategies, the American and British filmmakers arrived at their Indian narrative subject by sustaining a “ ‘positional superiority,’ which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever [losing] the upper hand” (Said, Orientalism 7). After all, the filmmakers “temporally distanced” their American/British narrative of India from the present, projected tropes of primitivism, exoticism and colonial subservience onto their characters, and racialized Indian bodies as a people devoid of history, political agency and psychological complexity (Fabian). Moreover, the “Ethnographic Others” whom Flaherty “discovered” and constructed for most of his films, especially those based in “primitive” societies, grew from a directorial style that revealed the entire event uncut to characterize the scene in the most natural, realistic and objective manner possible.14 Captivated by the skill, dexterity and endurance of “primitive” man, Flaherty, a

51 true Romanticist, extolled the essence of nature and found modern man’s technology dehumanizing (Barsam 2). The “ontological realism” he created -- through on location shoots, long takes in deep focus and a detached authorial presence that allowed his characters’ interactions to unfold “naturally” -- enabled a sense of “authenticity” that he repeatedly re-discovered in his expeditions (Rony 117). As a filmmaker who once claimed, “First I was an explorer, and then I was an artist” (Calder-Marshall 72), Flaherty performed the role of a pioneer by navigating exotic frontiers, by “discovering” new clans and by colonizing local space, natives and resources where he set up expeditionary camps for his films. Unlike Flaherty, Alexander Korda was less concerned with creating “authentic” scenarios than he was with circulating a type of “popular imperialism” that addressed the “complicated interplay between government and society” (Mackenzie 7). “A truly popular imperialism,” John M. Mackenzie contends, had an “interest in the defence of an existing Empire rather than in its acquisition [especially] after the imperial climacterics of the late nineteenth century had ceased” (7). These fin de siècle crises that affected the Empire’s stronghold on its colonies included the Ashanti campaign of 1874; the Afghanistan and Zulu calamities of 1879; the Egyptian and Sudanese calamities of 1882, 1884-5 and 1896-8; and the Second Boer War of 1899-1902, among others (Mackenzie 3). While the impetus for the violent conflicts above was impelled by the aggressive and competitive expansion of the British Empire, the imperial anxieties of the 1930s responded to “native” campaigns for independence and decolonization, particularly in places like India and parts Fatimah Tobing Rony describes the construction of the “Ethnographic Other” as a racialized, historical body contoured at the discursive axes of civilization, imperialism and anthropology. The visual “evidence” of the “Ethnographic Other” in cinematographs, early documentary cinema and popular films like King Kong (1933) demonstrate that its racialized body was not “just savage and pathological, but was physically closer to the genuine and authentic in man” (28). The creation of the “Ethnographic Other” signifies a repeated complex of stigmatized, primitive difference – nakedness, fetishism, bestiality – that necessarily suspends them at the lower end of the evolutionary ladder of history (41). As a source of “scientific findings,” the function of its construction legitimized Western imperialism’s advancement and right to dominate those considered less evolved. See Rony, 28-43. 14

of the Middle East. Like other British producers hoping to protect parliament’s quota policies --

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which prioritized the release of a minimum number of national films over Hollywood productions -Korda continued making movies that “dramatized” dominant ideologies, appealed to imperial sympathies and promoted class alliances (Richards 141). Korda’s films were successful, attracted big box office sales, and demonstrated that the themes, beliefs and values of his films reinforced British attitudes that supported the imperial project. In “Boy’s Own Empire: Feature Films and Imperialism in the 1930s,” Jeffrey Richards writes: As long as the British regarded it as their God-given duty to ensure fair play for the entire world, the maintenance of Empire was inescapable [. . .] The Korda films and indeed their Hollywood counterparts depict British rule as timeless and eternal. The inevitable result was to foster [. . .] an ‘illusion of permanence’ -- the idea that whatever they might say about progress towards ultimate independence, the British in fact expected and believed that their Empire would last for a thousand years (author’s emphasis; 150). For most Britons, then, the “jewel in the crown” was an ordained part of the Empire’s entitlement. As Richards implies, the colonization of a “jewel” like India symbolized the eternal ownership of a country that they could never claim. For them, whether in India, Africa, the West Indies or the Persian Gulf, “progress” and “modernity” were illusory emblems of “temporally distant” futures. By the rhetoric of imperialism, modernity (if and when delivered) could only arrive in a foreign, westernized form. Promulgating the “myth” of a strong and perpetual Empire counteracted the strained economic and political realities of India’s Quit India movement wherein the colonial authorities vigilantly prepared for native revolt. To neutralize the anxieties of losing its imperial stronghold,

Korda’s “native” characters (often played in brownface) foiled nationalist exigencies and obscured

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Britain’s “God-given” right to postpone autonomy, economic growth and industrialization in India. In most of Korda’s films, natives were subservient to the Crown; their civilization, or lack thereof, signified their white counterparts’ evolutionary advancement; their “backwardness” justified a need for further acculturation; and finally, colonized subjects in Korda’s world performed their duties with a two-dimensionality that built little identification or sympathy with its audiences. Sabu, however, was the exception. While he certainly played a foil to colonial resistance in Elephant Boy by supporting Petersen’s royal aims of hunting elephants, he also managed to build empathy with his imperial, Hollywood and Indian audiences. Narratively, Korda accomplished this spectatorial identification by aligning Sabu’s characters with the rhetorical imperial cause. Charming, affable and skilled with large animals, Sabu’s Toomai carried the plot forward by leading the white Sahibs to the pachyderms for their hunt. With the elephants’ labor, the colony’s infrastructure would grow, the land would be more navigable, and surveillance of India’s geography and people would facilitate the administration’s reign of the land. While Korda aimed to shape Sabu as a native instrument of the Empire in his films, Flaherty rendered Sabu with an “identifiable” set of “exhibitable” qualities that this “father of ethnographic cinema” heightened through his directorial vision. As discussed above, ways of viewing and producing racial difference, primitivism and colonized bodies in live spectacles translated into a recognition of the ethnological other on both documentary and narrative film screens. Flaherty’s desire to construct and display the “Ethnographic Other” fed a “metropolitan appetite for the exotic – both human representatives and their productions – [which] was insatiable, and formed part of the living fermentation that produced modernity” (Poignant 8). This appetite, indeed, reflected a need to confirm or adjust racial hierarchies in relation to national and imperial projects. As Western Europeans left their homelands to colonize and settle in distant territories, “exotics” of those lands,

in unequal measure, performed cultural difference in the metropole through highly organized

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spectacles created by showmen and exhibition commissioners. Although Flaherty filmed most of his “exotics” in their own “native villages” in India, Korda inevitably reiterated ethnological modes of display with the construction of a miniature Indian village on the banks of the River Colne near his London studio. Together, these American and British filmmakers commissioned their own displays of India using tropes of Empire, ethnological exhibitionism and displaced visions of India that framed Sabu’s entry into the modern world. In Professional Savages, a heart-rending monograph on the spectacular display and exploitation of North Queensland’s Aborigines in circuses, fairgrounds, colonial exhibitions, theatre spaces and museums, Roslyn Poignant argues that European and American constructions of Aborigines in the popular imaginary stemmed from an “entanglement with fact and fiction” (7). During the 1880s, the Aborigines’ survival in Barnum’s traveling circus and in colonial exhibition halls like London’s Crystal Palace, demanded that they consistently performed their Aboriginality/authenticity, while adapting quickly to new languages, food and manners in their process of deterritorialization from home (8). The circumstances for Sabu were, of course, quite different than the Aborigines of fairs, theatres and museums in America and Europe during the 1880s. Some of these North Queensland performers died from exposure to alien viruses, improper medical treatment, and at times grief, from the deaths of their loved ones. A few even succumbed to pulmonary disease as they performed with minimal clothing in severely cold conditions (Poignant 142-168). Of the nine “removed” from Queensland in 1883, six died under the custodianship of the showman and Barnum recruiter, Robert A. Cunningham; the remaining three disappeared from the historical record altogether while touring in Western Europe (Poignant 19, 188). Exhibitions and circuses publicized these under-clothed Aborigines as savage oddities from the primitive extremes of civilization, yet these “professional

savages” promptly self-fashioned a cosmopolitanism reflected in their rapid grasp of European

55

languages, their purchase of expensive Western wear, their adoption of European manners, and even an ongoing collection of musical instruments that they may or may not have played on tour (Poignant 95, 100). As a “low-caste” Dravidian son of a mahout, Sabu’s origins also stemmed from the lower echelons of a colonized society. Described as a “primitive, penniless, illiterate, youngster born in the Karapur jungles” and found in a stable (Tabori 194), like the Aborigines, Sabu was often underclothed, objectified and carted from one publicity event to the next as an exotic commodity. Both Flaherty and Korda earned commissions from their eleven-year-old Indian boy’s public appearances in the media, at zoos, and in parades during the film’s production and in the year after The Elephant Boy’s release. According to a 1938 document addressed to Robert Flaherty from his agent at Film Rights, Ltd., the filmmaker even received a third of all Sabu’s royalties related to their British/American film endeavor.15 The significance of positioning Sabu with these Victorian-era Aborigines on a historical continuum of ethnological display is to engage the performativity of their display at the juncture of diaspora, anthropology, colonialism and popular culture. The qualities that Sabu and Cunningham’s troupe share include a transatlantic migration from their homeland to London and from Europe to the United States; a premature death where they died thousands of miles from their birthplace; a renaming that substituted their indigenous names with pronounceable names like Tambo, Sussy, Billy, Jenny and Bob; a “salvage ethnography” ascribed to modes of performing racial difference and ethnic practice; and an ultimate self-fashioned liminal cosmopolitanism derived from balancing their

15

Box 36, Flaherty Collection. Columbia University, New York.

embodied connection to their homelands with the language, mannerisms and consumerism

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introduced by Western Europe and America.

The Reception of The Elephant Boy In The Elephant Boy, Sabu plays the titular role of Toomai, the son of a mahout, or elephant trainer. Shot entirely in black and white, the movie opens in a classic storybook framework as a white man’s hands turn the pages of an embossed, leather-bound book with an image of an adorned Indian elephant on its cover. The first scene shows a brown, turbaned, shirtless twelve-year-old Sabu, addressing the film’s intended white male audience with a heavily Indian-accented, “I salute you, Sahibs.” Softly lit before a stark studio background and shot with a filtered lens, Sabu’s premiere salute to the world frames him with a movie star glow. His naked torso, shot in mediumclose up, invites a fetishizing homoerotic stare that not only locks him into a gendered economy of effeminate Indian masculinities, but also conjures an anthropological gaze that enjoins the nakedness of primitive bodies for closer examination. From this initial scene onwards, and in many movies to follow, Sabu’s exposed body would incite a legacy of viewing pleasures that sexualize racial/ethnic difference and exoticize feminized “Oriental” origins. Throughout the narrative, the film switches between studio shots like the one explained above, to on location footage that depicts Sabu’s “natural” ease in the jungle with his elephants. One particular on location scene shows Irawatha, the giant elephant nudging a slumbering Sabu with his trunk. The boy yawns, rubs his eyes, and stretches as the elephant remarkably mimics his actions. A monkey seated on a branch above them further mimics Sabu’s yawning, rubbing and stretching. While Richard Barsam suggests that the comparison of Sabu’s behavior with Iravatha and the monkey is an indication of the co-existence between man and beast, I would add that this moment instigates a pattern of animalization that would shadow Sabu throughout his career. The

name, “Sabu,” after all, derives from the Arabic word, al-Sabu, which translates as “beast” (Lecker

57

34). As the quintessential Indian wolf-boy of the popular imperial imaginary, Mowgli and his adventures were published in the same collection of stories as “Toomai of the Elephants.” Six years after playing Toomai, Sabu would characterize Mowgli in Korda’s production of The Jungle Books (1942). In The Elephant Boy, Sabu’s Toomai is less a half-boy/half-beast than a child who aims to please male elders and experience the adventure of the wild. By the esteem of his father, Big Toomai (played in brownface by W.E. Holloway), the young boy is “mad to be a hunter.” One day, a crowd of Indian men gathers around the old banyan tree in the center of town. Posted on its trunk is an announcement that Her Majesty’s Government of India needs mahouts for a keddah, or elephant hunt. To meet the colony’s infrastructural demand for constructing roads, bridges and buildings, the government requires a squadron of one hundred elephants. Petersen Sahib (Walter Hudd), a government official, has been placed in charge of the task. Impressed by the tricks Little Toomai performs on his elephant, Kala Nag (Iravatha), the white sahib chooses the boy and his pet pachyderm, among others, to accompany him on an imperial elephant hunt in the wild. Six weeks pass and no elephants are found as Petersen Sahib and his men grow increasingly frustrated while tracking the jungle. Little Toomai places his faith in the legend of the “elephant dance” that occurs at night in a secret grove. Ridiculed by the older mahouts, the boy pledges the legend is true in the hopes of helping Petersen Sahib on his hunt. One night, a tiger sneaks into the camp, kills Big Toomai and leaves the boy an orphan. In Kipling’s original story, the only mention of a tiger involves an attack Kala Nag sustained; Toomai’s father lives though the story’s end. In the film, however, Big Toomai’s elephant, Kala Nag, goes musth (crazy) when he learns that his master is dead. Ram Lal (Bruce Gordon), whom Little Toomai calls a “bad man,” abuses Kala Nag as the animal’s new keeper. The character of Ram Lal does not exist in Kipling’s narrative either and was

58 created to add conflict to the plot. Played in brownface and filmed on a London set, he is the only “villain” of the story, and offers a moral and racial counterpoint to Petersen Sahib’s upright authority. Suffering from Ram Lal’s beatings, the elephant injures the mahout in defense and rampages the camp in rage. To protect the keddah, Petersen Sahib reluctantly plans to shoot the animal while rebuking Ram Lal’s actions. For the love of his pet and in the memory of his father, Toomai sets Kala Nag free in the middle of the night. (The night scenes of Sabu on his elephant are some of the most magical of the film and are entirely shot on location by Borradaille and Flaherty.) Sabu’s Toomai rides atop Iravatha’s Kala Nag to the secret grove where an elephant dance ensues. Petersen Sahib realizes the boy and Kala Nag are gone, and the camp sets out looking for them at dawn. Tracing their steps, they discover the boy watching over a grove of numerous elephants. With the help of the little boy, Her Majesty’s imperial mission is achieved. Toomai becomes a hero, the camp of mahouts cheer him on, and the final scene features Sabu “salaam-ing” his elders and saluting the white sahib. The central themes of The Elephant Boy follow from concepts that Flaherty espoused in his previous films. These involve the “rite de passage” of the young male protagonist into the early stages of manhood and societal recognition; the wisdom and transcendence of nature over human obstacles; and a boy’s emulation of a father figure who helps him succeed to the next stage of initiation. What interrupts these romantic motifs is Petersen Sahib’s white imperial authority and colonial knowledge, which conflicts with the lived experience and “intuition” of the brown jungle dwellers (Barsam 79). Ideally, Flaherty wanted to make a film that showed the elephants and mahouts in a pre-colonial period, unaffected by colonialism and the “white” man’s modernity, but the necessity of Kipling’s narrative impeded the documentarian’s vision of India’s primevality.

59 Further, the “interruption” of Flaherty’s romantic approach was a consequence of Korda’s control as a producer. While Flaherty was still shooting in India, Korda established a production unit in London where his younger brother, Zoltan Korda, directed additional studio scenes and recruited local brown-skinned extras to pepper the backdrop.16 One of the main reasons that Sabu traveled to England after his “discovery” in Mysore was to complete production on “native village” and jungle sets built on Korda’s west London studio stage in Uxbridge, Middlesex off the River Colne. Concerned Flaherty’s jungle adventure would result in an avant-garde work, Korda was determined to shape the jungle footage into a commercially profitable feature (Kulik 188). Indeed, the contrasting documentary and studio styles reveal a bifurcated aesthetic that signifies the competing narrative agendas of the movie. The film critic Charles Davy of the London Mercury News called the film an “uneasy mixture of styles…Flaherty spent over two years in India to make the picture; surely he should have been allowed more than forty minutes of his own.”17 John Grierson, the renowned British documentary filmmaker, wrote of the asymmetry between ethnographic and commercial studio filmmaking: Elephant Boy begins magnificently. Toomai is set on back of the highest elephant in all of Mysore: in his youth and innocence giving a dignity to the Indian people one had never seen before on the screen [. . .] But enter Messrs. Kipling and Korda and the studio mind. I do not blame it. East is East [. . .] it takes Flaherty to remind us that we film people live in two worlds, and the two Kipling fashion, do not often meet. (5) Dr. Anup Singh, an Indian journalist for The New Yorker, wrote less about the imbalance between the two aesthetic approaches than the lack of “authenticity” attributed to the mahouts: 16

Box 36, Flaherty Collection, Columbia University, New York.

17

Charles Davy, “Reviews: Elephant Boy,” London Mercury May 1937: 72.

60 The dubious artistic success of many features is gained at the expense of authenticity. Audiences outside of India will overlook a few points that were jarring to me. Most of the mahouts in the party are apparently bearded and turbaned Sikhs. This dress is colorful, but Sikh mahouts are rare [. . .] The English actors disguised as Sikhs behind beards and turbans are not very convincing. Why not have selected Hindu actors for these parts? (63) Conceivably, because the film was stamped with Flaherty’s name, expectations of “authenticity” pervaded the viewing experience of The Elephant Boy. For Davy and Grierson, the “authenticity” of Flaherty’s “realism” was compromised by Korda’s commercial aspirations. For Singh, a Sikh/American man himself, the deficiencies ascribed to the mahouts’ Sikh and brownfaced portrayals implied that the film was made with neither Indian nor non-white audiences in mind. Critical disjunctures notwithstanding, The Elephant Boy was indubitably a hit. Sabu’s novel appearance on the international film stage invited effusive acclaim. London’s Film Pictorial called Sabu “frankly more talented than a good many western stars, and if the film folk don’t eventually ruin him or forget him, he will go far.”18 The Guardian praised the boy as showing “such brilliant film inspiration the author proposes [that] the Immemorial East may produce the world’s greatest screen actors.”19 Frank Nugent of the New York Times painted him as “a sunny-faced, manly little youngster, whose naturalness beneath the camera's scrutiny should bring blushes to the faces of the precocious wonder-children of Hollywood. He's a much better actor than the British players Mr.

18

Film Pictorial (London). 18 February 1937.

19

“Film Stars” The Guardian (Nottingham) 30 Dec. 1936.

61 Flaherty tried to disguise behind frizzed beards and Indian names.”20 Some journalists hailed Sabu as a child prodigy above the 1930s crop of child actors including Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Freddy Bartholomew.21 The mainstream response to the movie was enthusiastic on both sides of the Atlantic in America and Europe. Robert Garland of the New York American wrote, “Never before in my professional moviegoing days have I seen a Rialto Theatre audience stand up and cheer. They stood up and cheered ‘Elephant Boy’ yesterday.”22 The film even won the 1937 award for “best direction” at the Venice Film Festival to a standing ovation. Despite the prestigious prize, Flaherty was disappointed with the film – “We are not terribly pleased with it as we think it could have been much better.” He was further disgruntled by the paltry 2.5 percent of box office revenue he earned.23 His wife, Frances Flaherty, on the other hand, profited from two children book deals based on their family’s expedition through India titled Elephant Dance (1937) and Sabu the Elephant Boy (1937). The film’s commercial success, which allowed Korda’s to recoup his risk of £90,000, was arguably a consequence of Sabu’s popularity, Flaherty’s ethnographic style and the numerous international chronicles published over its two years in the making.24 Overall, in terms of

“The Screen: Stealing a March on the Ringlings, the Rialto Has Its Own Big Show in Flaherty’s ‘Elephant Boy.’” New York Times 6 April 1937. 20

“Child Prodigies in Screen Limelight,” Northern Dispatch (Darlington) 8 April 1937; “Child Prodigies,” Yorkshire Observer (Bradford) 2 April 1937. 21

Quoted in Dixon Campbell, “Film Star from Elephant Stable, Elephant Boy Talks of England, Aeroplanes Please Sabu Best,” Daily Telegraph (London) 7 April 1937. 22

23 Flaherty was originally promised 5% of the box office revenue, but by Korda’s accounts, since Flaherty went £60,000 over Korda’s initial budget of £30,000, London Films reduced his overall earnings from the film. Box 37, Flaherty Collection. Columbia University, New York.

Memo to Robert Flaherty from London Films, Statement of Commission, 15 February 1939. Box 36, Flaherty Collection, Columbia University, New York. 24

investments, Korda benefited from another star vehicle made for his newest celebrity asset, a

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twelve-year-old Indian boy née Selar Shaikh and renamed Sabu .

Columbiad Visions and the “Discovery” of India: An Expedition’s Quest for the Orient Screened to preview audiences in London’s Leicester Square Theatre on Boxing Day (December 26th) 1936, the international press met the release of The Elephant Boy with great anticipation. Over the course of 1935 and 1936, hundreds of newspapers and magazines published stories that detailed the Anglo/American production of the colonial tale. Flaherty’s “hunt” for an elephant and an Indian star across India featured in stories from Bombay to Rangoon from Paris to New Zealand and from Jerusalem to New York.25 Once Korda and Flaherty decided at the end of 1934 to adapt Kipling’s tale on the subcontinent, London Films’ publicity office and Flaherty’s agent, T. Hayes Hunter of Film Rights Ltd., went to work publicizing their “quest” for an Indian “star” and his pet pachyderm (Rotha 163). The Madras Mail headlined, “Somewhere in India there is an Indian boy who will shortly become a film star.”26 Burma’s Rangoon Gazette wrote, “When the boy is discovered he will be specially trained for his part but he must be natural.”27 In an article entitled, “Six People in Search for an Elephant,” redolent of Luigi Pirandello’s absurdist, satirical

25

Elephant Boy Press Files, 1935-1937. Box 37, Flaherty Collection, Columbia University, New York.

“An Indian Boy May become a Film Star,” Madras Mail 2 Feb 1935. While The Madras Mail catered to an English-educated Indian elite, India’s press was censored and controlled by the British. Therefore, censure of the government, criticism of British industry in India or disapproval of state-sponsored artists would result in the imprisonment of editors and writers and the possible dissolution of the newspaper, especially during the 1930s when anti-colonial nationalist tensions were acute. The 1909 Newspapers (Incitement to Offenses) Act gave British magistrates complete control of the local and national press. The colonial government, thus, had discretion as to when a newspaper would be seized and shut down. The Madras Mail, The Hindu and The Times of India, which I shall be citing below among other Indian newspapers, are still in circulation and currently some of the most widely read dailies across India. See Wolpert, 283. 26

27

“Search for the Star” Rangoon Gazette 2 February 1935.

play on the pursuit of narrative truth (Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921), London’s Evening

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Standard announced that “In ten days there will be leaving for India Bob Flaherty, Fred [sic] Flaherty, Mrs. Flaherty, two sound engineers, one assistant and a charm against snakebite. And when they get to India they don’t know where they will go.”28 Equipped with a “Columbiad” vision of “discovering” India for the West -- and primed with connections from Korda, Maharaja Wodeyar, Viceroy Willingdon and the Bollywood filmmakers, Himansu Rai and Chinmanlal Setalvad of Bombay Talkies, Ltd. -- Flaherty was destined to manifest a “vestal” version of India’s uncharted jungles. Though he and his wife, Frances, possessed a sense of what “the jungles of India with all the jungle creatures” might look like, neither he nor his expedition team knew where they would find it (Flaherty, Elephant Dance 15-16). As Malini Schueller Johar writes in USOrientalism(s) in regard to nineteenth century evocations of Oriental “discoveries” in the literary imagination: The discovery of the Americas by Columbus was popularly transmitted as the outcome of a vision to reach the Orient [. . .] Accompanied by visionary statements about completing Columbus’s original mission, tropes of expansion and control over various specific Orients were thus mystified as “natural” through a complex genealogy of the country’s intimate associations with the search for the Orient. (9) Though Flaherty’s artistic mission did not concern expansion, conquest or domination in the vein of British colonial rule over India, or American dominance over the Philippines for that matter, his imaginative “control” over the Orient delivered a very particular form of India to the West, laden by imperial, colonial and ethnological discourses. When he finally “discovered” Mysore in the summer of 1935, he established a bustling film colony that employed domestic servants, production “Six People in Search for an Elephant” Evening Standard (London) 11 February 1935. Robert Flaherty’s brother’s name is David, not Fred. 28

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Fig. 4. Flaherty’s film crew shooting on location in Mysore State, India on the set of The Elephant Boy in 1935. Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK. assistants, construction workers and administrators over a period of eighteen months that indeed fueled and benefited Mysore’s local economy. Often photographed on set wearing the explorer’s garb of a Panama hat and safari suit, Flaherty performed the consummate role of an adventurer, eager to shoot and navigate unfamiliar territories and unexplored cultures (see fig. 4). For the explorer/artist, cities like Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta were hotbeds for nationalist activities and contradicted the “authentic” India that Korda

would duly fund and approve, especially if it matched the terrain of Kipling’s colonial imagination.

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When asked by a reporter where he would ultimately shoot his film, Flaherty responded: We are not going to have anything to do with a town. Our idea is to go and live in a typical Indian village and mingle freely with the inhabitants so as to understand their mode of life and appreciate their point of view. That alone will enable me to reproduce in my film typical Indian village life. 29 How Flaherty imagined “typical” is unclear since he had never been to India before the making of The Elephant Boy. What did “typical Indian village life” look like on a continent known for its diversity of languages, religions, and cultural practices? Which cultural or visual markers of a “native village” fulfilled a set of archetypes for him? How did certain traits of reconstructed ethnological “native villages” seen in world’s fairs, in situ exhibitions, and museums perhaps inform Flaherty’s search for a typical Indian ethnic space? Besides the literary fiction of “Toomai of the Elephant,” which preconceived fictions of India influenced his vision of the real India? As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues in Destination Culture, it is the ethnographer, the exhibition commissioner, the curator, and I would add the ethnographic filmmaker, who “constitutes the ethnographic object,” and “just as the ethnographic object is the creation of the ethnographer, so too are the putative cultural wholes of which they are part” (21). Certainly, Flaherty’s aesthetic trademark was his encapsulation of the Other’s authenticity, and because he restaged premodern villages and jungles as artifacts from an “ethnographic present,” he, in turn, belied “alternative modernities” told from the perspectives of India’s leadings industrialists, technologists and artists (Clifford 268; Gaonkar).30

29

Birmingham Weekly Post, 3 May 1935.

Indeed, Flaherty’s ethnographic scenes are highly choreographed spectacles that attracted

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local audiences, international press, and with the presence of his wife, brother and daughters, they often became Flaherty family affairs. When the filmmaker staged a keddah, an elephant hunt that occurred in Mysore State only once or twice a decade, Flaherty enlisted hundreds of “beaters,” hunters and mahouts to assist him in the jungle. 31 During the hunt, Flaherty filmed close-ups of the mahouts alongside totalizing shots of the jungle camp as the Indian men sang songs, banged on drums and clapped their hands while illuminated by the flickering light of their torches at night. In addition to creating ethnographic moments that showed the mahouts’ evening leisure, the main goal of shooting this keddah was to trap as many elephants as possible in a stockade, so Flaherty could simulate a stampede for the elephant dance at the end of the film.32 Regina Bendix’s “framework of reflexive modernization” is particularly apt for theorizing modern longing for authentic “antimodern” cultures. Claiming that the recovery of loss can only be achieved through modernity, this recuperation, she writes, is only attainable through “methods and sentiments” created in the present (8). Flaherty’s desire for a “typical” native village and a true-tolife “elephant hunt” necessarily required devices of modernity – his camera, ethnological pretenses, film technology, telecommunications, and a romantic critique of progress -- to interpellate his characters, locales, and events as “genuine.” Like Bendix suggests, the term authenticity implies its

James Clifford describes the “ethnographic present” as the narrative tense from which modern anthropologists conceive their ethnographic subjects. Representing their lives, practices and bodies as authentic “remnants of the human past, and thus without history,” ethnographers demonstrate our Western epistemological notions of modernity by “removing objects and customs from their current historical situation – a present-becoming-future.” See Clifford, 268. 30

31 Beaters, sometimes called clappers, do not literally “beat” the animals per se. Rather they form a large perimeter around an area where they suspect elephants dwell. By beating on a drum, or clapping their hands, they frighten the elephants towards entering the trap of the stockade. 32

York.

Cablegram to Korda, 1 February 1936. Box 35, Flaherty Collection, Columbia Collection, New

67 opposite – the fake, the disingenuous, and the fictitious (8-9). As the master authenticator, Flaherty construed “natural” portrayals as “actual” unforeseen events. These elephants were not hunted through the jungle; they already lived in the Maharaja’s stable. Gathered, released, surrounded in captivity, the elephants were then chased into a blockade creating the “illusion” of a stampede. In the aftermath of the keddah, Flaherty expressed concern to the London office from India about the perceived inhumane treatment of the elephants. London Films’ director of publicity, John Myers, sent a cablegram to Flaherty reassuring him that the film was “… getting marvelous publicity throughout the world, [we] do not anticipate any anti cruelty publicity…”.33 In Flaherty’s exploration of the jungle, where he not only put himself and his team at risk but endangered the animals provided to him, he iterates the role of the “warrior-explorer-engineer-administratorimperial paladin” that Jeffrey Richards contends is based on a “primacy of action” central to adventure films during the 1930s (147). As Richards suggests, films like Flaherty’s exalt the pioneering days of exploration, construction and profit, construed and legitimized as “adventure” (146). Here, Flaherty’s call to action as a filmmaker/explorer is predicated by a quest for the real India, replete with wild terrain, feral beasts, and of course, the most “authentic” elephant boy he could find.

Mysore’s Real India and the Projection of National Desires To find the real India and a real Elephant Boy, Flaherty departed the country’s cities for more idyllic regions. After scouting locations in Bombay, Assam, Patiala and Jaipur, his brother, David Flaherty, wrote,

33

Cablegram to Flaherty, 11 January 1936. Box 35, Flaherty Papers, Columbia University, New York.

68 Bombay is not beautiful. There isn’t much colour in the sky, the sea or the landscape. Though there is plenty of it in the costumes and the skins of the people, most of whom are a much blacker brown than the Samoans… It seems very unlikely that we shall find our elephant boy in Bombay. There are no elephants here in the first place… Mysore too is said to be more like the old India than the states around Bombay and the north. Mysore is a native state, the Maharajah is said to be a very nice man, with a large number of elephants, and there are plenty of mahouts and boys to choose from (author’s emphasis).34 Located in what is now Karnataka State, the kingdom of Mysore was ultimately chosen for its mild climate and the lasting hospitality of its Maharaja, Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV, whose subjects praised him as Rajashri or the “saintly king.” Though Flaherty and his family frequently visited the Maharaja, for the film’s purposes, Flaherty and his team mostly communicated with his Chief Secretary, Dewan Mirza Ismail, the Prime Minister of Mysore State. Through Mirza’s correspondence, it becomes clear that the Maharaja and the Dewan projected a different set of desires onto The Elephant Boy that contrasted from Korda’s imperial agendas and Flaherty’s ethnographic visions. For the state of Mysore, they hoped the movie would emerge as a tourism vehicle, represent India as a benevolent and civilized nation and publicize the good works that Maharaja Wodeyar performed for his royal subjects. In a letter dated to his agent, T. Hayes Hunter, Flaherty writes, “The maharaja and his ministers are extremely interested in the film, since it means advertising Mysore – something they have been at great pains and expense to try and do themselves.” A few weeks earlier, the Dewan asked Flaherty to write J.A. Dulanty, the High

Letter to Robert Flaherty from Flaherty’s younger brother and production assistant, David Flaherty, 11 March 1935. Box 35, Flaherty Collection, Columbia University, New York. 34

69 Commissioner for the Irish Free State, for information regarding the consequent increase in tourism following the 1934 release of Man of Aran. Flaherty wrote, Mysore, a native state ruled by a Maharaja, is undoubtedly one of the most wonderful countries in the world, though comparatively little known. The success of my undertaking depends largely upon the amount of co-operation I receive from the Mysore Government. Both his Highness the Maharaja and Sir Mirza Ismail, the Dewan (or Prime Minister) are alive to the necessity of good publicity for Mysore…We are charmed with this Mysore country, which indeed is one of the most beautiful in the world.35 This “little known” kingdom, a “discovery” renowned across Asia, but one that Flaherty would soon introduce to the West, was integral to the development of his film project. For instance, the kingdom of Mysore contained the jungle territories that Flaherty would use to shoot his keddah for the film, key scenes required to show the story’s dénouement when Peterson Sahib’s teams captures the elephants for the Crown. Further, the Dewan’s administration provided forest officers to the jungle expedition by facilitating the management of manpower, safety from wildlife and medical assistance when needed.36 The Maharaja also offered them the Chittaranjan Mahal, his grandmother’s ninety-year-old palace, as their living accommodations. 37 Iravatha, the Maharaja’s

Letter to J.A. Dulanty, the High Commissioner for the Irish Free State from Robert Flaherty. 15 June 1935, Box 36. Flaherty Papers, Columbia University, New York. 35

Cablegram to Alexander Korda from Robert Flaherty praising Mr. M.M. Machaya, Chief Conservative of Forests, and his assistant M.A. Muthanna. 7 Jan 1936, Box 35, Flaherty Papers, Columbia University, New York. 36

37 Though Frances Hubbard Flaherty writes that ‘Chittaranjan’ was a family name of the Maharaja, Chittaranjan is actually a Hindi vernacular term for movies, which denotes that the “Mahal” Flaherty and his family “colonized” was known as the “movie palace.” By Frances’ accounts, the Flaherty family was delighted to stay in an “authentic” Maharaja’s palace while living in India. See Flaherty, Elephant Dance, 33-34.

prize elephant and ostensibly the “largest elephant in India,” performed the role of Kala Nag, the

70

lead elephant of the film. 38 Moreover, the palace’s royal mahouts served as advisors, extras and trainers for the hundreds of elephants used for the film. In addition to selling the magnificent Iravatha to Aldous Huxley of Brave New World (1932) fame, who bought the beast on behalf of the Royal Zoological Society for its permanent Regent’s Park exhibit, the Maharaja also agreed to loan his pachyderms for a “world tour” parade during the film’s release as a “publicity stunt.”39 As their participation shows, the Maharaja and Dewan approached the making of The Elephant Boy as an opportunity to demonstrate the country’s munificence, highlight its abundance over its poverty, and display its lush gardens, parks and jungles preserved across the state. Remembered as the “golden age” of Mysore, the Mirza-Krishnaraja period of administration saw great progress. Sir Dewan Ismail, knighted by the British government in 1940, was a leading industrialist, proponent for privatization, builder of parks and gardens, and advocate for education who as a politician understood how to balance the nationalist aims of Gandhi and Nehru with the autonomy from the Empire that Mysore had exercised since 1881 with its democratically elected legislative assembly.40 Under the rule of Krishnaraja Wodeyar, a philosopher, mystic, lover of dance, music and arts, and advocate for India’s independence, the state experienced prosperity through its

London’s News Chronicle of 15 January 1937 publicized the Maharaja’s Irawatha as “the largest elephant in India.” An article by Margaret Shaw published in Zoo, The Nature Magazine, described Sabu’s costar Irawatha, as “one of the three largest Indian elephants in the world standing at 9 feet 11 inches and weighing about five tons.” Today’s Cinema hailed the pachyderm as the “biggest elephant in Southern India.” Certainly, the superlative size of the animal cannot be proven, per se, yet the mythology of Iravatha’s grand dimensions coincides with the popular folklore constructed around his co-star Sabu’s “penniless,” “orphaned,” “jungle” beginnings. See Margaret Shaw, “Elephant Boy,” Zoo, The Nature Magazine Sept. 1936; “Boys Who Love Elephants,” News Chronicle [London] 15 Jan. 1937; “Elephant Boy,” Today’s Cinema [London] 1 Apr. 1937. 38

“Elephant Boy Completed,” Birmingham Mail 24 Dec. 1936; Sinclair, Gordon, “Bottom Drops Clean Out of India’s Elephant Mart,” The Star [Toronto] 19 August 1935. 39

40

Rao, Jaithirth, “Leaving a Stamp on History,” Indian Express 18 Jan. 2006.

71 infrastructural expansion, pioneering hydroelectric power technology and economic development in the agricultural and industrial sectors. In early 1936, when Flaherty’s expedition was still stationed in the state, Gandhi arrived as a state guest to the Maharaja palace. King Wodeyar, a friend and supporter of Gandhi and the nationalist movement, was known to spin cotton on a spinning wheel, a statement of Indian swadeshi that expressed solidarity, self-reliance and self-rule (Jaithirth). Frances Flaherty described the Raja as a “little, pale man with a kind, sad face [who] summons to his projects the best machines, materials and brains of Europe, so that Mysore is the best administered state in India” (Elephant Dance 25). By Mirza’s standards, as detailed in his autobiography, the prosperity attributed to Mysore derived less from European involvement as Frances Flaherty suggests, than from self-directed policies that recruited the best minds across India to manufacture steel, develop cement factories, build aeronautic technology and provide electric power to its people (Mirza 19-23). Why Flaherty illustrated the Maharaja as diminutive and framed Mysore’s advancement as contingent on Western modernity is unclear but not surprising. At one point in the book, she even dismisses Indians’ attempts towards higher education as hypocritical, implying that the “primitiveness” of their intellect impedes their abilities to modernize society. She writes, “Indians love to get B.A.’s and A.B’s etc. -- educational tags. It gives them a coveted standing and prestige. But they never think of applying what they learn to their daily way of living and doing things, which may be thousands of years old and almost as primitive” (67). Throughout her children’s book, Elephant Dance, Frances Flaherty alludes to caste hierarchies, nautch girls, snake charmers, arranged marriage and even “Arabian-Nights” palaces, persistently reinforcing an Orientalist’s experience in an India suspended in the nineteenth-century colonial imagination. These tales of her experience in India framed Sabu’s introduction to Anglo/American children’s literary imaginations.

In contrast to her mystical descriptions of Raja Wodeyar that ranged from an intriguing

72

“power over animals” to climbing high hills to “meditate and institute projects for the people,” Frances Flaherty portrays Dewan Ismail as the King’s “living brain” who “has bidden us here. It is the advertisement we shall be to Mysore that he is thinking of” (Elephant Dance 26). To launch his publicity campaign for Mysore before the release of the film, Sir Mirza even summoned Times of India reporter to record and publish the production’s developments over the duration of their stay in Mysore (Flaherty, Elephant Dance 26). As a gesture of good will for all the support Ismail and Wodeyar extended from 1935 to 1936, Flaherty also promised a copy of The Elephant Boy to use at their discretion for Mysore tourism’s efforts. However, it was a gesture made in vain. United Artists claimed sole proprietorship over the film’s distribution and the Maharaja and Dewan never received a personal copy.41 Throughout The Elephant Dance and her other children’s book, Sabu the Elephant Boy, there is no mention of the civil unrest happening across the country. Perhaps the tranquility of Mysore State somehow shielded the Flaherty family from the realties of India’s native resistance. However, as Richard Barsam contends, Robert Flaherty “must have been aware that Indian nationalists were progressing toward independence from British rule” (79). Though Flaherty shot more than 170 hours of film in India, there is not a single reference to India’s nationalist movement, its political mobilization for a free Indian state, or the growing international attention of its leader, Mahatma Gandhi. Furthermore, in the hundreds of pages of personal letters, production notes, telegrams, reviews, film stills, and screenplay drafts concerning Elephant Boy in the Robert J. Flaherty archives at Columbia University, allusions to the mounting tensions of India’s colonial unrest are oddly unapparent. Letter of apology from Robert Flaherty to Dewan Mirza Ismail. 19 May 1937, Box 37, Flaherty Papers, Columbia University, New York. 41

73 The 1930s were unquestionably a tumultuous period in India’s political history. There is not enough room here to detail the events leading up to the formation of the Indian National Congress, the reasons why the British government continually imprisoned the Mahatma, or the complex ideologies of secularism and spirituality behind Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign. Yet one thing is certain. Gandhi was the most famous anti-colonial freedom fighter in the world at the time of Elephant Boy’s production (Low, D.A., 198). Indeed, Time Magazine named him the 1930 “Man of the Year.” For decades, especially after the end of The Great War, India’s nationalist activities regularly headlined international newspapers and newswires. And while the American press reported a more sympathetic version of the political tensions in India compared to British newspapers,42 India’s civil unrest, Gandhi’s fasts and multiple imprisonments, and the formation of a new Indian government amid Viceroy Willingdon’s suppression, provoked increasing doubts around the justification of colonialism, especially in light of escalating fascism in Western Europe. Still, amid recruitment of political activists for the nationalist campaign, when the British government struggled to control masses of people joining Gandhi’s and the Indian National Congress’ cause, Flaherty managed to organize an expedition that one journalist believed would show India as it has “not yet been shown…like the extent it deserves and the few films with a genuine Indian background that have reached [England] have by no means done justice to its glories. [Flaherty] aspires to reveal something of the soul of India, and he intends to search the country for an ideal Indian youth as his hero.43 Arguably, the filmmakers’ construction of this “ideal Indian youth,” imbued with the “soul

42 I thank Christopher Pinney for raising this observation of the disparity between British and American reportage of India’s anti-colonial campaign. This distinction is indeed not unexpected due to the British Indian government’s aggressive censorship of India’s press. 43

Yorkshire Telegraph (Sheffield), 31 Jan 1935.

of India,” would not be compatible with the spirit of anti-colonial consciousness, embodied by

74

Gandhi and his followers.

The “Discovery” of Sabu and the “Test” of Authenticity By the time Robert Flaherty had arrived in India by the first of April 1935, the Indian press was already publicizing the expedition’s search for an “ideal” elephant boy. Indeed, this “hunt” was of a different nature. Funded by Korda’s imperial reserves at the metropole, Flaherty’s mission was not merely about typecasting his hero as “a kind of Kim, or Mowgli, or Toomai” as he said to the London Times.44 His hunt was also about “discovering” an embodiment of India in a developing adolescent form with a natural, primal affinity for elephants and a charming enough character to export and distribute across the Western world. David Flaherty told The Times of India in March just weeks before setting off on their expedition that they needed a “boy skilled in the handling of elephants to take part in the film… already there was keen competition, for the job applications having been received in England even before sailing for India.”45 When asked about the search’s progress within the first few days of landing, Robert Flaherty offered, “It is my aim to get the services of a smart little mischievous Indian lad who I think will any day become a very good actor so long as he is not too sophisticated.”46 It would be months before Osmond Borradaile would “discover” Selar Shaikh in the Maharaja of Mysores elephant stables in early July 1935. In the weeks preceding that historical moment, Flaherty and his team interviewed and auditioned a countless number of boys, as well as

44

“Indian Boy as Kim Hero: Flaherty’s New Film,” Times of Lomdon 27 January 1935.

45

“Hunt for India’s Boy Film Star: Producer Arrives in Bombay,” Times of India (Bombay) 9 March

46

Madras Mail, 6 April 1935

1935.

75 grown men who claimed they passed as boys for the lead. Professor R. Chandra, an elephant expert, wrote, “In regard to your new picture ‘The Elephant Boy’…it is a remarkable coincidence that my early life exactly fits the story of the film…Though I may look older in the photo enclosed herewith, I can pass off for a boy.”47 The press had clearly publicized Flaherty’s search for the “real thing.” Many letters included requests to be “immortalized in Kipling’s Toomai of the Elephant celluloid,” or acknowledged that “I understand that you are in search of a Mahout boy and you think that he is somewhere in India. Who knows that I am not that boy. I am sending a photograph with this letter” (Flaherty, Elephant Dance 30-31). Flaherty often did not respond to these solicitations. His method of “discovery” involved surveying small villages in Mysore and Hyderabad, states known for their mahout and elephant populations. In mid-May 1935, Flaherty found a son of a mahout in Kakankote named “Abdullah … with a really appealing personality.”48 Flaherty deemed Abdullah too young for the part. By midJune, other boys auditioned for Flaherty in Bhadravati district and in Manantoddy, but the screen tests did not please Flaherty enough to cast them.49 What is notable about these encounters, is that the Flaherty’s, i.e., David, Robert and sometimes Frances, not only left these rural, often impoverished, villages empty-handed, but also left an impression on local villagers and leaders. Rural communities with surrounding elephant sanctuaries projected hopes of civic improvement upon these Western foreigners whose fascination with pachyderms brought them to the region. One leader from Periyapatna named, S. Anthojee

47 Letter from Prof. R. Chandra to Robert Flaherty, 8 Feb 1935. Box 35, Flaherty Collection. Columbia University, New York. 48 Letter from David Flaherty to Robert Flaherty, 15 May 1935. Box 35, Flaherty Collection, Columbia University, New York.

Letter from Father Lombardini to Robert Flaherty, 12 June 1935; Telegram from David Flaherty to Mohanram Tadasa, 20 June 1935; Box 35, Flaherty Collection, Columbia University, New York. 49

Rao, alerted Flaherty of the problems on the border of the Coorg Forest where wild elephants

76

interfered with farmers’ agricultural efforts. Periyapatna hoped Flaherty would use his status as a filmmaker to publicize the plight. The British government required a 166-rupee tax from each farmer, which indicated to Rao that “The Government care [sic] more for the elephants than the lives of the villagers and the properties. They had better ask the villagers to vacate the bordering villages paying them handsome compensation. In fact, poor villagers are doing so without any sort of remuneration from the government.50 Other pleas from villagers included using The Elephant Boy’s proceeds to increase sanitation levels around pilgrimage sites and create educational opportunities for children in villages where elephants lived nearby.51 Although there is no mention of colonial resistance or nationalist activities in these pleas, Flaherty must have been attuned to the government’s neglect of these village communities. Replies from Flaherty to these letters are not included in his records. By the time Flaherty and his team returned to the Chittaranjan Mahal after testing dozens of young boys across the state, they had already been in India for three months. In early July, a few days after settling into their camp, a stream of potential “elephant boys” arrived on the premises. David brought a little boy from the Malabar coast who Frances claimed wasn’t a “real” mahout boy. The three others she described “were adorable youngsters, but every one of them was too thin” (Elephant Dance 45-6). One boy, she claimed, was “different from the other sprightly little sprouts. He is rather pathetic, more reserved, an orphan. His mother’s family came from Assam, where the

50 Letter from S. Anthojee Rao to Robert and David Flaherty, 26 May 1935, Box 35, Flaherty Collection. Columbia University, New York.

Letter from the Representative of Melkote to Robert Flaherty, June (date unspecified) 1935, Box 35, Flaherty Collection, Columbia University, New York. 51

people are part Mongolian” (46). The little boy she described was Selar Shaikh who would be

77

renamed Sabu just weeks after his “discovery.” 52 In a letter that reads like an adventurer’s travelogue across the rugged country of India, Flaherty shares the details of their hunt for the “genuine” boy with John Myers, Korda’s director of publicity, “…right under our noses, Borradaile found in the Mysore Palace Elephant Stables a likely boy … who was moreover a bonafide [sic] elephant boy, the son of one of the palace mahouts.” However enthusiastic he seemed in his description to London Film’s publicity department, Borradaile claims that Flaherty was initially “not enthusiastic about the boy. He admired his strong little body but had hoped for a face with finer features.”53 Borradaile, on the other hand, was confident that he had found their “Little Toomai.” In his autobiography, Borradaile describes his first sight of Sabu. On seeing Sabu’s fine physique and grace of movement, I asked Yalavatti, my interpreter, to bring the boy over so that I could talk with him. When Sabu came up to me, we saluted each other with a salaam. His alert eyes, ready smile, strong body, and forthright manner made him a most attractive youngster. He told me his father had been a mahout who had died in the service to the Maharaja, and that he had come to the stables to collect his father’s pension in the form of food for the family. When I asked if he would like to work for me, he almost exploded with excitement Ella Shohat argues that the “power of creation” is inextricably related to the “power of naming.” The “discoverer,” for instance, marks “his” territory by claiming the land with a new name. Natives of these “virgin” territories were often stripped of their indigenous titles to accommodate more “pronounceable” names that would suit the explorers or colonists. In a letter to London Film’s publicity director, John Myers, Flaherty claims that Sabu identified himself as Sabu, yet many details in that document, likely written to the publicity department with the knowledge it would be made public, contradict Borradaile’s accounts of the boy’s discovery. Marilyn Sabu, as mentioned above, attests that Korda was the one who changed his name from Selar Shaikh to Sabu. See Shohat, 669-696. 52

53

London.

Sabu The Elephant Boy. Documentary Film. Dir. Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington,

78 and pleasure. It only remained for me to convince Bob Flaherty that I had found the elephant boy at last. Anticipating the importance of their encounter, I gave Sabu a few rupees and told him to throw away the rags he was wearing, buy a new dhoti, have a bath and report to me at the hotel in the morning. (74) Attired in his “jungle costume – which was nothing more than a scant breech-cloth around his middle and the inevitable turban on his head,” the eleven-year-old underwent a series of what Flaherty called “tests” to prove his “authenticity” for the role.54 Frances Flaherty recalls that when the production team tried to wrap his turban and dhoti, the little boy, “took charge of the matter and told us what he wanted” (Elephant Dance 50; emphasis in the original), suggesting here that Sabu aimed for modicums of control over his representations. In addition to acclimating the team to filming in the jungle, Flaherty’s expedition took the boy to Kakankote for his first “test” not too far from where Sabu was born. The monsoon season had just begun, and the Kabini River -- a tributary of the Kaveri, one of the largest rivers in South India -- was swollen and rising. Flaherty was “curious to know whether the elephants would be willing to tackle such a current … and asked the mahouts if they would care to try it, offering a most attractive reward.”55 Naturally, the elephants, by Flaherty and Frances’ accounts, were unwilling to enter the fast-moving waters (Elephant Dance 60). Lakshmi Prasad, one of the Maharaja’s favorite elephants and almost as big as Iravatha, was also being auditioned for the role of Kala Nag. With some prodding from the Jemadar (chief mahout) whom Flaherty coerced, the elephant allowed a rope around her neck before she reluctantly entered the river.

Letter from Robert Flaherty to John B. Myers, Director of Publicity, London Film Productions, Ltd. 7 August 1935, Box 35, Flaherty Collection, Columbia University, New York. 54

55

Ibid.

79 According to Borradaile’s version of the story, the Jemadar, “an old friend of Sabu’s father … invited Sabu to cross the river with him on the back of Lakshmi” (75). In Flaherty’s travelogue to Myers, he claims it was “Sabu [who] had the bright idea that he would like to go along too… and that he realised, boy though he was, that here was his great opportunity.”56 In Flaherty, Frances and Borradaile’s telling of this formative moment in Sabu’s ascent to fame, the river almost swallowed the little boy, the Jemadar and Lakshmi, with all three of them appearing “no more than a bobbing cork.”57 Flaherty and his crew were all in a panic, “I hadn’t realised what I asked them to do.” 58 Carried down the river almost a mile, the elephant swam upstream to safety as the boy and the Jemadar clutched anxiously to her for “dear life” (Elephant Dance 61). When they finally made it to shore, Flaherty exclaimed, with his nerves clearly shaken, “That settles it. Sabu will be the elephant boy!” (Borradaile 75). Having passed Flaherty’s “rite of passage” -- a “test” of authenticity that contoured his image with a sturdy, lasting, athletic masculinity – the eleven-year-old rapidly ascended to international celebrity. Once Flaherty decided to cast the boy as Kipling’s Toomai, Korda’s starmaking machine went to work announcing that a “real” son of a mahout would play The Elephant Boy. Indeed, in July of 1935, a star had been born. Anticipation around who Flaherty and Korda’s Indian film star would be shifted to who the boy actually was and what he might become.

56

Ibid.

57

Ibid.

58

Ibid.

Manufacturing Sabu

80

Headlines across the world announced that Flaherty had finally found his elephant boy after a three-month search. The press’ descriptions of Sabu’s “discovery” echoed Flaherty’s August 1935 travelogue, which Korda’s director of publicity circulated through the entertainment media. While still in India, Sabu’s star story stayed consistent from one article to the next playing up his mahout origins, highlighting his courage to pass Flaherty’s “test” and, of course, establishing his natural élan with elephants, a connection sustained through his life. In October of 1935, Glasgow’s Bulletin wrote, “The task of finding a suitable elephant ‘boy’ proved much harder than finding the ideal elephant … Then one day Osmond Borradaile brought in a pathetic little orphan boy called Sabu.”59 The Daily Telegraph of London also mentioned the effort it took to find the brave boy whose “father was one of the Maharaja’s mahouts…Sabu’s courage, at all events is not in question.” 60 The chronology generally led to a description of Sabu’s audition on the Kaveri River as published by Calcutta’s Statesman, “Sabu…was terribly shy at first but soon showed his mettle when Mr. Flaherty wanted to see an elephant swim a river in a flood…Sabu went with it, clinging to a hand-rope for dear life as beast, man and boy were swept a mile down-stream before the elephant touched bottom.”61 Most biographies explaining Sabu’s discovery during the second half of 1935 unfolded in a comparable vein. Reiterations of this story ensued as Korda attempted to contact Flaherty through the spring of 1936. Anxious to complete the film and concerned that Flaherty’s budget exceeded his initial investment day by day, Korda set up two more production units in addition to the expedition

59

“Elephant Star for British Film,” Bulletin (Glasgow) 12 Oct 1935.

60

“Elephant Boy as Film Star: To Take Name Part in Kipling Story,” The Daily Telegraph 8 October

61

“Elephant Boy: Famous Kipling Story Being Filmed,” The Statesman (Calcutta) 24 December 1935.

1935.

81 already there -- one in India with his brother Zoltan Korda to ensure Flaherty followed a script, and another in London to shoot interior shots and scenes with actors who were unable to film in India. Martin Stockham attests that practically half the staff of London Films was working in India during the Spring of 1936 (Korda 82). The longer the lapse in communication between Flaherty and Korda, the more mythological and Kiplingesque Sabu’s characterizations in the press became. For instance, London’s Referee reported that when Sabu was six years old, a wild elephant charged his family’s village, but Sabu, as fearless as he was, remained undaunted by the beasts’ presence. Instead of ransacking his home like he had to the other villagers, rather, the “elephant greeted Sabu, as he might have greeted an old friend. For a half-hour they played together in front of the house. Then the animal returned quietly to the jungle.”62 By May of 1936, when Korda had decided to bring the entire crew back to London to complete production, The Ceylon Observer claimed that because Sabu was born and raised in a jungle like Mowgli, with elephants instead of wolves, “The Indian boy star talks a language which Royal elephants can only understand.” Moreover, while Frances Flaherty’s children’s books and Flaherty’s letter to Myers framed Sabu as an orphan, Borradaile, whose family hosted Sabu for years after moving to London, claims that Sabu’s mother was alive when they made the film. “Sabu,” Borradaile argues, “was not the orphan the PR people decided he was.”63 The cameraman writes that he marched Sabu, “dragging his heels, to the post office,” each payday to send money back home to his mother in Mysore (Borradaile 85). Beyond Frances Flaherty’s beliefs that she was from Assam, few details about Sabu’s mother have been encountered.

62

“The Elephant Boy,” Referee (London) 2 Feb 1936.

Interview between Jasmine Sabu (Sabu’s daughter) and Osmond Borradaile. Date Unspecified, Gemini Pictures, Teddington London, UK. 63

82 The closer Sabu approached his departure for London in June of 1936, the closer the press drew the gap between his on and off screen personae. This approach of matching “the star’s personal life with the traits of the screen character” is an established device in the star-making system and assures audiences that the star personality performs his “reel” and “real” lives identically (Gamson 26-27). South Africa’s Cape Times, for instance, described Sabu as an “Indian boy who was born in the Karapur Jungle 45 miles from Mysore. Sabu, like Toomai has been literally brought up among the elephants.”64 The Daily Herald’s correspondent in an article entitled, “Kipling’s Jungle Boy in Person,” portrayed the twelve-year-old as the “real life Toomai of the elephants described by Kipling.”65 In his work on star culture in Hollywood cinema, Richard Schickel contends that the machinery behind studio press departments functions to protect, rather than promote, the facts behind celebrities’ fictional personae (116). Schickel writes, “press agents were extremely successful in quieting the doubts that arose from the frequent lack of correlation between a star’s skill and his or her success…columnists spent more time covering up dubious behavior than they did exposing it” (111). Emile Lucas, a senior publicist at United Artists in Hollywood, disseminated a press release in January of 1937 entitled, “Sabu of the Elephants: The Romantic life story of a little Indian boy who came from the jungle to – FAME!!”66 Created for the company’s international distribution of the film, the narrative illustrates Sabu’s birth and upbringing among elephants in the Karapur jungle, his “authentic” mahout ancestry like Toomai’s, his ability to “speak to the elephants in a language quite foreign to us,” the loss of his father and mother at an early age, surviving “as an

64

Cape Times, Capetown. 25 March 1936.

65

“Kipling’s Jungle Boy in Person. Daily Herald (London) 8 Mar 1936.

66

Press Release, United Artists, Jan. 1937. Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK.

orphan off a few rupees each month,” auditioning for Flaherty in colonial India, and sailing to the

83

metropole where he met Alexander Korda for the first time when a “hero worship sprang within Sabu that has become very important in his life.”67 The United Artists’ statement also includes Sabu’s eagerness “to return to England with the white sahibs over the sons to the land of the KingEmperor.” Thrilled by the sight of “hedges…smooth black roads…railway stations bigger than a village…red buses…towering buildings and multitudes of hurrying bustling, white sahibs,” the Indian boy ostensibly balanced his time between playing with his mongoose “Rikki,” his elephant Iravatha, attending boarding school, playing football and roller skating down Marylebone Lane.68 The teleological underpinnings that frame the beginnings of Sabu’s persona expose the West’s transformative civilizing function wherein a peripheral subaltern other acquiesces and benefits from the acculturation of the Empire’s center. What is telling about this press release, and the publicity that followed him in the years after The Elephant Boy, is the convergence of imperial, ethnographic and cosmopolitan discourses projected onto Sabu’s young boyish body. As a “primitive” orphan child, his manufactured image not only represents innocence, vulnerability and a “salvageable” past. His persona also points to the future manhood of the “imperial boy,” a figure that bridges encounters between the colonizer and the colonized, often fulfilling and glorifying a male British subject’s destiny to serve the Crown (Randall). While The Elephant Boy could only tell its story by eliding the nationalist realities of India’s anti-colonial climate, Sabu’s success as an imperial boy could only be realized by denying the nation’s tensions that risked interrupting his appeal. Written into Sabu’s contract with London Films was the requirement he had to wear his turban in

67

Ibid.

68

Ibid.

84 public at all times unless the studio deemed otherwise.69 What else was written into Sabu’s contract? Though he was barely a teenager when he arrived in London as a twelve-year-old in 1936, he most likely knew of India’s “Quit India” movement especially since Gandhi visited Mysore while he lived there. Was Sabu allowed to comment on India’s political situation? Did Sabu’s contract with Korda through 1942 demand that he withhold his political views? If Sabu experienced bigotry, was he ever allowed to voice the bias? Heretofore, I have not encountered any evidence that Sabu dissented from Britain’s rule over India. On the other hand, I have no proof that he supported it either. However, any allusion to India’s fight for sovereignty, especially by Sabu, would not only have impeded the imperial and timeless ideals that Korda and Flaherty garnered for the film. His fake authenticity would have also dismantled his metonymic function of fictionalizing India’s unquestioning support of Crown rule. *

*

*

The “discovery” of Sabu is a crystallizing moment that exposes the enduring relationship between popular culture, anthropology, imperialism and cinema. The eleven-year-old actor’s performance in Robert Flaherty and Alexander Korda’s 1936 production of The Elephant Boy not only reveals a competing/comparable set of desires that resulted in an imperial/ethnographic narrative film, but also points to the projection of those desires onto the body of a prepubescent, colonized Indian child. Portraying a boy of the Empire, Sabu’s performances of colonial masculinity signify a potential site of civilization’s progress – as a “crucial figure upon whom the production of new civil and symbolic codes depends” (Randall 25). Sabu’s “rags to riches” story provides a

Interview with Joy Mayes, the daughter of Sabu’s headmaster at his boarding school in Beaconsfied, England. 1992. Courtesy of Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK. 69

85 sensational star narrative that maps his progress from the East to the West, from low-caste to highclass, and from the charge of Maharaja Wodeyar to the custody of Korda, the Emperor of British Cinema. Headlines ranged from “Jungle Boy’s Romance: From Loin-cloth to Luxury Flat” to “Elephant Boy Film Star Likes London: But he wants to ride his “charger” in the street.”70 Sabu’s cultural hybridity grew increasingly complex; the cosmopolitanism he began to perform offscreen, albeit as a star text, augmented and accumulated qualities of Anglicized manners, Kiplingesque masculinities, colonial subjecthood, upper class Indian-ness, and movie star celebrity. Indeed, as an intermediary between the East and West, man and beast, and the colony and the metropole, the liminality of his persona heightened over time. Moreover, because Sabu hailed from humble origins, he arguably embodied Indian hopes of turning the world’s attention to a cultured and struggling civilization fighting for freedom. Yet, these liberal aims for nationalist advancement were contradicted by narrative myths of India’s timelessness and the misleading strength of the British Empire. For Korda, The Elephant Boy would reinforce, however erroneously, the permanence and moral resolve of the colonial project. For Flaherty, the jungle’s beasts and its keepers would encapsulate India’s abiding eternity. In the end, as much as their visions differed, their competing aims bolstered British patriotism, and Flaherty’s ethnographic “realism” served to extend Korda’s imperialistic attitudes (Barsam 79-80). Caught “betwixt and between” Flaherty’s romanticizing lens and Korda’s nation-building framework, Sabu’s “discovery” resulted from an expeditionary quest for “native” authenticity. By April of 1937 when United Artists had distributed The Elephant Boy across India, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, North America, Kenya, and South Africa, Sabu was living the movie star

“Jungle Boy’s Romance: From Loin-cloth to Luxury Flat” People Magazine (London) 29 November 1936; “Elephant Boy Film Star Likes London: But he wants to ride his “charger” in the street,” Evening Standard (London) 7 July 1936. 70

life, albeit as a child star enrolled in an English Boarding School. Korda insured the boy’s life for

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£50,000 and hired writers to create more movies that featured him in a starring role (Flaherty, Elephant Dance 136). These films, which I discuss at length in the fourth and fifth chapters of this project, include The Drum (1938), Thief of Bagdad (1940) and The Jungle Books (1942). Meanwhile, as Sabu acclimated to life in London’s West End and studied in a Beaconsfield boarding school on the English countryside, Sabu could be seen on the job in Korda’s Uxbridge studios “dressed in a European pullover, sports shirt and wrist watch” and “scuttling all over the place in a scooter car.” “Almost the same, but not quite,” like an English boy in his mannerisms, diction, style of dress and sport (rugby, football and cricket), Sabu began to assimilate into the foreign culture he found himself in (Bhabha). In the spring of 1940, as a sixteen year-old-boy, Sabu would leave for America just months after Britain joined World War II. Due to the war outbreak, Korda was forced to stop filming Thief of Bagdad, an Arabian Nights feature with Sabu as its titular lead. The entire production moved to Hollywood, and scenes planned with the Atlas Range as its backdrop shifted to using the Grand Canyon’s terrain. Sabu stayed on after British members of the crew returned home, and there, he began self-fashioning a sense of Indian-American-ness. He bought a ranch, he raced American sports cars, and he even tried to join the Masons. Moreover, as his family recollects, Sabu ardently identified himself as American. His daughter, Jasmine, remembers “He was American and he wanted to raise us as American … He didn’t talk about his past. I don’t think he lived in the past very much.”71 Attesting that she did not “know of anyone that was more American than Sabu,”

Interview with Sabu’s daughter, Jasmine Sabu for the documentary, Sabu the Elephant Boy. Courtesy, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK. 71

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Fig. 5. Sabu the Elephant Boy as a Military Man during WWII, 1944. Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures. Teddington, London, UK.

Marilyn said that after they visited India the first time after Sabu left in 1936, he told her, “You know, this is my home, but it’s not my home. America’s my home.”72 In 1943, Sabu joined the army and became a citizen. Indeed, his pachydermal past followed him even as much as he never spoke of those memories (see fig. 5). Because Sabu identified so strongly as an American, the next chapter locates him in a historical political economy of South Asian American masculinities. As an ambivalently discerned figure suspended between the colonizing gaze of the Empire and the cosmopolitanism of Indian diasporic identity, Sabu’s liminal personae would only be further magnified in an anti-Asian American political climate where he was a citizen of nowhere, defined as ethnically ambiguous and legislated as racially inassimilable.

Interview with Marilyn Sabu for the documentary, Sabu the Elephant Boy. Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK. 72

CHAPTER THREE

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Who Gets to Be a Citizen? The Racial Ambivalence of Indians in America South Asians occupy an ambivalent place in United States racial discourse. Identified by a myriad of labels, they have been named or named themselves Asian Indian, Brownie, Caucasian, Coolie, Dark Aryan, Dark Caucasian, Dravidian, East Indian, Hindoo or Hindu, Indo-American, Indo-Aryan, Indo-Pak, Mongol, Nigger, Oriental, Paki and Subcontinental (Kabria 72; Shankar 49; Takaki 296). Added to this complex of racial, national and religious terms are white, non-white, brown and Desi.73 Referencing the liminality of ethnic labels, with particular regard to the competing class distinctions between “Asian” in America and “Asian” in Britain, Gayatri Spivak asserts, “Presumed cultural identity often depends on a name” (Outside 54). When Sabu arrived in Hollywood to complete filming Alexander Korda’s international production of Thief of Bagdad (1940),74 the US State Department named him a member of the “Hindoo” race. Ironically, like many other South Asians living in the US, Sabu, at the time of his 1940 US arrival, was Muslim. Yet, according to the 1930 US Census, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Muslims and Christians from the subcontinent were all classified as “Hindoo.” Indeed a misnomer for ethnicity that suggests an institutional conflation of geography with faith, the “Hindoo” label endured from 1930 until 1950. Prior to 1930, the government would have grouped Sabu with other Caucasians even after the 1923 The United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind court case ruled Indians as “non-white.” Attesting to the

Derived from the Hindi word Desh, or nation, place or geography, Desi describes a person from the Indian subcontinent who is Bangladeshi, Indian, Pakistani or Sri Lankan. A colloquial term espoused by North American South Asians, Desi is rarely employed in other areas of the South Asian diaspora. For instance, “Asian” generally applies to persons of South Asian descent after “British Black” was averted for more specific ethnic identifications. In South Africa, where one of the largest Indian populations resides outside of India, Indians often call themselves Indian South Africans. For further descriptions of the term, see Shankar and Srikanth. 73

74

New York Times, 14 April 1940, 29

89 elusive nature of racializing South Asians in the United States, in 1950 the US Census restored South Asians to the status of “white.” Despite the trauma of India’s 1947 partition into Pakistan and years of nationalist unrest leading to the 1971 creation of Bangladesh, the US Census in 1960 and 1970 classified all South Asian immigrants (in lieu of their national origins) as “Other” (Lee, Sharon 78).75 Sabu’s embodiment of “Otherness” -- categorized, differentiated and managed by the United States government as an equivocal racial entity -- is particularly relevant to my reading of his liminal depictions of race, nation and gender. As I argue in the previous chapter, when Sabu left India to finish shooting The Elephant Boy in London, his producers ultimately rendered him a cosmopolitan, hybrid subject negotiating the in-between status of multiple geographies, nations, languages and cultural practices. In this chapter, I argue that the historically ambivalent racial status of South Asians in the United States constitutes, interpellates and frames Sabu’s portrayals of Indian-ness in popular Hollywood cinema. Compounding the uncertainty of the actor’s racial classification is the sustained emasculation of Asian men. Like most Asian men during the first half of the twentieth century, Indian men came to America without wives or families and resorted to living in homosocial “bachelor communities.”76 At the same time, they performed hypermasculine labor as railroaders,

75 Although the 1970 Census first identified Asians Indians as “Other,” the report then reclassified them as white, returning to the 1950 definition. By the 1980 US Census, however, Indians fell under the category of Asian Indian. In the 1990 Census, Asian or Pacific Islander (API) became a distinct category in which respondents “checked off” a specific ethnic heritage, i.e., Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Asian Indian, Pakistani, etc. By the 2000 US Census, Asian Americans comprised 4.2% of the population at 11.9 million people. With 1.9 million residents, Asian Indians make up the third largest Asian American subgroup behind the Chinese at 2.7 million and Filipinos at 2.4 million. See Barnes and Bennett. 76 Arguably, the absence of women, i.e. wives, hindered heteronormative perceptions of Asian American men and contributed to their feminization. In addition to surviving the targeted and ethnic disavowal that the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act enforced, the Chinese particularly suffered a gendered rejection of Chinese women. Designed to impede the growth of Chinese prostitution rings, the Page Law of 1875 rigidly barred Chinese women from coming to the US, whether prostitutes or not, and in effect, blocked the development of Chinese families and the formation of subsequent generations. In response to the shortage of Chinese men and women and the subsequent demand for alternative forms of cheap labor, US industries solicited Japanese male workers who migrated in large numbers during the 1890s. Almost twenty

lumbermen and farm workers. David Eng reminds us that, “Conceptions of Asian American

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masculinity are historically and psychically bound by the particularities of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexuality, gender, class, and age… Sexual and racial difference are legible – indeed they are derived – in relation to one another” (4-5). As colonial subjects whose home country did not attain independence until 1947, their nationality, or lack thereof, further complicated their masculinities. Subjects of the commonwealth possessed lesser privileges of mobility, democracy and security than citizen-subjects of England. To attain citizenship in the United States was to pursue sovereignty, a privilege of self-rule they could not enjoy back home. And because US legislation reserved citizenship for “free white persons” as the first waves of Asian Americans arrived, one of the primary ways Indian men pursued liberty was by claiming they were indeed Caucasian and Aryan, and thus entitled to becoming American, male and white. From the moment that Indian laborers reached California’s shores on the cusp of the twentieth century, interpretations of their race, gender, nationality, religion, caste and class troubled the boundaries of citizenship as mostly a white male domain. Consequently, the US legislature and local courts sought to define the limits of assimilability in relation to the Indian foreigner. The history of Indians’ struggle towards US citizenship, then, betrays the shifting and equally ambivalent definitions of whiteness during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Orientalist ideologies of race that they otherwise might have left behind followed them to the nation’s courts. In an effort to “prove” their Aryan heritage, Caucasian roots and “whiteness,” I argue that Indians’ years later, the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1908 allowed the entry of Japanese wives and children under the condition that additional Japanese laborers would be banned. Korean wives often came to the United States with their husbands during the first decade of the twentieth century. Indian men, on the other hand, almost always arrived alone. The ongoing threat of exclusion made it difficult for Indian men to go home for their wives, not knowing if they would be able to re-enter US borders when they returned. Many Punjabi Sikhs married Mexican women in California’s Imperial Valley after discovering commonalities in their values and work ethics. Consequently, they were able to establish communities, gain citizenship, and escape the perils of colonialism back home. For an historical ethnography on the marital ties between Punjabi men and Mexican women of California’s Imperial Valley, see Leonard.

reliance on ethnology, caste theory and linguistics not only points to an internalization of colonial

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knowledge derived from the study of their bodies and speech, but also expresses a tactical employment of imperial authority to demonstrate their eligibility for citizenship. At times they were successful; many times they were not. As I will show, early definitions of Indian-ness in America emerged at the junction of colonialism, ethnological discourse and legislative processes of managing whiteness. Borrowing from Gayatri Gopinath’s reworking of Paul Gilroy’s theory, the “Brown Atlantic” framework of this chapter places the formation of South Asian diasporic subjectivity at the intersection of British colonialism, Euro-American Orientalism, and anti-Asian US governance (70). By using this framework, I hope to demonstrate that the management and legislation of Indian men’s identities at the axes of race, gender and imperialism shaped and contoured Sabu’s performances on the Hollywood screen. His depictions of jungle boys, babus and camp orientals, which are discussed at length in the following chapters, expose the racial ambivalence, national ambiguity, and dependence on British colonial modes of representing Indian masculinity when there was a dearth of subcontinentals (and an absence of Indian women) in the US. When Sabu arrived in 1940, less than 2400 Indians lived across the nation. Approximately 5600 Indians returned to the subcontinent between 1917 when the Asiatic Barred Zone was enacted, and 1946, the year the Luce-Celler Act repealed the 1917 “barred” law (Visweswaran 15). The following discussion responds to David Palumbo-Liu’s poignant query, “How do we account for those Asians already in the United States” during a period of severe anti-Asian immigration policy that sent tens of thousands of Asians back to their originating nations? (18) The “foundational” moments in South Asian American discourse that bookend this era of exclusion (1917-1946) are most often described as the “older” or “early” Indian diaspora of the early twentieth century and the “newer” or “recent” South Asian diaspora that settled after the historic 1965 Naturalization and

Immigration Act eliminated race, religion and nationality as criteria for entry and citizenship

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(Gopinath; Mishra; Prashad; Shukla). In the pages below, I argue that neither the “old” nor “new” periodizations addresses the subject formation of those “Hindoos” left behind. Rather, they mutually inform and obscure Sabu’s position in United States racial history. Suspended between these diasporas, the actor’s ambivalent place in Asian American history is informed by aspects of both periods while complicating the construction of the “old” and “new” narratives. Placing Sabu between the “old” and “new” diasporas, then, exposes a discursive rupture in South Asian American history, a rupture that the circumstances of Asian exclusion have effectively enabled. The actor’s presence in 1930s and 40s popular culture stimulates possibilities for performance to unpack the ensuing gaps in histories of diasporic subject formation. As an “authentic” Oriental, his onscreen performances conjure a representational excess haunted by an embodied genealogy of imperial narratives and colonial stereotypes circulating across South Asia, Britain and America (Lee, Josephine 90).77 Although Vijay Prashad’s incisive work critiques and constructs a rich genealogy of Indian representations in US media, literature and New Age philosophy as byproducts of American political economy, an examination of the relationship between an absence of Indians and popular performances of Indian-ness in the US during an era of anti-Asian exclusion remains largely unaddressed, as is the case with most South Asian Americanist scholarship. Even with a scarcity of Indians living in the country, Indians were clearly present in America’s racial imaginary. Priya Srinivasan’s provocative essay, “The Bodies Beneath the Smoke or

77 Josephine Lee writes, “When the body of the actor is marked as ‘authentically Asian’ – when an Asian stereotype is played by an Asian actor – the performance of the stereotypes can become noticeably extravagant and hyperbolic” (30). These stereotypical portrayals are inescapably attached to re-performed versions of racialized Oriental identities. Lee continues, “the performative language he or she has recourse to is haunted by stereotypes, and this performative language is not only verbal but has to do with the language of the body as well” (90).

What’s Beneath the Cigarette Poster,” engages the embodiment of Indian dance practices on the

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white American bourgeois body of the modern dance “pioneer,” Ruth St. Denis. While Srinivasan draws a relationship between St. Denis’ aesthetic control of Oriental representations when very few Indians, especially women, lived in the country during the first two decades of the twentieth century, the timeframe of Srinivasan’s analysis coincides with the era of the “old” diaspora, and thus precedes the “foundational” gap between “old” and “new” South Asian American migrant histories. The Indian men who performed in St. Denis’ troupe from 1906 through 1911 were indeed men of the “older” era of Indian diasporic subject formation. By 1914, these male performers no longer appeared in St. Denis’ recitals (Srinivasan 31-32). Though Srinivasan incisively exposes the presence of Indian dancers’ “kinesthetic legacies” in the development of modern American dance practices, legacies that ensued from the early twentieth century into present movement forms, the majority of these white dance practitioners mobilized Orientalist representations of Indian-ness on white EuroAmerican bodies (8). Sabu’s authentic Indian body, on the other hand, performed and relayed Indian-ness, albeit Orientalist versions of Indian-ness, to white audiences during the late 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Moreover, while the “labouring presence” of Indian male dancers onstage with St. Denis “authenticated” her depictions of India’s mysticism, tradition and religion (Srinivasan 8, 24-25), I argue that the inverse was true for Sabu. Any genuine-ness attributed to Sabu’s portrayals of the East was “de-authenticated” by the appearance of white brownfaced actors alongside most of his roles. This gap in representation between Sabu and the white players surrounding him perhaps provided film viewers a chance to question the boundaries of Oriental impersonations in light of the arbitrary judgment of Asiatics “barred” in 1917 from the nation’s borders by a zone of geographies specified as Asian.

Peter Feng deftly notes that the study of Asian American performance and cinema

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requires a methodology that explores the many lacunae constituting Asian American identity, for these gaps include the gaps of history (the absence of narratives that would connect Asian Americans to the United States), gaps in representation (the anxious repetition that permits splitting results from an awareness that dominant discourse does not correspond to reality), gaps between essentialist and constructivist identity formations, and finally gaps between the fields of Asian American studies and film studies. (7) In order to engage the fissures in South Asian American diasporic subject formation, wherein I situate Sabu, the histories surrounding the narrative gaps must first be addressed. Revisiting the legislative events that excluded South Asians is central to reading the complexities of Sabu’s presence in American popular culture. Emasculated, primitive, excessively refined, colonized, racially ambivalent and, thus, inassimilable -- characteristics associated with Indian men of the "old" diaspora by governmental officials and journalists -- arguably correspond to the traits embodied in Sabu's incarnations of Oriental boy/manhood. The history offered below engages the circumstances of the “old” diaspora’s arrival, the anti-Asian sentiment that surrounded their presence, the organized resistance to their repression, the relationship between diplomacy and Asian immigration, and the mutually constitutive differences between Indians and other workers in the US. Significant attention is given to the legislation of whiteness against the ambivalently racialized Indian male body. The courts successive attempts to categorize “white” were a direct response to maintaining Indians as foreign and alien.

The “techno-mediated,”78 white collared and professional aspect of the “newer” wave

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certainly contrasts with Sabu’s more primal, queer and colonial portrayals. Although Sabu died in December of 1963, shortly before the post-1965 “new” diaspora began to arrive, the actor’s economic success heralded the coming of an industrialized bourgeoisie and signifies some of the more mythologized aspects of attaining the “American Dream.” The contradictions of his racially contingent celebrity, class privilege and sustained foreignness are analogous to the model minority paradox that defines Indian Americans as paragons of hard work and success, yet relegates them to the political and cultural margins of society. By narrating the “foundational” moments of South Asian diasporic subject formation, my intention is not to perpetuate a discursive dichotomy between the “old” and new.” Rather, by reading Sabu’s body at the interstices of the “old” and “new” diasporas, I hope to subvert the current “intoxication of the Indian community’s own success” (Bhattacharya 33), resist our internalization of model minority mythologies, and exhume the loss of historical memory that often conceals racial subordination in the face of class mobility, preventing the “development of alliances with other racial communities who experience similar and more virulent forms of racism” (Bhattacharya 33). Indeed, a primary task of this overall project is to privilege the figure of Sabu as a

Radhika Gajjala employs the term “techno-mediated” to describe a highly educated subaltern class of technological workers from across the developing world, particularly from the elite technology institutes of India. Pouring into the United States after 1965 as scientists and researchers, they aided the postwar infrastructural development of the military industrial complex. The continuous migration of techno-mediated professionals from across Asia into the US now anchors a digital diaspora financed largely by American corporations. More recently, techno-mediated workers need not leave their home countries, as is the case with the growing number of American call centers across India for instance. In the aftermath of the economic boom of the 1990s, however, an increased demand for English-speaking, technologically trained workers in the US ensues. Gajjala argues that the gender of these highly skilled workers emerges at the crosssection of virtual and physical transnational corporate spaces. Workers often arrive on temporary worker H1B visas that send them back home after their contract finishes. Though many female professionals migrate to many “Silicon Valleys” across the US, the climate of these techno-mediated spaces is largely male. See Gajjala, 2003. 78

96 citational terrain in order to unearth a genealogy of colonialist, orientalist and materialist trajectories of Indian-ness in America that inform the historical and cultural constructions of their subject formations at the axes of race, class, ethnicity and governance. What did becoming Indian American mean when a paucity of Indians resided in the United States? How did their histories of racialization differ from and converge with other Asian Americans? In light of Asian exclusion and the “present absence” of South Asians in the country, what contributed to his popularity in United States cinema culture? If Sabu’s performances expose the ambivalence of South Asians in the US racial imaginary, how did citations of British imperial modes of representation clarify visions of Indian-ness in the American popular imaginary? Finally, how was Sabu received in light of India’s pressing anticolonial movement that reached its peak during the late 1930s and 40s when the actor was at the height of his celebrity? Shaped at the crossroads of colonial knowledge, Indian migration and antiAsian legislation, Sabu’s performances in film and popular culture betray the reciprocal forces that shape South Asian American subject formation at local and global levels.

The Limits Of Periodization Periodization is helpful to the historian and reader as it organizes blocks of time with characteristics distinctive to each era (Okihiro, Columbia Guide 35). When historians write history, they locate their narratives within specific time frames that build upon standardized chronologies. What results in the process of establishing chronologies is the repeated legitimatization of knowledge as it applies to groups and individuals, often, through a teleology that connotes progress and evolution (Foucault). Recent contributions to diaspora theory, however, configure histories of migration as non-linear histories of nations that are positioned relationally across time and space (Appadurai 15; Bahri 40; Hall 244). Sandhya Shukla suggests that “A central quality of diasporic Indianness [. . .] is its discursive arrangement in transnational space, ordered not by a line from one point to another, but

by a circularity of movements” (28). Multiethnic nationalisms, multiple sites of exile and the

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resultant reinventions of home destabilize any attempt to measure Indian-ness by one history or timeline. Thus, due to the densely constituted identities that Indian-ness entails, Indian subject formation must be read through a variety of locations provided by stories of the past and present. Theorizing Sabu’s identity, therefore, demands an engagement with his trajectory from South India to Southwest London and onwards to Hollywood; a recognition of his conversion from Islam to the Baptist faith, from a country with a Hindu majority to one with a Christian majority; an acknowledgement of the relationship between the Hindu kingdom of Mysore where Sabu was born and the colonial regime against which upper-caste nationalists fought; and, finally, an incorporation of his presence into broader ontologies of what it means to become Indian in America. Further, situating Sabu’s migrant subjectivity between “older” and “newer” South Asian American periodizations engages what Paul Gilroy calls the “changing same,” in which diasporic performances of blackness, or in Sabu’s case Indian-ness, not only cite what has come before, but also express new subjectivities triggered by precipitous shifts in modern society (101). Because diasporic identities have multiple histories and always “come from somewhere,” Stuart Hall implores critics of cultural production to unpack the regimes of representation that have historically shaped how we come to know and see ourselves as the “Other.” One strategy, Hall offers, is by exposing the “cultural power,” “normalization” and “production” of cultural identity through specific moments in history that perpetuate dominant depictions of colonized and marginalized people (706). “Cultural identity [. . .] is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being,’ ” Hall explains, “identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past [and] like everything historical, they undergo constant transformations” (706). Reducing Sabu’s performances to a gallery of static caricatures would neglect the shifting imperial authority and contingent political anxiety of managing racial identity when America’s legislative,

judicial and executive branches of government sustained the exclusion of Asians. Hence, locating

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Sabu between the “established” narratives of the “older” and “newer” diasporas corresponds to the transformative nature of South Asian American “racial formation” throughout key moments in British colonial and Asian American history.79 Unpacking the racialization of Sabu and other Indians who lived in the US between the “older” and “newer” South Asian diasporas heeds Kamala Viswesaran’s warning that immigration history risks being read in a “presentist” frame, obviating resistant analyses of diasporic subject formation and perpetuating perceptions of South Asian immigrants as “newer” Asian Americans. In “Diaspora by Design: Flexible Citizenship and South Asians in Racial Formations,” she writes, “Groups like ‘Asian Indians’ may be designated as ‘new immigrants,’ thereby obscuring older histories of residence and racialization [. . .] ‘newness’ in the immigration paradigm may be less an artifact of recent entry than a potent political construct” (6). At times called less “established” than other Asian communities including Chinese, Japanese and Filipino populaces (Palumbo-Liu 6), “newer” Asian Indian immigrant groups of the “post-1965” era are interpellated, and interpellate themselves, differently from Indians of the “older” diaspora. The separation between the “older” and “newer” groups suggests not only a differentiation in ethnicity, class and religion but also points to distinct nationalist identities assigned by the temporalities of colonization, decolonization and India’s 1947 partition from Pakistan and the subsequent 1971 creation of Bangladesh.

79 This project is particularly indebted to Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s critical work on the historical development and conceptualization of race in United States social and political discourse. Approaching race as a process offers resistant strategies that strip racial stereotypes of their fixed, essentialist and illusive qualities, and in effect, reveals the historical and political contexts of their formations. While Omi and Winant’s period of focus follows Sabu’s arrival to the US, their discussion of the role of the state and sociocultural institutions lends a crucial theoretical structure for locating Sabu’s ambivalently construed performances as historically specific phenomena. See Omi and Winant..

A large majority of Asian American literature on South Asians is devoted to the post-1965

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era, yet several helpful works outline the legacies of the “older” diaspora (Chandrasekhar; Daniels; Hess; Leonard; Jackson; Jensen; Takaki). Due to the limited archival materials available, an even scarcer amount of scholarship exists on America’s first Indians who arrived centuries before the “older diaspora” landed on the West coast. During the 1700s, lascars, or Indian sailors, worked on British transport ships, disembarked onto Boston’s ports, settled temporarily in and around Salem, Massachusetts, married African American women and disappeared from the historical record altogether (Prashad 71; Jensen 13). The migration of these men – there is currently no evidence that Indian women accompanied these seamen to the US – was of larger consequence in Britain where they arrived with other women serving families as valets, as ayahs (Indian nannies) and as domestic servants (Jensen 40; Visram 29-30). Many of them stayed, and their legacies factored into definitions of the “British Black,” stirring anxieties of how to handle racial difference in the metropole as opposed to “natives” negotiating the presence of white foreign rulers on their indigenous land. As discrete as the migration of lascars and the early twentieth century movement of Indians to the US may seem, these histories meet at the market forces of colonial trade. Both sets of Indians ventured towards the imperial demand for labor and facilitated the mercantile valuation of goods and bodies. Indeed, the effects of British colonialism structured the formation of their identities on both sides of the Atlantic and across generations. Descended from these diasporas, Sabu’s migration across the Brown Atlantic proceeded from a film economy that traded in the currency and commodities of imperial representations. Hollywood’s burgeoning empire and Korda’s brand of Kipling-inspired filmmaking fueled the demand for colonial narratives that Sabu’s characters sold.

The “Old” Diaspora

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While the British East India Company recruited workers across Assam, Gujarat and Bengal (Visram 24), the fin de siècle migration of Indians to the US consisted mostly of men who were Punjabi and Sikh.80 The remaining twenty percent of this initial population was from Gujurat and either Muslim or Hindu (Takaki 203). Described as a “tide of turbans” (qtd. in Takaki 295) by one Californian journalist, the men began migrating in 1899 from India’s Northwest frontier. They found work in California, Washington and Oregon as agriculturalists, lumbermen and railroaders on the Western Pacific line of the Transcontinental Railroad and formed “bachelor communities” next to Chinese, Japanese, Greek and Irish laborers (Leonard 24; Jensen 30-31). Like the Chinese and Japanese, these Indian men were cast as racial Others and were accused of taking jobs from white workers. Yet, they endured lower wages for poorer working conditions and longer hours. In her wonderfully detailed history of Indian migration to North America, Joan Jensen argues that “Indians were good workmen who arrived from a country where living standards were lower; they thus provided a cheaper, more disciplined labor force for employers” (51). For these employers and laborers, then, race, nationhood and economics went hand in hand. The presence of Indians instigated a wave of solidarity among Euro-American laborers, particularly among Irish and Italian workers, who deemed the colonized Indians unfair competition. Indians, like the Irish, were also subjects of the Crown; British political economies conditioned the migration of both these populations (Takaki ). While Irish immigrants ultimately, albeit with difficulty, gained citizenship and residence due to their white “assimilability,” their fellow Asian workers’ suffered from a series of national and local exclusionary laws across California, the

Ronald Takaki claims that less than one percent of this early Indian American population consisted of women. He writes, “The Asian-Indian migrants were even more disproportionately male than other groups of Asian immigrants… generally they were young men, between sixteen and thirty-five years of age: many perhaps, most, were married…and had families in India. (62-63). 80

101 Pacific Northwest and Western Canada that forced thousands of them back to Asia. The outgrowth of hardening anti-Asian sentiments against Japanese and Chinese workers primed exclusionists for protesting another non-white workforce. Attracting international attention, one of the most violent incidents against the “early” Indians occurred in 1907 in the small lumber town of Bellingham, Washington near Puget Sound. Threatened with lynching, Indians were beaten, robbed and driven out of town, forcing them further south to California where they took up jobs as farmhands on small, discreet estates. Indians had been driven south before. Their migration to the northwest reaches of America was in large part due to aggressive exclusion and deportation by the Canadian government. The United States offered a potential haven from the racism they experienced in Canada, a commonwealth nation they hoped would welcome them as fellow subjects of the Crown. Unfortunately, Canadian labor forces wanted them expelled. As they traveled southward down the Pacific coast, they met with resistance again. In view of the public approval of anti-Indian violence in Bellingham, one Seattle writer vilified the turbaned Indian men as deserving of the attacks for being “dirty and gaunt and with a roll of pagan dry-goods wrapped around their heads” (qtd. in Jensen 51). The larger issue here was not their lack of sanitation or attire, but their willingness to perform backbreaking work skillfully for less pay. Employers’ demand for their labor increased and drove white employees’ wages down. Their Indian origins, sartorial appearance and staunch work ethic racialized their labor and rendered a difference of disdain. Further, publications including the popular literary magazine, the Overland Monthly, romanticized these men as “tall of stature, straight of feature, swarthy of color, and brothers of our own race” and who like “full-blooded Aryans were progenitors with us” (qtd. by Takaki 296). The British inflection in the Indians’ speech and their “Anglicized” mannerisms suggested to some American onlookers, who were “postcolonials” themselves, that the colonized Indians flaunted an

excessive refinement above other Americans (Palumbo-Liu 39). Whether primitive or overly

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civilized, the ambivalence of Indians’ racial status raised political and conceptual debates around shifting definitions of whiteness. That the Sikh, Hindu and Muslim men of India sailed to North America seeking alternatives to serving as sepoys, or Indian soldiers, indicates their proximity to the Queen’s royal army. Ostensibly, several of these early Indians either served the army themselves or were sons of army personnel and were thus attuned to a particular mode of British civility that contrasted among fellow Indian workers and from other non-Indian laborers. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the first decades of the twentieth, the colonial administration aggressively recruited men from Northwest India’s Jat caste -- a people of Sikh, Muslim and Hindu descent whose martial and agricultural history dates back to the seventeenth century -- to enlist in the British military (Leonard 29). The British particularly favored Sikh Jats whose religious orthodoxy, they believed, paid allegiance to a warrior-martyr tradition of faith, and, thus ensured loyalty to the sovereign (Jensen 8-9). Enlisting was often the only recourse for these Jat peasants in light of British administrative policies that placed small farmers and landowners in vulnerable positions. As the metropole pushed its agenda of developing capitalist agriculture across the commonwealth, the British government heavily taxed Indian farmers causing many to mortgage their land. Due to exorbitant interest rates from moneylenders at eighteen to thirty-six percent, coupled with contracts that required the sale of land if payment was not met, farmers often lost their ancestral property and resorted to enlisting their sons in the army (Takaki 63). Financial struggles, erratic weather patterns, and a famine that lasted from 1899 to 1902 (the time frame when this “first wave” arrived in the US) forced these Indian farmers to find other financial options that included working on sugar plantations in the British West Indies, Uganda, Surinam, Mauritius and Guiana as indentured servants (Mishra 421).

103 Vijay Mishra, describes this “older” diaspora as a “diaspora of exclusivism” that created selfcontained “little Indias” across the colonies. As opposed to the post-1965 “diaspora of late capital,” Mishra contends the older group was less connected to their homeland (422). While the newer group had the financial means for air travel and access to more advanced modes of telecommunication, the possibility of return for the “older” group was rare due to financial and technological restrictions. In his useful article, “The Diasporic imaginary: theorizing the Indian diaspora,” Mishra discerns the “newer” group as a “diaspora of the border” wherein their modernity is distinguished by a set of hybrid, deterritorialized experiences within the Western nation-state. The “early” wave’s sense of belonging to India, Mishra argues, “cannot be linked to a teleology of return because this belonging can only function as an imaginary index that signifies its own possibility” (432). Though the argument of conceiving “home” through a lens of hope is compelling, Mishra overlooks the “older” group’s performances of Indian nationalism, their financial contributions to the “Free India” movement back home and the growth of “imagined communities” via the distribution and receipt of newsletters, telegrams and publications during the anti-colonial era before India’s independence in 1947 (Anderson). As a result, Mishra’s oversight contradicts his “exclusivist” portrayal of the self-contained “older” group by maintaining there was little connection to their homeland beyond an imaginary domain. For these activists, the material conditions of colonialism and the homeward path towards autarky engendered a sense of local and global nationalisms within and without the borders of exile. Many of these early Indian Americans returned home of their own volition. In fact, thousands of Indian men left North America in 1914 to lead a rebellion against British indenture from across Bengal to the plains of Punjab (Prashad 187).

104 Despite the binaries perpetuated between the “newer” and “older” Indian groups, Mishra aptly notes that the beginning of the Indian diaspora, like most diasporas of formerly colonized nations, resulted from the imperial trafficking of bodies to the colonies and beyond (421). Indeed, the end of slavery produced a massive demand for labor across the commonwealth and later in the United States.81 A sovereign non-commonwealth nation, America offered an escape from indentured servitude and the stigma of colonial subjecthood in India, Britain and other imperial territories. Migrating to America began to acquire an “aura of opportunity” throughout India, as a counterpart to supporting the colonial administration (Shukla 33). Unlike other indentures working on sugar and rubber plantations across British colonies, the Indian Americans from India’s Northwest frontier frequently used their land as collateral for passage to America, arriving with financial obligations to themselves, their families and no one else. Resisting the desperation of colonization and forced loyalties to the Crown, these men strove to formulate their own identities and economic circumstances far from the Empire. Even forty years later, Sabu’s migration from England to California also signified a departure from the colonial subordination imputed to his celebrity. His widow, Marilyn, expressed that Sabu loved America and the possibilities and “dreams” it represented to him. He liked England, she said, but he thought he could “build a bigger life” in America. Because of the teen’s star power, there was also a larger salary contracted with Hollywood’s Universal Studios than with Korda’s declining London Films Production Company by the early 1940s. America also represented an escape from

81 The British Commonwealth prohibited the practice of slavery with the 1833 Act of Abolition three decades before President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The colonial government compensated for its sudden lapse of slave labor with a highly complex restructuring of indentured migration. Gandhi and the Indian National Congress opposed the colonial iniquities of indentured servitude in 1919, bringing attention to the economic duress and ill treatment that many indentured servants suffered, particularly in South Africa, where Gandhi began shaping anti-colonial strategies against foreign rule. See Peter Van der Veer.

the imperial narratives directed by Korda whom Winston Churchill (an adamant proponent of

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British rule over India) named the “Emperor of British Cinema.”82 Granted, members of the “old” diaspora did not possess the opportunities that awaited Sabu. The actor and his older half-brother, Dastagir Sheikh, came to California with the comforts of financial stability but with few chances to garner racial or ethnic kinship beyond their own fraternal bond. The male laborers of the “old” diaspora, however, established communities with like-minded migrants of similar religious, linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds who arrived within months or a few years of each other. Within a decade of settling in the US, these “early” Indians formed activist organizations that advocated for equitable processes of naturalization (Leonard 82). In addition to politicizing the Indian nationalist movement back home, they also protested Alien Land Acts that prohibited them, and particularly the Japanese, from owning California property. The objective of these Land Acts aimed to permanently consign inassimilable immigrants to a plebeian class of labor. Unwilling to settle for a life as migrant workers on property to which they had no prerogative, they advocated for shifting from farm tenancy to land ownership, establishing small credit unions in their communities and placing their farm deeds in either their American children’s or naturalized friends’ names who would often share the profits from the crops (Leonard 56-57). The most famous of these activist groups was the radical anti-imperial Ghadar Party. Formed on the eve of World War I in 1913, the “Ghadarites” or “Ghadars” included mostly Punjabis of Sikh, Muslim and Hindu persuasions (Leonard 83; Wolpert 293). Translated from the Urdu word for mutiny, revolt or rebellion, the name Ghadar invoked the watershed 1857 Sepoy Mutiny against the British.83 These Ghadarites not only protested Britain’s rule over India but also

82

Marilyn “Honey Sabu, personal interview, 8 Dec. 2002.

106 demonstrated against British imperialist interests in China. Led by the revolutionary Har Dayal and headquartered in San Francisco, their work offered educational training to local Punjabi farmers and manual laborers to learn better language skills, strengthen their business acumen and heighten awareness around their legislative rights as immigrants. Primarily, however, they organized anticolonial activities, endorsed communist ideologies and even sought overt political support and artillery from the German government, ultimately inciting the United States to prosecute them during World War I. Germany’s collaboration with Indian nationalists and opposition to Britain’s colonial reign was less about extending ongoing support to Indians during peacetime than weakening Britain’s imperial base during The Great War (Jensen 194-197; Wolpert 292-293). Consequently, the British increased surveillance on the Ghadarites with the American government’s assistance and followed them from the early 1900s through the 20s, 30s and 40s across the Commonwealth, the US, South America and Western Europe (Singh, Jane 39-40; Shukla 40). Active in India and across the Indian diaspora, the presence of the Ghadar Party highlights how the global circulation of nationalist ideologies via geographies of colonial settlements yields a “culturalism” that exposes the shared experiences of colonial and imperial oppression at home and abroad.84 Extending their critique of British colonization, the Ghadarites maneuvered their platforms to target America’s imperialist attitudes towards non-white people within its own borders. For them, the

In light of the historiographical project of subverting Britain’s rewriting of Indian history, many postcolonial Indian textbooks renamed the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny as India’s First War of Independence (Guha). Reclaiming the Mutiny as an anti-colonial Revolution, the Ghadar Press published a revised version of the 1857 Mutiny in 1913 that included patriotic songs and volumes of nationalist poetry. The pamphlets were distributed across India, the US and the colonies. See Jensen, 195. 83

84 My employment of “culturalism” borrows from Arjun Appadurai’s helpful discussion of how “dimensions of cultural difference” are often mobilized in service of transnational or national politics. He writes, “[Culturalism] is frequently associated with extraterritorial histories and memories, sometimes with refugee status or exile, and almost always with struggles for stronger recognition from existing nation-states or from various transnational bodies.” See Appadurai, 16.

racial logic embedded in the denial of US citizenship for “Orientals” bore the mark of European

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imperialist standpoints. Britain’s reconnaissance efforts attempted to contain anti-colonial activities through diplomatic agreements with countries where active members of the Indian diaspora mobilized awareness around the “Free India” movement. Colonial authorities were concerned that the emigration of Indians to the US could potentially publicize the oppressive conditions that Indians experienced in India. As a nod to US support of British imperialism, the Calcutta Board of Trade flew the US American flag next to Britain’s Union Jack when Williams Jennings Bryan, an outspoken anti-imperialist, lost the election in 1908 to William Taft (Jensen 96), a president who championed the successes of British colonialism. Taft even supported a gentleman’s agreement with Britain to restrict Indian immigration at India’s border and proposed deploying US immigration officers to Calcutta and Bombay’s ports (Jensen 142). The agreement was ultimately unenforceable due to amorphous and arbitrary criteria based on caste, literacy levels and the likelihood of certain “types” of Indians becoming public charges in the US. Taft’s immigration policies, indeed, reflected the enthusiasm of Theodore Roosevelt’s imperialist rhetoric. Just days before Taft’s inauguration, Roosevelt delivered a lecture in 1909 defending British rule over India. Declaring that the colonization of India “was the greatest feat of the kind that has been performed since the break of the Roman Empire,” Roosevelt argued that India was a colossal example in history in which men of European blood successfully administered a heavily populated region on another continent (qtd. in Johnson, Richard 266). Throughout his presidency, Roosevelt maintained that imperial control over the less evolved races at home and abroad was essential for the growth of a strong nation (Bederman 188; Jensen 18; Prashad 43). Republican Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana, an outspoken supporter of Roosevelt’s

108 “Progressive” platform, validated the President’s imperialist views. In a speech that applauded the annexation of the Philippines during Roosevelt’s election campaign in 1900, Beveridge proclaimed: The Philippines are ours forever. [. . .] We will not repudiate our opportunity in the Orient. [. . .] Territorial conquest and the domination of indigenous peoples do not go against the American grain but are in fact the fundamental principles and noblest ideals of the nation. We must remember that we are not dealing with Europeans or Americans. We are dealing with Orientals. (qtd. in Eperjesi 10) Fulfilling nineteenth century doctrines of Manifest Destiny, America began its own chapter of imperialism, domination and authority over Asia by expanding the “Far West” into the “Far East” (Okihiro, When and Where 15-6). Imperialist attitudes towards “Orientals” abroad translated to racial prejudice against “Orientals” at home. Serving American industry within the nation’s borders, those from the “Far East” living in the “Far West” experienced a kind of “internal colonialism” in which colonial models of labor exploitation, uneven distribution of resources and the arbitrary classification of ethnicity found their way to the New World (Omi and Winant 45).85 The perils of colonialism that many Indians experienced at home mirrored the discrimination they experienced in the US due to their race. With little recourse, Indians accepted exploitative wages and squalid living conditions. In California, white labor unions excluded them according to arbitrary differences in race, language, values and national origins. Moreover, employers pitted nonwhite ethnicities against each other to eschew solidarity across workers and the possibility of migrant strikes and rebellion (Hess; Leonard; Takaki).

Although Michael Omi and Howard Winant relate “internal colonialism” to the race-based 1960s and 70s nationalisms among African Americans, Chicanos, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans, their definitions of “internal colonialism” parallel the “old” diaspora’s correlation between Asian exclusion in the US and the anti-colonial movement in India. 85

The subjugating effects of colonialism back home paralleled the exploitation they

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experienced in the US. On a national level, throughout Roosevelt and Taft’s presidencies, immigration officials denied Indians entry at ports with inconsistent racial logic. In San Francisco and Seattle, custom agents judged Indians as potential beggars or polygamous “Muhammadans,” respectively (Jensen 111), by the regulations outlined in the Immigration Act of 1903 which deemed “professional beggars” and polygamists inadmissible among epileptics, prostitutes, anarchists and contract laborers who were deported within one year of entering the US (Abbott 150). The justification for barring Indians changed from port to port; no established local or federal legislation legitimized the denial of their entry. Courts had yet to decide whether “white” also included “brown.” Addressing the threat of a “Hindoo Invasion” in the US, the Immigration House Committee proposed a series of “Hindu bills” in 1913 arguing that Hindu “coolies” and Chinese “coolies” were of the same category, and thus equally deserving of exclusion. Indeed, legislative efforts towards shaping the racial parameters of “Asian” stemmed from maintaining America as “white.” Led by Denver S. Church, a Californian Republican, the House Immigration Committee contended that Chinese and Indians shared attributes of “clannishness, caste ideas, superstitions, habits of life, as well as economic conditions.” The bill was vetoed due to the unscientific basis of its argument and its possible applicability to more assimilable races including Italians and Greeks (Jensen 151-154). When the “coolie” argument failed, the health epidemics that Asians could potentially trigger became cause for worry. John Raker, a California Democrat and member of the Asian Exclusion League suggested that the Chinese, Japanese and East Indians are “racially alien to us and the question of the protection of the white race makes a study of the diseases of these people of more importance to us than even their economic or social characteristics” (qtd. in Jensen 153). Budgetary

restrictions and a general lack of systematization hindered medical clearance as an exclusionary

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measure. Measuring Indian bodies by their proclivity towards disease, polygamy or beggary proved an exigent undertaking. After several years of negotiating how to exclude Indians and extend the Chinese Exclusion laws to the burgeoning Asian population on the West coast, Congress resolved its inconclusive debates by passing the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone, which effectively “barred” all Asians (except teachers, students, artists, missionaries, merchants, civil engineers, doctors and tourists) from migrating to the United States, excluding those persons from the American protectorates of Guam and the Philippines.86 The repeal of the 1917 Act was extended first to the Chinese in 1943 and again in 1946 to Indians and Filipinos. In 1940, Sabu came to the US on an artist’s visa arranged by Alexander Korda’s film production house, London Films. His company justified Sabu’s entry by the revenue his “star power” could earn for United Artists, an American film distribution firm. Korda’s company argued that though Sabu was an Indian British subject, technically, the actor was migrating from England and not from a “barred” region.87 Substituting race with a proscribed zone of geography, the passage of the 1917 “barred” zone illustrates how the government managed the complexities involved with excluding foreigners who could possibly prove their right to stay. In 1934, two years after America granted independence to the Philippines, Filipino Americans lost their “protected” status as US subjects of an American protectorate. The revocation of citizenship and exclusion of Filipinos from the nations’ border effectively stifled the migration of all Asians into the country who arrived without a predetermined return date on their tourist, business and student visas. David Palumbo-Liu argues that the decision to grant independence to the Filipinos was “a result of great ambivalence.” America gave up the Philippines as an economic and military base, a possession that secured the growth of its imperial enterprise in the Pacific. While members of a US protectorate, Filipinos’ movement into the US was largely unfettered. With the passing of the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act, however, the government could then severely restrict the entry of a “hybrid” populace whose Indian, Asian and Spanish blood provided a completely different set of racial traits to negotiate and exclude. See Palumbo-Liu, 40. 86

87

Prudential Papers, Box 3, Gemini Pictures Film Archive, Teddington, London, UK.

111 For the early Indians Americans, their geography of origin was, of course, a geography of the Crown. As much as members of the “older” diaspora demonstrated their solvency in courts, disputed the likelihood of becoming state wards, or related their Caucasian roots to the Aryan civilizations of Harappa and Mohenjodaro (2600 B.C.E - 1700 B.C.E.), they could not escape the colonial origins that subjugated them at home and disempowered them abroad. Sabu’s colonial past followed him as well; in fact, his success relied on his performances of colonial tropes. And though his portrayals of Orientalist masculinities empowered him financially, his depictions perpetuated images of the uneven distribution of power between British colonizers and their colonized. For the early Indians in the decades before Sabu’s premieres, coming to America symbolized a relinquishment of colonial submission. However, linking Indian identity to the processes of British colonization was hardly far behind. In one specific instance, a turbaned Sikh recounted a moment in 1910 when a white man called him a colonized slave. “The ghora (white man) told me that his race ruled India and America too. All [Indians] were slaves” (qtd. in Takaki 295). Upon arriving, Indian migrants became increasingly aware that their fight for US naturalization coincided with the struggle to free their motherland. As British subjects living in America, groups including the Hindustanee Association (from which the Ghadar Party evolved) demanded that the British administration negotiate with the US government and facilitate their aims towards becoming permanent US residents (Singh, Jane 36-37). Australia, Canada, South Africa and other colonies of the British Empire had already excluded Indians with little intervention from the metropole, an indication that Britain would be unwilling to actively contest exclusion by the United States. Although Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson’s administrations discussed establishing gentlemen’s agreements, the British government resolved to merely limit the issuance of passports to Indian laborers (Jensen 144).

112 As vocal as groups such as the Hindustanee Association were to British ambassadors to the US, the Indian government responded unsympathetically and refused to influence or direct policy concerning their citizenship rights. Abandoned by their home rulers, and in some cases unwilling to ally with other Asians including the Chinese and Japanese who suffered racially-specific federal policies through the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1908 Gentleman’s Agreement, respectively, the Indians’ fight for naturalization was a struggle they carved out on their own. Hoping to avoid the growing hostility and animosity against the Japanese and Chinese, the “ragheads,” as these turbaned men were pejoratively called (Leonard 49), distanced themselves from identifying as Asian. Ranging from dark-skinned to light-skinned, and identifying themselves as Aryan, Caucasian and white, the Indians’ racial ambivalence set the circumstances for proving their credibility as citizens and thwarting victimized stances.88 However, their racial ambivalence could only assist them to a point. The 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone categorized them as “Asian” by national origins and culminated in concomitant definitions of who was Asian and who was not. American or Un-American? Constituting White Citizenship and “Alien-ating” the Other By 1920, approximately 6400 Indians had entered the United States. 3,453 Indians were rejected. (Prashad 72; Takaki 297). The early twentieth century appearance of these “Dark Aryans” Kamala Visweswaran dismisses South Asianist arguments that promote “early” Indians’ unchallenged acquiescence to racism or endorses “newer” Indians’ success at outclassing the “old” diaspora. Arguing that Indians have resisted their marginalization by claiming their Aryan heritage, and thus their whiteness, Visweswaran writes, “While this does not invalidate the community’s claims of exclusion, it does rule out a position of total victimization, thereby complicating the community’s narrative of exclusion.” In 1974, the Association of Indians in America (AIA) lobbied to be categorized as Asian American so that they could claim benefits as minorities. Most of these lobbyists were from middle to upper class backgrounds with no blood relations to members of the “old” diaspora. After Manoranjan Dutta, a delegate of AIA, charged that Indians from Asia be reclassified as “Asian” rather than “white,” Congress categorized Indians as Asian American (Espiritu 124-125). Thus, we see a pattern of Indian Americans moving between entitlements of racial privilege and minority reparations. Markedly, the incentive for deploying their ambivalence strategically was most often guided by financial gain and not by the formation of political alliances across Asian American communities. See Prashad, 2000; Visweswaran.. 88

provoked an outpouring of editorials that not only verified the xenophobia of the time but also

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demonstrated the anxiety involved with managing racial difference according to established scientific categories of Caucasoid, Mongoloid or Negroid. Were Indian men black, but with white features? Or were they Aryans as they claimed, but darker versions of the white race? Discussions attempting to clarify their race headlined Californian newspapers as the “Hindoo Question,” the “Hindoo Invasion” and “The Newest Immigration Problem” (Palumbo Liu 39; Takaki 296-297). Agnes Foster Buchanan of Overland Monthly cautioned in 1908 that America faced an inundation of “Hindoos” since the Vedas obliged them to “cover the earth” (qtd. in Hess 62). As more Indians arrived, local journalists compared these subcontinentals with other less recent Asian populations. In 1910, when “there were less than 6,000 Indians living in the Pacific states,” Herman Scheffauer of Forum magazine warned that the influx of Indians signified a new “Yellow Peril” (Hess 63). He cautioned, “This time the chimera is not the saturnine, almond-eyed mask, the shaven head, the snaky pig-tail of the multitudinous Chinese, nor the close-cropped bullet heads of the suave and smiling Japanese, but a face of finer features, rising, turbaned out of the Pacific and bringing a new and anxious question” (qtd. in Takaki 297). The economy of Asian bodies stigmatized by the framework of a “Yellow Peril” not only contrasted from the race of the nonindentured brown workers, but also signaled fears of a new class of labor competition. David Palumbo-Liu interprets “Yellow Peril” as a “particular convergence of racist stereotyping with the economics of labor and production” (37). As Palumbo-Liu makes clear, the language of the “Hindoo Invasion” enacted a similar racialization of human capital but, “the case of antipathy toward South Asian immigration into the United States was differentiated in terms of a perception of class; this projection is a direct outgrowth of colonization” (38). Though the perception of Indians’ public personae in the US was underscored by India’s relationship to Britain, it should be made clear that the limits of colonial power can never be fully defined (Dirks “History as a Sign”).

The colonial attributes assigned to Indians varied from one US locality to the next. Sabu, for

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example, paraded his class status like a modern “hybrid” prince from the jungle, donning a tuxedo with a turban while cradling a South American ocelot on his arm. Indeed, there are multiple starting points for narrating the constitution of Indian and Indian American identity. Nevertheless, in the narrative I describe here, colonialism is integral to, but not at the origins of, the constitution of Indian-ness and its represented history in US racial discourse. At odds with Indians’ clipped British diction, dark Caucasian features and epicene manners, exclusionists began associating the presence of the odd turbaned men with the “degeneracy” of Chinese homosocial communities. Stressing the queerness of their domestic spaces due to the absence of children and wives, the practice of feminizing Asian men resulted in their figuration as inchoately male and homosexualized (Eng 16). In 1910, Survey Magazine posited that Indian men’s inassimilability was partly due to “their habits, their intense caste feelings, their lack of home life – no women being among them – and their effect upon standards of labor and wages, all combine to raise a serious question as to whether the doors should be kept open or closed against this strange, new stream” (qtd. in Takaki, 297). The raced, gendered and caste distinctions projected onto the Indian male populace in this passage reflected an emergent imperial rhetoric that justified who belonged in and out of the nation’s “doors.” The “serious question” here involved an assessment of the relationship between gender, ethnicity, culture, caste and labor and how US national identity would account for and define this “new stream” of racial difference. In her work on USOrientalism(s), Malini Johar Schueller eloquently argues that the “task of imperial self-definition is anxiety ridden” (4). The legitimization of racial hierarchies through European colonial domination, juxtaposed with the white superiority of naturalization laws, testifies to a utopian logic that builds national agency among whites at home and across the world. The

anxiety involved in constructing the imperial body of the nation, Schueller continues, relies on a

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series of gendered, racial and geographic dualities including Oriental despotism, sensuality, idleness, moral flaccidity, effeminacy, and sexual aberrance, on the one hand, and USAmerican democracy, rigorous Anglo-American morality, industry, healthy heteronormativity, and masculinity, on the other. But these oppositions are deployed to repress or allay fears about the wholeness or stability of the nation in face of diverse ethnic immigration and African American and Native American presences. (4) As Schueller infers, the efforts to construct a national body exemplify an anxious attempt to unify a fragmented nation. 89 Whether through mob violence, racist legislation or material works of the imagination including cinema, excluding marginal fragments deemed “un-American” was essential to building the American body politic, and the ideal citizen, as heteronormative, masculine and derived from Euro-American blood. Arguably, local and national resistance to Asian American citizenship – against Japanese, Chinese and Indians particularly -- reflected the consternation involved with regulating naturalization as a white male domain. As a disruption to national and racial unity, the Asian American political subject consequently holds an “historically ‘alien-ated’ relation to the category of “citizen” (Lowe 12). Asians were not only alienated as foreigners. The governments’ rejection of Asian women, coupled with Asian men’s homosocial environments, feminized Asian masculinity with qualities that justified their inability to fulfill the manly traits ascribed to citizenship. Indeed, the feminization of Asian

89 For Schueller, “USOrientalism” was neither an ahistorical phenomenon nor an imitation of British Orientalism. Instead, representations of the East in American literature, exhibitions and performance gained their impetus from “immediate sociopolitical circumstances and from theories of the westerly movement of civilization culminating in the New World – theories that naturalized the idea of a USAmerican empire.” See Schueller, 20.

116 Americans is a byproduct of the legislation of Asian American bodies. Racializing and gendering the Asian American subject took the forms of exclusion, anti-miscegenation, alien land laws, detention, internment and denying kin’s entry. In her influential discussion on the relationship between labor, capital and the politics of Asian American immigration, Lisa Lowe suggests that these “technologies” trace back to 26 March 1790 when the nation’s First Congress passed the historic Naturalization Act, reserving citizenship exclusively for whites (11-12). The language of the Naturalization Act reads: That any alien, being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof; [. . .] that he is a person of good character, and taking oath or affirmation prescribed by law, to support the constitution of the United States, which oath or affirmation such court shall administer; and the clerk of such court shall record such application, and the proceedings thereon; and thereupon such person shall be considered as a citizen of the United States. (emphasis added; 1 Stat. 103, 1790)90 Up until 1952, when the McCarran-Walter Act nullified racial restrictions from naturalization, courts persistently referred to the language of the 1790 law to determine “aliens” eligibility. By most courts’ interpretation, persons of “Mongoloid” or “Negroid” descent generally did not fall under the category of “free white person.” For Indians, the same unequivocal categorization did not apply.

90 The 1790 Act of March 26th was repealed on January 29th, 1795. The difference between the original and the repeal was a change in the required period of residence for naturalization. The period of residence in the United States increased from two to five years and from one to two years in the applicant’s state. The 1795 act also included a clause that required the applicant to declare his intent of attaining citizenship at least three years before submitting a formal application. The stipulation that “alien whites may become citizens” reaffirmed Congress’s racial, yet ambiguous, vision of American citizenship. See 1 Stat. 414, 1795.

117 Defending their Caucasian and Aryan heritage, Indians laid claim to “whiteness” in order to acquire land, gain permanent residency and maneuver anti-miscegenation laws to marry white women legally. Although white women were naturalized under the 1790 Act, it was white men who possessed the gendered protection of the law, which enabled them to file lawsuits, gain land proprietorship, run for office and vote. Lowe astutely notes that “though the history of citizenship and gender in relation to the enfranchisement of white women is distinct from the history of citizenship and race in relation to the enfranchisement of nonwhite males, it is not entirely separate” (11). Passed two years after the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised female citizens with the right to vote, the 1922 Cable Act revoked their citizenship if they married aliens ineligible for naturalization. Anti-miscegenation laws, instituted as early as 1661 and established in most states by the nineteenth century (Takaki 101), halted chances for men of non-European descent to naturalize by marrying white women. Clearly, the legislation of women’s sexuality and desire preempted the transmission of citizenship from American female bodies to nonwhite alien men. Built into the Cable Act were provisions for US-born women of African and European descent to regain their citizenship if they were widowed or divorced; US-born Asian females, however, lost their nationality terminally. Under US law, the only other offense that abrogated one’s citizenship was treason (Palumbo-Liu 30). Gauging citizenship by a ruler of white masculinity was not a new tactic for the US government. As David Roediger makes clear, the lack of political agency that African American men held during the formation of the white working class in the nineteenth century was inversely proportionate to the surplus of legal rights embodied by white freemen, especially those who were native born and wealthy. Roediger writes:

That Blacks were largely noncitizens will surprise few, but it is important to

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emphasize the extent to which they were seen as anticitizen [and] defilers of the body politic [. . .] The more powerless they became, the greater their supposed potential to be used by the rich to make freemen unfree. Thus, it was necessary to watch for the smallest signs of power among Blacks, and since blacks were defenseless, it was easy to act on perceived threats. (57) However, it should be noted that although white citizens may have perceived African Americans as powerless, Blacks certainly exercised “signs of power” with immense risk and reward.91 Twenty-two years after the Dred Scott case denied “due process” and citizenship to African Americans, they were naturalized in 1868, albeit with severely restricted civic and political rights. As Lowe argues, naturalization formally legitimized African America men’s masculinity over those deemed inassimilable, yet their racial origins and enslaved past encumbered the full freedoms of citizenship that most white males enjoyed (11). Although Native Americans often obtained citizenship through intermarriage and individual ‘First Nation’ treaties, they were continually denied naturalization until the Indian Act of 1924. David Roediger emphasizes that before permanent British settlement was even established in North America, the term “white” was used to differentiate European explorers, traders and settlers from indigenous people as much as from African slaves (21). Native Americans were construed as savages and resistant to civilizing tactics, Roediger explains, but they were also viewed as “wildly”

91 Steven Hahn’s magisterial work, A Nation Under our Feet, argues that from America’s Antebellum through Reconstruction, African Americans persistently drew on the knowledge gained as slaves to mobilize grassroots networks across confederate and union lines. Highly organized slave rebellions grew from everyday resistance against masters; building kinship among workers evolved into the reconstitution of separated families; and, the fight for freedom and enfranchisement created alliances with republican politicians that led many African Americans to serve as magistrates, jurors, police officers, and county commissioners. See Hahn, 69-79; 216-230.

119 independent, connected to the land and crucial for the trade of fur and meat among early European settlers. African Americans, on the other hand, were forced into servility and because white settlers owned their slaves’ freedoms, black men were the primary “counterpoint” against which white workers’ masculinity and conceptions of citizenship were formed (22-23). In this sense, citizenship was aligned with the white male body through a series of exclusionary tactics that complicated and perpetuated civilized/savage, body/mind and masculine/feminine dichotomies. Judith Butler writes, “This xenophobic exclusion operates through the production of racialized Others, and those whose “natures” are considered less rational by virtue of their appointed task in the process of laboring” (1993, 48). Devices of exclusion, then, not only sculpted the ideal of white masculinity, but also sustained Enlightenment-based visions of a European America wherein Asian and other nonwhite manual labor was needed, but their individualism was not. Burden or Boon? “Court”-ing Caste for Newfound Freedoms The xenophobia inherent in the “technologies” of Asian exclusion is not a simple case of antagonism towards a racialized Other. Following Daniel Gorman’s work on the ambivalence of imperial citizenship, the intent behind anti-Asian legislation was much more nuanced. Plainly, the discrimination against Asians was racist. Yet anti-Asian sentiment and legislation also emerged from a direct conflict between notions of liberalism and nascent forms of US nationalism. As forces of immigration, industrialization and imperial expansion defined the breadth of America’s national identity, the primacy and freedoms of the individual were at odds with visions of a communal society based on consensus and homogeneity. Indians’ newfound liberalism in America, therefore, offered strategies to resist barriers of whiteness by writing themselves into white communality. If India’s nationalist movement towards freedom politicized difference by claiming “unity in diversity,”

120 then perhaps the framework of “free white persons” could expand to encompass a non-European plurality of whiteness as well. Arguably, exercising their liberalism through the pursuit of naturalization and whiteness was a direct response to a lack of sovereignty in India. While the fight at home dismantled British colonial practices that suppressed vernacular customs, devalued regional histories and attributed caste hierarchies to archaic Hindu scriptures, Indians in America deployed caste-based ethnologies in the courts that inverted anti-colonial ideologies espoused by Ghadars and other Indian freedom fighters.92 The specifics of Indians’ caste offered little social stature in America aside from highlighting one’s ethnological background in the courts. In a handbook created for Indian students to orient them upon arriving to America, a Bengali-born Berkeley author wrote, “We do not pay any more respect to a Brahman than we do to Pariah, Hindu or Muhamadan, Christian, Brahman or Kshatriya, Namasudra or Chandal. [. . .] In fact, we never know or care to know to what caste anyone belongs (Das 608). Differences among Indians themselves were downplayed towards a more cohesive Indian identity. Conceivably, the elision of caste and ethnic divisions among Indians of the “old” diaspora translated to public perceptions of a generalized Indian-ness. (Later, due to the “new” diaspora’s sheer scale, ethnic differences resulted in the vast organization of tightly formed communities based on language, class and sub-regional cultural practice.) Even three

Taraknath Das and Har Dayal were Indian nationalists who came to the US as students at Berkeley and Harvard, respectively. For them and other Indian immigrants, America represented a liberal democratic haven where they hoped to abandon the colonial discrimination experienced back home. However, the racial prejudice they encountered evinced the earmarks of a caste system. As Vijay Prashad, Joan Jensen and Jane Singh point out, the experience of discrimination in America strengthened the solidarity of political oppression on both sides of the ocean. Indian nationalism in the US, Jensen argues, was an antidote to powerlessness for many Indians. The revolutionary ideals that Das and Dayal raised in their writings and in university lecture halls across the West coast incited the British administration to collude with the American government. With the help of Indian informants, British undercover agents in America spied on Das and Dayal and other Indian nationalists living in America. The US bureau of naturalization awaited their petitions to naturalize and prepared for their deportation. Das ultimately gained citizenship through a legal loophole. Dayal, however, was sent back to India. See Joan Jensen, 163-193. 92

121 decades after the above student distributed his handbook, when only 40 percent of Americans could locate India on the map (Jensen 278), Sabu was publicized as an authentic Indian star -- born in the jungles of a Maharaja’s kingdom, but from a generic India nonetheless. In the Hollywood tabloids that mentioned him after 1940, rarely was his caste or sub-regional Karnatakan identity mentioned. British periodicals, however, often alluded to his Muslim, Burmese and Mysore roots during the premieres of Elephant Boy and Drums. Certainly, Indians signified “a primary racial other” in Britain as “part of a colonial system deeply fixated on India” (Shukla 36). Orientalist perceptions of caste pervaded the commonwealth’s popular imaginary. In America by contrast, African Americans constituted the racial counterpoint to the white American ideal. Black was black and Indian was Indian, the caste difference between a Vaishya or Kshatriya was and is of little concern to the general populace. In a community of a comparatively small size, caste distinctions played a small part among members of the “old” diaspora who together suffered the effects of racism and strove towards building coalitions among themselves as businessmen, farmers, manual laborers and students while advocating for nationalist solidarity and their country’s sovereignty back home. The nationalism against the British they witnessed in India informed their organized resistance against racism in America. There was no place for caste discrimination in their fight towards citizenship, labor rights and land entitlement. If caste was privileged as a distinction, Indians deployed it strategically in the hopes of augmenting their newfound liberalism through the pursuit of citizenship. Back home, the colonial and provincial maintenance of caste hierarchies and ethnic differences challenged the nation-building efforts among leading Indian nationalists. In order to strengthen the “Free India” crusade, the “father of the nation” Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (an untouchable leader) and Gopal Krishna Gokhale (a consummate Brahman social liberal) inspired a sense of “civilizational unity” that allayed the severity of caste, linguistic and

122 regional divisions through a necessary and cohesive denial of Britain’s white ruling presence (Varma 10). Ironically, the complexity of achieving “civilizational unity” resulted in resisting and borrowing caste notions from European Orientalists and upper-caste nationalist elites who hailed India’s ancient civilization, yet stratified its populace racially and ethnically across Dravidian and Aryan lines. By British standards of ethnology and linguistics, Aryans in India were considered any persons whose ancestors spoke Indo-European languages. Aryans differed from Dravidians, or Indo-Aborigines living further south, whom northern “barbarians” allegedly drove to the lower plains when they invaded the peninsula in the third millennium B.C.E. These colonialist, and later, nationalist disparities, perpetuated racial, linguistic and political anxieties across the country. In one instance, Dravidian organizers in Tamil Nadu fought for a separate state called Dravidistan to reject Hindi, the Indo-European language of the north, as the “official” lingua franca of India (Wolpert 368369). Despite nationalist efforts to unify India across language, caste and region, the early Indian Americans identified themselves as non-aboriginal Aryans. The word “Aryan” comes from the Sanskrit word “Arya,” which translates as “noble” or “favorable,” and is at times misemployed to invoke the status of Brahmins, the highest caste in the hierarchy. The “old” diaspora’s employment of caste-based identities in the courts not only points to an internalization of racial discourse and a contradictory embodiment of Indian nationalist identities. Indians’ manipulation of colonial discourse also shows how becoming Indian in the US is subject to historical, national and material contingencies that unstably shape Indian American cultural practice and identity. Though performed onscreen and not in the courts, Sabu’s expression of caste, ranging from Aryan princes to Indo-aboriginal jungle boys, reflect the colonial iterations that shaped his arrival, utterances required of the actor to enter, contribute and become part of American public life.

123 Although many Indians came to America to abandon the colonizing influence of the Crown, strikingly, the complicated and contradictory ways of racializing Indians in British India by Aryan or Dravidian categories informed the “old” diaspora’s construction of Indian-ness in America. Peter Pels explains that race dominated British colonial discourse on India throughout the Victorian era and into the twentieth century. Darwinist theories imbued caste and racial classifications of Indians with strains of biological determinism. “To know was to name, identify and compare – this was the frame in which the question of understanding India entered the discourse of colonial science” (Prakash 21). Born from the ethnographic study of Indian “natives,” British ethnology tested its methods through labeling, enumerating and predicting the propensity for certain “types” of bodies to perform specific modes of manual, military and intellectual labor. In his historiography on the British creation of a “criminal caste,” Nicholas Dirks argues that “The colonial notion of caste was that each group had an essential quality, that was expressed in its occupational profile, its position in the social hierarchy, as well as in a whole set of moral and cultural characteristics that adhered to each group qua group” (“Crimes of Colonialism” 160). Thomas Huxley, the eminent evolutionary biologist and President of the British Ethnological Society, grouped India’s “savages of the Deccan plains” with Australian Aborigines and “Negritos” from Africa. Huxley noted that a “mongoloid physical and linguistic presence” resided across the north and east and the large remainder of Indians encompassed the physiognomy of “pale-faced Aryan Caucasoids” (qtd. by Pels 82). By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century in the US, classifications using the distinctions between Caucasoids, Mongoloids and Negroids grew exceedingly vague and unscientific (Jensen 250). In British India, however, the application of this racial triad extended well into the 1900s (Pels 82). The work of Victorian-era Orientalists and biologists largely contributed to the development of racial discourse in India by shifting from an “articulation of knowledge on foundational texts,”

124 namely Sanskrit scriptures, literature and philosophy, to an “ethnological articulation of knowledge on bodies” (Pels 83). Ethnologists traveled across India and deep into the Punjab as early as 1881 to hone ethnographic practices, collect statistical data and relay their findings on caste, language and physiology to both the colonial administration in India and the metropole (Pels 102). The classification of “natives” was not merely driven by scientific curiosity or ethnological inquiry. The colonial knowledge produced from the study, appraisal and classification of bodies benefited the British government in two primary ways. First, the colonial enterprise required certain “types” of labor, and thus, necessarily organized India’s vast geography and peoples to exploit those castes and ethnicities whose physiognomy, history and social status matched desired forms of employment. Second, Britain’s active racialization and perpetuation of caste hierarchies benefited the colonial administration by maintaining divisions across India and challenging the emergence of organized Indian solidarity. The outgrowth of these racialized “types” manifested in a gallery of caste-based representations in the imaginative spaces of Kipling’s Departmental Ditties and Other Verses (1886), The Jungle Books (1898), Kim (1901) and numerous poems and short stories; in Wilkie Collins’ wildly popular mystery novel, The Moonstone (1868); and on the Savoy Theatre’s stage production of George Dance’s The Nautch Girl (1896). Presumably, men from the Punjab, especially those who were Jat and Sikh, were aware of how the British categorized them by their caste, faith, physical strength and proclivities towards agricultural labor and military service. Indeed, Kipling featured many a loyal Sikh soldier ranging from “Jowar Singh the Sikh” in What Happened (1886) and Suket Singh a “Sepoy of the 102d Punjab Native Infantry” who professed, “I cannot be a deserter” to the British in Through the Fire (1891). Sikhs were known for their adherence to the Crown during the 1857 Mutiny when the large remainder of sepoys across India revolted against their white commanders. Hence, the British preferentially recruited Punjabi men for their loyalty and martial abilities (Leonard 25). Pointedly,

125 the Sikh infantry’s decision to bolster Britain’s defense was less an indication of their faithfulness to the Queen. Rather, their support of the British was a rejection of the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah II whom the 1857 mutineers appointed to India’s throne without asking for the Sikhs’ participation in the revolt (Singh, Ganda).93 Although intensely critical of Britain’s colonizing presence and wary of pressures to enlist in the Queen’s army, the Indian men of the “old” diaspora hoped to situate their links to Britain and their “Aryan” heritage gainfully. Prior to claiming their Aryan-ness fit into the category of “free white person,” Indians argued they were entitled to naturalization under an 1870 convention between the United States and England. Although the agreement established that citizens of either country could become citizens of the other, the naturalization of British subjects from the colonies was not made explicitly clear (Jensen 248). In order to become American citizens, Indians as British subjects were required to surrender their allegiance to the Crown. This allegiance implied two conditions: First, [an] unmeditated relationship between King and subject and, second, any privileges attached to one's status as subject are granted by the sovereign and are exercised at his pleasure; they are not claimed by the subject against his sovereign. These features distinguish a 'subject' from a 'citizen'; the latter enjoys his status through membership in a community enjoying the same status and makes claims against the state based on this membership. (Hansen 70)

93 Ganda Singh contends that the mutineers of 1857, who were mostly Hindu and Muslim, neither consulted nor invited the Punjabi Sikhs to participate in India’s First War of Independence, known in colonial discourse as the 1857 Mutiny. Further, for over two hundred years, the Punjab’s civilians tirelessly fought against the tyrannical rule that the Mughal Empire brought to the region. Thus, they could not faithfully build an alliance with the mutineers under the threat that Mughal rule would be reinstated to the territory.

Thus, in the decades before India’s independence, the colonial administration deemed Indians as

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subjects, and not citizens holding the same rights as “Britons.” Sandhya Shukla posits that because Indians were citizens of nowhere before 1947, their “ambiguous nationality was a barrier to the assumption of American or British national affiliations” (37). What resulted was an abiding and imaginative connection to India that engendered an alternative space of identification. The imaginative space they carved out for themselves, I argue, was a recuperation of their own masculine authority, an authority lost in the delegitimization of their manhood through the exclusionary and constitutive maintenance of white male citizenship. Invoking Philip Bryan Harper’s examination of African American masculinity, Gayatri Gopinath asserts that whether across the Black Atlantic or Brown Atlantic, conventional diasporic ideology, “holds that the only way to resolve the contradictions between migration and racism is through the shoring up of masculine authority” (70). As men whose gender and race was anxiously in question during the first half of the twentieth century, a primary mode of affirming Indian male authority was by inscribing the power of white manhood onto their ambivalently classified bodies.

White to Some, Brown to Others: “Passing” for American and the Malleability of Whiteness As an increasingly diverse work force emigrated from South and East Asia and across Europe, issues of citizenship for both women and men grew more complex in the first decade of the twentieth century. The intricate maze of regulations and the two-tiered state and federal system often resulted in legislative mayhem. Guided by the 1790 Act’s decree, it was court clerks who determined the parameters of “white” on a case-by-case basis, and thus, the applicant’s eligibility for citizenship. In 1906, Iasar Singh and Sohan Singh, two Punjabi Sikh men, appeared before the California superior court in Santa Clara to petition for naturalization. The Singhs are the first

127 Indians on record to apply (Visweswaran 19). According to the 1790 Act, which was interpreted to say, “only those included in the definition of ‘white’ could be naturalized” (Palumbo-Liu 220), the clerk was unsure whether these “tawny” men fell under the category of “free white person” and wrote to the federal bureau of naturalization to clarify the statute’s guidelines for naturalization (Jensen 248). While the federal and local courts had the power to naturalize “aliens,” the interpretation of the law was left to the executive branch of government. After awaiting a response for seven months, the bureau wrote back and explicitly refused to offer an opinion on the matter. In 1907, Robert Devlin, the US attorney for San Francisco, contacted the justice department with the same issue, “there is considerable uncertainty as to just what nationalities come within the term white person” (qtd. in Rees 13). Less than a month later, US attorney general Charles J. Bonaparte replied “It seems to me clear that under no construction of the law can natives of British India be regarded as white persons” (qtd. in Takaki 298). Consequently, the Santa Clara court denied the Singhs citizenship. The correspondence from 1906 to 1907 between the justice department, Santa Clara’s superior court and San Francisco’s US Attorney set into motion a series of inquiries regarding how to contain whiteness against the ambivalently racialized Indian body. Broader racial genuses of Aryan, Oriental and Negro vaguely applied, the former of the three being the most ambiguous. The anxieties of defining a “free white” body – a “figure in crisis” produced by an historical denial of gendered and racialized Others -- proved exceedingly challenging for the nation’s courts (Butler, Bodies 49). Regulative exclusions that “bound” white masculinity against the constitutive physical difference of Orientals, Native Americans and Negroes were not neatly applicable to the contrast of the Indo-Aryan Caucasian foreigner. In 1908, two years after the Singhs submitted their petitions for citizenship, the chief of the bureau of naturalization ordered all United States attorneys to actively deny citizenship to “Hindoos

128 or East Indians” and to pressure court clerks to refuse “declarations of intention or to file petitions for naturalization” (qtd. in Jensen 249). This directive ran counter to the instructions outlined in the 1790 Act. Although US attorneys followed orders and opposed the naturalization of Indians starting in 1909, they were often unsuccessful in persuading courts to deny applications. Attorneys’ arbitrary suppositions of the Founding Fathers’ psyches, for instance, suggest that race was being determined by social and popular beliefs versus established factual findings. Local courts resolved to make their own decisions rather than follow US attorneys’ speculations on the First Congress’ insertion of “white” in the 1790 statute (Jensen 250).94 Early Indians’ strategies of performing white assimilability in US courts not only reveal the racial, national and caste ambivalence of “Hindoos” at the time. Hoping to attain the privilege of citizenship, their arguments also reflect a climate of white entitlement that the actions of the federal government, and many district courts, aimed to maintain. In 1909, a series of court cases across the United States revealed how the parameters of “whiteness” were being measured against racially ambivalent Indian and Middle Eastern bodies. Abdullah Dolla, a Calcutta-born trader of Indian spices, silks, and textiles, applied for citizenship in a Savannah Court. Local upstanding citizens testify on Abdullah’s behalf that he passed as white. After all, he had bought a plot in the local white Savannah cemetery, which demonstrated that the community accepted him as one of them. Against the wishes of the US attorney, the judge pronounced him white and granted him citizenship. By the judge’s assessment, the corporeal legitimacy of Dolla’s skin was “sufficiently transparent for the blue veins to show clearly” (qtd. in Jensen 250). Further, his ability to pass as white demonstrated his active assimilation into a community of similar or higher-class whites. Dolla’s perceptible whiteness equipped him with the

This current section draws heavily from Joan Jensen’s foundational work on South Asian American history. Because Jensen’s Passage from India (1988) is one of the few histories that focuses in exhaustive detail on the legislation and governance of South Asian racial formations in the US, I rely on her scholarship to ground my analysis of Indian Americans’ ambivalently discerned racial identities. 94

129 “currency of a normative body” and the capacity to maneuver through society “unmarked” (Butler, Bodies 170-171). In this proceeding, socially accepted standards of skin color, rather than national origins or scientific evidence, determined his whiteness. In response, the federal government appealed the judge’s decision. Invoking a combination of social, cultural and scientific questions, the case above is one of many trials that measured Indians’ capacity to pass and integrate into the white community. Later that year, an Indian Parsi man named Balsara and an Armenian man named Halladjian applied for citizenship in New York and Massacusetts courts, respectively. In Balsara’s case, the attorney general argued that white” applied only to those races who settled in the United States before the Revolutionary War (Visweswaran 20). The district judge found the attorney’s postulations unscientific and granted Balsara naturalization, a ruling that the federal government appealed. In Halladjian’s case, the US attorney argued that Halladjian belonged to the same “Asiatic” Caucasian race as other Indians, and was thus, not assimilable into the racial makeup of America. Rejecting the US attorney’s argument as tenuous, the judge asserted there was no history or ethnology to back his claims and granted Halldjian citizenship. The bureau of naturalization contested the ruling, furthering its efforts to deny Indians and other “Asiatics” the right to apply. Despite the bureau’s mandate, Indians and other non-European Caucasians continued to petition for citizenship across the United States. In 1909, for instance, Abdul Goffor Mondul, an Indian Muslim, attained citizenship in Galveston, Texas. On the West Coast, however, where the large majority of Asian Americans first resided, most court clerks abided by the bureau’s order and rejected Indians’ attempts to attain naturalization. At the same time, courts across the nation deployed the 1790 statute by their own accord and gradually began to adopt verdicts in other parts of the US that granted citizenship to Indians and other “brown” applicants including Syrians, Iranians, Armenians and Latin Americans. On May 3rd, 1913, a court in Spokane, Washington

discreetly accepted Calcutta-born Akhoy Kumar Mozumdar’s application (Jensen 322). The first

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West Coast Indian to gain citizenship, Mozumdar, a spiritual teacher and founder of the Christian Yoga Society, convinced the courts that he was Caucasian, and thus, met the requirements for naturalization. Why were courts initially more yielding to petitions in the East than in courts in the West? The disproportionate denial of Indians’ citizenship on the West Coast during the first decade of the twentieth century implies that racial attitudes were more accepting of Indians as “whites” on the Eastern seaboard. Indeed, Indians’ racial identities were inconsistently determined across the country by courts, social and religious groups and universities. A turban in New England and across the Southeast was a passport to “high society” while on the West coast many Sikhs and Muslims removed their headdress to avoid racial discrimination (Jensen 171-172). I argue that the bodily absence of Indian laborers in the eastern US left little threat for a “Hindoo Invasion.” From Chicago to New England, India existed largely in the realm of fantasy and the imagination. Conceivably, a visible migrant worker presence in the East may have interrupted the symbolic postulations that positioned the disembodied, timeless and ancient “wisdom” of India against the commercial, capitalist and modern realities of America. The eternal “soul” of India offered an internal route towards liberation; American “freedom” drew a materialist, external path towards liberty. Without a physical reminder of how Indian-ness was embodied, India, then, fit into ahistorical and Orientalist expectations of fantasy, exoticism and transcendentalism associated with and described in the literatures of Katherine Mayo, Rudyard Kipling, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. As Vijay Prashad asserts, the “elevated thoughts of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman emerged in the first films on India as they do in the world of popular orientalism” (20). Thomas Edison’s 1902 film, Hindoo Faqir, was the first American motion picture on India (Narayan 487),

featuring the tricks of an Indian magician who made swords vanish and butterfly wings on his

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female assistant appear to help her flutter and fly away. A train of eerily exotic works followed Edison’s film that highlighted the sensuality and spirituality of India. These included Oriental Mystic (Vitagraph 1909), Bombay Buddha (Universal 1915), Soul of Buddha (Fox, 1919), Stronger than Death (Metro 1920) and the Green Goddess (Distinctive 1923). Hollywood filmmakers began borrowing from established literatures to build a “horizon of expectations” that viewed India as exotic, primeval and essentially different from Western spectators in the decades before Sabu made his popular appearance in Hollywood (Iser).95 Although Sabu never played a transcendentalist, “holy man” or guru specifically, the combined narrative backdrops of India’s primitivity, untamed jungles and spiritual antiquity draped his performances with a “denial of coevalness” that suspended him in the past and distanced him temporally from his viewers (Fabian 15). Indicatively, representations of India in American cinema relied on a structuring absence of Indians’ experience of racism in America. The cultural and racial ambivalence projected onto Indian foreigners fluctuated between different permutations of desire (for cheap labor, spirituality and exotic adventure) and disavowal (against labor competition, strange cultural practices and physical differences) from one US region to the next. From Washington State to California, for example, organized efforts intensified to extend the Chinese Exclusion Act and disavow Indian populations from the nation’s borders. In 1908 -the same year the bureau of naturalization initiated its anti-Indian order and the same year Roosevelt’s administration implemented the Gentleman’s Agreement with Japan -- the JapaneseKorean Exclusion League changed its name to the Asiatic Exclusion League (AEL) to circumscribe

Susan Manning directed me towards Iser’s work, which has consequently provided a helpful framework for “reading” how Sabu emerged from a rehearsal of discursive encounters with India through the reception of literatures, public exhibitions and early Orientalist films. See Iser, 1980. 95

Indians in its anti-Asian regime (Hess 61; Singh, Jane 37). Headquartered in San Francisco, the

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League escalated its lobbying tactics as each new Asian group disembarked onto the nations’ shores. Electing exclusionists into office, inciting anti-Asian riots, and influencing businesses to turn away Asian as patrons and employees were just a few activities the AEL effected. The success of their influence on California’s attorney general, U.S. Webb, led to the passage of a series of Alien Land Acts between 1913 and 1923 which stipulated that only those persons eligible for citizenship could legally purchase land in California (Leonard 135). They also rallied support to elect the California exclusionists, Republican Denver S. Church and Democrat John Raker, to the House of Representatives, two congressmen who were central to passing the 1917 Barred Zone legislation. With the backing of Raker in the House and Senator Ellison D. “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina in the Senate, Church vehemently argued for protecting the nation’s borders from the threat of “Hindoo” civilization. Together in 1914, they introduced federal legislation to target, deport and exclude Hindu laborers and their families. Though the bill ultimately did not become a law, Anthony Caminetti – Woodrow Wilson’s Governor-General of Immigration and a zealous official of California’s anti-Oriental Native Sons of the Golden West -– strongly encouraged Congress to pass the legislation. In a speech to the House, Church warned that India’s 350,000,000 people were anxious to bring their “superstitious and backward” culture to America. He alleged: Heretofore the most terrible of all the Hindu gods was the crocodile and in order to appease the wrath of these scaly and saw-toothed monsters, loving but superstitious mothers cast from the banks of the Ganges their helpless offspring into the crocodile's mouth. [. . .] With these ideals in mind, it is plain the ideals of the Hindu will not fit the notions of the West. (qtd. in Hess 63-64) Church’s diatribe betrays the extent to which Orientalist tropes from popular fantasy and exotic lore translated into legislative processes to shape cultures of fear against the Eastern other. Plainly, the

exigency of excluding “Hindoos” demanded a fictionalized tourist account, laden with tropes of

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idolatry, savagery and chimera, to paint, purge and legislate Indians as an irrevocable threat. For legislators, particularly those from the West coast, the stakes were high. If Indians could claim naturalization by arguing they were white and eligibly American, they could augment the thousands of farm acres they already owned, leverage agricultural trade in their favor, own and expand retail stores, drive labor wages down and transgress anti-miscegenation laws that could potentially open the doors to multiple forms and effects of interracial “profanities.” For the AEL and its supporters, Indians’ social mobility was a gateway for granting liberties to other Asian and nonwhite foreigners, a diverse alien population the AEL hoped to dissolve. In the face of legislators’ and exclusionists’ efforts to send Indians back home, Indians continued to obtain naturalization and settle in the US. To account for the new addition of nationalities that slipped between the margins of established ethnologies, the 1910 census bureau added “other” to its list of racial groups among White, Negro, American Indian, Chinese and Japanese. “Other” encompassed more recent immigrants from India, Korea and the Philippines. Regarding the 2,545 Indians counted in the census, a footnote specified why the “Hindoos” were classified as “other” and grouped with other nonwhite Asians. It read, “The popular conception of the term ‘white’ is doubtless largely determined by the fact that the whites in this country are almost exclusively Caucasians of European origins. [Hindoos] represent a civilization distinctly different from that of Europe” (qtd. in Jensen 252). This footnote not only suggests the inscription of socially determined ideas of race onto the institutional management of America’s bodies. It also discerns Hindoos’ “otherness” as incompatible with European “civilization” and the attendant evolution of American society. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the “discourse of civilization” relied on positioning nonwhite others, primarily Native and African American men, against the “evolved” nature of white masculinity and citizenship (Bederman). As the 1910 census and Denver

134 Church’s efforts propose, the contradistinction between whiteness and Indian-ness assumed a “clash of civilizations” that the nation and its citizens could, at best, untenably absorb. Discernibly, the 1900 census did not include “Hindoos” or “others” when the “early” Indian wave arrived as preparers gathered their figures. Indeed, contingent definitions of race surfaced from one census decade to the next, oscillating between different profiles for “white,” “other” and “colored.” For instance, “In censuses prior to 1890,” a 1900 US Census preparer wrote: the word colored was generally used as synonymous with negro [. . .] in the census of 1890, and to some extent in that of 1900, the word colored was given a wider significance, including all persons not belonging to the Caucasian or white race, and embracing, therefore, not only the negroes, but also the Indians, the Chinese, and the Japanese. (Willcox 14) “Other” did not appear as a racial category until ten years later, suggesting that the use of “colored” as a category in 1910 was far too ambiguous a term to account for the diverse stream of races pouring into the nation’s ports after the turn of the century. Justice Henry A. Smith of South Carolina contended in 1913 that if “color” was an indication of race, then some Japanese and Chinese persons could possibly stand with whites, Parsees, Brahmans and appear more biologically evolved than the “Negro.” Even within the white race itself, there were several color of white, Smith insisted. In a case involving the citizenship of an Indian Christian named Faras Shahid, Smith asserted that all Caucasians were not comparable to whites. Appraising Shahid as “the color of a walnut and somewhat darker than a mulatto,” Smith concluded that because neither Caucasian nor Aryan had gained currency as words until 1830, the term white did not refer to all persons belonging to the Indo-European race, specifically those from India, Ceylon and the mixed tribes of Persia (Jensen 253-254). Geographic origin rather than color was necessarily the criterion. He continued:

135 To say that a very dark brown, almost black, inhabitant of India is entitled to rank as a white person, because of a possible or hypothetical infusion of white blood, 30 or 40 centuries old, and to exclude a Chinese or Japanese, whose parent on one side was white, and who thus possesses manifestly at least one half European blood, would seem highly inconsistent. (qtd. in Jensen 253) Smith’s tautological evocation of miscegenation to discount the legacy of Aryan miscegenation upheld his surmise of the Founding Father’s vision of an America descended from Europe. On these grounds, the South Carolina federal district court denied Shahid citizenship. Ignoring Smith’s ruling as precedence, Indians and other brown “Caucasian” applicants continued to use ethnological theories to pursue naturalization. In 1917, when the Asiatic Barred Zone blocked most Asians from entering the nation, Sadar Bhagwan Singh of Pennsylvania applied for citizenship in order to safeguard his US residence, visit his family in Punjab and legally return without a “bar” to his American home. From an ethnological standpoint, Singh argued, Indians were biologically Aryan, and thus white. The Pennsylvania court applied Justice Smith’s verdict from three years earlier and rejected Singh’s application (Jensen 255). Aware of the inconsistencies in citizenship rulings, Indians amplified their evidence to prove their eligibility as free and white. In 1919, Mohan Singh, another Punjabi Sikh, petitioned for naturalization in a Los Angeles federal court. S.G. Pandit, Singh’s lawyer, outlined three points in his argument. The first posited that in legal cases a “preponderance of respectable opinion” included Indians as Aryans in the Caucasian race (qtd. in Jensen 255). Second, anthropologists all over the world classified Indians as Caucasian. And third, the acceptance of Indian petitions across the country from Georgia to New York and from Washington to California offered proof that Indians were considered “white” by social, cultural and popular standpoints. Singh’s lawyer offered his own biography as evidence that Indians were Caucasian and eligible for citizenship. Pandit came to California in 1909, obtained citizenship

136 in 1914, and passed the California bar for his law license in 1917. Accepting his rationale, the judge granted citizenship to Singh (Jensen 255). Combining legal precedence with anthropological knowledge became a standard argument among Indian men to prove their eligibility as “free white persons” under the 1790 statute. The unbalanced racialization of Indians in the courts not only points to the arbitrary nature of the triadic categorization of race (Caucasian/Mongoloid/Negro), but also reveals the malleability and socially constructed nature of “white” and other racial classifications in the US. As Omi and Winant note, “the categories employed to differentiate among human groups along racial lines reveal themselves upon serious examination, to be at best imprecise, and at worst completely arbitrary” (55). As I have attempted to argue thus far, it is precisely the arbitrary racialization of “early” Indians that both served and hurt their pursuit of citizenship and American-ness. Oscillating between white, Caucasian, Asiatic, “Hindoo” or “other” and shifting across citizen, non-citizen or British subject, Indians’ perplexing racialization and nationalization in America forced the government to rectify their racial ambivalence and specify the legality of excluding them. The 1923 Supreme Court ruling against Bhagat Singh Thind’s citizenship introduced a twenty-three year era of exclusion derived less from legal rationale than a desire to discern and remove Indian foreigners. Enforced until 1946 when the second Luce-Celler Act loosened the anti-Indian bar with stringent quotas, the legacy of Bhagat Singh Thind’s landmark case preempted Sabu’s and other Indians’ rights to apply for naturalization. Without recourse to citizenship or the full freedoms of white American manhood, they self-fashioned and navigated individuated routes of performing Indian-ness in America.

Bhagat Singh Thind: Becoming American and the Fiction of the “Common Man” Sabu migrated to the United States twenty-seven years after Bhagat Singh Thind came to Oregon. Although Thind petitioned for citizenship thrice (1920, 1923 and 1936) and Sabu applied

137 only once (1944), both were ultimately naturalized after fighting in WWI and WWII, respectively. The manner in which Thind and Sabu formulated their diasporic identities is remarkably similar. In addition to serving as soldiers in World Wars, they harnessed their Oriental differences towards becoming Indian American via what Marta Savigliano theorizes as a process of “auto-exoticization.” In her influential work on Tango, dance ethnographer Savigliano, describes “auto-exoticization” as a mode of self-representation in which colonized subjects come to internalize, embody and perform qualities that perpetuate how their colonizers have historically viewed and represented them. While living in America, Thind and Sabu appealed to different forms of US Orientalisms imbued with imperial modes of signification. With a PhD in philosophy, Dr. Thind fashioned himself as an elite intellectual and spiritual guru who gave lectures on metaphysics during the 1920s titled, “The Sacred Hum of the Universe” and “Can We Talk with the ‘Dead’ and How?” (Prashad 36) Citing the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, Thind’s references to transcendentalism, theosophy and séances offered an otherworldly distraction from the realities of an economic depression and the restrictions of biblical morality during Prohibition. Sabu, a decade later, attracted a fan base drawn to a more popular Orientalism comprising Arabian Nights journeys, Kipling-esque adventures and voyeuristic views of brownfaced harems delivered in American accents and produced on towering Hollywood sets. Both Sabu and Thind mobilized Indian authenticity to achieve public recognition and higher class status. While Thind’s audiences comprised academics, artists and high-class socialites seeking nirvana and transcendence, Sabu’s spectators were more populist in composition hoping to travel to exotic lands filled with danger and excitement. Unlike Thind, Sabu never had to demonstrate his caste in a court of law to prove his “whiteness.” Rather, Sabu emphasized his non-whiteness to deliver a westernized version of the Orient to American audiences. Indeed, hoping to stay in the

United States, Thind and Sabu relied on the Orientalist discourse and colonial frameworks that

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structured their public personae towards achieving the “American Dream” as Indians. Like other Indians petitioning for citizenship before him, Thind exploited British ethnology to highlight his high caste, Aryan lineage and propensity for “whiteness.” In 1920, Thind submitted his application to an Oregon federal district court where Justice Charles E. Wolverston presided. Born in Punjab and educated at Punjab University, Thind, a Punjabi Sikh, came to the US in 1913 as a student to attend the University of California at Berkeley where he received his doctorate (Shukla 36). Drafted in 1917, Thind served the US army for less than a year during which he was promoted to Sergeant. On the eve of the war’s end in 1918, Thind left the army with an “honorable discharge” (Jensen 256). Instituted when the US joined The Great War in 1917, The Selective Service Act required that conscription apply to all citizens and aliens living in the US including seasonal agricultural workers, permanent residents, asylees, refugees, parolees and agricultural workers. Refusal by aliens to register with the government resulted in the denial of future petitions for citizenship (40 Stat. 76, 1917). Thousands of Asians -- immigrants and non-immigrants, aliens and citizens -- served in both wars. Plainly, many did not want to risk losing the right to petition for naturalization. Although some soldier battalions were Japanese or Filipino specific in WWII, including the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the First Filipino Infantry Regiment, respectively (Takaki 486, 359), Indian soldiers most often served in white or mixed brigades (Jensen 256). Thind was the only Indian among a few African Americans in the largely white 166th Depot Brigade. Sabu was the only person of color in WWII’s 307th Bombardment Squadron. Based on his service in the War, Thind argued that under the guidelines of the 1790 Naturalization Act, he was indeed “a person of good character” (1 Stat. 103, 1790). Although he readily admitted support for India’s sovereignty and his involvement with the Ghadars, he neither

approved the party’s revolutionary activities nor had any connections to the propaganda they

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published nor the violence they incited (Jensen 256). Sabu’s involvement with the nationalist movement was less apparent. Whether he was too young to advocate Gandhi’s campaign or support Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League’s efforts to create Pakistan, it is unclear where his political leanings rested. Heretofore, I have not come across any evidence that might convey Sabu’s anti-colonial dissent. Presumably, a public offscreen Indian nationalist stance would have contradicted the onscreen colonial characters he played that foiled all allusions to British suppression and India’s struggle towards freedom. When Thind brought his citizenship case to the Oregon court, he was confident the judge would favor his petition on legal precedence. Initially, Thind succeeded. For Justice Wolverston, the question of Indian naturalization was if Indians should be allowed to reside in the country whether they were US citizens or not. The 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone had been retroactively applied to deport Indians from the country, but the law mentioned nothing about barring applicants from citizenship. By that interpretation, Wolverston approved Thind’s petition (Jensen 256). As they had with every case that granted Indians citizenship, the bureau of naturalization appealed Wolverston’s decision. Sixty-nine other Indians attained citizenship between 1908 and 1923 on the grounds they possessed the same Aryan background as Europeans and were thus considered “white.” (Hess 65; Visweswaran 20). Following the attorney general’s orders, the bureau took Thind’s case all the way to the Supreme Court. As Thind awaited his appeal for over two years, he remained assured. A year before his case went to trial, the 1922 Supreme Court ruling of The United States v. Takao Ozawa declared that Ozawa, a Japanese man, was ineligible for citizenship because “white” was synonymous with Caucasian and only “free white persons” could be naturalized (Takaki 298-299). Thind’s case cannot fully be understood without an explanation of how the term “white” was defined in Ozawa’s case

the year before. Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland argued that though Ozawa benefited

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from American education and upbringing, Ozawa was physically not Caucasian by anthropological opinion (Takaki 208). It was the Supreme Court’s responsibility to regard the will of Congress, Sutherland continued, and the will of Congress deemed Ozawa ineligible. As Jensen explains, “the courts had applied the word white to persons of the Caucasian race, including Indians – a conclusion with which Sutherland saw no reason to differ” (257). Sutherland explicitly indicated that Indians were naturalized only because they were Caucasian, and thus, fit within the parameters of “white.” (Shukla 36-37; Takaki 298). Based on the 1922 Ozawa ruling, Thind and his lawyer trusted they could easily show that the anthropological classification of Indians as Aryans proved they were Caucasian, and hence, eligible for citizenship. However, their expectations -- and for many other Indians whose hopes hinged on the court’s ruling -- were destroyed. By a unanimous decision that Justice Sutherland delivered, the highest court in the nation ruled that though Indians were Caucasians, they were not white by the “understanding of common man” (qtd. in Takaki 299). The Supreme Court built its verdict from an arbitrary hypothesis of what “free white persons” might have meant to the First Congress when they drafted the 1790 law. Discounting science, history, legal precedence and rationale, the court maintained that the phrase “free white persons” was part of the “common man’s” vernacular in 1790. And by the “common man’s” estimation, Sutherland decreed, white was not synonymous with Caucasian, for the “common man” had a more limited view of what white popularly “looked” like (Jensen 258; Shukla 36; Takaki 299). Hence, by the Court’s judgment, Indians, and thus Thind, did not fit into the conception of the “common man’s” purview. Thind might be a Caucasian, but he was a “nonwhite” Caucasian. That the 1917 legislation included India in its “barred” zone reflected Congress’ position towards the assimilation of “Hindoos” into the category of white. As Palumbo-Liu argues in light of the

Supreme Court decision against Thind, “Whiteness became the signified of the will of Congress.

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That is, whatever Congress had in mind when it decided on whom to accept as naturalizable, a necessary component was ‘whiteness’ ” (39). The Court, with the urging of Congress, fabricated the “common man” as an emblem of American hegemony whose ahistorical specter governed and enforced US immigration. Sutherland’s invocation of the Founding Fathers’ vision of a “common man” was based less on historical accuracy than Congress’ nostalgia for a white utopian America. Immediately after the Thind decision, the government instigated a retroactive campaign of deporting and denaturalizing Indians. Sixty-five lost their citizenship by 1927 while forty-five cases pended in appeals (Jensen 260). Indians’ ineligibility for citizenship led to the denial of marriage licenses to Indian men and their white wives-to-be. In the process of US denaturalization, Indians also lost the ability to reapply for their British subjecthood. When they renounced their loyalty to the Crown to become American citizens, the British government claimed that Indian Americans abandoned England’s interests during The Great War, and thus, had no recourse to naturalization in the colony. The period of exclusion that the Thind decision initiated literally situated Indians’ citizenship “neither here nor there.” From 1923 through 1946, Indian nationalities were suspended “betwixt and between” the margins of legislation, colonial policy and racist ideologies that fostered, nourished and imagined a homogenous population of white “common” men and women. The presence of the “common man,” a universal ideal to which Indians, Asians and other nonwhites had no claim, loomed in a series of aggressive immigration laws that denied Asians entry and citizenship. Previous loopholes that allowed for Korean and Japanese entry were met with a denial of immigration quotas to persons ineligible for citizenship in the 1924 National Origins Act (Lowe 7; Takaki 300). Two years after the Philippines achieved independence from the US, the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Acts consolidated anti-Asian sentiment by excluding Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian immigration, marking “a significant attempt to uniformly bar Asian

142 immigration while redefining America’s notion of Asian-ness” (Palumbo-Liu 33). The universality of the “common man” prevailed as America exercised its sovereign right to constitute its own space, nation and people through a rejection of aliens and a denial of their non-European bodies. The Bhagat Singh Thind case inaugurated an era of Asian exclusion that would last twenty years for Chinese, twenty-three for Indians and Filipinos, and almost three decades for Koreans and Japanese, albeit severe quotas of approximately 100 persons per year applied to each nationality thereafter. Only in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the watershed Immigration and Naturalization Act into law, would the US government finally dismantle immigration quotas based on national origins. A “new” labor diaspora arrived wherein their Indian nationalism would help rather than hurt them. In the aftermath of India’s independence, elite research and technical universities sprouted across the country as part of India’s postcolonial plans to solve the problems of poverty, illiteracy and sickness through the development of talent in the fields of science, business and technology.96 As the demand for technical labor increased in America in the decades after WWII, India’s “brain drain” flooded the US with a highly professionalized wave of migrants who excelled in applied science, business and medicine from the most prestigious universities across the burgeoning nation-state. 97

For Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and for most of India’s leaders since his reign, science is indelibly linked to the country’s nationalist identity and the growth of its global influence. Addressing the Indian Science Congress as early as 1938, Nehru hoped, “If we could tap, say, even five percent of the latent talent in India for scientific purposes, we could have a host of scientists in India [. . .] It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources turning to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people.” In the weeks preceding Nehru’s inauguration in 1947, he proclaimed that the “new India” would be linked to science, not for the pursuit of truth, per se, but to save the new nation-state from economic turmoil. See Prakash, 196. 96

Members of the Indian National Congress began using the term “brain drain” to criticize the exodus of highly educated Indians’ tendencies to move to the United States. The term was previously used to describe the migration of skilled workers from Britain to America. There is not enough room in the current discussion to expound on the relationship between British colonial formations of a subordinate subaltern 97

Although South Asian Americanist discourse marks the “old” and “new” diasporas by an

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interval of more than four decades from 1923 to 1965, the legacy of the initial wave, contoured by the migration of labor to the colonies and the New World, is evident in the post-1965 bourgeois class of professionals driven by forces of globalization and neo-colonial economies dominated by Western Europe and America (Gopinath 8). Indeed, Kamala Viswewaran reminds us, “South Asian postcolonial migration to the US (and elsewhere) was, and continues to be, heavily dependent upon the colonial history of class formation in the subcontinent” (9). If we locate Thind’s verdict as an end point to the “old” diaspora, and situate 1923 as the start of a discursive gap in which the United States government rejected South Asian aliens and citizens from the nation’s borders, then the question emerges -- how do colonial histories impact the formation of South Asian subjectivity in the US during this interval and how do we begin to theorize the bodies that never left, and bodies like Sabu’s who arrived, at the height of Asian exclusion? As thousands of Indians and fellow Asians returned to their home nations as the US judiciary enforced the Supreme Court rulings of 1922 and 1923 and the National Origins Act of 1924, the United States administration of Asians shifted from a focus on “exclusion to the management of a newly defined interiority” (Palumbo-Liu 18). The minority presence of those Asians left behind -- including Dr. Bhagat Singh Thind, Lal Chand Mehra, a film actor employed by Cecil B. DeMille, and a community of Sikh men married to Mexican women in California – augmented the nation’s contradictory stance that upheld its diversity as an emblem of American modernity. Fewer inassimilable foreigners lessened the threat to economic and civil liberties enjoyed

class of educated Indians and its impact on the development of a postcolonial Indian bourgeoisie across the diaspora. Postcolonial theorists including Partha Chatterjee, Sara Suleri and Kamala Visweswaran have called this middle class a “salariat” or “middleman minority” that attained Western-style educations either in India or abroad to first gain British administrative positions, Indian government jobs and later “white collar” positions internationally, serving the dominant economic interests of transnational First World corporations. See Shukla, 58; Visweswaran, 9-11.

144 by the white “liberal” population. As David Palumbo-Liu suggests, after America signed the 1919 Treaty of Versailles armistice that ended WWI, the US “held itself up as the nation that would lead in the reformation of the modern world, and such reformation had a particular connection to the modern state’s ability to assimilate migrant populations” (20). In this sense, American modernity at the onset of severe Asian exclusion was only reserved for those deemed adaptable to the imaginary parameters of the Supreme Court’s universal “common man.”

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Sabu’s short life (1924-1963) poignantly marks the interval between the “old” and “new” South Asian diasporas and precisely coincides with the period of Asian exclusion in the United States. The 1923 verdict of the United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind judged Indians as nonwhite Caucasians, and thus, ineligible for citizenship. This landmark decision initiated a series of antiAsian immigration acts that culminated in racialized definitions of Asian-ness across the nation. Although Sabu arrived in 1940 at the age of sixteen, the climate of anti-Asian sentiment was pervasive. Only after persistent lobbying efforts by influential Asian leaders did Congress permit immigration from Asia, albeit with strict restrictions. As the United States fought a war against the spread of Fascism and Nazi ideology, the government could no longer justify the racism embedded in its immigration policies. Ultimately, Sabu attained citizenship on January 4th, 1944 under the condition he would enlist in the army (Leibfred, “Sabu” 453). Sabu graciously obliged. Shortly thereafter, he was sent to Greensboro, NC for basic training. The previous year, the 1943 LuceCeller Act repealed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and admitted Chinese immigrants at quotas of 105 per year. Three years later, the second Luce-Celler Act repealed the 1917 “barred zone,” establishing quotas that admitted only one hundred Indians and Filipinos each annually. Only in 1952, at the height of the Korean War, would Japanese Issei (first generation Americans) and

Koreans become eligible for citizenship by the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act, a law that

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approved quota-based immigration from the “Asia-Pacific Triangle,” a geographic region comprising most of South and South East Asia (Takaki 417). In 1965, the Immigration and Naturalization Act lifted all national-origins based limits on citizenship and immigration. Sabu died of a heart attack less than eighteen months earlier. Sabu’s life – onscreen and off -- offers a citational terrain to map the racialization of South Asians in America. The historic ruling against Bhagat Singh Thind bound Indians to a peculiar racialization that was less about the identity politics that connected him to his Aryan heritage or his entitlement to whiteness as a high-caste Caucasian. Instead, as Sandhya Shukla points out, the Supreme Court decision “ascribed to Indians a racial representation, borne not out of origin, or necessarily self-identification, but out of their embeddedness in local social and class formations” (36-37). As I have argued above, although Indians of the “old” diaspora attempted to develop their own sense of community through their connections to language, religion, nationalism, ethnology and labor, they could not escape the political, colonial and social forces that legislated them as unAmerican. Strategically citing British colonial knowledge in US courts, Indians reverted to performing caste privilege in pursuit of the “white” promise of citizenship. Anthropological evidence that the federal government previously employed to legislate and maintain definitions of “free white persons” fell short in the wake of Indians’ petitions. That popular beliefs about Indians’ racial identities substituted scientific classifications in legislative and judicial processes reveals the “anxieties” inherent in containing the limits of the white imperial body. From the invention of the “common man” grew the test of “common understanding” which eventually became part of the nation’s Constitution (Jensen 264). Guided by no legal definition, the law arbitrarily deemed how well a person could socially “pass” in the white community, and in turn, applied one’s “passability” to his/her legal rights.

146 Thus, for Sabu, becoming American emerged through an enactment of social relationships wherein he “passed” as a member of the white community via class mobility and fame. Sabu married a white woman, converted to Christianity, gave his kids American names and spoke American English in the home. He drove American sport cars, owned a Hollywood ranch, raised horses and served the United States army as a decorated war hero. His off screen life, as quintessentially American as it was, deeply contrasted with his onscreen depictions. Like the Indian men before him who hoped to escape colonization in America, yet employed colonial knowledge to attain social privilege, Sabu submitted to processes of “auto-exoticization” that helped him make financial and public gains (Savigliano 137). Though he performed affable Oriental agents with a flair for adventure and a vulnerable impishness, the cultural producers of his exotic characters maintained the upper hand through a perpetuation of his “Otherness” and a denial of roles that may have positioned him contemporaneously. Qualities used to describe Indian Americans of the “old” diaspora -- including primitive, refined, swarthy, white, aboriginal and queer -- also applied to Sabu’s Kipling-esque adolescent portrayals and obsequious buddy roles. Unsurprisingly, at the height of India’s “Free India” movement, Indian audiences on the subcontinent protested, criticized and censored Sabu’s roles in Elephant Boy and The Drum as offensive foils to the perils of British colonialism. In the US, on the other hand, where most Americans did not oppose the colonization of India (Jensen 17), Sabu’s “passability” as American and Indian built identification with US audiences and inevitably harnessed his stardom. As I argue in the next chapter, the ambivalent processes of racializing Indians in America imbued his depictions of jungle boys, babus and camp orientals with a liminality that situated him “betwixt and between” multiple genders, nationalities and ethnicities. With a collection of WWII medals and a star on Hollywood Boulevard for his Orientalist roles in Elephant Boy (1936),

147 The Thief of Bagdad (1940), The Jungle Books (1942) and Arabian Nights (1942), Sabu, arguably, was the most famous Indian living in America.

CHAPTER FOUR

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Sabu as Babu and Boys in the Jungle Cosmopolitanism and Strategizing the Stereotype Crowned with a cerise-colored turban and attired in a suit with “hand-stitched lapels,” Sabu sat in a deluxe New York hotel room across from Theodore Strauss, a writer for The New York Times. Sabu had been in the United States for less than five months, and by Strauss’ accounts, he was not only a “handsome, princely fellow” with “dark brown features,” but was also “at a curiously, unassimilated age when one is a little more than a boy and a little less than a man” (Strauss 135). In addition to highlighting the liminality of Sabu’s adolescence, the journalist also underscored Sabu’s transcultural qualities with a quintessential description of his “discovery” in India and ascent to international fame. To illustrate the popular mythology that followed Sabu to the United States, Strauss’ portrayal of the actor’s journey is worth quoting at length: The curious and romantic fact is that in Sabu’s case the transition was literal. As almost every one now knows, he was until the age of 12 just another gamin loitering about the elephant quarters of the Maharaja of Mysore, where his father had been a mahout with 100 mammals under his supervision […] it was Sabu’s desire that some day he might follow in his parent’s footsteps. But then Mr. Flaherty chose him for the lead of his film. A twelvemonth later, Sabu was in England as a ward of the British government and enrolled in one of the kingdom’s more aristocratic schools. Between being tutored in English, the intricacies of Rugby and the peculiarities of the English caste system, Sabu continued to appear [in] such epics as “Drums” and the more recent “Thief of Bagdad,” which was still being shot after the war broke out. And to discover Western civilization – including as it does fast cars, bowling and ice cream – simultaneously with elevation to the fantastic prerogatives of film

149 stardom should be enough to turn any impressionable youngster’s head. (Strauss 135; emphasis added) The passage above repeats a teleology that romanticizes Western civilization’s capacity to cultivate, train and modernize non-Western subjects like Sabu from the most modest of extremes. Exposed to royalty as a “gamin loitering about the elephant quarters of the Maharaja of Mysore” and edified by “the kingdom’s more aristocratic schools,” Sabu’s story demonstrates that with the right acculturation, and a good amount of luck, the least likely of personalities can be transfigured into a modern prince. In his “transition” from Indian society to the “peculiarities of the English caste system,” Sabu parlayed his inheritance of taming pachyderms into a coveted career of starring in British and Hollywood films as jungle boys, colonial babus98 and camp orientals, filmic representations I unpack throughout this chapter and the next. Indeed, the cosmopolitanism this son of a mahout attained grew from a diasporic trajectory imbricated by competing colonial, imperial and national imperatives. Timothy Brennan’s definition of cosmopolitanism as a “fundamentally ambivalent phenomenon” is particularly useful as I continue my mapping of South Asian American subject formation across the representations that Sabu’s body performs (659). As Brennan argues, the ambivalence of this term’s employment not only derives from agendas that range between neoliberal orientations, aspirations towards world citizenry and the promise of free market economies, but also

Although a more detailed discussion of the babu follows below, for the purposes of guiding the reader, the word babu – incidentally rhyming with Sabu -- refers to a specific colonial masculinity engendered by the British first in Bengal and applied across the subcontinent during the 19th century and onwards. The stereotype of a babu connotes an effeminate, loquacious and obsequious Indian man, possessed with British affectations who is “almost the same but not quite” the English "in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,” as the parliamentarian Thomas Babington Macaulay famously proselytized in 1835 (qtd. in Bhabha 124). At the time of “Macaulay’s minute” the colonial administration sought to build a burgeoning class of Indian administrators who would serve the British empire as native informants, interpreters and “mimic men” to gain indigenous knowledge for governance, surveillance and trade. See Bhabha, 121-131; Roy, Indian Traffic, 71-91. 98

150 from how the critic invokes and represents “global” as an ideal (663). Gita Rajan and Shailja Sharma extend Brennan’s theorization to devise a “new cosmopolitanism” that moves beyond its “nationalimperial” derivations to occupy a “range of fluid subject positions, which can be trans-class, translocal with competing value systems” (2). While Rajan and Sharma build their neologism from a discussion that connects the “new” global economy with post-1965 South Asian migrants in the United States, I find their description of “new cosmopolitans” applicable to Sabu’s transcultural identity. Rajan and Sharma write: We define new cosmopolitans as people who blur the edges of home and abroad by continuously moving physically, culturally, and socially, and by selectively using globalized forms of travel, communication, languages and technology to position themselves in motion between at least two homes, sometimes even through dual forms of citizenship, but always in multiple locations. (2-3) Although Sabu seldom traveled between India and the United States once he left India in 1936 – his first and last visit was in 1952 for the making of Baghdad -- I suggest that the distribution of his images through the technology of film and his traversal of three spatial locations -- India, England and the United States -- position him as a cosmopolitan subject who articulates the irregularities, multiplicities and ambivalence intrinsic to cultures of migration. Charting the circulatory paths of the “Brown Atlantic,” Sabu’s British colonial background conditioned his portrayals of India and the Orient in both America and Europe. His Indian roots followed him to England where Korda’s imperial production house publicized his loyalty to the Crown, arranged endorsements in which he sold Tetley tea and made short live action reels (screened before theatres’ main features) that showed the child star driving miniature Aston Martin sports cars.99 Speaking in clipped Anglo-Indian

diction, while turbaned and dressed in Indian Nehru jackets, he inaugurated the “Pet’s Corner”

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exhibit at the London zoo in 1937 astride an elephant, appeared on BBC radio to discuss Maharajas and mahouts, and even visited King George VI at Buckingham Palace with Alexander Korda in 1938.100 On arriving in America in 1940, his obsequious, yet glamorous, personae adapted to Hollywood audiences. Critics called him the “Hindu Mickey Rooney,” categorizing him as a “Hollywood child star” alongside Gordon Griffith, Shirley Temple and Judi Garland.101 While he made efforts to assimilate into American culture by naturalizing, adjusting his accent, and climbing up the ranks of Hollywood celebrity -- even attempting to join the Masons who rejected his application for membership102 -- his fame necessarily relied on exploiting his racial, ethnic and colonial difference through Orientalist portrayals of the East. However, Sabu complicated and challenged these hackneyed Orientalist images through enduring “immigrant acts” that recuperated his agency with distinct performances of hybridity, acculturation and cosmopolitanism offscreen (Lowe). The actor neither overtly criticized his Oriental depictions in the press nor revealed his dissent to his wife, as she claims. However, as much as Korda’s London Film and Hollywood’s Universal Studios tried to collapse his on and off screen life together, Sabu took lengths to attenuate

Sabu papers, Gemini Pictures, Press Files (1936-1938), Teddington, England, UK; “Elephant Boy,” Time Magazine, 3 May 1937: 34. 99

100

Ibid.

101

“The Jungle Book,” Life Magazine 16 Mar. 1942: 76-78.

102 Robert Hemmes, a childhood friend of Sabu’s, shared that Sabu was not always accepted for his stardom. Hemmes recollects that the Atwater Chapter of the Order of DeMolay – the young boy’s division of the Free and Accepted Masons of Los Angeles -- denied membership to Sabu because “he was different and he wouldn’t fit in. As time went on it became apparent that what they meant by different was not only his background in India, and his occupation in the movies, but that his skin was dark.” Ironically, as Hemmes pointed out to me, carved onto Sabu’s gravestone is the Free Mason emblem of the square and compass. Marilyn claims Sabu became a member in adulthood. Personal Correspondence with Robert Hemmes, March 26th 2004.

his foreign-ness by proving his American identity as a WWII soldier, joining the fraternity of the

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Freemasons after several attempts and by raising his kids with little exposure to their Indian heritage.103 Indeed, Sabu’s Indian-ness, British-ness and American-ness came into being through an embodiment of contingent cultural practices that framed the unfixed and liminal parameters of his ethnic identity. “The processes that produce such identity,” posits Lisa Lowe, “are never complete and are always constituted in relation to historical and material differences” (64). Although the historical realities between Sabu and post-1965 South Asian Americans differ, they share a cosmopolitanism wherein they “occupy a space that is between here and there, which is almost an extension of the home country, but also a source of accumulated wealth and privilege in the host nation” (Rajan and Sharma 15). As I demonstrate below, a large portion of Sabu’s “accumulated wealth and privilege” grew from performances where cinema, colonial knowledge and anthropological discourse clashed across Khyber Pass battlefields, “temporally distant” Orients and Kipling’s imperial imagination. At odds with these Oriental caricatures was an enactment of American modernity symbolized by the glamour, technological innovation and consumption afforded by Hollywood. Sabu’s famous collection of show horses, his reputation as a “ladies’ man” and his entrepreneurial ventures as a real estate developer and import/export broker of house furnishings104 deviated from his repeated portrayals of mounting elephants as vehicles, appearing distinctly queer as the white protagonist’s buddy or thieving from marketplaces instead of trading in lucrative commodities (Leibfried, “Sabu” 455). Although he appeared in stereotypical roles, his performances exhort 103

Interview with Paul Sabu, Sabu’s son. Production File, Sabu the Elephant Boy, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK. 104

Robert Hemmes, Personal correspondence, 26 March 2004.

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Fig. 6. Sabu parading through North London for the Harringay Circus after returning from America as a star. Courtesy Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK.

readings that contextualize his characters against an active resistance of an imperial gaze, read against the politics of decolonization that framed the Indian subcontinent at that time. The consequent “trauma” of colonization, especially before India’s 1947 independence, caused many Indians traveling through the diaspora to carve out social, cultural and political spaces that distanced them from the psychological burdens of British rule (Shukla 15). In Sabu’s case, and for others moving away from commonwealth locales, assimilation offered routes of rejecting the past through modes of self-invention and autonomy. Granted, a marginal Indian community lived in Los Angeles when he moved to the US in 1940; thus, the options to participate in communally designed ethnic practices were limited. Yet even in his measured efforts of becoming American, an “aura” of Indianness was never far behind. Indian drum rhythms greeted him and his wife when they entered Hollywood nightclubs; the mention of Indian elephants often followed the utterance of his name;

and he qualified his ethnic origins by donning a tightly-bound turban with a Western suit in press

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photos, a choice that arguably valorized his Otherness (See fig. 6). Significantly, coupled with his expressions of Indian-ness were gestures of becoming American. These included enlisting in the US army, marrying a white American actress, converting to Christianity, launching successful business enterprises and attaining citizenship. Like many Asian American actors of Hollywood’s classical period of the 1930s to the 1950s, particularly Philip Ahn, Keye Luke and Richard Loo, performing Oriental stereotypes was the only recourse for finding work in a mainstream film industry entrenched in racist casting and representational politics. Frequently, they took secondary jobs to supplement their incomes. Ahn was a furniture designer and restaurateur; Luke was a graphic artist and voice actor; and, Loo ran a printing press (Chung 45). As Hye Seung Chung suggests in Hollywood Asian, at times, these actors exaggerated their Asian accents and mannerisms to win movie roles (45). Once they were cast, they took lengths to mollify their “alien-ness” by speaking and acting more American. “Given this history of Asian American performers,” Chung asks, “is there anything subversive about their Oriental masquerade, anything that might restore a sense of ethnic self-esteem?” (45) In these instances, casting an authentic Asian body in the role of an Oriental betrays the fabrication of the stereotype, thereby dismantling the efficacy of racialized and colonized visions of Otherness (Bhabha; Lee, Josephine; Moon; Shimakawa). Building on the work of Josephine Lee and Karen Shimakawa who approach Asian American stereotypes strategically to expose the instability and ambivalence of popular Asian American representations, I situate Sabu as a fitting emblem who reveals the unfixed and split nature of Indian caricatures when an absence of South Asians lived in the US. As I argue in the previous chapter, representations of India largely existed in the realm of the imagination when a dearth resided within the nation’s borders. Hence, with an absence of visible Indian bodies, the legibility of Indian-ness often relied on modes of British colonial

representational practices borrowed from ethnology, imperial literature and travel writing. These

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Orientalist representations took the forms of nautch girls, child brides, passive princes, impish thieves, snake charmers, babus, jugglers, holy men, immolated widows and tribal teens displayed, narrated and imagined from imperial exhibitions (in India, the metropole, World’s Fairs and Barnum’s Hippodromes) to early American cinema (Thomas Edison’s Hindoo Faqir (1902) and Douglas Fairbank’s The Thief of Baghdad (1924)), and from pro-colonial propaganda disguised as American travelogues (Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927)) to the fiction and poetry of the consummate imperialist, Rudyard Kipling. Indeed, in order to retire the Oriental stereotypes Sabu performed – tribals, princes, thieves and babus -- one must necessarily invoke them first (Ma xi). And to highlight the colonial, racial and gendered ambivalence imbricated onto Sabu’s caricatures, the iterations that inform his personae must be unpacked. Unpacking his performances – both onscreen and off -- forms the crux of the discussion below.

Citational Terrains and Metonymic Entities: Performing the Space between “Excess” and “Lack” The current discussion encompasses an analysis of Sabu’s performances of jungle boys and babus in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books (1942) and Drums (1938), respectively.105 Chapter five engages Sabu’s depictions of camp orientals primarily in Thief of Bagdad (1940). These three movies were

Black Narcissus (1947) is one of Sabu’s most famous works and is routinely cited elsewhere in criticism on Orientalist cinema. A reading of Sabu’s role as the nameless colonial Prince of the Himalayas in the adaptation of Rumer Godden’s famous 1939 novel may seem conspicuously absent from this chapter. However, Sabu was a grown man in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Oscar-winning film, and my focus on Sabu’s adolescent years heuristically coincides with my reading of the actor as a traverser of manhood and boyhood, as a triangulator between the female and male love leads, and as a metonym for India, i.e., an inchoately formed national body dependent on its white paternal rulers. For detailed analyses of Black Narcissus see Jaikumar, “ ‘Place’ and the Modernist Redemption of Empire in Black Narcissus (1947),” 57- 77; Sheehan, 30-39; Shohat, “Gender and Culture of Empire,” 669-696. 105

156 produced when Sabu was a citizen of “nowhere” before his 1944 naturalization. The ambiguity of his citizenship provides an heuristic framework that augments the liminality of his onscreen roles In Identities in Motion, Peter Feng makes clear that “Hollywood cinema participated in creating popular support for imperialism, which was justified scientifically by the inferiority of America’s ‘little brown brothers’ ” (37). Although The Drum (dir. Zoltan Korda, 1938) was an imperial film dramatizing a border conflict between the British military and an Islamic kingdom in the Himalayas, it was made with international audiences in mind and distributed by United Artists, a Hollywood company. In the years leading up to India’s independence, the British government took efforts to shield the international media from Indian nationalists’ revolutionary activities, and in response, aimed to develop media, cinema and propaganda that justified their ruling presence there. Alexander Korda thought a reliance on “national stereotypes” in his brand of popular films would garner support for the imperial cause (Trumpbour 152). Winston Churchill, who overtly objected to India’s sovereignty through WWII, knighted Korda in 1942 for his participation in Britain’s imperial mission, rewarded his “devoted patriotism” with public monies and exalted his brand of filmmaking, which “embraced an antiquated nineteenth century glorification of Empire” (Trumpbour 148- 149). The “structures of feeling” developed in Korda’s films shaped Sabu’s early performances of colonial subjecthood as the international community considered the moral justifications of European and Japanese imperial projects in the years before and during WWII. Shot on location in India, The Elephant Boy and The Drum narrativizes the colonial encounter between Indians and the British with Sabu positioned as the primary object of the imperial gaze. While The Elephant Boy is an American and British endeavor, The Drum is indeed a British imperial film. However, Korda, a director who worked both in Hollywood and England produced both films with international markets and American distributors in mind. Therefore, though Sabu was a racially and nationally ambivalent figure in America’s popular imaginary, a colonial framework accompanied his arrival to

the United States inflecting the equivocality of his non-citizen and non-white Caucasian status.

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Thus, his hybridity is not only complicated by the “paradigmatic” ambivalence between the colonizer and the colonized, but is further implicated by the ambivalence of his citizenship, his nationality, his race and his feminine masculinity. My focus on a specific figure like Sabu is not to essentialize him as an isolated object. Rather, his body serves as a “metaphor for a panoply of objects and institutions which, when taken together, seem to make present an entire universe to the observer” (Oksiloff 18). Again, by positioning Sabu’s performances as a citational terrain, I aim to show how his depictions guide the observer towards dynamic and historical views of South Asian American masculinity at the axes of British colonialism, US nationalism and the work of the imagination. For Sabu to “discover” Western civilization, the West had to necessarily “imagine” and “discover” Sabu first. Projected onto his “discovery” is a legacy of Western imperial narratives that position India in the distant past, measure male adolescence as an investment in civilization and justify colonialism’s ordained prerogative to moralize and civilize its colonized masses. As I argue in chapter two, Sabu’s “discovery” transpired at the nexus of British imperial commercial agendas, American ethnological practices and local aspirations of increasing Mysore’s tourist economy. To achieve these ends, the Elephant Boy expedition scoured India for an authentic “Toomai of the Elephants” with an equally adventurous spirit, the skills of a mahout and the ability to traverse British colonial and “native” spaces with ease, confidence and humility like the title character from Kipling’s fable in The Jungle Books (1894). In his study on the sociology and signification of film celebrities, Richard Dyer theorizes “Stars [. . .] collapse the distinction between the actor’s authenticity and the authentication of the character s/he is playing.” In other words, manufacturing celebrity often relies on diminishing the boundaries between on and offscreen personae. That the actor played “Sabu the Stable Boy” in

Sabu and the Magic Ring (1957) and “Sabu the Jungle Boy” in Baghdad (1954) and The Black Panther

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(1953) indicates that his American film producers not only blurred the divide between Sabu’s “real” and “fictional” identities, but marketed their films with the iconicity of his name. Even more significant is the fact that Sabu featured as a “boy” well into his late twenties and thirties, revealing how his boyish depictions derive from an economy of shaping Asian men as inchoately male and reiterating that Asian men never reach the status of fully developed men. As one of the most popular Indian icons living in America, Sabu’s pubescent portrayals arguably served as metonyms that signified India’s developing, if not adolescent, status as a nation-state scrutinized by the First World imperial order, a paternalistic community that questioned the viability of India’s - and other formerly colonized nations’ -- progression towards sovereignty.106 As Robert Stam reminds us, “Representations become allegorical; within hegemonic discourse every subaltern/performer/role is seen as synecdochically summing up a vast but putatively homogenous community” (662-663). Discerning Sabu’s performances of “boyhood” as metonyms for South Asia’s political and economic development augments well cited theorizations on Asian men’s sexuality that link the gendering of their ethnicities to “feminized” professions in restaurants, laundries and tailor shops, for instance, or to “bachelor communities” emasculated by antimiscegenation laws and federal policies that restricted the immigration of Asian women (Eng 17; Lee, Josephine 11; Lowe 11).

A few months before Japan entered the war at the end of 1941, Winston Churchill committed Great Britain and the United States to peace aims through the Atlantic Charter drawn on August 14th of the same year. The declaration of the Atlantic Charter avowed, “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live” and affirmed the “wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” Overjoyed by this charter of self-governance, Indians at home and abroad celebrated in anticipation of their independence. But their joy was short-lived. Churchill met with the House of Commons on September 9, 1941 and specified that the charter did not apply to “India, Burma and other parts of the British Empire” (Wolpert 333-335). While Churchill was ready to ensure “self-rule” and “self-determination” to European nations in the wake of a World War, countries like India would interminably be suspended in a state of dependency on their paternalistic rulers. 106

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Fig. 7. A “lack” of civilization was often accompanied by a “lack” of clothing for this child star. This portrait was taken while Thief of Bagdad (1940) was in production. Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK.

These theorizations are crucial to political economies on Asian American men’s subject formation, indeed, and I want to posit that the manufacturing of Sabu’s Oriental personae not only surfaced from the historical junctures of colonial labor economies, the legislation of South Asian racial ambivalence and racist exclusionary tactics discussed in the previous chapter. I also want to suggest that Sabu’s position in American society engages binaries drawn between performances of blackness and Asian-ness in US popular culture. Building on Robert Lee and Eric Lott’s work on yellowface and blackface minstrelsy, respectively, Priya Srinivasan argues that though similarities exist between these acts of racial masquerade (enactments that figure well into twentieth century performance and cinema), the “fundamental difference” is that African Americans have historically been constructed as primitive or “lacking in culture” while embodiments of Asian Americans as

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Fig. 8. The lavishness of Sabu’s garb connotes the “excess” of a Maharaja’s birthright. Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK.

Orientals point to an “excess of culture” (63). Validly, Srinivasan’s discussion historicizes the discrete racial formations that frame performances of blacks and Asians by whites, coupled with instances when blacks “blacked up” and Asians “yellowed up,” signifying on white displays of racial and ethnic Otherness. Her historicization provides a complex lens for examining the absorption of Oriental dance into American modern dance while Nautch practices in India were simultaneously stigmatized by elite Indian nationalists, missionaries and colonialists. In Sabu’s case, however, I argue that these binary oppositions between blacks’ “lack” and Asians’ “excess” are unsustainable.

When Sabu “browned up” as an Asian, albeit a South Asian foreigner for the screen, his

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impersonations ambivalently occupied both an absence and presence of culture and civilization. When performing a “lack” of culture, the actor’s onscreen characterizations of savage boys, animal trainers and tribal leaders -- Elephant Boy (1936), The Jungle Book (1942), Song of India (1949), Savage Drums (1951), The Black Panther (1954), Baghdad (1954) and Jaguar(1956) -- point to a primitiveness often associated with Native Americans and African Americans in the US popular imaginary (see fig. 8). These primeval embodiments, often citing romantic visions of noble savagery or colonial conceptions of tribal culture, elide a pedigree attributed to classes/castes of a higher status. On the other hand, his depictions of “excess” as princes, monarchs and sultans – in The Drum (1938), White Savage (1943), Black Narcissus (1947) and Hello Elephant (1954) – epitomize the baroque decadence and lasting ceremonies so often related to Orientalist representations of royalty across Asia and the Middle East. Markedly, Sabu’s film depictions correspond to the studios’ constructions of his authenticity offscreen. After all, as a boy born in the jungle and found in an elephant stable, his origins “naturalize” his performances of jungle boys on film. Moreover, his “princely” demeanor (as portrayed by Strauss’ New York Times article above) and climb up Hollywood’s royal echelons verify his ability to pass as a contemporary Raja possessed with glamour, treasure and ceremony (see fig. 8). Hence, Sabu’s presence in popular culture complicates constructions of “excess” and “lack,” attributed to Asian and African American performances of race. Further, his liminal personae problematize arbitrary dichotomies that reinforce hierarchical constructions along a white-black continuum. Embodying correlations with other Asian, African and Native American populations, while building identification with white audiences, Sabu’s oscillation between a primitive “lack” of culture and Oriental “excess” of tradition signifies that race is always mutually constituted in relation to corresponding processes of racialization.

162 The Strategies and Pleasures of “Cross-Viewing” Stereotypes Notably, Sabu’s performances of “browning up” -- wherein he is directed to perform exaggerated versions of himself and the Orient -- signify “moments of crossing” that ambivalently “straddle a desire for incorporation and a need for denigration” to his American audiences (Cheng 222). Framed by landscapes of untamed jungles or barren Arabian deserts, Sabu’s compact brown body arrives shirtless, glistened, oiled and darkened in contrast to his fellow white actors who are most often clothed and brownfaced, yet lighter-skinned than him. In these scenes, the camera sexualizes his body as a site of “otherness, which is at once an object of desire and derision, [and] an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity” (Bhabha 96). In his essay, “The Other Question,” Homi Bhabha contends that this space between “desire and derision” -- or as Anne Cheng suggests, “incorporation and denigration,” in relation to African American performances of blackface and Asian American performances of yellowface – releases a “productive ambivalence,” exposing the discursive boundaries of colonial, sexual and racial knowledge, and in effect, transgressing any fixity the stereotype might enable (Bhabha 96; Cheng 222). Indeed, to dismantle stereotypes that stem from (neo)colonial legacies of power, systemic patterns of prejudice and local/national modes of social control, the critic must unpack the ideological conditioning involved in constituting the racial Other. Bhabha theorizes that the “stereotype is a complex, ambivalent, contradictory mode of representation, as anxious as it is assertive, and demands not only that we extend our critical and political objectives but that we change the object of analysis itself” (100). Rather than approach the stereotype as a static construction, Bhabha instead broaches his theorization with an analysis of how colonial space absorbed the shifting exigencies of its “subject people” who manipulated colonial discourse to “construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to

163 justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction” (101). Obviously, the construction and maintenance of stereotypes protects privileges enjoyed by persons and groups occupying positions of power. However, the stereotype is more demonstrative of the anxieties involved with maintaining institutional privilege than it is successful at naturalizing sexual, colonial or racial difference. Josephine Lee extends Bhabha’s theorization of the colonial stereotype to trouble Orientalist performances of Asian Americans in theatre. She argues that the act of invoking racial stereotypes necessarily cites a genealogy of racism, and in doing so discloses “the inner dynamics of that history which already suggests the potential for its disruption” (96). Following from Bhabha’s assertion that stereotypes emerge from relentless racial “impulses” to secure phantasms that can never be fixed, the masquerade required of stereotypical performances emits an anxiety that exposes the overdetermined nature of the racial representation (Lee, Josephine 91). The symbolic excess produced when an Asian body performs an Asian stereotype heightens the “initial anxiety of encounter,” thereby offering strategies that point to the contested space between repetition and representation (Lee, Josephine 97). Conceivably, Sabu’s performances of passive princes, savage boys and impish thieves are neither replications nor acts of mimicry, but simulations and impersonations that diverge from his efforts to acculturate as an American in his offscreen life. When Asian American bodies reinstate enduring caricatures of dragon ladies, lotus blossoms or effete Oriental princes, the stereotype betrays the frailty of its own construction. Lee eloquently poses, “Any ability of the stereotype to ‘impersonate’ or stand in for a real body is troubled by the body’s propensity to move outside the realm of stereotype. The unsettling presence of the Other it supposedly represents has the potential to disrupt the stereotype as the partial representation that mocks its own attempts to imitate” (109). In this sense, although Sabu’s publicity agents rendered his image with an aura of authenticity as shown by his first film The

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Fig. 9. Sabu selling war bonds in 1943. Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK.

Elephant Boy, I want to maintain throughout this chapter that his social performances of becoming American – selling war bonds (see fig. 9), driving Cadillacs and raising an American nuclear family – expose how his Orientalist representations were at best, charming, adventurous and vibrant acts of 19th century Victorian literatures, and at worst, totalizing portraits of the East in which “natives” submitted to despotic rulers or bowed to “enlightened” colonizers equipped with Western civilizing directives. Orientalist tropes notwithstanding, there is pleasure in watching these “exotic” films, some of which – Thief of Bagdad, Jungle Books and Black Narcissus, especially – broke new ground for innovations in special effects, set design and cinematography. While Sabu’s portrayals of babus and jungle boys are redolently stereotypical, the charm, athleticism and theatrical skill required of these roles invoke a sense of delight as he holds his own next to actors as accomplished as Conrad Veidt in Thief and Deborah Kerr in Black Narcissus, or when he performs his own stunts with panthers in

165 Jungle Books or as an acrobatic juggler in Arabian Nights. Further, his iterations of queer masculinity, colonial adolescence and liminal citizenship effect a set of ambivalent reading strategies in which I find myself simultaneously marveling at his theatrics while cringing at his sycophancy onscreen. In her integral work on Asian American performance practice, Josephine Lee reminds us that the Asian American spectator often experiences a “pleasure of recognition of the Asian body, even in the playing of stereotypes,” and through resistant strategies, denies the “possibility of a monolithic ‘white’ spectatorial position” (97). Arguably, the “ideal spectator” was white for most of Sabu’s movies especially in the early films that form the crux of this chapter. In movies that headline Sabu’s name, most actors of color pepper the backdrops in exotically designed costumes and/or portray servants/slaves who submit to their white leads’ commands. Excepting the triad of films he did with Maria Montez and the Oscar-winning Thief of Bagdad (1940) where Rex Ingram, the celebrated African American actor plays a genie whom the titular role releases from a lamp, Sabu is often the only lead actor of color whose desires manifest in the course of his characters’ developments. In the “exotic” films he did under third billing after Montez, the Dominican-born “Queen of Technicolor” and the Swiss American adventure hero, Jon Hall, the narratives’ closures are determined by the marriage of the white protagonist to his Latina ingénue; the restoration of power to the rightful white brownfaced rulers; and the conversion of depraved “native” Oriental citizens into loyal palace subjects. In a Said-ean sense, these dénouements uphold the West’s “positional superiority” over the Orient though narratives of “despotism, Oriental splendor, cruelty and sensuality…domesticated” for Western use (Orientalism 7, 4). Indeed, the resilience of Said’s argument stems from a critique of “the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures” (Orientalism 7). The Western “superiority” displayed across the bodies of white and brownfaced actors reinforces that these movies were certainly produced with a white spectator in

mind. Although most non-European actors in these films either play submissive, tyrannical or

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dissolute characters, while white brownfaced actors often characterize fully developed heroes or villainous leads, the gendered, sexual and racial triangulations of these films between Sabu, the white protagonist and the Latina ingénue (who passes as white, and thus, deservedly kisses the white male lead) yield a variable series of looking relations with the Orient and its Oriental characters that trouble Manichean dichotomies between Self and Other. In Thief, and Arabian Nights, for example, the object of the white male protagonist’s desire in these films vacillates between the female lead and Sabu. Although Sabu never “gets the girl” in these Orientalist adventures, the white hero always wins the “damsel in distress,” an endeavor Sabu’s characters repeatedly facilitate. However, a central facet of the white heroes’ character development is firmly securing Sabu’s loyalty and vice-versa. By the film’s resolution, the concluding scenes often feature the white hero standing between Sabu and the heroine. Arguably, there are many modes of identifying with Sabu’s characters, locations that shift between and encompass queer, Asian American, Indian, immigrant and Euro-American spectatorial positions. In her pioneering work on dance spectatorship in the US from the 1930s to the 1960s, dance historian Susan Manning offers critical strategies for reading “bodies in motion” from alternative positions that privilege gay, leftist and non-white reception of Negro and modern dance. “Cross-viewing,” Manning maintains, “does not happen along a single axis alone, but along multiple axes simultaneously” (xvi). In this sense, spectators from various locations identify with or diverge from raced, gendered and classed bodies onstage, and underrepresented audience members potentially recognize themselves in non-Euro-American derived choreography or in performances marked by sexual and racial transgressions. Manning continues, “Cross-viewing in relation to gender and sexuality more often worked in one direction than in two directions. That is, spectators who lived out gender and sexual dissidence saw what spectators whose lives conformed to normative

expectations saw but also perceived other possible meanings” (xvii). Similarly, while the primary

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romantic relationship in Sabu’ films are between white brownfaced heroes and brownfaced female leads, the interracial homoerotic gestures punctuated by Hollywood camp provide paths of identification for gay and non-white audiences who likely discerned seductive displays of words, gestures and sentiments between the hero and his brown buddy, Sabu. The Orientalist mise en scènes of his films, particularly Thief, Arabian Nights, White Savage (1943) and Cobra Woman (1944) render a shielded space for experiencing queer desire in the movie theatre -- imagined eastwardly and southwardly to ancient temporalities, embodied by “browned up” bodies like Sabu’s and his white buddies, and tilted from the heterosexist assumptions of Hollywood romance. At one level the “distancing devices” that situate Sabu in anachronistic worlds and exotic environs achieve a “denial of coevalness” and perpetuate the East and its subjects as unevolved, antiquated and temporally remote (Fabian). As much as Orientalist paradigms apply to Sabu’s personae, the ambivalence of his stereotypical caricatures produces an interpretive excess that in Homi Bhabha’s words, “vacillates between what is always ‘in place,’ already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated” (95). This anxious repetition -- a repetition that aims to presuppose the parameters of the gendered or racial subject -- instead enacts a performativity that Judith Butler theorizes as a “reiterative and citational practice, by which discourse produces the effects of which it names” (Bodies 2). Highlighting Sabu’s performativity -- a series of utterances citing a genealogy that shapes, contours and informs his performances of South Asian masculinity – this discussion aims to unsettle fixities ascribed to his Oriental stereotypes by not only privileging cross-viewing pleasures but also by unpacking the citational terrain that characterizes the cultural hybridity of his on and offscreen personae.

Jungle Boys, Wolf-Boys, Imperial Boys: In-Between the Jungle, the Village and Civilization

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Shot on ten acres of land, the American production company, United Artists, built an Indian jungle forty miles outside of Hollywood for the film, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (dir. Zoltan Korda, 1942).107 The two-volume collection of stories, The Jungle Books (1894, 1895) is arguably Rudyard Kipling’s most famous literary work with its culture of Indian jungle life, a vibrant cast of animal characters and the enigmatic protagonist, Mowgli, the archetypal Indian boy raised by wolves in the wild. Produced by Alexander Korda, the movie set includes Siberian wolves, Indian and African elephants, water buffalos, monkeys, antelopes, leopards, tigers, panthers, doves, parrots, hyenas, bears, pythons, cobras and crocodiles. Adapting Kipling’s colorful characters for the screen proved a difficult endeavor, yet the film’s strength lies in its cinematography of exotic fauna, most of which came from California zoos.108 The menagerie of over two thousand live animals, amid a $65,000 wilderness of bamboo stalks, palm trees, shrubs, flowers and ferns, provides a tropical simulacrum for Sabu’s imitation of Mowgli, Kipling’s adolescent hybrid boy.109 Although the film received mixed reviews, critics praised Sabu’s “bestial” portrayal of Mowgli and credited his performance to his authentic “jungle boy” or “wild boy” background, describing him as “natural,” “effective,” “astonishingly confident” and a “tarzan with brains.”110 Laurence Stilling’s script adaptation awkwardly attempts to capture Kipling’s ornate language, but

Alexander Korda’s 1942 production of The Jungle Book influenced the storyboard of Disney’s 1967 animated feature. The similarity in the set designs of Korda’s production and the jungle backdrops in the cartoon are particularly uncanny. However, while Korda’s version augments the relationship between Mowgli and the human village, Disney’s version privilege’s Mowgli’s relationship with his jungle family. See Karol Kulik; See http://www.fosteronfilm.com/fantasy/thiefbagdad.htm. 107

109

Time Magazine. 18 April 1942, 92.

New York Times, 8 March 1942, 14; New York Times, 6 April 1942, 19; Newsweek, 6 April 1942, 65; The Nation, 9 May 1943, 553. 110

169 the lyricism is lost when dubbed in American diction as live animal speech. That Variety, Newsweek, The Nation and The New York Times used the word “silly” in their critiques relays some of the film’s absurdity, especially when “the barber” (John Qualen) and the “village pundit” (Frank Puglia) fall into a slapstick routine, dress up like maharajas and yield to a stolen gem’s curse which drives them to blood-thirsty lunacy. The commonalities between Kipling’s original tales and the screen adaptation are tenuous; only three of the eight Mowgli stories from The Jungle Books are used.111 While The Nation called The Jungle Book the most “vulgar film of the year” with “Hollywood actors who make the least convincing Indians one ever hopes to see,”112 mainstream Newsweek described The Jungle Book as an “eye-filling spectacle and an impressively successful screen novelty.”113 As Kipling’s Mowgli, “the role for which he was born” (Leibfried, Rudyard Kipling 31), Sabu’s performance epitomizes the “in-between-ness” central to theorizing his liminal personae across the “Brown Atlantic.” Filmed in 1941, production on the film began less than a year after Sabu moved across the ocean from England to America. His accent reflects a mixture of British, Indian and American dictions. At the age of 17, when he was not quite a boy and not yet a man, Sabu’s characterization of a diasporic Mowgli sustains affinities between hybridity and adolescence, subject formations that are both marked by the ambivalent statuses of the in-between. Kipling’s conception of Mowgli perceptibly grew from a transcultural endeavor in that the Anglo-Indian author wrote The Jungle Books in Brattleboro, Vermont during 1892. He derived his inspiration for the romanticized wolf-boy from Beast and Man in India (1891), an ethnology on Indian savage boys and girls written by

111 The adapted stories from Kipling’s Jungle Books include “Mowgli’s Brothers,” “How Fear Came,” “Tiger! Tiger!” and the “King’s Ankus.” 112

The Nation, 9 May 1943, 553.

113

Newsweek, 6 April 1942, 65.

his father, John Lockwood Kipling and circulated his wolf-boy stories across England to various

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publishers and magazine editors until it was ultimately published in 1894 and 1895 by Macmillan & Co. in London (Newton). The director of the Mayo School of Art in Lahore and an accomplished commissioner of colonial exhibitions across India, Kipling’s father filled both volumes of The Jungle Books with original illustrations.114 What is telling about Kipling’s imperial boys, including the eponymous Kim and Toomai from “Toomai of the Elephants,” is that they are not only culturally ambivalent, but their constitution necessarily relies on the segregation of women. They never develop past adolescence to the age of sexually desiring the opposite sex; their desire instead remains in the realm of homosocial bonds. Females often signify as obstacles (rather than agents) who interrupt the goals of their adventures (Randall 19). Moreover, as cultural hybrids, these enduringly “in-between” boys navigate across multiple worlds that waver from jungles to villages and from colonial territories to native spaces. They represent an imperial idealization of the subaltern whose hybrid abilities potentially translate towards supporting the colonial project -- as in the case of The Elephant Boy, a story predicated on the need for elephants to complete infrastructural work for the British Raj. Mowgli’s knowledge of the wild, as narrated in Kipling’s “In the Rukh,” ultimately transfers to fulfilling the job profile of a forest ranger for the Royal Officer Corps as a tracker, herder and surveyor. Kipling published “In the Rukh” in 1893 before the first volume of The Jungle Books (1894). The story, thus, prepares the reader for an imperial resolution of Mowgli’s jungle exploits that culminate in “pursuing his human destiny in the service of the Empire” (Randall 68). In

114 John Lockwood Kipling organized large-scale collection for imperial exhibitions across India and at the metropole. At the Calcutta International Exposition he wrote that he and his three south Asian assistants worked amid a “howling chaos of packing cases, bales, Bengalee baboos, bamboo scaffolding, Chinese carpenters, [and] perspiring Britons” (qtd. in Hoffenberg 35). Exhibition India’s civilization through its architecture, temples, handicrafts, textiles, people and performers, under Lockwood Kipling’s guidance, Indian objects became historical relics. See Hoffenberg, 39-40.

171 Korda’s Hollywood adaptation, however, once Sabu’s Mowgli witnesses the evil, greed and savagery of the Indian village, he chooses to remain with his “jungle people,” the “society” of animals living in the wild. The story of Mowgli was prompted by “real” cases of children raised by animals in India. In 1891, just a year before Kipling began writing The Jungle Books, his father wrote, “India is probably the cradle of wolf-child stories, which are here universally believed and supported by a cloud of testimony (313-14). By the early twentieth century, “Indian wolf children were beginning to constitute a class. [. . .] They were installed as a fact (or fiction) of Indian life and as such merited an entry in Things Indian: Being Discursive Notes on Various Subjects Connected with India (1906)” (Benzaquen 223-224). While Korda’s version of The Jungle Books was in production, the American, Arnold Lucius Gesell published Wolf Child and Human Child: Being a Narrative Interpretation of the Life History of Kamala, The Wolf Girl (1941), a renowned scientific study on the popular case of Amala and Kamala, wolfsisters discovered outside of Midnapore in 1925 (Benzaquen 231; Kidd 93). The popularity of late-Victorian accounts of “wild girls and savage boys” influenced the creation of “exotic” animal-raised children in The Jungle Books and later in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes (Newton). Like Burroughs’ Tarzan, Kipling’s Mowgli excels among humans and animals as a leader of the jungle, critiqued man’s savage killing of prey, and condemned his greed for hidden treasure and expansion into the jungle. However, while Mowgli had neither caste nor father,115 but an ostensible mother whose biological son could have been any one of several wolf-

115 “In the Rukh,” a story from Kipling’s 1893 collection, Many Inventions, narrates the encounter of an older more mature Mowgli with Forest Officer Gisborne of the Woods and Forest Department. When asked of his caste, his village and family by Gisbourne, Mowgli replies, “I am without a village…Sahib. I am a man without caste, and for matter of that without a father.” On the verge of manhood, Kipling’s jungle boy has no ancestry and no patronymic name to identify him, for his identity and knowledge is linked to the terrain of the jungle and not derived from the ordered legacies and reason of man. See Rudyard Kipling, Many Inventions (1893; London: Macmillan and Company 1899) 206.

172 boys “abandoned” by Indian parents across the land, Tarzan, alternatively, was the noble “Lord of Greystoke,” a descendant of aristocracy who chose the wilderness as his habitat after experiencing the discontent of English modernity. Kipling’s Mowgli, in contrast, selects a career as a ranger for the Department of Woods and Forests after witnessing the “esteem” of the British civil service in India and accepting his rank in the face of the presiding white sahib. The narrative assumption built into “In the Rukh” is that the jungle boy graduates to civilization and manliness, but not to the level of masculinity of the white Forest Officer Gisborne whom Mowgli eventually serves. In comparison, Tarzan’s Anglo-Saxon manhood, and underlying sense of “culture,” follow him through the jungle, to Europe, to America and back to his life with the apes where the combination of his “racial supremacy” combined with his “primitive masculinity” ensure a masculine ideal that stems from his “civilized racial inheritance” (Bederman 221). Adriana Benzaquén argues in Encounters with Wild Children that characters like Mowgli and Tarzan not only “reinscribed ancient myths,” but also “became appealing heroes for readers stirred by imperialist dreams and hungry for vicarious adventure” (224). Classified ambiguously, not as Homo sapiens, but as homo ferus or “wild man” (Benzaquen 43), these children invoke Romanticist desires for escaping the ruins of industrialization, war and modernity while inspiring utopian possibilities of returning to nature. As Marianna Torgovnik eloquently asserts, “The needs of the present determine the value and nature of the primitive. The primitive does what we ask it to do” (9). We recognize our past in their representations, and idealize “now” as an evolved departure. Embodying narratives of primevality that authenticate our own advancement, these human/savage bodies idealize that which is lost to progress and placed beyond the borders of conventional social codes. Sabu, then, as a figure perpetually suspended in the past, feeds a sense of longing for authentic origins and unadulterated ideals in the wake of modernity and WWII’s political, social and economic duress.

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White contend, “The low-Other is despised and denied at the

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level of political organization and social being whilst it is instrumentally constitutive of the shared imaginative repertoires of the dominant culture” (5-6). Indeed, Sabu’s depictions of racialized feral adolescents in mainstream dominant cinema point to a “repertoire” of imperial gestures that vacillate between loathing and longing, and condescension and fascination, revealing how the ambivalent racialization of Asians was vital to the conception of American culture and the boundaries of racial and national identity. As I have been arguing throughout the dissertation, the racial formations of South Asians in the United States not only derive from individuated cultural practices, labor economies and migratory patterns. The reception and production of their identities also articulate intersections of British colonial representations, overlapping nationalisms and popular imaginaries. Kipling, whom George Orwell once titled the “prophet of imperialism,” played a major role in shaping visions of India in US popular culture. Sabu’s popular performances of his imperial literature in the United States are symptomatic of the associations that Indian-ness in America had with Kipling’s imperial world.

Alexander Korda’s Production of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1942) Once called the “kipling of kinema,”116 Alexander Korda begins the first scene of his Technicolor adaptation of The Jungle Books (dir. Zoltan Korda, 1942) with a classic encounter that situates the colonizers against the colonized. Shot in medium close-up, brownfaced villagers dressed in bright colors encircle a turbaned storyteller and listen eagerly to his tales. The camera then zooms out to encompass a view of a memsahib117 and a Sikh military officer (played by the acclaimed

116

The New York Times, 4 August 1939

174 African American actor/producer Noble Johnson) trotting towards the site on well-groomed horses. The memsahib (played by the American actress Faith Brook) dismounts her horse and exclaims in an American accent, “What a beautiful old man. What a lovely head!” in regard to the storyteller. Dressed in jodhpurs, a brown slouch hat and a white collared shirt with camera in hand, the memsahib emblematizes colonial modernity against the village proceedings and snaps a photo of the “native” scene, capturing the rural Indian space for posterity. The storyteller (Joseph Calleia) asks, “What would you do with my image, Memsahib?” The memsahib replies, “Why, I would keep it, for a memory of India.” In response, the storyteller remarks, “Verily, you would have all of India in your picture. Nay! You would have the book of the jungle to read in my eyes.” From the eyes of the female tourist gazing through the eyes of the storyteller, The Jungle Books then transports the audience into an imperial fantasy with incumbent Orientalist tropes that suspend India in the past, portray its villagers as “wildly” undeveloped, and feminize it as a dark, mysterious place aching for possession. For a few coins from the memsahib, the storyteller directs his listeners to the dangers of “yore,” pushing Mowgli’s story far from the present to “the beginning, when the silence was so vast a deer could only hear it.” The narrative’s primordial references determine the filmmakers’ domestication of an anachronistic Indian space with simulations of fauna, flora and a native village built in Sherwood Forest less than an hour from Los Angeles. The structure of the film is a story told within a story, and the storyteller is later revealed as the aged Buldeo, the film’s treasure-hunting antagonist and Mowgli’s main human foe. In a clumsy

117 Memsahib, in Anglo-Indian parlance, is a term natives use to refer to white women in India. Ella Shohat argues that Western women in colonial narratives often exist in a “relation of dominance” towards non-Western women and men. She writes, “This textual relationality homologizes the historical positioning of colonial women who have played, albeit with a difference, an oppressive role towards colonized people (both men and women), at times actively perpetuating the legacy of Empire. See Shohat, “Gender and Culture of Empire”, 40.

175 Indian accent, the hoary old man introduces the law of the jungle in which an animal of “claw, horn or fang will kill for hunger and eat there, but he will never kill for killing’s sake, a law which all men break but the jungle forbades.” With shot after live shot of the “animal clans,” including leopards, antelopes, elephants and hyenas, the narrator introduces the jungle society as Mowgli’s family of wolves including the boy’s wolf-mother, Raksha and his wolf-father, Akela; Baloo the bear, the “wisest teacher of the jungle”; Mugger the evil crocodile; Bagheera the panther with a “voice like soft honey dripping through a tree;” Kaa, the wise python; and, Shere Khan, the tiger and “assassin who first brought murder to the jungle clan.” Although Buldeo is the primary antagonist in the film, Shere Khan is Mowgli’s nemesis both in the movie and in Kipling’s original text. Raised by wolves, Mowgli118 has lived in the jungle for twelve years before crossing the border to the village for the first time. Shere Khan has chased him to the jungle’s edge wanting to rid the domain of man. When Mowgli reaches the village enclosure, he discovers the “red flower,” or fire, an element that both frightens and captivates him with its powers of destruction and hypnotizing light. The coruscation of the “red flower’s” light is a recurring motif throughout the movie and illumines Mowgli’s strained ambivalence between the jungle and the human village, a struggle that the storyteller describes as “the book of life itself … man’s war with nature.” Indicatively, Mowgli is caught between civilization and the wild, navigating his terrain as an inside and outsider, and as a savage and human. In addition to highlighting Mowgli’s challenges between human and animal worlds, the recurring glimmer of the “red flower” casts a soft glow upon Sabu, embellishing him in shimmering patches of dark and light and feminizing his young male body “as the perfect to-be-looked-at image” (Mulvey 38). In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey theorizes, “cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an Rudyard Kipling invented the word, Mowgli for his hero of The Jungle Books. Though in the book, the word means “little frog,” the word cannot be traced to any specific Indian language. See Makman. 118

176 illusion cut to the measure of desire” (39). Although Mulvey discusses the “male gaze” in relation to the pleasures of looking at women’s bodies on film, the “voyeuristic-scopophilic” gaze is applicable here as Sabu’s Mowgli repeatedly takes on the characteristics of an eroticized and racialized imperial spectacle. The tremulous light of the “red flower” shines on his lean, muscular, naked torso and as a male star, “the apparatus of stardom” furthers the spectacular qualities of his personae, “valuing him for his whole body [. . .] more than his impersonation of agency” (Cohan xvi). Transfixed by the fire, Mowgli reaches for the “red flower” and burns his hand. His lupine howls startle the village from its slumber, and a group of men chase, capture and restrain the strange boy as he barks and growls in anger and fear. Messua (Rosemary de Camp) believes the wolf-boy is the child she lost a decade ago. Against the wishes of Buldeo, the village leader, who calls Mowgli a “thing,” a “savage” and one who ultimately “will bring the village down,” Messua decides to adopt and raise the boy as her own. Mowgli stays in the village, learns the “man’s” language, herds their livestock and makes friends with Buldeo’s “sightly” midriff-bearing daughter, Mahala (Patricia O’Rourke), against her father’s wishes to steer clear of the boy’s devilish sway. Instead, Mowgli takes Mahala on a tour of the forest. They swing across vines, talk to wolves, monkeys and the rock snake Kaa. (In these scenes, especially as Sabu swings from vine to vine, his depiction of Mowgli is reminiscent of Tarzan’s navigation of the wild.) In the middle of the night, Mahala and Mowgli approach the monkey kingdom “where a great Maharaja once ruled with hundreds of horses and thousands of men.” Mahala falls into a sinkhole where a giant cobra guards the king’s treasure amid skeletons of thieves who died from the serpent’s bite. The cobra spares them and allows Mahala to leave with a gold coin. Buldeo discovers the coin in Messua’s hand the next morning and enlists the help of the barber (John Qualen) and the pundit (Frank Puglia) to help him find the lost kingdom. Unable to

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Fig. 10. Sabu with Kaa, the rock snake, from The Jungle Book (1942). Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK.

locate its whereabouts, Buldeo and his team return to the village, resolving to capture Mowgli so he can lead them to the treasure. Meanwhile, Mowgli is in the jungle plotting Shere Khan’s death with the help of Kaa, the rock snake (see fig. 10). Mowgli kills Shere Khan with a “tooth” or knife he bought from Buldeo. The men run after Mowgli, are unable to track him, but ultimately, find the Maharaja’s vault protected by the giant cobra. There, they cover themselves with jewels, dress in silks befitting a king, fill their sacks with gold coins and fight over the Raja’s sword, a treasure encrusted with a giant jewel that will save Buldeo from a life of work. Unbeknownst to them, the jewel is cursed and anyone in possession of the sword other than the dead king will die under its spell. The pundit kills the barber, Buldeo murder the pundit, and on the way out of the jungle, Buldeo goes mad, frightened by the animal sounds led by Bagheera, the wolves, the birds and the elephants. Buldeo

runs back to the jungle empty-handed, rallies up the villagers and announces that the jungle is

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haunted and must burn to the ground. Mowgli learns of Buldeo’s arson plans from Bagheera. On the back of an elephant, he warns all his “jungle people” to flee to safety. While corralling wolf pups, bear cubs and deer, he crosses paths with Mahala who informs him that Messua is still in the village, perishing in flames. Mowgli mounts an elephant bareback and (literally) gallops towards the fire while a herd of elephants follow behind. Finding Messua, he leads her to an island in the middle of the river where the water will protect her from the fire. Mahala and other villagers join her. Both women cry out to him as he returns to the river’s edge where his herd of elephants awaits. “Mowgli, Mowgli, come back.” Mowgli answers, “No. I am of the jungle. Their lair is my lair, their trail, is my trail. Their fight is my fight.” The last shot of Sabu’s Mowgli features him climbing up the trunk of an elephant, repeating the famous trick he performed in The Elephant Boy, as Toomai. In this scene, the citationality of Sabu’s role in The Elephant Boy exceeds the textual space of viewing Mowgli as a discrete character from his earlier Kiplingesque persona. Sabu and his elephants are filmed in silhouettes, irregularly lit by the flames’ intensity while clouded in smoke. The film’s final shot reverts back to the film’s introductory scene wherein the memsahib launches into an eager and animated slew of questions about Mowgil’s next adventure. Buldeo turns to the camera and replies, “That memsahib, is another story,” a statement offering possibilities of Jungle Books sequels. However, no subsequent film was ever made. *

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As in Elephant Boy, the stars of this film are Sabu and the animals. The adolescent actor

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carries the plot assuredly through his close interactions with wolves, panthers, monkeys, elephants, water buffalos and tigers. Howard Barnes of the Herald Tribune wrote, The chief asset of this particular literary classic on the screen [. . .] is the presence of Sabu in the role of Mowgli. He is perfect for this motion picture tour de force. Whether he is communing with his friends in the jungle or coping with his enemies [. . .] he gives a direct and unswerving portrayal which holds the production together far more that the script or the spectacular staging. (Herald Tribune, 12 April 1942) Though critical that the director, Zoltan Korda, sacrificed “the human equation” for “pictorial grandeur,” Variety hailed Sabu’s ability to “swim and swing his way through the jungle with ease and grace.119 Variety, like other critics, compared Sabu’s performance to that of Tarzan. The Times of London wrote that the film’s “human beings never for a moment belong to anything but a set in Hollywood. Sabu, as Mowgli, is an exception. And it is possible to imagine him in a real jungle.”120 Here, the writer’s observation is perhaps informed by the popular knowledge that Sabu was born in a jungle, and this fact equips him to appear more “jungle-like,” tribal, aboriginal or primitive than a brownfaced counterpart. Or, the critic’s comment might also suggest that Sabu and Mowgli share a similar hybrid quality that allows them to navigate multiple cultural spaces with ease. Kipling’s version of Mowgli negotiates the animal world and the human world confidently enough to translate details of each world with the other -- albeit as a Romantic “savage” who ultimately defers to the disciplinary gaze of white sahibs. Sabu delivers his “real jungle” portrayal in a British-Indian-American accent, a

119

Variety, 25 Mar. 1942, 8.

120

Times of London, 5 June 1942, 14.

“brown voice,” which Shilpa Dave identifies as “a specific racializing trait among South Asians

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which simultaneously connotes foreignness and class and cultural privilege. This aspect of South Asian racial identity demonstrates the historical ambiguity of South Asian ethnic and racial classification” (315). Further, the presence of his “authentic,” yet ambiguous, brown-ness manages to bridge the “constructed-ness” of the Hollywood set with the “constructed-ness” of his fellow actor’s brownfaced masquerade, demonstrating that racialized performances of India are ultimately an act. The films’ racialization of the brownfaced Indians as rural, uncivilized and untamed divides the village from the more pristine, orderly and controlled dimensions of the jungle. Moreover, the excess entailed in creating an authentic tropical world outside of Los Angeles points to the representational excess involved in framing an authentic jungle boy lacking in caste, history, language and a shirt, for that matter. Situated in a Hollywood jungle with brownfaced Indians speaking with pidgin Hindi in American accents, Sabu’s embodiment of Mowgli mediates similar representational devices used in The Elephant Boy that “temporally distance,” animalize and infantilize the Indian Other (Fabian). However, unlike The Elephant Boy which was shot by Flaherty on location in India and aims to capture a semblance of Indian “authenticity,” The Jungle Book is reminiscent of a zoo, a colonial exhibition and a Barnum-esque “Oriental Congress” with its display of captive animals, elaborately reconstructed native villages and representations of brownfaced Indians as categories of nation (Adams 194). Like The Elephant Boy, shots of animals are juxtaposed with Sabu’s quotidian gestures of howling, scratching and yawning against the bestial movements of wolves, monkeys and elephants. After all he is Mowgli, yet here again, we view signs of Sabu’s animalization, which as Shohat and Stam argue is a colonizing trope implicating “a larger more diffuse mechanism of naturalization” that reduces “the cultural to the biological,” “associates the colonized with [. . .] the instinctual” and draws divisions between the body and the mind (138).

Moreover, the political/civic immaturity and temperamental violence projected onto the

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film’s dramatization of an agrarian Indian village reinstates imperial tropes of infantilization.121 The “underdeveloped” villagers justify the need for a civilizing hand, and in the recollection of the storyteller, the “moral guidance” of British colonialists is nowhere to be seen. The modernity in the film is contemporaneously signified through the presence of the white memsahib, the technology of her camera and by references to “his Excellency,” a disembodied paternalistic presence who is not only the father to the white female tourist, but also a ubiquitous colonial ruler of India. Here, colonialism and modernity collapse into each other, and any sense of filmic cosmopolitanism -- a subject’s embodiment of and exposure to international identities, travel and practices within the film’s symbolic frame -- is displayed via an hierarchical distribution of power between those ruled and their rulers. The colonial encounter between the storyteller, his people and the memsahib structures and initiates a narrative framework that points its viewer towards imperial identifications. Because Kipling was the representative voice of the “Age of Empire,” he was not only instrumental in the elaboration of “England’s’ mysterious imperialist identity and destiny” Benita Parry argues, he was also integral to the “projection of the white race as the natural rulers of a global space created and divided by imperialism” (61-2). The popularity of Kipling’s writings circulated imperialist images of India around the world in dozens of translations, and arguably, American readers came to

121 Infantilization relates to animalization but emphasizes how indigenes embody an earlier stage of individual human development. Diplomatic synonyms for “childlike” including “developing,” “underdevelopment” and “Third World” project an infantilizing trope in regards to pre-nation-states and emergent countries on a global scale. Even when a country like India possesses a millennia-old civilization, the nation’s lack of sovereignty in the face of colonial rule positions it as a “Third World” developmentallychallenged toddler. (Bernstein and Studlar). The hope for the “infant” country is to receive guidance from a more adult or advanced First World society gently pulling it along into modern times. See Stam and Shohat, 1994.

understand India – its culture, its habits and its people -- as one of “the white man’s burdens”

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through his colonial imagination. In both the movie and in Kipling’s tale, the jungle conveys its own wisdom, justice and law, and as Lisa Makman argues, is itself a metaphor that Kipling correlates with the Enlightenmentbased governance of the British Empire (xxvi). If a sense of political maturity is lacking among the Indian villagers, the natives’ future of British colonization assures that the Empire will eventually deliver the necessary civilizing tools. But until then, before Buldeo grows into an old and impoverished teller of tales, moral guidance materializes as the jungle’s “natural law” and translates through the “instincts” of Sabu’s Mowgli. Signifying the diversity of India’s ethnicities, the animals that Kipling anthropomorphizes as the “jungle people” are presented as “models of self-regulation and submission” whose colonization results in following the supreme rules of the land (Makman xxvi). In contrast, the Indian villagers play the savages, are possessed with minimal self-restraint and are prone to not only killing animals for sport but to killing each other for greed. Korda, following from Kipling, depicts Mowgli as morally evolved in comparison to the brownfaced villagers. Mowgli and the animals obey the “law of the jungle,” which Kipling writes, “is by far the oldest law in the world… it has arranged for almost every kind of accident that may befall the jungle people, till now its code is as perfect as time and custom can make it” (Jungle 177). The implication here is that Mowgli “accidentally” fell into the cradle of the jungle’s civilization. Yet fortunately for him, unlike the “real” cases of wolf-children who rarely lived past childhood (Benzaquén), Mowgli matured into an adolescent agent of Empire, whose imperial calling as a ranger was primed by the instinctual wisdom of the jungle and spared the savagery of the “other” Indian people living beyond the borders of jungle code. If the jungle’s natural law is a metaphor for the order of British governance as Lisa Makman suggests, then Mowgli signifies a “native” ideal who through the disciplinary/civilizing tactics of

183 Empire uses local knowledge to serve the Crown. Similarly, reading Sabu’s performance of Mowgli against the “extra-textuality” of his constructed star persona – i.e., his upbringing in the jungle, his “accidental” discovery in a “native” kingdom and his British tuition – signifies Sabu’s inculcation of modernity through the adoption of Anglo/American social, educational and civilizing techniques. So while the memsahib’s modernity is represented by her peregrinations, her style of dress, language and camera, her cosmopolitanism is challenged by Sabu’s stardom, a celebrity text that exceeds the symbolic space of the filmic frame. As Toby Miller notes, “stars on-screen confront diegetic difficulties but do so with another interaction occurring, between their film subjectivity and their extra-textual -- albeit still textually derived and publicly known -- personae” (598). Hence, the biographical knowledge of Sabu’s espousal of British, Indian, and American cultures, his “instinctive” affinity with jungle animals (particularly elephants), and the ambivalence involved with being both an object and agent of imperial narratives imbues his portrayal of Mowgli with competing colonial, national and cosmopolitan values. In my reading of Sabu’s jungle boys, my intention is not to collapse Sabu’s identity into the fictional character of Mowgli. Rather, viewing Sabu’s jungle boys through the extra-textual lens of Sabu’s cosmopolitanism potentially offers strategies for displacing the Orientalist attributes often aligned with his “browned up” colonial caricatures. Granted, the Orientalism of The Jungle Books is ineluctably connected to a British imperial worldview that shaped Kipling’s writings. As Said asserts, Kipling wrote his stories from “the perspective of a massive colonial system whose economy, functioning and history had acquired the status of a virtual fact of nature” (Culture 162). However, the film adaptation of this story was produced almost fifty years after Kipling wrote his animal fables, beseeching a “cross-viewing” that accounts for India’s internationally-publicized anti-colonial movement, their compulsory support for Britain’s Allied efforts in WWII, and England’s paradoxical stance against fascism while India’s pleas for self-rule were violently denied.

184 Notwithstanding tropes of animalization, could it be possible that Indian spectators (in India and the diaspora) of Korda’s 1942 movie reread the jungle society as a nationalist expression of “unity in diversity” or a potentially indigenous display of self-governance? Could Sabu’s display of heroism in rescuing the jungle society from the village fire be symbolic of protecting the nation from England’s incendiary agendas structured to divide the country further by caste, language, religion and custom? Further, could Sabu’s efforts to station the white-brownfaced citizens on a river island at the end of the film gesture towards sending the Anglo-Indian colonizers back to their home country in the British Isles? In posing these re-interpretive questions, I wish to suggest that as much as Korda’s The Jungle Books rehearses Eurocentric tropes of infantilization and animalization, the extra-textuality of Sabu’s star status and the liminality of his on and offscreen personae implore ambivalent readings that “disidentify” with the white spectatorial gaze in order to recuperate Sabu’s performances as potential sites of resistance (Muñoz). José Muñoz writes, Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. (31) Likely, Sabu’s performances in film have been left untheorized in South Asian American discourse due to the identifications of his roles with the imperial project and with enduring Orientalist images of India.122 Yet, “recycling” and “reconstructing” the colonialist desires projected onto Sabu’s

Although recent scholarship exists on Sabu’s filmic performances within a British imperial context, his portrayals are often left untheorized within a US economy of Asian masculinities. His elision might partly be attributed to South Asian Americans’ efforts to separate themselves from colonial 122

primitivized body not only exposes the cultural logic of the white Universal subject, but also

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privileges what bell hooks calls an “oppositional gaze,” which, extending black feminist spectatorship to South Asian American feminist readings, allows for re-orientations, retellings and reinventions of Orientalist texts from a number of postcolonial and spectatorial positions (300). Although there is no primary evidence that Sabu deplored his Orientalist performances through letters or interviews, it is not unlikely that Sabu distanced his offscreen personality from colonial/Oriental/imperial agents who promoted the Empire when, arguably, most Indians around the world supported India’s freedom from colonial rule. In the next section, I discuss how the actor’s characterization of Prince Azim, an adherent of colonialism in The Drum (1938), impeded a potential career of working in India with Indian producers. Sabu’s feasible dissent, as private as it might have been, was at odds with the mainstream attitude of Americans who, like the majority of Europeans, supported colonialism in India (Jensen 17). American’s complicity towards India’s colonization, then, did not hinder a mainstream market for Korda’s brand of imperial filmmaking. The Jungle Books was the last film Sabu made under contract with Korda before signing with Hollywood’s Universal Studios to perform in Arabian Nights (1942). With Korda, he also played Kipling’s Toomai of The Elephant Boy; Prince Azim, a foil to his royal family in The Drum (1938); and the titular role of Abu in Thief of Bagdad (1940). In all of these films, Sabu plays the authentic Oriental alongside brownfaced mimics in colonial and fantasy worlds. As I demonstrate below, the presence of Sabu’s actual Indian body against these “browned up” actors exposes the Bhabha-esque

identifications. Priya Jaikumar’s 2006 publication, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India, offers an incisive analysis of Sabu’s feminization in Black Narcissus and The Drums in regard to the genre of the imperial romance film, which she claims “enhances the fantasy of spectatorial identification.” The last section of this chapter extends her argument to read Sabu’s portrayals as part of a representational regime that subjugates the “dark figure’s difference” by enforcing an “erotic susceptibility” to his image. See Jaikumar, 2006.

186 space between mimicry and mockery, in which Sabu’s performances challenge Orientalist, colonialist and racist frameworks that shape his onscreen roles.

Sabu as Babu: “Mimic Men” though the Ages and the Citationality of Colonial Masculinity While a sequel to The Jungle Books was never produced, it is worth considering how Korda might have depicted Sabu as Mowgli based on Kipling’s 1893 story, “In the Rukh,” which narrates the jungle boy’s ascent to imperial agency and colonial service. As cited above, Mowgli eventually develops into a civil servant under the direction of Forest Officer Gisborne and assists the colonial administration with his “instinctual” skills as a tracker, surveyor and herder of the jungle. Although “In the Rukh” does not fully realize Mowgli’s acculturation into a uniformed member of the “rukh,” a neologism for the Royal Officer Corps (ROC), the eventuality of Mowgli’s evolution traces a teleology of Western progress that Kipling’s enduringly imperial and adolescent boys achieve (McClure 60). However, as civilized as Mowgli might become as he matures into manhood, he can only acculturate to imperial authority within limits. Gisborne will always be the white sahib, and Mowgli will sustain the role of “native informant,” providing indigenous knowledge to his superior so the forest’s “rukh” will function most efficiently. Once he begins to adopt the ways of the Englishman, there is no turning back to the “purity” of his origins. And although Mowgli may try to emulate Gisborne’s autonomy and control, the jungle boy can only aspire to “be almost the same, but not quite” like his white employer. The space of colonial difference between “almost the same” and “but not quite like” is where Homi Bhabha locates his theory of mimicry by revisiting the colonial discourse surrounding the babu. The babu, as Parama Roy describes him,

187 has a particularly suggestive colonial history; he is the quintessential mimic man of colonial discourse, the English-educated, confused, epicene [figure] who can achieve neither the rationality or poise of the Englishman nor the simplicity and purity of the unanglicized, unhyphenated native. (80) Indeed, the babu is a contradictory hybrid figure in colonial discourse, the perception of whom shifts in varying degrees during specific moments in Indian history. India’s 1857 War of Independence (or “Mutiny” as colonialists termed the sepoys’ intricately organized violent upheaval) is a pivotal point when colonial knowledge began rendering the babu as more effeminate, menacing and ineffectual as Indians began demanding their own rights in light of emerging nationalisms (Sinha 5). To conjure the babu’s symbolic presence is to invoke an ambivalent Indian masculinity that vacillates between undying subservience to the Crown or scheming nationalist resistance suspect to “using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.” As Bhabha suggests, it might appear that the babu is mimicking, modeling and imitating his colonizer, yet his irreconcilable Otherness instead results in an insidious mockery of his superior. In Bhabha’s seminal article, “Of mimicry and man, the ambivalence of colonial discourse,” the ambivalent space of difference between mimicry and mockery produces its own “slippage” and “excess,” threatening the disciplinary gaze of the colonial subject (122). Thus, the effect of mimicry becomes a “menace” rather than a loyal and abiding emulation (123). This difference, as Bhabha theorizes, is not a subjugating disparity. Rather, the difference functions to dismantle colonial power, knowledge and discourse, enabling a sense of agency that Orientalist polarities between the Western subject and its Eastern other often elide (Young 141). Reading Sabu as a babu, then, facilitates a recuperation of his agency beyond stereotype analyses that position him as a subjugated object of the Orient. As a “mimic man” his enactments of Oriental stereotypes offer critical moments for unmasking the representational systems that mold

him. I suggest that Sabu is part of a “line of descent [that] can be traced through the works of

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Kipling, Forster, Orwell, Naipaul, and most recently [to] the anomalous Bipin Chandra Pal” (125). Here, Bhabha cites the presence of the babu first through imperial fiction and later through Benedict Anderson’s influential Imagined Communities. Notwithstanding his figuring of the babu in postEnlightenment political discourse, modern literature and key colonial archives, Bhabha extends his analysis to neither film nor performance in his article. My discussion of “Sabu as babu” resumes Bhabha’s genealogy of this hybrid, ambivalent masculinity by considering the circulation of this character across the diaspora from India to the metropole and into American popular culture via the body of the star. Arguably, Sabu’s citationality of the babu betrays how the producers of his movies appropriated representations of imperial Indian masculinities, further complicating the equivocality, ambivalence and liminality of South Asians’ racial and ethnic formations in the United States. As Robert Stam reminds us, stereotype analyses must permit for “mutations” and “metamorphoses” that point to the representation’s historical instability by shifting from the “ghettoization” of identity at the axes of either gender or race, for instance, to examining the culture or character in question at the overlapping intersections of class/caste, race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality and nation/empire (661, 666). In this sense, the instability of meaning attributed to a stereotype like the babu is destabilized by changes in imperial policy, anti-colonial tensions and institutional surveillance; via its circulation and reconstruction from colonial India to England and the United States; by means of its adaptation from literature to film or performance; and through its ambivalent reception by South Asian audiences in the diaspora. Bhabha theorizes that the “metonymy of presence” – the presence of an overarching attribute representing part of the whole – surfaces in the repeated identities of the stereotype, and in effect, differs with each repetition or performance (128-129). Though Sabu does not entirely mimic the popular stereotype of the loquacious, bespectacled Bengali, Huree Chander Mookherjee, in

Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), for instance, or the mendacious lawyer, Chambhuddy Ram, in

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London’s Daly Theatre’s production of James T. Tanner’s The Cingalee (1904), he invokes the babu’s “metonymy of presence,” like the “Simian Black” or “Lying Asiatic” through his British comportment, his effeminacy and obsequious manner towards the symbols, corporeal bodies and structures of Empire he supports (Bhabha 128). The term babu is an honorific title originally employed among the bhadralok, a propertied, refined and educated class of Bengalis who were likely some of the first “native” Indians to encounter British colonial mercantilism in the early 1600s when the East India Company established their trading syndicate in the region. As Parama Roy clarifies, the bhadralok was a heterogeneous constituency, and its class constitution, like the definition of the babu, reflected notable “educational, economic and juridico-political transformations” (2000; 2). During the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the principal trading partners with the British comprised a class of upper- to middle-caste men who built significant amounts of capital and were given to ostentatious displays of conspicuous consumption. Though reputed as babus with social authority, their excessive demonstrations of wealth often invoked public ridicule among playwrights and journalists. The vertical mobility of this nabya (new) bhadralok was halted when the British Crown took over the region in 1858 in the wake of India’s First War of Independence. In light of Britain’s financial dominance and a consequent economic recession during the second half of the nineteenth century, the bhadralok transitioned from commercial enterprises to more intellectual, bureaucratic and professional pursuits. In order to attain respectable bureaucratic posts in the government and commercial services sectors, these babus matriculated in areas of law, medicine and journalism under a Western liberal educational system devised with English language training. Their gradual transformation from merchants to intellectuals partly grew from an incommensurability with Britain’s financial hold on the region, diminishing returns and disproportionate taxation laws that

granted land proprietorship to tax officials while inflicting the petit bourgeois and peasants with

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exorbitant rents and unregulated interest rates (Roy 2000; 1-13). The “go-between” class of bhadralok babus heralded Macaulay’s call for an indigenous force of colonial subjects to act as intermediaries between the British administration and indigenous people. In his infamous 1835 “minute on education,” Lord Thomas Macaulay, the “first law member” of India’s parliament (Wolpert 214), proselytized in his famous “Minute on Education”: We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class, we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degree fit for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population. (qtd. in Young, G.M. 359) These Indian “mimic men” that Macaulay visualized would essentially replace their classical educations in Sanskrit philosophy, Vedic science and vernacular literature (texts that Macaulay deemed less valuable than a single rudimentary book taught in British preparatory school) with Milton, Chaucer and Shakespeare (Wolpert 214). Invested in the legislation of “happiness” and prosperity, Macaulay believed that an order of justice and force over the Indian people would strengthen the type of governance required of the Empire (Wolpert 214). By training these babus in Western modes of thought, culture and morality, they would ideally mediate lower caste/class submission to foreign rule. 123

In Masks of Conquest, Gauri Vishwanathan points out that during the latter half of the nineteenth century, the babu came to signify the unfulfilled guarantees of creating an abiding western educated class of colonial mediators. As anti-colonial sentiment magnified among Indians, the babus became more invested in 123

191 The bhadralok’s exposure to British civilizing and pedagogical tactics resulted in the reshaping of Indian masculinity, an identity that reflected and negotiated the management of colonial and modern social formations. Although early Bengali babus hailed from bhadralok sects, it should be clear that all members of the bhadralok were not babus. From the discursive inception of the babu figure within the bhadralok community to the imperial reconstruction of his masculinity through didactic strategies, his societal position has historically been wrought with anxieties, ambivalences and liminal proclivities. Sumanta Banerjee claims that babus were a perpetual object of ridicule in farces written by members of the bhadralok who viewed these English-educated natives as second-rate, pompous and impressionable entities (Banerjee 180). These works included Bhabanicharan Bandyopadhya’s Naba Bibi Bilash (1832), Pearychand Mitra’s Alaler Gharer Dulal (1858), Kaliprasanna Sinha’s Hutom Pechar Naksha (1868), Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Ekei Ki Boley Sabhyata (1860) and Lok Rahasya (1888). Authored by bhadralok males who were ironically scholars of European literatures and civilization, these caustic satires were directed against the more privileged members of the English-educated bhadralok and derided babus’ servility to the English, their subservience to their wives, a disregard of traditional duties, and their ostentatiously Anglicized modes of deportment and consumption (Roy 2000; 6). While vernacular works from Bengal’s rich literary tradition stigmatized the babus’ privilege, Westernization and neglect of native culture, British literature slighted the babus’ inability to fully adopt the language and manner of English gentlemen. In Guru English, Srinivas Aravamudan asserts that Victorian and Edwardian fiction often characterized the babu’s Anglophilia with “incongruous challenging the British colonial regime. Although their Western education prepared them for higher positions in the British imperial administration, they were rarely admitted to higher posts. Many of them deployed their organizational skills to deflect British authority and designed strategies to expose the inner workings of Britain’s economic and political hold over the country. See Vishwanathan.

literary allusions to canonical English authors such as Shakespeare and the Romantics, but this

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anglophilia is farcically undermined by the babu’s unconscious lapses into vernacular locutions and native references” (133). This “baboo English” expressed itself in the diction of fictional babus who exhibited excessive subordination to those of higher racial and societal rank while displaying grandiloquent gestures to those “below” them. Indeed, Anglo-Indian caricatures of the babu, rather than bhadralok satires of the babu’s betrayal, circulated through the colony and onwards to the metropole shaping him as a “grimacing stereotype of the ontologically funny native, hopelessly trying to be like us” (Said, Culture 185). Of the most famous Victorian-era “mimic men” is Kipling’s Hurree Chander Mukherjee of Kim (1901) who was neither a journalist nor an administrator, but a Bengali spy. Parama Roy suggests that Kipling’s iconic babu mimics the mimic man, yet “it is not always clear where his Bengali identity begins and its mimicry ends” (78-79). The “metonymy of the babu’s presence” also takes shape in the Savoy Theatre’s production of George Dance’s and Frank Desprez’s opera, The Nautch Girl or the Rajah of Chutneypore (1893) which features “Baboo Currie” as the high-caste manager of an Indian “dancing girl troupe” who takes his company on tour through Europe to perform at the Paris Exhibition.124 James T. Tanner based the character of his bumbling babu solicitor from The Cingalee (1904) on the eponymous protagonist of F. Anstey’s Babboo Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee, B.A. (1897).125 Anstey, of Punch magazine fame, sends his “dark-complexioned” babu from a “respectable Indian university” to London where he orates at ladies debate club meetings, offers the salmon he catches to the Gods, quotes Greek and Latin epics by rote and attends performances at the Adelphi Theatre with hopes of sighting “rescued nautch girls” onstage (Anstey 1897).

124

The Nautch Girl (1893) File, Victoria and Albert Theatre Museum Archives, Olympia, London,

125

The Cingalee (1904) File, Victoria and Albert Theatre Museum Archives, Olympia, London, UK.

UK.

193 These manifold babu portrayals that mocked his Anglophilia at the metropole, critiqued his cowardice by the badhralok and anticipated his political dissent by Anglo-Indians in the colony not only reflect emergent attitudes towards the management of colonial difference and Indian cosmopolitanism, but also points to the growing ubiquity of the term to describe Westernized Indians by both Britons and Indians alike. In 1888, the Victorian-era newspaper, The Bengalee addressed “in Anglo Indian parlance that the English educated Natives of the country are all babus, whether they be Parsees, or Sikhs or Mahrattas or Madrasis” (qtd. in Sinha 16). According to this Calcutta-based paper, a publication that appealed to white British citizens of India, “the English educated Natives” were effeminate in nature, encompassed a very peculiar segment of the Indian middle-class and shuffled between antiquated Indian values and the refinement promised by British edifying tactics (Sinha 16). Implicit in its description that babu refers to Indian men, the article does not address what educated female “natives” would be called. Although numerous cosmopolitan Indian women were educated through the British system in India and abroad, the article’s “impossibility” of a Victorian-era educated female “native” accommodates an ambivalent masculinity that contains both feminine and masculine characteristics. The ambivalence of this masculinity is even further complicated in the popular colonial imagination in relation to the “tribal” frontiersman and the aboriginals of the jungle. While the babu’s excessively civilized gestures, his British affectations and imported worldly indulgences render him “manly” in a way that might have linked homosexuality to his emasculation (Bederman), homosexual practices instead were projected onto the more “virile” and “robust” primitives of India who lacked a sense of civilization (Sinha 19). Mrinalini Sinha argues that the colonial focus on effeminacy to distinguish the sexually enervated Indian male from the sexually virile frontier tribesman in India exposed the contradictions of a discourse that attempted to link homosexual practices with a distinct homosexual

194 personality defined in terms of effeminacy and a lack of manly virility. (19; emphasis added) Following from Sinha, these contradictions, I suggest, signify the anxieties of deploying white masculine imperial power across a country as diverse as India in topography, nationalisms, culture and ethnicity. As Sinha attests, from the early days of colonial rule, effeminacy gradually evolved from an amorphously defined quality attributed to the entire population of Bengal to a feminized perception extending all over India. (13). That British officials, writers and administrators perceived Indian natives as effeminate in character – as primitive homosexuals in the jungles or as excessively effete men in colonial offices – shows how imperial knowledge fueled the cultural production of Indian men’s feminized identities in literature, theatre and film across Europe and the New World. By emphasizing the historical trajectories and transformations of the babu, my aim is not to subsume, equate or collapse Sabu with the stereotype of this iconic colonial masculinity. Rather, my intention implements Gail Bederman’s strategy of unmasking the “ideological processes of gender” in relation to South Asian American male subject formation (7). Augmenting Teresa de Lauretis’ work on the technologies of gender, Bederman claims that “masculinity [. . .] is a continual and dynamic process” that operates through a “complex political technology, composed of a variety of institutions, ideas, and daily practices” (7). Positioning Sabu on a genealogy that connects colonial masculinities of India with Asian masculinities of America allows for a deeper understanding of how the actor’s “in-between-ness” stems from shifting political, colonial and cultural trajectories at local and global levels.

Intermediating Empire on the Border of India in The Drum (1938) The citationality of the babu, an inherently liminal creature who reiterates corporeal mediations of the South/East and North/West, materializes on Sabu’s body in The Drum as a

195 sycophantic liaison between native forces and the British administration. In Alexander Korda’s 1938 Technicolor production, Sabu does not literally embody the stereotype of the babu, per se, but he certainly re-performs qualities of babus’ aspirations to please his English superiors while patronizing those deemed below him. As I have argued thus far, interpretations of the babu in English and Indian theatre and literature reflect shifting political economies, wavering between the imperial anxieties of governing a country resisting foreign rule to critiquing Indian men who neglect nationalist duties by aping the West uncritically. Noted above, the babu at one point was a bhadralok designation that evolved over time into a ubiquitous colonial label for all English-speaking Indian men. Like the caricatures of Huree Chander Mukherjee in Kim or as Chambuddy Ram in The Cingalee, Sabu’s characterization of Prince Azim is an English-speaking, sycophantic, obsequious, effeminate boy aching to embody and acculturate into whiteness while submitting to the Empire’s authority. Although the film is set contemporaneously in 1938, A.E.W. Mason’s storyline evokes the Afghan Wars of 1838 and 1878-79 (Jaikumar 2006; 137). The Drum takes place in a fictional kingdom called Tokot, which borders India’s frontier province separating Afghanistan, a Muslim nation, from India, a predominantly Hindu one. This border territory is particularly fitting for my current discussion of Sabu’s liminal portrayals of nation, race and gender in British and American cinema. The border at the Khyber Pass separates British India from an autonomous territory the Empire hopes to absorb, thereby symbolizing Sabu’s cultural ambivalence of residing on the border between hopeful sovereignty and colonial subjecthood. Sabu plays the young handsome, effeminate Prince Azim whose father, the Khan, rules over Tokot (See fig. 11). Azim’s uncle, Ghul Khan (played in brownface by Raymond Massey) aims to kill the Khan and the young prince in order to claim the kingdom as his own. The film’s white protagonist (although the film’s publicity lists Sabu under first billing) is the English Captain

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Fig. 11. Sabu as Prince Azim in The Drum, 1938. Photograph of Painting, Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK.

Carruthers (Roger Livesey) who, with the King’s support, plans to install a colonial protectorate in the region to restrain tribal insurgencies and arms smuggling. The Captain assures Azim, who idolizes the English gentleman, that the Empire’s presence will uphold peace in the region. Bill Holder (Desmond Tester), a Scottish drummer boy, is Azim’s other male object of affection. Together, they create a special drum rhythm for when, and if, danger arises. Their connection is an intimate one, and the queer undertones of their exchange are guised by the safety of their inchoately male, adolescent homosociality.

197 Once Carruthers leaves Tokot to marry Mrs. Carruthers (Valerie Hobson), violence erupts in the region and the fratricidal Ghul Khan murders his brother, the king of Tokot. After Ghul Khan’s cronies attempt to kill the young prince, Azim escapes to Peshawar126 with Wafadar (Roy Emerton), Azim’s loyal attendant. Ghul Khan invites Carruthers back to Tokot and prepares to annihilate the British troops on the last day of Muharram. Murderous, sinister and duplicitous, attributes associated with Islamic rulers in British imperial films of the 1930s (Richards 141), Khan abhors the English and plans to restore an Islamic imperium across the region but needs to eradicate Britain’s military presence first. Prince Azim, Wafadar and Muhammad Khan (Ammid Taftazani), the Khan’s former adviser -- all allied to the British and opposed to Ghul Khan’s revolution -- warn Carruthers of Khan’s imminent attack with the rhythm of the drum and, in turn, place themselves in a peril. Ultimately, the Governor of Peshawar’s army rescues Carruthers and his men, thus installing Azim as the crown prince and reinstating British occupation over the region. As in his other films, a primary role that Sabu plays, even as the primary point of audience identification, is resolving the plot’s central conflict by supporting the white leader of the film. Here, the dénouement relies on obliterating the “evil” Ghul Khan to ensure that Prince Azim begins his passive reign “protected” by the British Crown. At the start of the film, when Azim hears that Carruthers and his army arrive in Tokot, he exclaims to the Khan, “The English troops are here! Can I please go greet them?” His father replies, “Yes, go greet Captain Carruthers in my name. If England is our friend, there will be peace.” Running to meet the Captain and his British troops, Azim initiates his task as an intermediary, reiterating a mixture of attributes and qualities linked to babus and India’s passive princes during the reign of the British Raj.

126

Since India’s 1947 partition, Peshawar has been part of Pakistan.

198 Princes across India, who submitted to the “wooing” of British leaders, came to be known as “comforting loyalist ‘breakwaters’ in a turbulent sea of political troubles whose rising tide might otherwise have washed British rule from the subcontinent long before 1947” (Wolpert 240). Heads of princely states often upheld their loyalty to the Queen with the assurance they could adopt any heir they wished without the British dispossessing them of their royal provinces. Moreover, the British were obliged to the Rajas’ influence over individual kingdoms’ in staving off anti-colonial revolts, in reassuring subjects of the Empire’s benevolence and deflecting the reoccurrence of another pan-Indian revolution. In the popular Indian imaginary, Westernized babus and princes loyal to the British Raj often exemplified perfidious personalities who favored Anglo-Indian control above the colonized masses vying for independence. Notably, many of India’s princes went abroad to study in elite preparatory schools in England and returned to India as English-speaking, Westerneducated, princely babus. Although Prince Azim does not go abroad to study, the English-speaking adolescent longs to acculturate and adopt the practices, diction and attire of his English friend, Bill Holder. For instance, the prince asks Bill to teach him how to play the drum, to demonstrate English slang, and in one particular moment to wear his uniform so that one day he can share the sartorial appearance of Bill and his hero, Captain Carruthers. One of the final scenes of the film features Bill attired in his military regalia on his way back to the British Isles. Azim remarks, “Bill, I think you look grand.” Bill replies, “Not too dusky” while smoothing his vest. Shirtless and glistening in the moonlight, Azim asks, “One day will you let me put those things on?” The queerness of this interracial exchange notwithstanding, Bill’s comment, “not too dusky,” is an ambivalent one and it is unclear whether he is referring to himself or to Azim. While the prince remains with his “people,” Bill has the freedom to come and go, mature into an officer through British edification and prospectively return to India as a ruler of Azim’s people. Indeed,

this “not too dusky” boy might transcend his working class roots and progress to a position of

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colonial authority, while Azim’s limits of passing for white are indeed contained by his “duskiness.” Bill’s allusion to “dusk,” an inherently liminal term that denotes the twilight time between day and night, points to Azim’s “in-between-ness” where even if he wears Bill’s military garb, his racial difference or “duskiness,” can at best render him almost the same, but not quite like his redheaded friend. Yet, by mimicking the British costume, Azim might also mock the confines of British-ness, perhaps demonstrating that even when the British don their white costumes of authority, heighten their clipped diction and exalt their Western European formalities, that in itself is an act and deserving of critique. The extra-textuality of Sabu’s stardom, in which he’s described as a “prince” or “Raja” offscreen, also lets the audience know that the actor has already “put those things on” and might be extending his babu parody in Europe and on trips to America, even if in 1938, he can only return to India as a subject of the Crown. Priya Jaikumar notes that A.E.W. Mason wrote The Drum specifically as a “vehicle” for Sabu after his success in the Elephant Boy (2006; 150). Jaikumar offers an incisive critique of The Drum, labeling it a British imperial romance that “strains to combine popular representations of empire while anointing those narratives with a sense of a sacred higher cause and endowing them with the referential weight of past events” (Cinema at the End of Empire 135-136). Sabu’s role in this film is to promote that higher cause, a cause embodied by Captain Carruther’s assurance that the British will bring peace to a region threatened with “native” insurgency. Positioned as a foil to his community and as an obsequious pawn to the British regime, Sabu’s Azim risks his own life to sustain the virtues of empire desperately needed on the Khyber Pass. Further, while ingratiating himself to Carruthers and Bill, the adolescent boy condescends to the “natives” (a mixture of brownfaced extras and indigenous locals), calls them lazy, threatens them with thrashes, and commands death to soldiers if they bring peril to Tokot’s British friends. This denigration reiterates the intermediary

200 demeanor of a babu who is expected to pay obeisance to the nation’s colonizers while internalizing his rulers’ disdain against his own people. In response to the stereotyped portrayals of Ghul Khan’s treachery and Sabu’s submission to British colonialists, Indian audiences -- especially Northwestern frontier Muslims living in Madras and Mumbai -- protested against the film and picketed in front of the cinema houses screening The Drum. Raja Rao, a legendary nationalist novelist from Mysore, writes Robert and Frances Flaherty in November of 1938, The tumult and agitation Sabu’s second picture “The Drum” has created generally all over India and particularly in Bombay has [. . .] resulted in many arrests and a ban on the picture, followed by a similar action in Madras, even before entry of the film into that Presidency as a preventive measure. London Films, I am afraid, are responsible for the promulgation of an order by the Bombay Government that the Board of Censors will in future certify foreign films bearing on Indian Life only after Government approval.127 It is noteworthy that The Drum was the last film Sabu filmed on location in India until 1952 when he returned to produce and film Baghdad, a feature that did not reach distribution beyond India. Clearly, Indian audiences of 1938 did not want Indian bodies repackaged and sold as Western objects of display, especially during a struggle as crucial as the “Quit India” campaign. In a 1938 Times of India article, “Films Offending Indian Sentiment: Importers Warned,” the journalist suggests that the riots incited by The Drum instigated a more stringent censorship regime by the Indian government that

127

Box 37, Flaherty Papers, Special Collection, Columbia University.

201 takes this opportunity to warn the importers of foreign-made films, parts of which offend the Indian sentiment or national self-respect may not receive in future the indulgence which The Drum has received. [. . .] The Government have now instructed the Board of Film Censors that hereafter, it should submit to the Government its report and opinion on every foreign film depicting Indian life or dealing with Indian subject matter.128 Evidently, Sabu’s performance of Azim in The Drum shaped an enduring Indian perception that read the actor as a pawn of imperial propaganda. The imperial “excess” his performance exposed not only offended Indian viewers, but more significantly, led to local readings and global actions that vehemently problematized the distribution of British imperial films across India. Among the sections of the film that the Indian office of the Home Minister found “objectionable” included scenes in which Sabu becomes an “instrument of destroying his own people for the sake of personal gratitude to Captain Carruthers [. . .] when he attempts to destroy Ghul who represents freedom” and as Sabu expresses his “preference for being a member of the Pathan [British military] regiment rather than a free chief” (Bombay Board of Film Censors qtd. in Jaikumar, “British Cinema” 342344). The Bombay Board of Film Censors cut almost 1300 feet of the film before allowing it to screen again in India. A censored cut of two hundred and seventy feet of film included Sabu directing Indian men to stop shooting the British troops. The largest section cut from the film was four hundred and two feet of reel that showed “Sabu warning the British Governor of Ghul’s impending massacre.”129

128

The Times of India, 3 November 1938, 13.

129

Ibid.

In the wake of imperialist films like The Drum screening in their country, Indians became

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increasingly interested in viewing representations of themselves by a burgeoning national film industry (Chakravorty). That the riots in Madras and Bombay spawned state action by the Home Ministry demonstrates how Indians fervently eschewed imperial cinema, especially with authentic actors like Sabu, that portrayed Indians and India through lenses replete with Orientalist and colonialist frameworks. On the other side of the Atlantic, American audiences also recognized the propagandist nature of Korda’s filmmaking. Bosley Crowther of the The New York Times described Korda’s film as a “gorgeously High Anglican sermon for peace in the inconsistent but swirlingly dramatic terms of imperialist warfare for defense, naturally – in an East Indian province.” Crowthers illustrates the British as “especially persuasive with those redcoats, those regimental toasts to the King, that look of high moral purpose” (28). Images of those redcoats onscreen professing their allegiance to King George VI perhaps reminded Indian audiences of their own “moral” platforms and offered further justification to thwart foreign rule and its filmic representations on their land. The cross-viewing of The Drum by segregated audiences of Indians and Anglo-Indians in ostensibly the same cinema halls, reinforces how reconstructions of historical moments -- a Khyber Pass conflict that occurred almost a century before -- not only offers opportunities to build identifications with subjectivities that relate to or differ from their own, but also enables a recognition of the reconstruction’s fissures, which in this case, effected “social and political change” as seen in the censorship policies of the Government of India (Manning xvi). While Indians went to England and France to attend elite institutions of learning, their Western liberal educations were justifiable, to some extent, if they could apply their skills in law, oration and science to the Indian nationalist cause. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India went to Cambridge and studied law at London’s Inner Temple. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the first prime minister of Pakistan, passed

203 the bar at London’s Lincoln’s Inn. Both, nonetheless, returned to the subcontinent to nationalize Muslim and Hindus against the British. To idealize Western culture and support imperialism countered the “Quit India” climate, and arguably, anti-colonial Indians could only patronize Sabu’s rendition of a passive babu-esque prince to the limits of their political consciences. As seen in The Drum, the babu’s “metonymy of presence” -- exhibited by Sabu’s condescension to his Indian subjects, his capitulation to Captain Carruthers paternalism, and his desire to mimic the manners, costume and morals of Bill -- not only points to the unstable performativity of the babu, but also demonstrates how Indians’ identification with the excess of Sabu’s sycophantic presence led to undermining the colonial establishment and implementing social change at the government level. Indeed, Indian audiences likely attended screenings of The Drum to glimpse Sabu’s career advancement after he catapulted to international fame after the success of The Elephant Boy a year before. Though not without its problematics of suspending India in the past, eliding all traces of a contemporaneous nationalist movement and signifying modernity as an authentically Western trait, Flaherty and Korda’s 1936 film did not depict Indians as victims of their own treachery and in desperation of British colonial protection. The “ironic compromise” of Sabu’s depiction of “a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite” like his colonizers, is that the cultural ambivalence of his princely babu through the eyes of Indian moviegoers emitted an “excess, a slippage and a difference” that demanded mocking, unmasking and activism (Bhabha 122). By examining Sabu as a babu, one is reminded that hybridity is a transformative process of cultural confrontation, and thus, an archetype like the babu is neither static nor fixed, but always dynamic and active. Sabu moved to the United States two years after the film’s release and arguably continued to perform the role of “mimic men.” While in The Drum, Sabu’s mimicry of babus is born of a relationship between desire

204 and disavowal rooted in colonial ideology, in the camp portrayals I discuss in the next chapter, Sabu mimicry of Oriental characters becomes a mockery of Western façades of the Orient.

CHAPTER FIVE

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Sabu as Abu in Thief of Bagdad (1940) Unveiling the Excess and the Camp Oriental Because of Sabu’s multiple transgressions amid and across various masculinities, ethnicities, nationalities and civilizing states, the complexity of Sabu’s position in American popular culture demands a set of reading practices that engage theories of camp, hybridity and liminality. To limit my approach to highlighting the symbolic excess of camp’s “irreducible ambiguity” (Cleto 30) or focusing on decentered analyses of his hybrid subjectivities would elide the historical formations produced by his colonial upbringing and the state’s management of his racial and national classifications. Because camp and hybridity together possess subversive strategies that dismantle racist, colonialist and heterosexist assumptions projected onto subaltern bodies, in combination, these theories are integral to reading Sabu as an agent and not a mere object of Orientalist modes of subjection. Hybridity, for instance, exposes the unfixed parameters of identity that shift, unsettle and emerge through a productive ambivalence between the colonizer and the colonized and/or between producers of racist images and the agents who resist them. What emerges from this ambivalence is an inhabitance of “shifting positionalities” that, in turn, engender diverse cultural practices, identities and objects inflected by uneven material histories of migration, colonialism and racial formations. (Bhabha 101; Lowe 67-70). While hybridity theorizes the sutures of hyphenated identities, camp betrays the space between the actor and his/her theatrical personae, a space replete with “manipulations of intertextual codes” that parody epistemologies of denoting gendered and sexualized Others (Cleto 23). Employing camp, hybridity and liminality in my reading of Sabu’s performances camp orientals corresponds to how the racial, gendered and national politics of the period find their way into Hollywood performances of the South Asian Other.

In Orientalism, Edward Said suggests that the “exteriority” of Orientalist representations

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necessarily coincides with a façade, a manipulation or pretense that “is governed by some version of a truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would” (21). As Said makes clear, representations are neither “natural depictions” nor “delivered presences.” If anything, they are “re-presences” (Orientalism 21). Sabu’s “re-presence” of Mowgli, for instance, points to a sensationalized genealogy of “real” wolf-children “discovered” in India’s jungles. The actor’s queer depictions of princely babus in The Drum and Black Narcissus perhaps invoke instances when India’s rajas acquiesced to the British in order to maintain positions of power. In contrast, rulers like the Queen of Jhansi (Rani ki Jhansi), or the “Joan of India,” defended her queendom on horseback and led her army to victory against British forces until colonists in 1858 colluded with the neighboring Mughal kingdom and killed her in battle (Wolpert 238). Cooperation with the British by heads of princely states often ensured prosperity and proprietorship over one’s royal domain. Though Sabu’s “Oriental” portrayals may cite “real” events or individuals, needless to say, my intention here is not to reveal a sense of “truth” ascribed to Sabu’s depictions. Each of his performances extends and “affiliates itself with other works, with audiences, with institutions, with the Orient itself” (Said, Orientalism 20). As I have been arguing thus far, Sabu’s performances of “Orientals,” if anything, release a slippage in signification that potentially elicits anti-colonial readings, for instance, of the excessive lack of civilization exhibited by Indians in The Jungle Books. The surplus of imperial agendas in a propagandist film like The Drum troubled the symbolic and moral frameworks of Indian audiences who ultimately demanded control of their own representations and implemented censorship regimes owing to the “Quit India” nationalist mood. The “exteriority” of these filmic scenarios and the excess projected onto Sabu informs my final analysis of his camp oriental persona. In the pages below, with a primary focus on the Arabian Nights-inspired feature, Thief of Bagdad (1940), I engage and “re-read” the exteriorities and façades of

207 his campy Orientalist portrayals -- representations or “re-presences” that tease, humor and mock the “highly organized and encoded system” of Western discourse -- which foregrounds him as an exotic, erotic and queer Oriental Other (Said, Orientalism 21). As a camp oriental, Sabu traverses multiply gendered spaces that are sometimes exclusively female, as in the case of the harem or seraglio, or predominantly male as exemplified by Iraqi marketplaces (Thief of Bagdad) and desert battlefields that pit brother against brother (Arabian Nights). Built around gargantuan multi-armed deities with smoking mouths and blazing red eyes in Thief of Bagdad, for example, or framed by studio backdrops of cartoon-pink Taj Mahals in Arabian Nights, these spaces emit “a discursive resistance, a semiotic excess, which indeed translates directly into an exuberant, virtually inexhaustible camp corpus of reference” (Cleto 3). Alongside the camp figures Rudolph Valentino, Anna May Wong, Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Mae West, Marlene Dietrich and Tony Curtis whose iconic statuses rely on the “principle of ambiguity” (Cleto 27), Sabu’s humorous and “exuberantly modern” performances invite camp readings that point to the liminality of his movement ‘betwixt and between’ a plethora of ethnic, gendered and Orientalized states.130 Indeed, reading Sabu as camp engages the (self)-parody, mimicry and irony of his depictions and resists reductive approaches of suspending him in Orientalist frameworks that often discount articulations of difference by Eastern bodies to Western audiences.

Joseba Gabilondo extends Nestor Garcia Canclini’s work on “exuberant modernism” in his readings on the intersections of hybridity, camp and the baroque in queer Latin American representations. Derived from the intersections of colonial hispanism and the baroque extravagance of the Catholic church, Gabilondo suggests that “exuberant modernism” encompasses the tensions between European baroque culture and hybridity’s “irreducibility” across the manifold colonized ethnicities across Latinidad. The “excess” produced from this tension enables an incorporation of Latina/o-specific forms of camp that account for colonial histories, indigenous cultures and the redeployment of baroque’s excess as a strategy of performing queer hispano identities. Arguably, Sabu’s camp appearances in “Arabian Nights” tales also correspond to an “exuberant modernism” that highlight the “excess” of the East’s lavish decorations, costumes, and architecture without obscuring the imperial and colonial frameworks that construe the Islamic world for the West. See Gabilondo. 130

As Fabio Cleto argues, camp’s fragmented epistemology, disputed etymology, and

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contradictory applications lend the term an “irreducible ambiguity” that is at the center of camp’s constitution. (30). The deployment of camp, Cleto suggests, is more productive if we think of it “as both theory and field of reference, by analyzing it in terms of circulation within culture and its production through ‘camp effects’ ” (7). The mise-en-scenes that Sabu inhabits appear distinctly camp in their parodic, gratuitous “re-presences” of the Orient. His relationship to these Oriental spaces produces an “effect” through suggestions of irony, the aesthetics of difference, his personae’s theatricality, and the humor accompanying his transgressions between masculine/feminine, East/West, Indian/Arab and gay lover/platonic friend (Babuscio 119-126). If as Cleto suggests, “camp and queer are cognate terms,” and “camp is queer as a mode of being, as posturing a body, as a modality of distribution within social spaces [. . .] and as a mode of communication” (30), then Sabu is as queer as the moments he reciprocates the homoerotic gestures conveyed by the white male lead; as queer as the seductive poses he offers the camera with his brown skin glistening after emerging from a lagoon; and, as camp as the instances we see him winking, smirking and smiling at the camera, inviting audiences to question the authenticity of his roles. Sabu’s intentionality of performing “pure camp” or “deliberate camp” is of less concern than how he vacillates between the two, perhaps motioning towards his ambivalence as a Muslim “Hindoo,” as a British subject without citizenship in the US, India or Britain, and as a diasporic adolescent caught between boyhood and manhood. In her seminal article, “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag discerns “pure camp” as naïve, unintentional and only successful when an unconscious attempt at “seriousness” fails (283). “Deliberate camp,” on the other hand, is less effective though a self-conscious strategy that lessens the distance “between the thing as meaning something [. . .] and the thing as pure artifice.” However, intentionality may not be as much of a question, she argues, than “the delicate relation between parody and self-parody in Camp” (282).

Sabu demonstrates this dynamic space between parody and self-parody by humorously

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pointing to the citationality of his own personae. The terrain of representations he references not only cites previous roles, but also enacts an overt genealogy that exceeds the diegesis of the film space. With his first film, The Elephant Boy, Sabu introduces himself with, “My name is Toomai! My father was Toomai, his father was Toomai and his father’s father was Toomai. Like them, I am also a mahout!” This pattern of stating his heredity repeats itself more subtly in Drums when Captain Carruthers, the white male protagonist of the film played by Roger Livesey, identifies Prince Azim’s lineage with the Tokot Kingdom. Two years later, The Thief of Bagdad’s writers introduce Sabu to his buddy, Achmad (John Justin) the prince, with, “I’m Abu the thief, son of Abu the thief, grandson of Abu the thief...” Here, we see a shift occur in this introductory “shtick.” Naked aside from a green loincloth, Sabu’s Abu bows down to Prince Achmad, who gazes affectionately towards him, as the adolescent delivers his line with a series of nods, punctuating each utterance of “son” with a mischievous smile and a bob of his head, removing any seriousness from the words expressed. Here, in John Babuscio’s terms, “camp as a response to performance springs [. . .] from a preference for the intensities of character, as opposed to its content: what the character conveys tends to be less important than how or why it is conveyed” (125). In Arabian Nights, this kind of self-parody becomes even more pronounced as Ahmad (Billy Gilbert), the brownfaced Oriental burlesque leader, introduces Sabu as “Ali Ben Ali, “the world’s greatest acrobat who is the son of an acrobat, who himself is an acrobat, who is also the son of a son of a son of an acrobat.” Sabu smirks, looks at the camera as an aside, smiles, then shifts his eyes back to Ahmad as if to convey, “Enough already, let’s move on with the show.” As Mowgli in The Jungle Book, released the same year as Arabian Nights, his character is not introduced with a lineage like the films above. However, the extra-textual narrative that publicizes his jungle origins authenticates that he might be closer to a

Mowgli character than we think. Though wolves did not raise him, he certainly grew up with

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elephants from the jungle. Sabu’s individualism, i.e., as Sabu playing Abu or Sabu playing Mowgli, hinders any “suspension of disbelief.” His iconicity figures him as camp in that he “cannot be contained by the parts [he] plays [. . .] his non-realistic style of acting enables [him] to exceed the limits imposed by [his] films” (Babuscio 125). While Sabu performs in a stylized, yet naturalistic manner under the direction of Robert Flaherty in Elephant Boy as an eleven-year-old boy, his self-parodic quality develops and heightens with each new film as his personality becomes more iconic. While I can only speculate on Sabu’s intentions, it seems that witnessing the “browning-up” of his costars gave him pause to question how his filmmakers and audiences managed and received his Orientalized “authenticity.” The scopophilic gaze that caresses his body as a spectacle, coupled with colonial formations of Indian masculinity and the American government’s ambivalence around Indians’ racial identities, all culminate in Sabu’s liminal portrayals of the camp oriental.

Technicolor Orients and the Queer “Excess” of the East The pages below focus primarily on Thief of Bagdad (1940), which influenced Sabu’s appearance in Universal Studios’ Arabian Nights (1942) as Ali Ben Ali, an Indian juggler. Sabu plays the titular role in Thief, building on his already established international stardom. Arabian Nights, on the other hand, gave him third billing for the first time, an indication that his “star status” was beginning to fade. Since Sabu is the primary point of audience identification in Thief, I build my analysis of his camp oriental persona from his performance of Abu, Baghdad’s charismatic, mischievous thief who, like Robin Hood, steals from the rich and gives to the poor.131 While Korda’s The Jungle Book influenced Disney’s animated version, The Thief of Bagdad also inspired Disney’s animated feature, Aladdin, a half-century later (Erickson). The animated version parallels the 131

Although Thief of Bagdad and Arabian Nights are both set in the capital of Iraq, and can be

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categorized within the genre of “Hollywood Easterns,” they are two very different films. While Thief incorporates some of the more typical themes of Scheherazade ’s Thousand and One Nights including magic carpets, flying horses, lanterns and genies, Arabian Nights on the other hand was considered a “gaudy spectacle [. . .] a Technicolored romance, completely devoid of fantasy, that seems more inspired by Westerns than it does by [Richard] Burton’s famous Eastern tales. [. . .] It stands as costumed horse-opera and not much more” (Crowthers 15). In “The Wild East: Deconstructing the Language of Genre in the Hollywood Eastern,” John Eisele suggests that the “Eastern” as opposed to a cowboy “Western,” comprises the subgenres of “Arabian Nights” fantasies, “sheik” films, “foreign legion” adventures, “foreign intrigue” narratives and “terrorist” action films (68-91). Each of these subgenres, Eisele argues, varies in the degree of identification built between the Oriental characters and the cinema audiences (68). Although Eisele does not reference the use of brownface in these films, I want to suggest that the use of shaded makeup by Sabu’s costars presents both a barrier and a route of identification for white audiences. Spectators could simultaneously disengage from the marked racial discrepancies of the villains or embrace the hero’s difference and his “exotic” surroundings as a filmic diversion, especially during the Depression and WWII, when Hollywood produced movies with escapism in mind. The racial doubling of Sabu’s brownfaced costars is transitory at best, and is accentuated further when depicted

narrative structure of the live action 1940 film with plot points that include the kidnapping of princess Jasmine, the restoration of justice with a lively genie’s assistance and the clever manipulations of the protagonist thief. The 1992 characterization of Aladdin conjures a combination of Justin’s Achmad and Sabu’s Abu. Disney’s eponymous hero embodies many features of Sabu’s Abu – his ingenuity, his impish qualities and creative escapes from danger. Like Achmad, Aladdin is the winner of the princess of Basra’s hand, and is also assisted by a wily sidekick named Abu. Similarly, both Abus in the 1940 and 1992 versions express jealousy over the male romantic lead’s affections for the princess. But the cartoon Abu is a wily monkey rather than a half naked, loin-clothed adolescent boy. Shohat and Stam’s theory of “animalization,” a trope that often emerges in Eurocentric cinema, is useful here in that Abu’s composite, a racialized and primitivized human, is exchangeable for a primate. See Shohat and Stam, 137-138.

212 against other “real” brown actors. However, it must be noted that Sabu’s attempt to “pass” for an Iraqi demonstrates that he is “browning up” too. Framed as a “generic” Oriental, he at once authenticates and de-authenticates Western amalgamations of Eastern locales. Indeed, though Sabu is of the East, his origins are thousands of miles removed from Iraqi geographies. The passability of brownfaced actors on “Oriental” terrains evokes narratives of EuroAmerican access, navigation and conquest of traversable foreign territories. And because their “unveiling” and return to whiteness is imminent, the degree of identification between the white spectator and hero is further reified. Interestingly enough, Bosley Crowther’s review of “Arabian Nights” references Richard Burton’s narrative presence in these classic fourteenth century tales. Parama Roy suggests that Burton was both a “liminal character of masquerade” and a “heroic figure” in the Victorian imagination. In his hyperbolized depictions of “genuine Orientals,” his “semiotic of disguise” and preternatural linguistic and literary abilities helped him pass as a native, at times provoking British colonial officers to call him, “White Nigger” (Roy, Indian Traffic 18-19). While Richard Burton’s intellectual prowess as a linguist helped him pass as an Oriental merchant, dine in native homes and even visit private harems, the cultural “authenticity” Burton achieved, certainly has little presence in Sabu’s Arabian Nights fantasies. Indeed, portraying racial, national or ethnic authenticity was not a motivating factor in either Alexander Korda’s Thief or Walter Wanger’s Arabian Nights. While reviewers criticized Arabian Nights for its low production value, bad acting, cheap sets, and formulaic narratives, Thief of Bagdad (1940), in contrast, won the most Academy Awards that year in the categories of cinematography, special effects and art direction. Variety preferred the Douglas Fairbanks silent version of 1924, but exalted Korda’s production as one of “the most colorful, lavish

213 and eye-appealing spectacles ever screened.”132 The New York Times called it the most “beguiling and wondrous film of this troubled season.”133 Robert E. Mosberger’s entry in the World Book Encyclopedia of Film lauded it as “arguably the best Arabian Nights motion picture ever made, and a strong contender for the best fantasy film ever made as well” (1703). Indeed, the “color” of Korda’s film sets come to life with its bustling bazaars, pink marble palaces set against deep blue skies, and white terraced buildings surrounded by a multiracial display of women and men, some in brownface and others not, but all dressed in colorful robes, jewels, veils, dhotis and turbans. Filmed on studio sets at Korda’s London Films and shot on location in the Grand Canyon and in the desert outside of Los Angeles, Thief of Bagdad is a multinational effort with four different directors, American distributors and Korda’s imperial eye presiding over the Orientalist spectacle. As the thief, Sabu once again appears shirtless, oiled and taut as a destitute member of the city. Processed in Technicolor, the beauty of Sabu’s dark, shiny skin is further spectacularized, especially in contrast with his fairer costars who are in brownface, but still much lighter versions than him. Interestingly, the nameless Princess of Basra, played by June Duprez, is the only lead actor not wearing shaded makeup. If anything, her skin has a porcelain, luminescent hue and is embellished with soft camera filters, sheer pastel costuming and the reinforcing presence of fair-skinned maidservants. The princess’s whiteness is idealized as an extension of her unblemished purity, and any subject of Baghdad who steals a glimpse of her radiance is punished with death. Sabu’s Abu has no interest in glimpsing the Princess’ visage, but his “buddy” Prince Achmad (John Justin) successfully steals a glance. While a consequent romantic triangulation arises between the Princess, Sabu and the Prince, a male homosocial rivalry does not translate across her heterosexual body

132

Variety, 14 October 1940, 14.

133

New York Times, 6 December 1940, 28

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Fig. 12. The Thief (Sabu), the Princess (June Duprez) and the Prince (John Justin) in Thief of Bagdad (1940). Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK.

(Sedgwick 205-206). Rather, sexual desire is mediated across the body of the white male lead whose brownfaced ambivalence negotiates Sabu’s glistening darkness with the princess’ fair glow (see fig. 12). Sabu’s first scene in the movie shows him stealing fish off a grill, dropping the filets into hungry vagrants’ laps, and bolting through the twists and turns of Baghdad’s maze of a kasbah. Caught by guards, this Baghdadi Robin Hood is thrown into the palace’s dungeon where Prince Achmad the rightful ruler of Baghdad awaits his death by the hands of his Vizier. The Vizier has usurped Achmad’s throne by committing treacherous acts in the Prince’s name. Abu enters the jail kicking and screaming, and after struggling in the groping arms of the palace guards whom he gropes back, Abu falls to the dungeon floor faking tears. Once the gate slams shut, Abu starts to laugh hysterically, removing a prison key from his loincloth with a smile. Abu and Achmad escape, they become fast friends and start a string of adventures that focus on Achmad’s restoration to Baghdad’s throne and his betrothal to the fair Princess of Basra.

While sailing to Basra from Baghdad on the Tigris River, Abu and Achmad stare

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affectionately at each other, as Abu serenades Achmad with a song, “I want to be a sailor can’t you understand it?” When they land in Basra, Achmad illegally sees the Princess in her palanquin and vows to meet her that night. Abu teaches the prince to thieve and helps him steal into the Princess’ harem. After a romantic night with the Princess, Achmad returns to Abu’s side and tells him of his love for her. In the moonlight, with Miklos Rozsa’s string score lulling the scene with wistful melodies, Abu feels abandoned and jealous but bound to his new friend, and decides to help him win the hand of the Princess instead of joining Sinbad’s ship crew as planned. Meanwhile, Jaffar visits the Sultan of Basra (Miles Malleson) with plans of expanding his domain by coercing the Princess’ hand from her father. Jaffar knows the Sultan has a weakness for magical toys, trinkets and ornamental machines. A clock pendulum, a sculpture of a Hindu deity on a chariot, and a green statue of a half-fish/half-man are shown to Jaffar. Even a miniature panorama of live Indian acrobats is exhibited, conjuring visions of colonial exhibitions in India, Europe and America that featured the novelty of jugglers and contortionist troupes from the subcontinent.134 Jaffar offers the Sultan a mechanical flying horse in exchange for his daughter. The Sultan, under one of Jaffar’s spells, agrees to marry his daughter off to the Vizier. Learning that her father has promised her to Jaffar, the Princess masquerades as a young boy and leaves the palace. With Sabu’s help, Achmad returns to the Basra palace for another interlude with the Princess.

In his study of The Orient on the Victorian Stage, Edward Ziter suggests that images of Indian jugglers and acrobats circulated in the imperial imagination from the early eighteenth century through the Victorian period. As “signs” of the East, they were initially viewed as performers instead of spectacles, meaning, what they did which took precedent over what they were (97). It was only later in the nineteenth century that the culture of colonial exhibitions signaled the systemization of nations, people, commodities and the expansion of the imperial enterprise. The juggler as a native performer -- alongside, snake charmers, nautch girls, acrobats and musicians -- signified artifacts of lore that imparted to Western audiences “the traditional mysteries (handed down from father to son) as well as the specifics of religious practices and beliefs.” Hence, it is not surprising that Sabu played this ethnological archetype in Arabian Nights two years a later. See Ziter, 97-101. 134

Instead of finding her, he discovers Jaffar waiting with his guards. Blinding him with a spell and

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turning Abu into a dog, Achmad and Abu roam the streets like mendicants. Jaffar captures the princess and brings her back to Basra. Grief stricken, she falls into a deep spell, which can only be broken by the kiss of a true love. The blind prince’s kiss awakens her, but Jaffar kidnaps her immediately and sails off for Baghdad. Blind Achmad and his seeing-eye dog, Abu, follow, but Achmad is too slow and gets left at the port. Jaffar sees the dog and has his men throw him overboard. Jaffar is jealous of the Princess’ love for Achmad and pleas for her embrace. She agrees to hold him if the prince’s sight is restored. Once Jaffar and the Princess hug, Achmad regains his sight, and Abu returns to human form. Abu and Achmad’s reunion is a romantic one and competes with the romance the Prince shares with the Princess. An orchestral arrangement of Abu’s “I want to be a sailor” plays as the interracial buddies hold each other close. But Achmad’s mood shifts to distress when Abu tells him Jaffar has abducted the Princess. Abu, seemingly crushed and with a dog’s leash gracing his collar, asks, “Is there nothing for you without her?” Jaffar tersely replies, “Nothing!” In response, Abu purses his lips as if stifling a laugh and gazes towards the horizon at Jaffar’s clipper sailing towards Basra. Achmad and Abu jump on a tiny sailboat that capsizes as Jaffar’s wizardry churns up the sea. Abu is cast away to a deserted island where he finds a magic lantern with a giant genie. Played by the renowned African American actor, Rex Ingram, the genie grants him three wishes in a loud bellowing American accent. Abu wastes his first boon in hunger wishing for his mother’s homecooked sausage. The second wish takes him to a temple high in the Himalayan range where an “allseeing eye” shows him Achmad’s whereabouts. Abu flies through the sky on the shoulder of the genie to the ornately carved, quasi-Buddhist-Hindu temple where a massive multi-armed deity resides. After surpassing obstacles posed by green-skinned attendants with Afros and stabbing a

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Fig. 13. Sabu scaling a giant web on his way to thieving the “all-seeing-eye in Thief of Bagdad (1940). From Powell and Pressburger Images of Thief of Bagdad. http://www.powell-pressburger.org/Images/40_ToB/index.html

gargantuan spider spinning its mammoth web, Abu steals the glowing red gem from the deity’s “third eye.” (See fig. 13) The ruby shows Abu an image of the Prince stranded on a craggy desert mountainside, and the genie takes the boy to save his beloved forlorn friend. When Achmad and Abu meet, they embrace, and together, they peer into the “all-seeing-eye.” Many of these scenes in the Grand Canyon show shirtless Sabu and shirtless John Justin in medium close-up standing on a cliff, looking up at the genie, resting their hands on each other backs and brushing their shoulders against each other. The ruby eye reveals that the Princess has sniffed a poisonous blue rose, which has erased her love for Achmad. Achmad becomes cross and wishes Abu to shatter the eye into a thousand pieces. Resembling a lover’s quarrel, Abu feels betrayed and unappreciated for his efforts, and wishes Achmad away to be with her. The genie grants the wish, wins his freedom, and Abu is left alone. In anger, Abu shatters the gem and is suddenly transported

to the magical “land of legends” where white-bearded patriarchs have awaited this “chosen little

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prince” for thousands of years. The boy’s arrival ensures the old men will return to their dreams of eternal childhood. Gifting Abu with a bow and arrows that if “aimed at injustice one will never fail,” the head patriarch bids the “chosen one” farewell. Abu then jumps on a flying carpet for Baghdad. Meanwhile, the Princess and Achmad await their decapitations in Baghdad. Once the Princess lays her eyes on her “true love,” the spell of the blue rose breaks, and Jaffar vengefully sentences the Prince and Princess to death. As Jaffar’s henchmen lift their axes to execute the lovers, Abu flies over the scene on his magic carpet. With his golden bow and arrow, Abu shoots Jaffar between the eyes. Achmad reclaims his throne, the Princess becomes his Queen, and Abu will grow into the Prince’s Grand Vizer. The final scene shows Abu in a powder pink suit and gold turban, gliding away on his magic carpet under the arch of a giant rainbow.

Queering the Oriental and the Desires of Triangulation In Thief of Bagdad, Korda’s film sets become Sabu’s playground. The nimble youth swims in the Pacific, swings across ropes in dungeons, climbs giant cobwebs, scales enormous deities, flies on magic carpets and shoots with gilded bows and arrows. He is indeed the hero of this film who “saves the day.” And though Sabu doesn’t get the “girl,” he spends a good amount of screen time chasing the “boy.” John Justin noticeably shares more filmic space with Sabu than he does with June Duprez. Markedly, most of their screen time is spent with a comparable scarcity of clothing. While Sabu’s loincloth covers him from his waist to his groin, Justin’s harem pants cover him all the way to the ankles. Like in his other films, Sabu’s bareness subjects him to the camera’s exoticizing and eroticizing gaze more than the white players onscreen. However, in Thief, the writers and directors build more spectatorial identification with Sabu than Justin. While Sabu never needs

saving – he steals the jailer’s keys to save himself and Achmad, releases a genie from its lamp,

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escapes from a deserted island and brings the villain to his death -- it is the white heterosexual couple in “distress” that requires Abu’s rescue. The possibilities for cross-viewing Abu through his queered and racialized personae facilitate multiple modes of identification that destabilize a singular white/male/straight spectatorial viewpoint. Nonetheless, though Sabu is indeed the lead of Thief, he still plays Justin’s sidekick, continuing a Hollywood tradition from the early studio era days that positioned Native Americans, African Americans and Latino actors as “foils of symbolic value to the white male protagonists” (Donalson 9). With his diminutive frame, over-refined manner and wistful sentimentality, Justin portrays Achmad with an amorphous masculinity. At times, Sabu appears manlier than Justin in many of Thief’s scenes, which, in turn, diminishes Justin’s male authority. Yet, Abu’s sidekick status ultimately bolsters Achmad’s manhood with a heterosexual resolve that unites the Princess with her Prince. While Melvin Donalson argues that most men of color in Hollywood features “have been rendered so white males appear more courageous, tolerant, heroic, and intelligent in the narrative” (9), Sabu’s presence, in contrast, often renders Justin as reliant, imprudent and absurdly dreamy. Adolescent, culturally hybrid and effeminate, Sabu’s liminal masculinity furnishes Justin with a gender ambivalence that is not only punctuated by a competing sexual desire from Abu and the Princess, but is also accentuated by Justin’s brownface makeup, eyeliner, lipstick and soft doe-eyed features. Justin, a Shakespearean stage actor, recalls his earliest interaction with Sabu on Thief as a moment of sexual tension that the filmmakers goaded. Justin recounts, In the boat was a little brown boy [. . .] out popped this chap, and it was like a little devil out of somewhere, wonderful smile, most beautiful body, he was very friendly and nice. They left me with him to do this scene -- him and me -- escaping together

220 from a terrible master in the boat. They wanted me to do it again, ‘you want to enjoy it more, we want you to stretch, John,’ they wanted me to do a striptease. I would have walked out then and there, except for him. Sabu was laughing, he thought it was very funny so I stayed for him, so I decided to laugh and enjoy it. We had a wonderful time and we liked each other more and more.135 The actors’ interracial homoerotic affection offscreen certainly manifests in their rapport on film. Yet, what is unclear is whether Justin was directed to “striptease” for the camera or strip for Sabu. This “striptease” moment occurs as the directors prep Sabu and Justin for their first scene together. Here, as the wind blows through Sabu’s long black tresses and the seawater sprays his glistening torso, Abu serenades Achmad on their way to Basra to begin a series of “homosocial” adventures.136 As Justin’s anecdote implies, the filmmakers shape this scene with a playful eroticism that brings some of the “incongruous contrasts” between Sabu and John Justin to light. It is the incongruities of scenes like these that mark Sabu’s relationships with fellow actors and the Orientalist set as distinctly camp. The sensual, tapestried and baroque excess of the Orient coupled with the homoeroticism of Justin and Sabu’s interactions exemplify a camp oriental aesthetic, which exposes the incongruities of Sabu’s hybrid, sexual and racial personae. When these incongruities are spectacularized as fantasy, stylistic choices like “clothes and décor” point to the performance of identity while belying any sense of a fixed existence (122). Babuscio explains,

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Stockham, Martin. Gemini Pictures. “Sabu: A biography.”

136 Following from Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men, my use of the word “homosocial” is intended to evoke the potentially “homoerotic” field of desire that exists between Sabu and Justin. Sedgwick positions homosocial and homoerotic relationships on the same continuum as “a strategy for making generalizations about, and marking historical differences in the structure of relations with other men” See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) 1-2.

In film, the aesthetic element of camp further implies a movement away from

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contemporary concerns into realms of exotic or subjective fantasies; the depictions of states of mind that are (in terms of commonly accepted taboos and standards) suspect; an emphasis on sensuous surfaces, textures, imagery, and the evocation of mood as stylistic devices – not simply because they are appropriate to the plot, but as fascinating in themselves. (121) In an Orient amalgamated by architectural and religious references to Hindu India, Muslim Iraq and Buddhist Nepal, the surfeit of appropriated exoticism “props up” bad political taste with an aesthetic of totalizing vistas embellished by Orientalist lushness. The incongruities of “relationships between activities, individuals, situations and gayness” emerge as a series of ironies drawn across masculine/feminine, brown/white, straight/gay, Oriental/Occident, Indian/American/British, hero/sidekick and lover/friend (Babuscio 119). For instance, white European and American actors costume their “western” bodies in exuberant “eastern” detail with veils, hijabs, turbans, harem pants, saris, Nehru jackets, and dhotis. The Princess dresses as a boy to escape her father’s seraglio, yet her femininity returns not by Achmad’s touch, but by the evil and paternalistic Vizer’s hand. As the towering genie, the acclaimed African American actor, Rex Ingram waxes aphorisms in a heavy Bronx accent and roars with belittling laughter when little Sabu asks, “Am I not your master?” Sabu’s adolescence enables a safe flirtation with the prince while Achmad’s heterosexuality is duly dispensed through marriage to the princess. And while Jaffar’s and Achmad’s rivaling pursuit of the princess relays manifestations of their homoerotic desire across her body (Sedgwick 21), she also bridges the queer triangulation between Achmad and Abu. As mentioned above, Sabu is indeed the primary agent of spectatorial identification in this movie. Yet even though he is the hero, neither his race nor gender allows him to “get” the girl or

222 the boy.137 However, because the movie does not deviate from heterosexual code -- the resolution relies on obliterating Jaffar as an obstacle to the marriage of the Prince and the Princess – the mainstream viewer can “safely” identify with Sabu’s homoerotic adventures with Justin. The emphasis on homosocial bonds in the imperial imaginary certainly reiterates the masculinist and paternalist agendas involved in the expansion of the Empire. 138 After all, as Robert Young asserts, “the imperial game was already an implicitly homo-erotic practice” (26). The majesty of Thief’s Orientalist terrain offers an ideal playing field for Abu and Achmad’s imperial game of homoerotic desire. With the help of Abu, his “native informant,” Achmad explores the kasbah outside the palace enclosure, an area he had never seen as a sheltered prince living above his people. Together they travel on sailboats, scale mountains, watch processions and barter prices in the marketplace. Abu acculturates Achmad to the Baghdad subaltern’s way of life, and Achmad begins to “pass” until Abu helps him reclaim his authority as Prince. Spectatorial identification vacillates between Justin and Sabu’s characters, yet Abu remains the principal object of homoerotic desire, which is conveyed by Achmad’s loving gaze and reciprocated by Abu’s loyalties as a dutiful servant of the crown.

137 When Sabu’s most popular movies were being made, the severity of the Hays Production Code was ascending towards it peak. The Motion Picture Association of America’s adoption of the Hays Production Code in 1930 prohibited all references to miscegenation. As movies including Frankenstein (1931), The Sign of the Cross (1932), Blonde Venue (1932), and Tarzan and His Mate (1934) became more suggestive, violent, and profane to increase studio revenue at the start of the Great Depression, the stringency of the Hays Code intensified and resulted in more formal restrictions by Joseph Breen, who after becoming the head of the Production Code Administration in 1934, censored all acts of “sexual perversion” including “white slavery,” “nudity,” “suggestive dances,” “venereal disease,” and any inference that threatens “the sanctity of the institution of marriage.” See Hay Production Code 1930, http://www.artsreformation.com/a001/hayscode.html 138 Although many white women were complicit in the colonial project, European colonizing strategies required the containment and control of female agency in order to thwart the threat of miscegenation and the consequent loss of sexual power. Thus, while white women signified the moral justifications of colonialism to a certain point (at least until Indian nationalism began destabilizing the morality of foreign rule), the imperial game was largely a male homosocial endeavor. See Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).

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Fig. 14. John Justin and Sabu between takes on a ledge in the Grand Canyon. Their homosocial play offscreen likely translated into homoerotic chemistry onscreen. Courtesy of Martin Stockham, Gemini Pictures, Teddington, London, UK

The imperial gaze that captures Sabu’s Abu as a sexualized object references previous modes of racializing and fetishizing of his masculinity. Since the writers aimed to capture “versions” of colonial realities in his earlier features, the “camp effect,” although apparent, is less obvious in The Drum and Elephant Boy. Yet even as an eleven-year-old in The Elephant Boy, Sabu is shot at the film’s start like a pinup with his arms stretched above him, arching his back, pouting his lips and staring back at a camera equipped with a soft-filter lens. Because of his age, this portrayal “passes” as childhood innocence, and as a fifteen-year-old in Thief clearly at the peak of puberty, modicums of innocence remain, but the homoerotic gestures exchanged between Sabu and Justin negate the possibilities of purely chaste interactions (see fig. 14).

Pointedly, the innocence of their interaction hinges on the consummation of their

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homoerotic desire, and in the realm of Orientalist fantasy, anything is possible. The mystery, sensuality and excess of the Orient provide the transgressive conditions for the culmination of their sexuality to ensue. However, as a lowly thief, a boy of color, and an object of imperial queer desire, Abu’s affections for the prince can only be reciprocated within the limits of “mainstream” convention. Sexual intercourse between the prince and boy would have to be left on the Thief’s cutting room floor. Achmad can return Abu’s affections, but his duty as the romantic lead is to marry the girl. Ironically, the erotic tension between the buddies heightens during their moments of separation. For instance, even as Achmad and the Princess testify their love to each other while shackled in the dungeon facing their final hours, Achmad is distracted by his memory of Abu and cries dramatically to the Princess, “Abu and I parted quarreling. I wish I could tell him I’m sorry … Abu, my friend. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.” The memory of their “lovers quarrel” on the desert mountainside feeds the pain of their separation, and in turn, the culmination of his homoerotic longing renders an ambivalence around his sexual desire. Is Achmad passing as queer? Or is he attempting to pass as straight? Do his attempts to “brown-up” as an Oriental mirror his efforts to mimic desire for the princess too? What Sabu’s “camp oriental” persona achieves in Thief is the freedom to navigate the inherent irony of being “almost the same, but not quite” Western caricatures of the Orientalized and queered Other. Indeed, the mimicry of the Orient that surfaces here is less a mockery of the “object” of signification than a strategic disruption of Euro/American positioning of the Eastern other. In one of Thief’s final scenes Sabu winces and tugs at the collar of his baby-pink suit as if its ill-fitting design and itchy fabric is causing discomfort. Prince Achmad with his Princess at his side gives a lively speech “owing everything to Abu … When he grows into a man he shall be my Grand Vizier. All the wise men of the East will teach him all the wisdom of the world … He will be the

shining youth of Baghdad” Achmad pauses to look for his advisor-in-training and notices Abu

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mounting his magic carpet. Achmad calls out, “Abu! Where are you going?” Abu exclaims, “You’ve got what you wanted. Now I’m going to find what I want … Some fun and adventure!” The final shot is Sabu in his pink fitted jacket, pale blue peasant pants, and shiny gold turban waving goodbye and flying towards the rainbow on his carpet. While this final scene of Sabu and the rainbow likely offers contemporary camp enthusiasts a celebratory site for exalting Sabu as a camp figure, the actor’s escape from the scene’s heteronormative resolution also invites queer viewers to imagine how Sabu might realize his own homoerotic desires while beseeching “Orientals” to consider how Sabu might reinvent himself beyond Western constructs of Oriental fantasies.139 *

*

*

Although I limit each discussion of the camp oriental, the babu and the jungle boy to three separate films above, these liminal personae are hardly mutually exclusive. Sabu’s enactments of the “camp oriental,” for instance, easily extend to his other roles. The ambivalent tension of the babu, vacillating between the mimicry and mockery of either Oriental stereotypes or Westernized Orientals, also applies to many of his embodiments that encompass aspects of the East and the West. Whether in the jungle or not, his characters’ affinities for jungle animals often accompany iterations of the “camp oriental,” while pointing to a potential absorption of Western modernity, signified by the influence of his white costars. For instance, the artifice of the Indian jungle in Los Angeles’ Sherwood Forest, filled with both live and taxidermic beasts, enacts a “camp effect” built on Western/Eastern contradictions, shaped by modern facades of ancient temples and re-presented

139

My emphasis on the rainbow is not to suggest that Korda inserted the rainbow to frame Sabu’s queerness, nor is my mention of the pride symbol an indication that contemporaneous viewers of Thief read meaning into the arch. Indeed, the symbol did not come into vogue until the late 1960s. Rather, I point out the arch to privilege contemporary camp readings that view Sabu as camp as a strategy through which he resisted the Orientalism ascribed to his personae.

226 by the extra-textuality of wolf-children projected onto Sabu’s performance of Kipling’s classic jungle boy. The absurdity of Mowgli’s swift acculturation from the jungle to human civilization in a matter of weeks parodies Sabu’s rapid offscreen developments towards Western comportment and society. Here, applying the entity of the “camp oriental” to Mowgli’s persona strategically exposes the excess, facade and humor of this Hollywood jungle display. The irony of camp also extends to Sabu’s Orientalist character in The Drum, a princely babu who yields to the homoerotic advances of a drummer boy whose British military uniform Azim covets and asks to wear. Though the prince has declared his loyalty to his native kingdom Tokot, Azim’s desire for whiteness is marked by the chance to disrobe and wear his white buddy’s garb. Bill, the drummer boy, chirpily responds to Azim’s request with “anything that’s mine is yours, Azim,” “you’re a blinkin’ marvel” and a “toff, if you know what I mean.” The moonlight tints their intimate exchange with hues of blue -- lighting the shirtless Indian boy like a “glamour shot” and offering a heightened “erotic charge to Sabu’s image” (Jaikumar 2006; 158). The camp element here manifests with an ineffable “gay sensibility” that can safely be experienced through a veil of adolescent innocence ascribed to the homoerotic pair (Babuscio). Arguably, this “gay sensibility” ensued through the actor’s subsequent depictions. The Jungle Book, made a year before joining the army, was Sabu’s last starring role, and after signing with Universal Studios in 1942, he seldom ranked higher than third billing. The adolescent works discussed earlier in this chapter primed his adult appearances and cameos in B-grade movies, some of which became camp classics. After signing onto Hollywood’s studio system, Sabu regularly appeared in Orientalist Technicolor features, three of which starred “that spectacular flaming image” of Maria Montez alongside the “hunky” Nordic, Jon Hall (Smith 29). In Arabian Nights, Sabu is a juggling entertainer, and in Cobra Woman (1944) and White Savage (1943), Sabu plays a mélange of camp orientals, jungle boys and tribal princes from the South Seas. Next to the Dominican starlet

Maria Montez – also a “camp oriental” who built a career on Orientalist roles -- Sabu’s

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homoeroticism is heightened through a triangulated buddy relationship with John Hall who courts lusty romances with Montez. In Jack Smith’s pioneering 1962 article on camp, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez,” the queer writer and filmmaker suggests that her “acting was hoodwinking” and because “her conviction of beauty” was a “main concern, her acting had to be secondary” (32). Exalting these films to cult status almost two decades after their release, Smith emphasizes that he is less concerned about discovering what is a script writer’s exact meaning. Images always give rise to a complex of feelings, thots [sic], conjectures, speculations, etc [. . .] Visual truths are blunt, whereas thots can be altered to suit & protect. The eye falls into disuse as a receiver of impressions & films (images) mean nothing without word meanings [. . .] a personality type star appeals to, informs the eye. Maria Montez was remarkable. (32) Although a cult classic article like Smith’s on Montez has yet been written about Sabu, I would argue that the South Asian actor also possesses a “remarkable” “filmic appositeness.” While Montez’s conviction may have rested on self-exploiting her beauty, Sabu self-fashioned an arousing, mischievous and nimble Oriental innocence that had its roots in India, cited generic Orients across the “Brown Atlantic” and moored itself as a camp oriental icon in America. His youthful charm, vigor and theatricality valorized a queer racial difference against his costars’ brownfaced attempts to emulate “eastern” fragments of Hollywood’s and Korda’s visions. Indeed, the exoticization and eroticization of Sabu’s body is palpable; Sabu, I imagine, was well aware of his objectification and commodification. After all, his popularity sold ice cream (See fig. 15), zoo memberships and even war bonds, and his exotic personae and his eroticized frame fed a consumer market that projected seductions of fantasy, travel and queer desire across his body. As

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Fig. 15. Sabu on the underside of a “Dixie Consumers” ice cream lid for the film, Thief of Bagdad (1940). From Powell and Pressburger Images for Thief of Bagdad. http://www.powell-pressburger.org/Images/40_ToB/index.html

a non-white Caucasian living in the United States less than two decades after the Supreme Court ruled that Indians were inassimilable (and would remain so until the Luce-Celler Act of 1946) the construction of Sabu’s personae in popular culture suggests that a particular “type” of South Asian difference was acceptable as long as it was identifiable. As I suggest in my chapter on The Elephant Boy above, the recognition of Sabu’s liminal jungle persona partially derived from the male adolescent pleasures of the colonial literary imagination. Moreover, because he was the star of his early films, his legibility grew from locating him as a primary point of audience identification in The Elephant Boy, The Drum, Thief of Bagdad and The Jungle Books. Indeed, Western filmgoers related to Sabu. The liminality of his racial, national, and gendered personae both embraced and denied varied routes of spectatorial identification that simultaneously read him as Other, white, Hindoo, Caucasian, straight, queer, camp, Indian,

American and British. As discussed in chapter three on South Asian racial ambivalence, South

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Asians experienced a peculiar US racialization that shifted between the scientific classifications of Caucasian, socially accepted standards of “white,” non-aboriginal Indian designations like Aryan and arbitrary state categories like “Hindoo.” Suspended “betwixt and between” a number of subject formations, Sabu’s liminal presence in popular culture demonstrates an emergent diasporic hybridity, born not only of colonial masculinity but also from Asian American difference, indicating the capacity to negotiate multiple culture practices, rehearse the values of the host country and destabilize any “fixed” sense of racial, sexual or national identity. For Western audiences, Sabu certainly embodied a global cosmopolitan “ideal” that was less universalistic than inclusive of multiple nations, languages and ethnicities. Indian audiences, on the other hand, were likely unsure how to relate to an Indian body “shipped” to the West for the purposes of performing Western versions of India and the East, versions of the Orient that were clearly made for Euro-American viewers but delivered to an India fighting for sovereignty anyway. Although Sabu’s filmic personae catered to American and British audiences, Indians living in America did not always appreciate the deluge of imperial tropes circulating through American public life. Kumar Goshal – an Indian journalist for The Nation and the National Guardian who came to the US in 1920 -- rallied the international community to call for deposing British governance of India. Imploring “forward-thinking” Hollywood directors, Frank Capra and Lewis Milestone, to consider the effects of racial representation on India’s nationalist movement, Goshal writes in 1942, “Let us see the people of India, not as Gunga Dins and elephant boys, bejeweled maharajahs and snake charmers, naked fakirs and nautch girls [. . .] but as real Indian people who have made incredible sacrifices in their fight for national freedom” (qtd. in Shukla 42).

230 For Goshal, these impersonations of Indian-ness in the popular imaginary replaced India’s colonial “realities” with imperial “fantasies,” threatening to shape India’s independence as a political fantasy too. In a similar vein, Krishnalal Shridharani, an Indian freedom fighter and American journalist from Columbia University who immigrated to America in 1934, wrote in My India, My America, “Indians are not Maharajahs, Swamis, fortunetellers, elephant boys, and snake charmers so often as they are people like any others, plain flesh-and-blood creatures, with common likes and dislikes, with human charms and drawbacks” (148). Indian activists like Shridharani and Goshal recognized that the circulation of stereotyped Indian images, particularly Sabu’s elephant boy, did nothing to build humanity around India’s colonial plight. These Orientalist “re-presences” shadowed India’s modernity with anachronistic allusions, discounting Indians’ authentic human efforts to claim their representations and the agency of their own nation. While Shridharani and Goshal certainly differed from Sabu in their antiimperialist leanings, their criticism of US immigration restrictions, and their participation in raising awareness around the “Quit India” movement in America, all three of these men, however differently, were simultaneously crafting expressions of diasporic selves.140 Sabu, I maintain, performed a unique self-fashioning of Indian-American-ness that negotiated, resisted and managed Orientalist discourses alongside the struggles of American assimilation. As Sandhya Shukla makes clear, “The absence of a colonial relationship between America and India has meant that the United States did not invite the forms of vilification that colonial England had in

140 In my discussion of Indian Americans’ process of Americanization, I am entirely aware of Indian women’s conspicuous absence from these pages. As Sandhya Shukla notes, the shape that Indians’ Americanization took during the 1930s and 40s possessed a masculinist privilege, which poses a challenge for Indian women to “write” themselves into these immigrant narratives. Granted, anti-Asian US immigration policy made it difficult for Indian women to enter the United States until after 1965. Even so, narratives that privilege the Indian female immigrant experience are largely of recent popular phenomena. See Shukla, 160161.

India” (137). Plainly, Indians had greater options for reinventing themselves separate from the

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colonial subjugation they likely encountered if they had ultimately settled in England. Most Britons, including Alexander Korda, objected to India’s independence throughout the 1930s and 40s. And though Sabu’s wife, Marilyn, claims her husband did not experience any racism while living in England, it is not improbable that he experienced forms of prejudice, even in the form of subtle institutional biases. Balancing Indian-ness and American-ness was indeed a complicated task when less than 4000 Indians lived across the United States in the years before India’s independence (Shukla 43). Active Indian immigrant communities were few and far between; fashioning culturally hybrid identities grew from processes of individuation versus participation in communities that shared a national sense of “home.” The typical immigrant narratives that sustain “push and pull” tensions of assimilation or nativism as we understand them in current post-1965 Asian American discourse did not necessarily hold for Sabu. Nativist expressions often manifested as anti-colonial political platforms, and to express nationalist ideology would have contradicted the colonial caricatures he played onscreen. For Sabu, assimilating into US culture was not only a means of survival; it was also an indirect denial of British subjecthood. However, I want to emphasize that Sabu’s ability to become American weighed heavily on his class privilege, affording him assimilation into a mostly white, Christian, Californian society. Ironically, it was not the actor’s ability to pass as American that initially gave him his success. If anything, it was the harnessing of racial difference through an “auto-exoticized,” and arguably, an “auto-eroticized” authenticity, that mobilized his accumulation of economic privilege (Savigliano). As Sabu matured into manhood, his movie roles diminished in quality due to the lessening popularity of fantasy films, the increasing demands for social realist plots and the decline of Hollywood’s studio system. Furthermore, the veil of childhood impish-ness that facilitated

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Fig. 16. Cover of Harringay Circus Brochure, during his London Circus Tour. (1951-1952); author’s collection.

homoerotic identifications with his characters began to wane. In his last decade of making movies through the 1950s, he often made cameos as “Sabu, The Stable Boy” or “Sabu, the Jungle Boy,” reinforcing the masculinity of the white male lead by helping him “get the girl” and/or discovering a lost gem in an obscure South Seas jungle location removed from any associations with India. Around this time, Sabu returned with his wife Marilyn, and their son, Paul, to London where Sabu joined Tom Arnold’s Harringay Circus (see fig 16). In the circus, “His Highness Prince Sabu” appeared as the main attraction and was part of the grand “Arabian Nights” finale which included “flame dances,” “ritual fire eating” and of course intricately executed elephant tricks. Though he appeared in a prince’s costume initially, the audience preferred the more authentic naked appeal of “The Elephant Boy.” Liebfred writes, “Sabu appeared in his finery from the conclusion of The Thief

of Bagdad, but audience response was low, so he was forced to wear the more traditional dhoti

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(loincloth), and consequently suffered a great deal from the cold (Sabu 455). Just four years after India’s independence from the British, this London audience preferred a more “traditional,” “exposed” and “familiar” version of Sabu. Performing animal tricks not as an “elephant boy,” but now as an “elephant man,” Sabu acquiesced to a “public regulation of a fantasy through the surface politics of the body” (Butler, Gender Trouble 136). For these Britons, the fantasy of Sabu’s pachydermal past required the presence of his fetishized body. And for his elephant tricks to appear “genuine,” they had to be delivered by a “genuine” homoeroticized Indian masculinity. As James C. Scott argues, subaltern performances encode, often in sanitized, ambiguous ways, the “hidden transcripts” of a subordinated group. A kind of “euphemization” occurs when hidden transcripts are expressed within power-laden situations by actors who prefer to eschew the injunctions that an overt statement might bring (53). For Sabu, these “injunctions” occurred offscreen and offstage but not in the overtly politicized way of Shridharani or Goshal. As Sabu’s film career declined and the demand for his animal tricks increased, the actor grew increasingly fluent in deploying the liminal hybrid qualities of “matured” jungle boys, babus and camp orientals. While his extra-textual persona exceeded the interpretive frame of his films’ reception, I want to suggest that he also exploited aspects of his onscreen characters in performances of his offscreen self. Often seen wearing a turban in public, sometimes holding a margay or ocelot on his shoulder, and tuxedoed like a modern Hollywood princely babu, he deployed his cultural currency to trivialize the attention placed on his Oriental “excess.” The “effect of this excess,” explains Savigliano, in relation to the process of “autoexoticization,” owes to the “conspicuous artificiality of the linkage with the reference” (36). Savigliano suggests that the creation of stereotypes in a place like Argentina grew from attempts to create distinctions among a population whose racial hybridity was at the crux of their colonial

origins. By embracing hybridization’s cultural, social and biological effects, the “conflict and

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tensions” between local and global politics retain their presence in the configuration of identity and cultural practice (Savigliano 37). Hence, Sabu’s performances of hybridity, that is, a cultural hybridity, were continually inflected by the effects of colonization, the promise of US naturalization and a film industry that marketed his “conspicuous artificiality” until it potentially collapsed into a gratuitous performance of camp orientalism. In this sense, the “hidden transcripts” embedded in Sabu’s Oriental circus performance perhaps critiqued a history of ethnological exhibitionism, exploited the producer’s desperation to revive imperial Indian caricatures in postcolonial Britain, and signaled his eventual departure to the other side of the Atlantic where the options for self-invention were comparatively preferred. Indeed, my reading of Sabu’s intentions are speculative, yet his offscreen efforts to selffashion a cosmopolitan identity suggest that the actor’s resistance arrived in veiled, disguised forms. In the final years of Sabu’s life, the majority of his films possessed a “camp sensibility,” not only because of their poor production value, their transgressive gendered and racial characters, and exotic otherworldly locales, but also because the politics of re-location were humorously narrativized into these adventures. In Mistress of the World (1960) Sabu plays a white-collar research assistant in the South Seas who develops technology to wipe out the electricity of entire continents. In Jungle Hell (1956), the village of his character named, “jungle boy,” is the host to aliens, flying saucers and curious anthropologists. As the boxer, Tipo Tairu, in Savage Drums (1951), Sabu defends his tropical island from the ravages of a communist invasion. Whether in the South Seas or on a ubiquitous tropical isle in his later years, Sabu performed hybrid plots combining Cold War politics, science fiction, and Oriental fantasies that demonstrated the liminality of his intermediating roles while highlighting the pleasures of his camp oriental portrayals. At the core of camp orientalism’s strategy is locating oneself within the gendered, sexual and racial excess of the Orient while simultaneously

235 standing, witnessing and distancing oneself from its parodic façade. Achieving the liminality of this task -- of moving “in-between” imperial constructions of “authenticity,” of citing ambivalent colonial knowledge, and of traversing untamed spaces against the grain of civilization -- indeed marks Sabu as an inimitable and enduring phenomena of American, Indian and British culture(s).

CONCLUSION The Afterlife of Sabu

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Over the years of researching Sabu’s cultural meanings in the US and British popular imaginary, I have come across a variety of sources that reveal the endurance of the actor’s iconicity in contemporary popular culture. Even though he died almost forty-five years ago in 1963 from a heart attack on his Chatworth, California ranch, fragments of his specter linger in the most unexpected locations. For instance, one of the most popular personalities in the World Wrestling Federation calls himself Sabu The Elephant Boy. Born Terry Michael Brunk, this wrestler has a fan base of millions around the world. Sometimes he wears a leopard-print loincloth in the ring, other times the burly man dons harem pants complete with pointed slippers that curl up at the toes. When he enters the ring, he often wears a turban. Mimicking the gentle charm and wit, which the actor Sabu displayed in his films, would, of course, not hold in a wrestling ring. Thus, the WWF Sabu roars, growls and charges at his opponent like a Mowgli character not yet civilized. While the WWF star appropriated the actor’s name and the wildness associated with feral jungle boys, for others, especially those who attended Sabu’s movies as children in the 1930s and 40s, the actor is remembered as an emblem of peace, harmony and justice in the Middle East. Just a few months after the United States waged war on Iraq in 2003, Albert Gazeley wrote a poem asking where did all the “honour amongst the thieves go?” Comparing his childhood imaginings of Iraq with the war footage he sees on CNN, Gazeley remembers, “When I was just a child, I was crazy about ‘Sabu’/ he rode upon his elephants and never did wear shoes/ when ‘Arabian Nights’ was a fantasy beyond my wildest dreams/ the ‘Thief of Baghdad’ was my hero, the greatest film I’d ever seen/”141 America’s occupation of Baghdad, the looting of museums, and the destruction of Iraq’s

civilization intensifies his nostalgia for “Abu’s Baghdad,” which, for Gazeley, exemplified moral

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ideals wherein “noble thieves” like Abu stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Indeed, Sabu’s depiction of a Baghdad thief delivered a wondrous innocence to millions, while certainly reinforcing an Orientalist fantasy, but Gazeley’s wistful memories of Sabu’s pink-tinted Baghdad would forever be replaced with the ravages of war. For John Prine, the legendary American folk singer, Sabu’s place in his historical memory is more ambivalent, critiquing the consequences of child stardom in America while commenting on the cultural difference of his personae. In a 1978 song called, “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone,” Prine comments on the demise of Sabu’s career and wonders how the actor’s manager “could send a child actor to visit in the land of the wind chill factor?” Implied here is that Sabu will likely perform his tricks underdressed, as he often did, in a subzero American climate. Though the song is playful -“here comes the elephant boy/ bundled all up in his corduroy/ headed down south towards Illinois from the jungles of East St. Paul/” -- the subtext of Prine’s song gestures towards the exploitation of an “old big shot” whose “movie wasn’t really doing so hot.” The folk lyrics also install the star as an American fixture, who like many others across the US, is suspended in negotiations of racial, national and cultural difference, which Prine locates as a spectacle on Sabu’s body. Moreover, the invocation of the “elephant boy’s” name conjures a set of exotic references to India, its jungle and beasts that deeply contrast with the landscape and demographics of the 1970s American Midwest. For a songwriter seeking vivid imagery for her/his lyrics, the mention of Sabu provides an array of “colorful” associations that not only point the listener towards the Orient, but also summon American imaginings of Hollywood glamour, B-film camp and narratives of immigrant assimilation.

Albert Gazeley, “When I was just a child I was crazy about Sabu,” April 2003. See http://www.albertgazeley.net 141

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Fig. 17. Sabu’s endurance as the archetypal sidekick and his subjection to canine affiliations.

Other posthumous allusions to Sabu include a 1978 cartoon by Jim Davis, the author of the widely syndicated Garfield. Davis draws Garfield, his scheming orange cat, with a safari hat standing in tall grass looking out towards the horizon of a savannah or jungle. Odie, Garfield’s loyal, floppyeared canine friend, wags his tail dopily while clutching a pencil in his mouth. The caption in the cartoon above Garfield’s head reads, “My pencil, Sabu. I feel a thought approaching” (see fig. 17). Here, Davis cites the actor’s unquestioning loyalty to the protagonist’s sidekick and projects this cultural memory onto the cartoon’s air-headed dog. Less humorous than indicative of the actor’s roles in the latter part of his life, Davis’ mention of Sabu in the context of an expedition or safari signifies the lasting circulation, appropriation and re-performance of his figure across various media in popular culture. Just a few years after Sabu’s death, a 1966 episode of Rowan and Martin’s television show, “Laugh-In,” satirized the story of Sabu, a baby born in the jungle among elephants. During the 1960s, the comedian, Lenny Bruce, did Sabu impersonations from Thief of Bagdad and The Elephant Boy. What made Sabu’s personae in popular culture so enduring? What incites performers to replay his roles? What is it about his characters that brings spectators to project a variety of desires upon him that range from heroism as seen in Albert Gazeley’s 2003 poem above, to the

spectacle of cultural otherness as in Prine’s 1978 song, or his abiding assistance as a “native

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informant” in Jim Davis’ 1978 cartoon? What I have attempted to achieve in this dissertation is how the liminality of the film star Sabu provides a range of spectatorial identifications for cultural consumers. Whether flirting as a camp oriental, embodying the WWII hero, or signifying the “American Dream, ” Sabu’s array of representations builds compatibility, rejection, and a combination of the two, across a diversity of social values. For example, Ian Iqbal Rashid’s 1996 film Surviving Sabu points out the mixed perceptions that South Asians possess of the actor across generations. In this provocative British short, a South Asian working-class immigrant father and his queer British Asian upwardly mobile son watch old Sabu movies together on television. These films mostly include the roles I discussed in chapters four and five. As shown in Rashid’s work, the British Asian father valorizes the achievements of a movie star who made it big in Hollywood, while his queer son derides the Oriental stereotypes Sabu iterates. When I first watched this movie in 1998 at a South Asian artist/activist performance festival called “Desh Pardesh” in Toronto, my own response to Sabu’s performances was ambivalent. In a dark auditorium, I sat in an audience of hundreds of like-minded liberal, politically active, queer- friendly diasporic South Asians from across North America. All of us were there to make sense of South Asian diasporic cultural production, our roles as activists, and the modes through which we negotiate home with nation. After all, Desh Pardesh from Hindi translates as “home nation, foreign nation.” While I marveled at the intriguing figure of Sabu, who was also being analyzed by the onscreen characters and watched by South Asians around me, I was taken by his exotic “glow,” the seduction of the camera, and my own susceptibility towards identifying with his charm, his smile, his good looks, and athleticism while disavowing the Orientalist, Kiplingesque fantasy worlds that framed him.

Throughout this project, I have revisited that decade-old moment of pleasure and denial,

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feelings that still arise as I watch his films today. My sustained intrigue took me to the archives to “discover” for myself the qualities that Borradaile, Flaherty and Korda “found” in 1935 and projected onto an eleven year-old boy playing with pachyderms in the Maharaja of Mysore’s elephant stables. Equipped with fascination and the knowledge that the actor is indeed an historical figure, this project’s lines have engaged how India was understood in the 1930s and 40s popular imaginary when a dearth of South Asians lived in the United States at the height of his celebrity. In order to address my questions, I necessarily approached the construction of South Asian identity from an embodied genealogical perspective that incorporates historical modes of representation from colonial India, Britain and the United States. To achieve this standpoint, I have read Sabu’s performances as a citational terrain to engage the discursive inheritance of his multiply located personae. The contemporary significance of a project on a 1930s and 40s Hollywood star like Sabu contributes to dismantling the internalization of model minority stereotypes among South Asian Americans in this country. For most post-1965 immigrants and their children, the government’s policies of Asian exclusion are not part of their historical memory. As Ananya Bhattacharya argues, many South Asian Americans are “intoxicated” by their economic success and privilege (33). Ideally, examining the climate of Sabu’s presence in popular culture guides us towards an understanding of how class privilege among immigrants is always shaped by transnational political economies. Following Bhattacharya, the recuperation of historical memory exposes the racial subordination so often obscured by class, a necessary restoration that potentially leads to building political alliances across class, race and gender. Indeed, Sabu experienced the benefits of Americanization during a period of exclusion, not only through his performance of citizenship or patriotism, but also through a “whitening” effect attributed to his class ascension (Ong 78).

241 Arguably, this “whitening” effect also applies to the circulation of Bollywood stars across the “Brown Atlantic.” Stars ranging from Shah Rukh Khan to Hrithik Roshan and from Aishwarya Rai to Preiti Zinta are packaged, marketed and distributed to appeal to a class of South Asian diasporic subjects whose conspicuous consumption points to the privileges of economic mobility. While there is not room in this dissertation to compare Sabu with 1930s and 40s Bollywood stars or contemporary Indian actors, the next phase of this project aims to engage a reading of Sabu’s performances of Indian-ness alongside the fashioning of Indian-ness in an anti-colonial nationalist climate during the nascent developmental stages of India’s film industry. Yet, connections between Sabu and current Bollywood stars are already being made. A 2005 article printed in The Times of India addresses the endurance of Sabu’s presence not only in America, but in the Indian imagination as well. Comparing Sabu with Aishwarya Rai, one of the most famous Indian actresses and models in the world at present, the journalist writes, It isn't Aishwarya Rai, or Om Puri or Kabir Bedi or even I.S. Johar who made the first major foray into Hollywood, but a young mahout from Mysore. The west's celebration of Sabu was spontaneous and based on his exotic appeal. Ash's splash is driven by hard-nosed marketing which barrels her onto Oprah, Good Morning America and David Letterman. Beauties there are many and at 31 it won't last forever. If she is going to leave a lasting record that will be archived like Sabu's, the tough part begins now. 142 Thus, even as Sabu adopted America as his home, Indians in India, are recovering and reviving him as an historical Indian entity. Although it is unclear what kind of nativist leanings Sabu had when he

142

Times of India 19 February 2005.

242 was alive, 45 years after his death, Indians are contouring his presence with nationalist affiliations in the global popular imaginary. However, as much as Sabu is remembered as a global Indian icon, his jungle boy, babu, orientalist representations would not work in a post-liberalized Indian economy today. Global Indian audiences -- viewers that live in India and abroad -- are less interested in Kipling tales that remind them of a period when colonists represented their lives than stories that reflect India’s unique sense of modernity. One of the largest film producers in the world, making over 800 films per year, Bollywood contours its citizens as modern polyglots, conspicuous consumers of fancy brands, and achievers of high-profile jobs in the areas of computers, telecommunications and finance. Films like Dulwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Brave-hearted Will Take the Bride, 1995) and Kal Ho Naa Ho (Whether or Not There is a Tomorrow, 2003) take place across several continents, are spoken in a mixture of Hindi and English, and not only appeal to national audiences, but foment a nationalism shared across the diaspora. Though Sabu might be recuperated as a national figure today, his films were clearly made for a global Euro/American imperial nation. Bollywood films, on the other hand, are made for a globalized Indian nation that spans across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, North America, the West Indies and South America. South Asian diasporic makers of films from Gurinder Chadha’s Bend it Like Beckham (2002) to Mira Nair’s screen adaptation, The Namesake (2006), posit a different set of cultural negotiations that address diasporic Indian-ness in classic immigrant frameworks. These films point to “push and pull” narratives that dramatize the conflicts experienced in the process of assimilation. Chadha’s British work distinguishes her lead character, Jess (Parminder Nagra) with the talent of playing European football, an activity that her parents find unfeminine by the social codes of traditional Indian womanhood. The Namesake, based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, exposes the resistance that the lead character Gogol (Kal Penn) shows towards the cultural practices his Bengali immigrant parents

243 cherish. Ultimately, both Jess and Gogol pursue their own paths through “coming of age” tales that point to individuated challenges of living in England and America, respectively, while their Indianness mirrors a loyalty to their families and a recognition of their inescapable ethnic differences. Although Sabu performs negotiations of the East and the West, his heightened foreign-ness exposes an historical absence of Indians in the audience. Indians did not produce his films; white Euro/American filmmakers framed his depictions and tailored them towards white viewers. The diasporic directors described above, on the other hand, build spectatorial identification with immigrants who relate to the process of leaving their non-European homelands, adjusting to a new life abroad, learning a new language, raising their children in a new culture, building immigrant communities and settling into a society where they are marked as foreign. Certainly, these narratives are not new, but the films’ contemporaneous, “coeval” regard for the absorption of ethnic difference in America and England offers examples of how one might perform American-ness or British-ness in distinct South Asian ways. While there are more than one million South Asians living in the United States today, there is not a South Asian actor in Hollywood who possesses the same degree of fame that Sabu had at the peak of his career. Indeed, the spiritual guru, Deepak Chopra, the filmmaker, Deepa Mehta, and the television personality, Padma Lakshmi, are all active cultural producers of popular culture. The cultural authenticity they deliver to the West arrives in a sophisticated, cosmopolitan form that packages Eastern mysticism, film narratives and cuisine, respectively, in fashionable Western modes. Although they all are part of a legacy of introducing Indian cultural forms to Euro/American audiences, their foreign-ness and fame is not as punctuated as Sabu’s was during the 1930s and 40s. Today, customs and practices including yoga, curry and meditation have been absorbed into the American popular fabric. If these Indian forms were once exotic, they are not anymore. Ironically,

Sabu’s star-makers heightened the actors’ exotic-ness, embellished his origins and valorized his

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difference to create one of the most famous Indians in twentieth century cinema. From the moment of his discovery, Sabu has arguably been a global figure. His body, as I have argued, offers a terrain of international identifications that affirms his significance in the cultural archive. My hope for this project is that it will lead researchers to examine other South Asian American cultural producers of the 1920s through the early 1960s to address the fissure in South Asian American discourse that Asian exclusion determined. Indeed, engaging this discursive gap will also enhance South Asian presence within the fields of Asian American Cinema and in the field of Asian American studies. The body of work that I have studied in this project demonstrates that Asian American cultural practices, and in turn Asian American identity is continually changing, adjusting to precipitous shifts in the development of culture and also reflecting changes in the global economy. When Sabu made his movies, the experience of globalization often occurred in the movies and in turn, presented itself on the bodies of its players. Viewers were able to “visit” foreign locales, witness (non)conventional relationships, and live vicariously through the embodied otherness projected onto the screen. If this dissertation inspires readers to watch Sabu’s movies, I implore them to question their own citational terrains, the legacies of their viewing pleasure and the cultural inheritance they bring to consuming Anglo/American constructions of a transnational “exotic” named Sabu.

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APPENDIX SABU FILMOGRAPHY and ROLES The Elephant Boy (United Artists; 1936)

Toomai

Drums (United Artists; 1938)

Prince Azim

The Thief of Bagdad (United Artists; 1940)

Abu

Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book (United Artists; 1942)

Mowgli

Arabian Nights (Universal; 1942)

Ali Ben Ali

White Savage (Universal; 1943)

Orano

Cobra Woman (Universal; 1944)

Kado

Tangier (Universal; 1946)

Pepe

The End of the River (Universal; 1947)

Manoel

Black Narcissus (Universal; 1947)

The Young General

Man-Eater of Kumaon (Universal; 1948)

Narain

Song Of India (Columbia; 1949)

Ramdar

Savage Drums (Lippert; 1951)

Tipo Tairu

Hello Elephant (Rizzoli; 1952)

Sultan of Nagore

Baghdad (Falcon Films; 1952)

Sabu the Jungle Boy

The Black Panther (Howco; 1953)

Sabu the Jungle Boy

The Treasure of Bengal (Venturini; 1954)

Ainur

Jungle Hell (Taj Mahal Productions; 1956)

Jungle Boy

Jaguar (Republic; 1956)

Juano

Sabu and the Magic Ring (Allied Artists; 1957)

Sabu, the stable boy

Mistress Of The World (Republic; 1960)

Dr. Lin-Chor

Rampage (Warner Bros; 1963)

Talib

A Tiger Walks (Walt Disney; 1964)

Ram Singh