The Andaman Sea. The second half of the 19th century. As European colonialism grips South Asia in its long, slithering tentacles, a legendary pirate haunts the borderlands of the British Empire. His name: Sandokan.
Created by Italian writer Emilio Salgari in the late 19th century, Sandokan first appeared in the serialized adventure novel, The Tigers of Mompracem (1883), as an Indo-Malay prince-turned-pirate waging a war of revenge against the British colonial empire that killed his father and annexed his kingdom. Born of rage and exile, Sandokan lead his ragtag band of pirate brothers to reclaim sovereignty over the seas around Borneo. In the late 19th- and early 20th century, Salgari's tantalising tales of Sandokan's anti-colonial exploits exploded in popularity across Italy and Latin America — part of the growing market for pulp fiction that provided cheap, serialized, and addictive narratives for Europe's expanding working class.
Like his contemporaries Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard, Salgari never visited the lands he wrote about. His depiction of Asia was imaginary, pieced together from atlases, natural history books, and travelogues. Yet his books challenged the usual colonial narrative: instead of glorifying Western conquest, they gave voice — albeit stylized and exoticized through orientalist imagination — to resistance. Sandokan might have been shaped by orientalist tropes, but he was also a righteous avenger and, for post-Risorgimento Italy, a symbol of Italians' frustrations with foreign domination. Behind the tropical jungles of South Asia, swashbuckling duels, and doomed romance with Marianna Guillonk, Salgari captured something more profound: Sandokan was a lens through which Europe's colonial history, orientalist fantasies, and pulp fiction obsessions intersected, and occasionally rebelled against each other.
In 1976, a six-part English-Italian television series directed by Sergio Sollima brought Sandokan — played with unmatched panache by Kabir Bedi — back to the mainstream in all his campy, pulp fiction glory. This cult-classic adaptation maintained Sandokan's anti-imperial core, casting British officers as arrogant villains and Sandokan as a charismatic rebel leader. Yet, visually and tonally, the series leaned heavily into orientalism — fetishising Bedi's Sandokan as a romantic hero who symbolised both threat and allure.
Sandokan's renewed appeal in the 20th century drew from a postcolonial fascination with the pirate as the last free man, a rebel who sails beyond the boundaries of empire. In 19th and 20th-century pulp fiction and camp TV and movies, pirates became symbolic of freedom in a world carved up by colonialism. The pirate fantasy gave Western audiences a way to vicariously confront and critique the very colonial systems they benefited from without dismantling them.
Sandokan was a product of these self-contradictions. He was both the noble savage and the political insurgent. He was both romanticised and racialised. He spoke the language of resistance, but within a narrative built by the Settler Colonial state. Even his love story with Marianna, the Italian-English noblewoman dubbed 'The Pearl of Labuan', reflects colonial ambivalence. She humanises him, civilises him, and ultimately makes him legible to European audiences.
What does it mean that Europe's most popular anti-colonial hero is a fictional pirate from Asia imagined by an Italian man who never set foot in Asia? Or that two of the most enduring pirate figures of modern pop culture — Sandokan and his kindred Captain Jack Sparrow — embody resistance while being mediated through orientalist or whimsical filters?
In both, we see the limits of empire's imagination. Even as these characters challenge colonial authority, they are made palatable by framing them within adventure, spectacle, and pulp fantasy. They reflect a desire to rewrite history, to cleanse imperial guilt, and to indulge in rebellion without consequence. But they also offer something else: a crack in the edifice. A glimpse, however imperfect, of a world where the colonized fight back, where the margins speak, and where the seas — whether real or imagined — belong not to the empire, but to those who refuse its rule.
A new adaptation of Sandokan starring Turkish actor Can Yaman as the titular prince-turned-pirate is currently in the works. Watch the trailer here.
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