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4
Moor or less?
The surveillance of Othello, Calcutta 1848

SUDIPTO CHATTERJEE and JYOTSNA G.SINGH

All my vulnerabilities, my history, my information and experience, my childhood and my manhood…had to be hurled into…the quest for Othello.… We bring private knowledge to a public role.… I understand the state of exile. I understand a need to belong.… My father was born in East Africa—the son of Gujerat [sic] parents. He spent his childhood in an Islamic community born of the ancient Arab trade routes. My father came to England in 1927…and he returned neither to East Africa nor Gujerat (India); to the landscapes that had nourished his pride, his myths, and his morality.… I think this bred in him a sense of displacement. His beautiful English bride…was his perfect Desdemona, and I hasten to add no one conspired to destroy them. But I know the chaos that could rise up in his throat when our English landscape became too alien.… I could see the cry behind his eyes.… ‘‘I want to go home” they used to say; and “I want to go home” went into the crucible to be coined night after night during Othello’s disintegration.

(Kingsley 1988:171)

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