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of English theater practitioners in theatrical verisimilitude and the pervasive, pseudo-scientific debates about racial typologies whereby nineteenth-century Europeans often saw Asiatics as being closer to the normative, “superior” European man than the supposedly ‘‘inferior” Africans. Yet who should the “Moor” on the stage most closely resemble? Identity and difference, as will be apparent, become vexed issues when it comes to racial demarcation.

II

Nineteenth-century colonial discourse about “race” was hardly monolithic or stable; instead, as the prevailing debates about racial cranium differentiation show, it was fissured by complicated, and sometimes confusing, racial typologies in which we can glimpse the vexed history of European racial stratification. Thus having an Indian, a Bengali youth, play Othello was seen as different and less of a fall from “civilization” than having an African play the part. Yet an Indian Othello was not quite acceptable, either. We can identify in this incident the moment of impossibility of Native participation in British theatrical enterprises, and simultaneously the moment of inevitability of the emergence of the Native’s own hybridized Western-style theater, which happened within a few years of this incident. James Barry, the manager of the Sans Souci, along with a Mr. Clinger of the same theater, started training Native amateurs in Shakespearean theatrics and other productions in English in the same year, 1848. By 1857, the first Bengali play in the Western style had been produced. The exclusive space of the Calcutta theaters— one that was to mark the social and cultural boundaries between the rulers and the ruled—also reveals that racial and cultural identity is often theatrical and hybrid, rather than fixed and pure.

From the available historical records, it is apparent that James Barry’s production and recruitment of a Bengali actor occurred under the auspices of both an English and Indian patronage. According to The Calcutta Star, August 4, 1848, several Indian aristocrats and bābus3 supported the endeavor:4

Under the Patronages of Maharajah Radkaunt Bahadur; Maharajah Buddinauth Roy…Maharajah Prawnkissen Mullick and Brothers; Baboos Greeschunder Dutt and Brothers… Mr. Barry having obtained the above Patronages and also the kind and gratuitous services of a Native Gentleman in conjunction with the

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