< previous page page_74 next page >

Page 74

These things seem quite well beyond the range of an untutored mind and there is a well known fact which militates strongly against the supposition. The Hindoos are invariably most excellent SLEEPERS; now the castle-building man is never a good Sleeper.

(416)

This letter reflects the contemporary findings of both craniologists and Orientalists who were proclaiming the supposed racial relation of the Asiatic to the European. However, it was impossible within the scope of the colonial imaginary to see them as equals at any level. While the pseudo-scientific discourse seems anxious to offer neat gradations of difference between Asiatics and Africans, just as Orientalists stressed the original, ancient proximity between Asians and Europeans, these distinctions were blurred on the Calcutta stage, where the categories of “Moors,” “Mohammedans,” and “Asiatics” often overlapped.

The colonial stage seemed to draw more on prevailing racist fantasies than on academic empiricism. The collapsing of racial categories on the stage was symptomatically related to the ideological rift between projects such as Orientalism and craniology and the pragmatic business of ruling and expanding the Indian empire. The empire had to have its dominant and dominated, the mighty master and the servile servant. The “Moor” of the theater therefore had to be mimetically recreated with an astute eye for anthropological detail that expressed his ‘‘Otherness.” What was possible and feasible in the pseudo-scientific narrative of race—the linking of Asian and European racial categories—was impossible to realize in the corporeality of the staged body. The staged “Moor” had to be less exact(ing) than the real “Moor,” “whiteness” being the stable and all-encompassing category that conferred on Europeans the privilege to build and rule the empire.

III

These impulses, on the one hand to categorize gradations of racial distinctions and, on the other hand, to shade together the very same gradations when confronted with “whiteness,” form the background against which James Barry’s 1848 production of Othello in Calcutta can be understood. In the colonial responses to this production, we can see the ways in which “Shakespeare”

< previous page page_74 next page >