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Despite the daring nature of the undertaking, its “medicinable” potential to bridge the gulf of racial difference, the colonial situation had rendered it quixotic. The Shakespearean Moor, despite his complexion, was not dark enough for the Bengali Native to play. This was Shakespeare, after all, and none but the white English could represent Othello in the best possible way. The (Indian) Other therefore could only be produced by the (English) Self.

Addy’s performance, while considered a failure by the English reviewers, nonetheless was an important event on the stage of England’s empire. His “brown” Othello stood in for mimetic excess, overbearing in the exactness of its verisimilitude, but pointing to a realm of hybridity—the domain of mimetic alterity—both in the colonial society of India and on its ostensibly exclusive stage. The Native had run out of options. Despite the strictures of racial difference and conservation, the imperial nature of the relationship of the ruler and the ruled had turned the borderland between them liminal, a gray area where the colonial identity of the Native danced with imperial surveillance in a tenuous accord. About ten years after Addy’s performance at the Sans Souci, the Bengali intelligentsia would have its own theater as a playground of hybrid constructions.

V

The central theme informing this essay remains surveillance. Has the Shakespearean Moor—be it in Aldridge’s, or Addy’s, or even Kingsley’s performance—meant more than the sum of its players’ personal experiences? How has surveillance of racialized spaces through Othello transmuted and transmitted itself from the colonial to the postcolonial? To make a final jab at the disciplining gaze of surveillance that Othello has accorded imperialism, without discounting the postcolonial liberation agendas it has also vindicated in many radical stage interpretations, let us (re)turn to the essay’s opening, Ben Kingsley’s personal statement on what impelled and moved him as he performed Othello’s nightly “disintegration” on the stage —his metaphoric search for ancestry. Remembering the idea of race as a trope that we mentioned earlier, in an odd way Kingsley is indeed a descendant of Addy. He is, willy nilly, the Indian Moor on the English stage, warping through 150 years of coloniality. A reading of his statement could well lead us to believe that Kingsley’s father is Othello and that Kingsley is playing his father.

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