ABSTRACT

From Laurence Fishburne's African-English accent in the 1995 Othello directed by Oliver Parker to André Holland's American-English accent in the 2018 Globe production, Othello's accent has frequently been used in Western productions as a signifier of his “Otherness.” The question of accent, however, becomes more challenging in Indian productions given the significance of a cosmopolitan English accent in modern day India and everything that accent might represent. A further layer of complexity is added when one considers the expectation of “a fastidious precision in the use of English language” (Michael Billington's phrase in his review of Iqbal Khan's 2012 Much Ado About Nothing) in “Indian Shakespeare” as in the case of Saptapadi (1961) where actor Uttam Kumar's depiction of Othello was voiced over by Utpal Dutt, a noted Shakespearean actor who was part of Geoffrey Kendal's troupe Shakespeareana. This chapter takes up the question of English accents in the 1961 Saptapadi, compares it to the use of the Khariboli and Hinglish accents in Vishal Bhardwaj's Omkara (2006) and seeks to examine the uses of accents in the depiction of Othello, Iago, and Desdemona in these two cinematic adaptations of Othello.