Indian Ink

by

Tom Stoppard

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Indian Ink: Act 2 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
Flora Crewe and David Durance dance with two other English couples in the Jummapur Club in 1930, while across the stage Eldon Pike sits on the club’s verandah in the 1980s. The other dancers ask Flora about her poetry. One man brings up the imperialist writer Rudyard Kipling. The other—Durance’s boss, the Resident—mentions studying with the classicist poet Alfred Housman, who believed that everyone either gives in to love (like Virgil) or tries to resist it (like Ovid). Flora says that she’s like Virgil.
Flora inhabits an entirely different persona and social world with Durance than she does with Das. She’s equally comfortable in both, but she clearly finds Durance’s less interesting and inspiring. Meanwhile, the other colonial officials’ references to Kipling (an avowed imperialist) and Housman (a noted scholar of the Romans and Greeks) suggests that they essentially view their purpose in terms of civilizing India through Western influence—even as the Indians around them are demanding autonomy and self-determination. Flora is starting to see how the notion of Western cultural superiority is merely a flimsy justification for plundering India’s labor and resources.
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One of the women asks if Flora will be in town for the ball honoring Queen Victoria’s birthday—she says no. Flora explains that David has promised to take her for a ride in his car, and the woman notes that the Rajah of Jummapur has a “terrific” collection of 86 cars. Flora and David go out to the verandah for fresh air, and the other man starts quoting Kipling.
Flora’s disinterest in the ball suggests that she is growing more and more skeptical of the Empire. The Rajah’s “terrific” cars show how he profits handsomely from doing the Empire’s bidding—and again shows how colonialism is about nothing more than amassing wealth and power.
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In the 1980s, Dilip meets Pike on the verandah. He’s wearing a fine suit and carrying an old, worn-out one with military ribbons on it. He helps Pike into it and explains that nobody can enter the Jummapur Club without formal wear. But Dilip also declares that he’s learned the painter’s name: Nirad Das. The man who lent him the jacket remembers Das and Flora. Pike insists on meeting this man immediately. Dilip explains that he's an elderly World War II veteran named Subadar Ram Sunil Singh. Now, he works in the cloakroom, but as a young boy, he operated Flora’s punkah. Dilip and Pike go inside for dinner.
By staging Dilip and Pike’s visit to the club in the same set as Flora and Durance’s—and making Pike wear an absurd suit—Stoppard emphasizes the lasting influence of British colonialism on the organization of contemporary Indian society. In fact, Subadar Ram Sunil Singh’s story underlines the basic injustice of colonialism: he has spent his life working tirelessly for both of these elites, but he still lives in poverty and must give his suit—with its proof of his distinguished military service—to an ignorant white visitor.
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Settings and timelines mix together onstage. In a letter to Eleanor, Flora writes that Durance took her out in his car, that she ate dinner at the Club, and that the Club members were talking about withdrawing from India. Servants bring her and Durance their whiskey-sodas, and then Dilip and Pike have dinner in the same club, five decades later.
Stoppard highlights the marked contrast between the passionate Indian movement for independence—whose participants faced retaliation, imprisonment, and even murder—and the British officials’ leisurely chats about whether to set India free. Some readers and audience members may conclude that, by juxtaposing this conversation with Dilip and Pike’s visit to the club decades later, Stoppard is suggesting that Dilip and Pike’s research into Flora actually perpetuates the same kind of inequality enforced under colonial rule. Namely, they treat Flora’s work as the most important art ever created in Jummapur, totally ignoring the contributions of Indian artists like Nirad Das.
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Durance asks about Flora’s health and offers to show her the English cemetery. He says that English colonists “drop like flies” of tropical diseases in India, so he finds it peculiar that the doctor would send her there. She clarifies that the doctor told her to travel by sea to a warm place, and she chose India. Durance explains that English soldiers, government workers, and businesspeople all come to the same club in Jummapur, because it’s ruled by the Rajah. Under the new “Indianization” policy, they’re training Indian officers to run the civil service themselves. But Indians can’t even enter the Club.
As Durance points out, it’s ironic that an environment that kills many English people actually promises to heal Flora. This irony serves as a metaphor for the way that Flora’s freedom of thought and sexual liberation prevented her from fitting into her era’s stuffy, sexist culture. Of course, this scene also alludes to a classic trope from colonial literature: the idea that Europeans can discover themselves and achieve true freedom by traveling to their countries’ colonies (where a vast population of enslaved natives will do their every bidding). Lastly, Durance mentions the Rajah’s decision-making power and the “Indianization” policy to make British colonial rule seem less exploitative, but the ban on Indians entering the club makes the brutal truth clear: the Empire will never treat Indians as equals.
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David asks Flora to ride with him in the morning and tells her to say yes: everyone has been gossiping about her and is watching them. He awkwardly kisses her and admits that people know about her scandal in London. She explains that her publisher faced an obscenity trial for printing her poems. She mostly wrote about sex, and when the judge asked why, she replied, “Write what you know.” All the newspapers covered it.
David describes—or invents—the other colonists’ gossip to try and manipulate Flora into dating him. (Unlike Das, he still doesn’t know that she’s dying.) Of course, her widely publicized obscenity trial further underlines her historical, political, and literary significance.
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David Durance mounts a horse and starts practicing his polo swing. Flora asks about India’s future. Durance notes that Gandhi just finished his Salt March and declares that “the jails are filling up” due to conflicts between Hindus, who support Gandhi’s fight for independence, and Muslims, who don’t want to live under Hindu rule. Flora mounts a horse and jokes that governing India looks fun. Durance declares that the Indians view the English as superior rulers who have finally “pulled this country together.”
Stoppard situates his play in the historical context of the Indian independence movement: the Salt March was a crucial turning point in the movement because it won Gandhi broad, nationwide support for the first time. Readers and audiences must ask whether Flora takes Durance’s comments at face value or manages to see through them, thanks to her conversations with Das. Clearly, India’s jails aren’t just “filling up” on their own—rather, the British are filling them up by ruthlessly persecuting anyone who dares to call for democracy and self-determination in India. Similarly, Indians clearly don’t admire the English—this idea is little more than a convenient, self-serving delusion.
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As Flora and Durance ride out in the country, a group of birds startles their horses. Flora admits that it’s her first time riding a horse, and Durance says that he can tell. He laughs and proclaims that everything “went wrong” when the Suez Canal opened, English women started coming to India, and English men stopped mixing with the natives. Flora asks how Durance’s boss (the Resident) knows that she’s in India for health reasons, since she hasn’t told anyone—except Das. Durance says that Das probably gossiped about her. But Flora calls that impossible. Durance asks Flora to marry him. She says no. He asks if she would ever consider it. She says no again.
Durance keeps trying to turn Flora against Das, for both personal and political reasons, but the reality is that the other officials probably found out about Flora’s health condition on their own. His comment about English women isn’t just a flirtatious joke; he’s also observing that the Empire undermines itself by drawing such a strict division between English rulers and Indian subjects. Of course, this is ironic, because Flora is now the one mixing with Indians (something English men used to do in the past but have given up ever since English women started going to India).
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Dilip and Pike drink American cola in the Rajah’s palace, which is now a luxury hotel. The Rajah still lives upstairs. The waiters are dressed like his old servants, and they effortlessly cross over between both sides of the stage—1930 and the 1980s.
The fate of the Rajah from the 1930s, his grandson (the current Rajah), and their palace shows how the social hierarchies imposed by the British on India have largely survived intact. The major difference is that elite Indians—not British officials—now sit at the top of it.
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Subadar Ram Sunil Singh turned out to be “a goldmine”—he told Pike and Dilip that Nirad Das was imprisoned for throwing a mango. Pike asks Dilip if he paid Singh too much and admits that he doesn’t know how to deal with India’s poverty—like whether to give beggars money. Dilip jokes that begging is a profession in India, which is spiritually “in a higher stage of development.” That’s why Madame Blavatsky moved her Theosophical Society to India, he says, quoting his favorite English poem, “Bagpipe Music.”
While Singh’s story reveals important details about Nirad Das’s fate, it also leaves a crucial question unanswered: what actually happened? Was Das really just arrested for protesting, or was the real motive his relationship with Flora? Meanwhile, Pike’s comments about poverty—a common preoccupation for contemporary travelers to India—once again show that colonial inequalities persist. Dilip’s clever response focuses on lifting Pike’s spirits and distracting him from the problem. But the reality—which Pike scarcely realizes—is that this poverty is really the legacy of English rule. As Anish Das pointed out in his conversation with Eleanor Swan, for the vast majority of India’s history, India was far wealthier, more developed, and more integrated into the global economy than England.
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Pike asks why Dilip loves English so much, and Dilip replies that English is “a disaster” in India—50 years after independence, India’s education system and high society have scarcely changed. This isn’t the India that Gandhi and Nirad Das were fighting for. Dilip also thinks it’s a shame that Das’s “revolutionary spirit went into his life and [not] his art.”
Just like Nirad Das, Dilip loves English art and culture even though he’s fully aware of how British colonialism devastated India. And there’s no contradiction between this Anglophilia and historical awareness: in fact, once instated through British colonial rule, this dynamic has become a permanent feature of life in India. Dilip’s comment about Das’s “revolutionary spirit” may merely be his way of saying that Das wasted his potential by going to prison. But this may also indicate that he views Das primarily as a machine who produced art, and not as a complex individual. After all, Eleanor Swan has complained about Pike remembering her sister Flora in precisely the same flawed way.
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Pike asks if Dilip thinks Das and Flora had a sexual relationship. Dilip says no—but upon further reflection, he admits that it could be true but is impossible to know. A waiter informs them that the former Rajah—who is now just “an ordinary politician”—is coming downstairs to meet them.
Pike and Dilip act as foils for the audience when they discuss the elephant in the room: the nature of Flora and Das’s relationship. Stoppard will never reveal the truth to his audiences, but they should also ask whether—and how much—the play’s fundamental meaning changes if Flora and Das really do turn out to have been lovers.
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In 1930, the Rajah visits Flora’s bungalow in his Rolls Royce to invite her to tiffin (lunch). He apologizes for not being able to show her all of his cars at once, but then, several of them drive slowly by her bungalow in a procession. She admires them, and the Rajah explains that he won one of them while gambling with an English Duke in the South of France. He jokes that, while he goes to the South of France for his health, Flora comes to India. (She is disappointed to hear that he knows about her illness.)
A third suitor sets out to win Flora’s heart. Where Das catches her attention through his creativity and passion, and Durance, through his wit and power, the Rajah tries to attract her with his wealth and connections. However, audiences—and Flora—can easily see the dark truth: he has only amassed his fortune by helping the English control and exploit his own people.
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The Rajah starts talking about Winston Churchill—whom he knows from school—and declares that Britain’s power depends on controlling India. But the Princely States (like Jummapur) also depend on the British for their survival. Independence would only lead to conflict and division, the Rajah concludes. He compares the nationalist threat today to the fundamentalist threat during “the First Uprising”—a term Flora doesn’t understand, since the British call it “The Mutiny.”
The Rajah’s reasoning is just as self-serving as Durance’s—although at least he recognizes that most ordinary Indians don’t want a foreign empire to be rule them. By bringing up Churchill, who is best remembered for his leadership during World War II but also famously hated Indians and opposed Indian independence, Stoppard reminds his readers that European countries’ history of democracy and freedom at home is closely linked to the brutal empires that they ran abroad.
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As the Rajah’s cars continue driving by, a servant brings snacks, drinks, and cigarettes. The Rajah smokes and tells Flora about his art collection. Some of it is erotic art, which he can’t show her. She is offended, but he agrees to let her see all of it, on the condition that he can gift her one painting. She eats an apricot, and the Rajah points out that most Englishwomen don’t eat fruit without a thick skin in India. Suddenly, Flora recognizes one of the cars that goes by. She walks offstage to go sit in it, and Eldon Pike explains that it used to belong to Flora’s ex-fiancé, Augustus de Boucheron (or Perkins Butcher), a wealthy philanthropist who burned Modigliani’s portrait of her. Flora asked Modigliani to paint her again, but he died before he had the chance.
The Rajah continues trying to impress Flora with what he owns rather than what he does or who he is. Stoppard strongly implies that Boucheron’s car is the same one that the Rajah said he won from a Duke in a gambling match—which would mean that the Rajah won the car from him when gambling. Thus, Flora’s meeting with the Rajah takes on the air of an elaborate practical joke: Flora has crossed the world, seeking an exotic adventure, only to meet people she could have met back at home. With his comment about the fruit—which most visitors would not eat for health reasons—the Rajah seems to imply that Flora is more adventurous than other English women. But the truth could also be that she simply does not care because she is already dying.
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The Rajah approaches Eldon Pike and they start to chat. (The same actor now represents the original Rajah’s grandson, in the 1980s.) He apologizes for being late and explains that he’s just a member of Parliament now. He also explains that his father gave away his grandfather’s cars during World War II and produces a thank-you note from Flora to her grandfather from 1930. According to the note, the original Rajah gifted Flora an old painting of Krishna and Radha. Pike asks if it was a nude watercolor on paper, but this confuses the Rajah. After a handshake, they part ways—but Pike doesn’t understand when the Rajah says “Namaste” (goodbye).
When the same actor portrays the two Rajahs, this once again underlines the continuities between the present and the past. After all, the same small elite continues to hold power in India, even if the nation has transitioned from a monarchy to a democracy. Pike misses the significance of the first Rajah’s gift to Flora because of his utter ignorance about India. Indeed, his confusion about the word “Namaste” (which should be the first Hindi word any traveler learns) again underlines how, despite his deep interest in Flora Crewe, he does not bother think to about India, its people, and its art as legitimate objects of academic study.
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Anish Das and Eleanor Swan sit in the garden, drinking gin-and-tonics and looking at Nirad Das’s painting of Flora and the painting the Rajah gifted to her. Swan talks about how she and her late husband Eric started drinking gin-and-tonics in India to avoid malaria. She also reveals that she didn’t tell Eldon Pike about the paintings. Anish remembers receiving the news of his father’s death one Christmas day while he was studying in England. In his father’s trunk of papers, he found two things: a newspaper clipping from his father’s trial for “conspiring to cause a disturbance at the Empire Day celebrations” in 1930 and the nude watercolor painting of Flora.
Stoppard draws a direct parallel between Anish going through his late father’s possessions and Eleanor doing the same with Flora’s. They have both learned far more about their loved ones’ last days through this conversation than through the objects that their loved ones left behind. Their stories speak to Stoppard’s fundamental questions about history and memory: how can we know about past events when the people who experienced them are gone, and how much should we trust the meager evidence that we do collect? Similarly, how much of the past do we miss when we remember, study, and memorialize it?
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Looking at the watercolor, Swan points out that Das didn’t paint Flora “Indian”—meaning that she doesn’t look flat, like the tree, birds, and sky in the background. Anish says that these elements are all important symbols. For instance, there’s a vine whose leaves and petals are falling off, which represents the fact that Flora was dying. But Swan disagrees: “sometimes a vine is only a vine.” She points out that Das has painted a copy of Up the Country on Flora’s pillow, and Eldon Pike drops in with a footnote to explain that Emily Eden wrote Up the Country while following her brother on a tour of India.
Because of their different cultural, artistic, and educational backgrounds, Anish and Eleanor interpret the same picture in wildly different ways. Eleanor just notices whether Das’s style is “Indian” or not, which suggests that she still thinks all Indian painting is the same. Her remark also implies that she underestimates the intricacy of Indian art. But Anish notices the work’s details and his father’s creative decisions. Of course, in his dry, scholarly work on Flora, Eldon Pike also misses these crucial details—and virtually everything else that actually makes the end of Flora’s life so meaningful.
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Back in 1930, Das and Coomaraswami are sitting on Flora’s verandah when she comes home in the evening. She invites them inside, where they light the oil lamp and sit. Coomaraswami apologizes for the unannounced visit and asks about her day. She explains that she visited the Rajah and talked to him about cars, art, poetry, and politics. Coomaraswami starts asking her a convoluted question, but Das clarifies that Coomaraswami is trying to say that he’s sorry if the Rajah criticized Flora for her connection to the Theosophical Society. Flora explains that the Society never came up; Das and Coomaraswami are delighted, and they apologize for the trouble and start to leave.
Flora saw her meetings with Durance and the Rajah as just innocent dates. But they could be quite dangerous for Das and Coomaraswami, who could face prison time if Flora inadvertently linked them to the independence movement. Indeed, this scene raises the question of whether Durance and the Rajah’s true motive for dating Flora was to keep tabs on the Theosophists. In fact, Anish Das and Eleanor Swan’s conversation in the previous scene shows that Nirad Das did ultimately end up imprisoned over his politics—and raises the troublesome possibility that Flora’s visit to India made this possible.
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Flora stops Das and demands that he tell her what’s wrong. He explains that the Rajah has banned the Theosophical Society, allegedly for participating in the riots. He collects his watercolor painting of Flora, which he won’t be able to finish. Flora admits that she’s considering leaving Jummapur tomorrow, and she asks Das if he told anyone about her health problems. (Tired of waiting for Das, Coomaraswami leaves in his buggy.) Das explains that everyone knows about Flora’s illness because Joshua Chamberlain mentioned it in his letter to the Theosophical Society—which the Rajah and the Resident surely opened and read before it reached Coomaraswami. Flora weeps and apologizes.
Stoppard starts tying up his play’s many loose ends: the audience learns how Das became an enemy of the state, and Flora learns how everyone found out about her illness. It turns out that, from the very beginning, her visit was far more political than she realized—and, despite her best intentions, she unwittingly served the colonial government’s interests by passing information on the Theosophical Society to Durance and the Rajah. The Theosophists pose a threat to the colonial order because they promote free thought and connect Indians to British intellectuals like Flora—who could serve as powerful allies in the independence movement.
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Das gathers his painting supplies and prepares to leave, but Flora asks if she can keep the unfinished watercolor so that she won’t forget him. He agrees. He asks if they will see each other again. Flora says maybe—she has to take a ship back to England in July because her sister will be giving birth in October. Then, Das pulls a watercolor out of his pocket and gives it to Flora. She finds it stunningly beautiful and tells Das that it has the love rasa. (Shringara, he clarifies.) Under the moonlight, a recording plays of Flora’s poem about giving in to heat (sexual desire).
Flora asked Das to paint her according to his own Indian perspective and style, and this conversation suggests that he succeeded. When she describes the painting as having shringara and then reads from her work, which has the same tone, this suggests that they consummated their attraction through art (even if they never did so sexually). Of course, while Stoppard directly shows the audience these reflections on the portrait, the play’s other characters—especially Anish Das and Eleanor Swan—have to infer what it truly means. This dramatic irony underlines how omission, distortion, and guesswork are inherent parts of any attempt to recover lost memories.
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At dawn, Flora lies in her bed on one part of the stage while Pike and Dilip come onto another part, drinking and chanting the poem “Bagpipe Music.” Dilip tells Pike that the Jummapur branch of the Theosophical Society was shut down for its nationalism. Then, he falls asleep. Pike mumbles about Flora and India, inserting his comments into the general structure of “Bagpipe Music.” Then, he wakes Dilip, and they plan to get breakfast. Dilip says that Pike hasn’t experienced real Indian heat yet—and will go to the hills soon.
“Bagpipe Music” comments on the way that modern society destroys traditional culture and community. This makes Pike and Dilip’s drinking song doubly ironic: it points to the way British imperialism devastated India, as well as the way Pike and Dilip’s (modern, institutional) academic research totally misses the truth about Flora Crewe’s time in India. In his journey to Jummapur and the hills, Dilip follows in Flora’s footsteps—the difference is that, unlike her, he learns virtually nothing about India in the process.
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Back in 1930, Flora wakes up at dawn and meets David Durance on her verandah. He offers to take her for a ride and show her the sunrise. She agrees. While she gets dressed inside her bedroom, Durance stands outside and tells her that he ran into Nirad Das on his way to visit her. He waved to Das, but Das refused to acknowledge him. “There’s hope for him yet,” Flora remarks, which confuses Durance. Flora finishes dressing, so Durance enters her bedroom. He picks up her copy of Up the Country and finds the Rajah’s miniature painting of Krishna and Radha inside.
Flora’s past encounters with Durance and her recent conversation with Das and Coomaraswami have given her good reasons not to trust anything that Durance tells her—especially his story about meeting Das on the road. Flora’s comment about “hope for [Das]” strongly suggests that she now fully supports the independence movement, and the fact that Durance doesn’t enter her bedroom until she finishes dressing suggests that their relationship never goes beyond acquaintance.
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Durance asks why the Rajah would give Flora a painting, and Flora comments that perhaps the Rajah wanted to sleep with her. Durance is horrified, complains that this puts him “in a frightfully difficult position,” and insists to know if the Rajah ever visited Flora. She refuses to answer, but he declares that it’s his job to report on the Rajah for the British, and Flora is “a politically sensitive person” because of her links to Chamberlain. She tells him to report whatever he wants, and they drive off in the Daimler car.
Durance’s comments again mix his personal interest in Flora with racist prejudice against Indians and his political role defending the British Empire. He simply cannot fathom that Flora would treat Indians as her equals—or, worse still, as potential lovers. (He and his fellow colonial officials would never do the same.) He also worries that Flora might be encouraging the Rajah to abandon his steadfast support for the Empire.
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Flora sits on her verandah with her suitcase and writes that Eleanor “won’t approve” of her latest romantic interest, but also that she’s finally leaving Jummapur. (In a footnote, Eldon Pike explains that David Durance died during World War II.) Flora writes that she feels better and is starting to write poetry again; Pike notes that the poetry Flora wrote in Jummapur formed part of her 1932 book Indian Ink.
Flora’s letter to Eleanor is ambiguous—her unseemly romantic interest could have easily been Das, the Rajah, or Durance. (After all, Eleanor was a communist in the 1930s and probably would have approved of Durance least of all.) And Stoppard gives his audience yet another subtle twist: Flora’s time in Jummapur is of academic interest to people like Eldon Pike because she wrote key parts of her final poetry book, Indian Ink, during her time there. Of course, this just accentuates the irony in Dilip and Pike’s failure to learn anything about the poems’ subject and inspiration: Nirad Das.
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Decades later, Anish and Mrs. Swan read this same letter. Anish declares that Pike is wrong to insinuate that Flora’s affair was with Durance, because it was really with his father, Nirad Das. But Swan argues that it’s not clear—she would have approved of Das more than Durance at the time, even if she has since become a conservative. She comments that Das changed, too: he ended up throwing mangos at the Resident’s Daimler car. So, Swan concludes, nobody knows if Flora’s romance was with Das, Durance, or the Rajah. And it doesn’t matter, she says, because Flora “used [men] like batteries.”
The truth of Flora’s relationships will forever remain a mystery. This may frustrate some readers and audience members, but it will certainly leave all of them thinking. It's even possible that she consummated relationships with none, or more than one, of the men. But Swan’s comment about Flora changing men around like “batteries” challenges the audience to question whether the truth about Flora’s relationships even matters. And Swan’s comments about the way people change also underline the fact that, through her own relationships, Swan turned from an avowed communist into an impassioned defender of the British Empire. Finally, it’s notable that the Daimler car was the same one David Durance drove off from Flora’s bungalow. Thus, the charges against Das may really mean that he fought with Durance over Flora—or that Durance simply invented charges against him.
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Anish decides that he won’t tell Eldon Pike about his father’s watercolor of Flora—his father wouldn’t want it publicly mentioned. Anish thanks Swan for the tea, cake, and jam. Swan reminisces about “the fruit trees at home” in India, which released a flood of flowers that covered Flora’s gravestone.
Anish and Swan’s agreement not to tell Pike about the portrait suggests that they have chosen personal remembrance over formal remembrance. They cherish their knowledge about Flora and Das’s story, but they fear that scholars like Pike would misinterpret it. It’s telling that Swan calls India “home”—this proves that, despite her defense of the Empire, her sense of identity is really just as caught between India and England as all of the other characters’.
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Nell,” a much younger Eleanor Swan, pays her respects at her sister Flora’s grave in India in 1931. Flora died on June 10th, 1930, just weeks after leaving Jummapur. Eric, an English official stationed in India, promises to add “Poet” to Flora’s gravestone and recalls how Flora gave a poetry reading to his Club. Nell bursts into tears, and Eric comforts her. He asks about Nell’s baby—who died as an infant—and asks Nell to call him “Eric,” not “Mr. Swan.” He invites her to a cricket match. They leave, and then Eldon Pike comes onstage to search for Flora’s grave.
Stoppard ends the play with a few final plot twists. First, Flora died in India, and so her time in Jummapur was the last creatively significant period of her life. The play challenges its audiences to assess how this fact—which characters like Swan and Pike have known since the beginning of the play—changes their understanding of Flora’s legacy. Second, Stoppard reveals that Nell met her husband Eric at Flora’s funeral (and ended up staying with him in India). In a way, by doing so, Eleanor fulfills Flora’s legacy. But she also ends up choosing the most distasteful kind of romantic prospect that Flora had: the colonial administrator. Perhaps Stoppard is also suggesting, more darkly, that the true legacy of Flora’s stay in India was converting another well-meaning young English woman—her sister—into a diehard imperialist.
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In the play’s final scene, Flora again reads from her letters to Eleanor (Nell). She writes that she’s leaving Jummapur, and while she “committed a sin [she]’ll carry to [her] grave,” she hopes that her “soul will stay behind as a smudge of paint on paper,” like Radha the herdswoman. On one part of the stage, Nazrul and Coomaraswami take Flora to the train station and help her board, while on another part, Nell goes through Flora’s suitcase, finding the blue dress, Das’s canvas, the copy of Up the Country, and the Rajah’s miniature painting.
The audience has heard fragments of this passage several times throughout the play, but Flora finally reads it out in full. The passage takes on a different meaning now that readers know that Flora died in India, but not which of her suitors shared in her “sin.” (Indeed, she does manage to “carry [this secret] to [her] grave.”) The objects she leaves behind in her suitcase offer readers and audience members yet another ambiguous, incomplete lens through which to remember her final days.
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Quotes
The play ends with Flora reading aloud one of Emily Eden’s letters from Up the Country. Eden describes a small group of Europeans throwing a beautiful celebration for the Queen’s birthday in 1839, while a group of thousands of Indians waits on and bows to them. Eden asks why the Indians don’t just “cut all our heads off and say nothing more about it.”
Audiences may find it surprising that Stoppard ends his play by quoting an entirely new text, which he has only obliquely referenced so far. However, Emily Eden is arguably a model for Flora Crewe, and this passage from Up the Country underscores many of the play’s central ideas about colonialism. It shows that the British have profoundly exploited Indians for centuries. It shows that this truth has long been obvious to intelligent visitors (even if they benefit from the colonial system). And it shows that the British Empire was always inherently fragile—and bound to eventually collapse.
Themes
The Effects of Colonialism Theme Icon
History and Memory Theme Icon
Art and Inspiration Theme Icon
Quotes