Tom Stoppard’s play Indian Ink interweaves two storylines set more than 50 years apart. In 1930, the fiery, controversial English poet Flora Crewe goes to the fictional city of Jummapur, India, where she meets Nirad Das, a brilliant, passionate local painter. Das paints portraits of Flora as she writes poetry about sex, love, and India; it’s never entirely clear whether they become lovers. Meanwhile, two other men also court Flora: a chauvinistic young English official, David Durance, and the elegant and extravagantly wealthy Rajah (king) of Jummapur. In the other timeline, in the 1980s, Flora’s elderly sister, Eleanor Swan, meets with two men interested in Flora’s legacy: Eldon Pike, a literary critic who is compiling Flora’s letters and writing her biography, and Nirad Das’s son Anish, who wants to learn more about his father.
The play begins with Flora Crewe arriving in Jummapur to speak at the local Theosophical Society, which accommodates her in a sparse but functional old bungalow. While Flora acts out the letters she wrote to Eleanor in 1930, Eleanor and Eldon Pike read the letters and discuss Flora’s legacy in the 1980s. Coomaraswami, the Theosophical Society president, gives Flora a tour of Jummapur and hosts her lecture at his house. She is surprised to learn that her Indian audience knows almost everything about the London literary scene. She strikes up a conversation with the painter Nirad Das, who asks if he can paint her portrait. She agrees, and he starts biking to her bungalow to paint her as she writes. (Eldon Pike is astonished when he learns this: there are no known portraits of Flora. But Eleanor Swan nonchalantly mentions that Modigliani once painted Flora, too.) Flora and Das struggle to communicate at first because of cultural barriers, but soon, they hit it off. Das even gifts Flora a copy of Emily Eden’s colonial travelogue about India, Up the Country.
Later, Anish Das visits Eleanor and explains that his father, a little-known artist who was imprisoned for supporting Indian independence in 1930, painted the portrait on the cover of Eldon Pike’s Collected Letters of Flora Crewe. Anish and Eleanor get into a heated political argument: he believes that the British Empire exploited and impoverished India, while she views it as the best thing to ever happen there—and thinks that Anish’s father deserved jail time for opposing it. (In fact, Eleanor’s husband was a British army officer who was long stationed in India.) Anish explains that he’s a painter, just like his father, and Eleanor agrees to let him sketch her.
Fifty years before, Flora and Das also discuss the budding Indian nationalist movement—Das supports it but is afraid to say too much and incriminate himself to an Englishwoman. The same day, Captain David Durance visits Flora’s house unannounced and asks her to dinner at the official British Residency. She finds him pompous and distasteful, but she agrees. Meanwhile, during their painting sessions, Das and Flora chat about politics, the Hindu story of Radha and Krishna’s love affair, and the concept of rasa (or the emotional “essence” of a work of art).
In the 1980s, Eleanor Swan tells Anish Das that Eldon Pike’s footnotes to Flora’s poems and letters are highly unreliable. Meanwhile, Pike and his friend Dilip show up in Jummapur in search of information about Flora—especially a lost watercolor portrait of her in the nude by Das.
Back in 1930, Das tears up his pencil sketch of Flora because he’s insulted that she didn’t say anything when he showed it to her. When he tries to destroy his canvas portrait, too, he and Flora start fighting over it—but she quickly collapses in exhaustion. She admits that she has come to India because she is dying (likely of tuberculosis). She wants to shower, but the running water is broken, so Das helps her bathe with a jug of water. She asks if he wants to paint her in the nude, and she requests that he paint her in his own authentic, Indian artistic style rather than continuing to imitate the Western styles that the British have imposed on him. He agrees.
Act Two of Indian Ink begins with Flora and David Durance dancing after dinner at the Jummapur Club in 1930, while Dilip and Pike go to the same club—which is largely unchanged—five decades later. They finally find a connection to Flora: Subadar Ram Sunil Singh, an elderly man who was Flora’s punkah (fan) operator as a young boy and remembers her meetings with Das. In 1930, David Durance takes Flora out for a drive and horseback ride, but he strikes all the wrong notes. He awkwardly brings up the obscenity lawsuit that her publisher faced for printing her erotic poetry and stupidly insists that only the English can rule India effectively. He asks her to marry him, and she says absolutely not.
In the 1980s, after visiting the Jummapur Club, Dilip and Pike go to the Rajah’s palace—which is now a luxury hotel. They discuss Indian politics and debate whether Das and Flora were lovers. In 1930, the Rajah visits Flora and impresses her by having just a few of his 86 luxury cars drive by her bungalow. He warns that India must not become independent and agrees to show her his art collection, on the condition that he can gift her a painting. Back in the 1980s, Dilip and Pike meet the new Rajah of Jummapur—who is the original Rajah’s grandson. He no longer has any formal powers, but he is a member of India’s parliament. Meanwhile, back in England, Anish Das and Eleanor Swan admire Nirad Das’s two paintings of Flora—the oil portrait and the nude watercolor, both unfinished—as well as the Rajah’s painting of Krishna and Radha.
In 1930, after Flora’s date with the Rajah, Das and Coomaraswami visit her and explain that the Rajah is shutting down the Theosophical Society over its support for the independence movement. Fed up, Flora decides to leave Jummapur for better weather. She and Das share a tearful goodbye: he gives her his watercolor and she reads him an erotic poem. Later, David Durance visits Flora and grows furious when she tells him that the Rajah visited her—he doesn’t think she should be involved with Indian men, least of all “politically sensitive” ones.
In one of her final letters to Eleanor, Flora reports that she has finished her poetry book, Indian Ink, and admits that Eleanor “won’t approve” of the man she is involved with. Years later, Anish Das assumes that this man was his father, but Eleanor thinks it may have been David Durance or the Rajah. She also reveals why Nirad Das ended up in prison: he threw mangos at a British official’s car—which David Durance was probably driving on one of his dates with Flora.
Flora dies just a few weeks after her departure from Jummapur, and when Eleanor visits her grave a year later, she meets her husband Eric, an official who works for the British government. The play closes with Flora reading from her letters and Up the Country, in which Emily Eden wonders why Indians don’t just band together and murder their British overlords.
