Flora Crewe and Anish Das’s relationship in Indian Ink is a meeting not only of hearts and minds, but also of different creative forms (painting and poetry) and artistic traditions (English and Indian). At first, they struggle to bridge the cultural gap between them through conversation. But they succeed once Das starts to paint Flora while she writes. This collaborative artmaking helps their relationship flourish: they use it as a proxy to build personal, cultural, and sexual connections. They realize that, by evoking the same emotional tone (or rasa) in their work, they can communicate through art in a way that they never could through words. By the end of the play, Flora is writing about desire and forbidden love, while Das is painting about the same subjects by styling his nude portrait of Flora on traditional depictions of Radha and Krishna. This leads to their greatest work: Flora writes her final volume of poetry, while Das finally integrates the European painting styles he admires with the Indian artistic tradition to which he belongs. Through this portrait of mutual inspiration, the play suggests that artists should seek creative fulfillment not by withdrawing into their own minds, but rather by delving into the world and connecting with other people.
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Art and Inspiration Quotes in Indian Ink
FLORA And it’s called a duck bungalow …”
MRS SWAN Dak bungalow.
FLORA “… although there is not a duck to be seen.”
She disappears into the bathroom with her suitcase.
MRS SWAN Dak was the post; they were post-houses, when letters went by runner.
IKE Ah …
PIKE “Perhaps my soul will stay behind as a smudge of paint on paper, as if I’d always been here, like … Radha?”
MRS SWAN Radha.
PIKE “—the most beautiful of the herdswomen, undressed—”
MRS SWAN (Interrupting, briskly) Well, the portrait, as it happens, is on canvas and Flora is wearing her cornflower dress.
“Yes I am in heat like a bride in a bath,
without secrets, soaked in heated air
that liquifies to the touch and floods,
shortening the breath, yes
I am discovered, heat has found me out,
a stain that stops at nothing,
not the squeezed gates or soft gutters,
it slicks into the press
that prints me to the sheet
yes, think of a woman in a house of net
that strains the oxygen out of the air
thickening the night to Indian ink
or think if you prefer—”
ANISH Oh … yes. Yes, I am a painter like my father. Though not at all like my father, of course.
MRS SWAN Your father was an Indian painter, you mean?
ANISH An Indian painter? Well, I’m as Indian as he was. But yes. I suppose I am not a particularly Indian painter … not an Indian painter particularly, or rather …
MRS SWAN Not particularly an Indian painter.
ANISH Yes. But then, nor was he. Apart from being Indian.
MRS SWAN As you are.
ANISH Yes.
MRS SWAN We were right up near Nepal …
ANISH Yes, the tea-tray …
MRS SWAN You spotted it. In India we had pictures of coaching inns and foxhunting, and now I’ve landed up in Shepperton I’ve got elephants and prayer wheels cluttering up the window ledges, and the tea-tray is Nepalese brass. One could make a comment about human nature but have a slice of Battenburg instead.
DAS My painting has no rasa today.
FLORA What is rasa?
DAS Rasa is juice. Its taste. Its essence. A painting must have its rasa … which is not in the painting exactly. Rasa is what you must feel when you see a painting, or hear music; it is the emotion which the artist must arouse in you.
FLORA And poetry? Does a poem have rasa?
DAS Oh yes! Poetry is a sentence whose soul is rasa. That is a famous dictum of Vishvanata, a great teacher of poetry, six hundred years ago.
FLORA Rasa … yes. My poem has no rasa.
DAS Or perhaps it has two rasa which are in conflict.
DAS (Unhesitatingly) The rasa of erotic love is called Shringara. Its god is Vishnu, and its colour is shyama, which is blue-black. Vishvanata in his book on poetics tells us: Shringara requires, naturally, a lover and his loved one, who may be a courtesan if she is sincerely enamoured, and it is aroused by, for example, the moon, the scent of sandalwood, or being in an empty house. Shringara goes harmoniously with all other rasa and their complementary emotions, with the exception of fear, cruelty, disgust and sloth.
FLORA That was the thing I was going to ask you.
DAS When?
FLORA The delicate question … whether you would prefer to paint me nude.
DAS Oh.
LORA I preferred it. I had more what-do-you-call it.
DAS Rasa.
FLORA (Laughs quietly) Yes, rasa.
ANISH My father abandoned this portrait.
MRS SWAN Why?
ANISH He began another one.
MRS SWAN How do you know, Mr Das?
ANISH Because I have it.
He opens his briefcase and withdraws the watercolour which is hardly larger than the page of a book, protected by stiff boards. He shows her the painting which is described in the text.
MRS SWAN Oh heavens! Oh … yes … of course. How like Flora.
ANISH More than a good likeness, Mrs Swan.
MRS SWAN No … I mean, how like Flora!
DAS Oh!—you’re not dying are you?!
FLORA I expect so, but I intend to take years and years about it. You’ll be dead too, one day, so let me be a lesson to you. Learn to take no notice. I said nothing about your painting, if you want to know, because I thought you’d be an Indian artist.
DAS An Indian artist?
FLORA Yes. You are an Indian artist, aren’t you? Stick up for yourself. Why do you like everything English?
DAS I do not like everything English.
FLORA Yes, you do. You’re enthralled. Chelsea, Bloomsbury, Oliver Twist, Gold Flake cigarettes, Winsor and Newton … even painting in oils, that’s not Indian. You’re trying to paint me from my point of view instead of yours—what you think is my point of view. You deserve the bloody Empire!
DAS The Empire will one day be gone like the Mughal Empire before it, and only their monuments remain—the visions of Shah Jahan!—of Sir Edwin Lutyens!
FLORA “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
DAS (Delighted) Oh yes! Finally like the empire of Ozymandias! Entirely forgotten except in a poem by an English poet. You see how privileged we are, Miss Crewe. Only in art can empires cheat oblivion, because only the artist can say, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
FLORA If you don’t start learning to take you’ll never be shot of us. Who whom. Nothing else counts. Mr Chamberlain is bosh. Mr Coomaraswami is bosh. It’s your country, and we’ve got it. Everything else is bosh. When I was Modi’s model I might as well have been a table. When he was done, he got rid of me. There was no question who whom. You’d never change his colour on a map. But please light your Gold Flake.
The case was dismissed on a technicality, and the policemen were awfully sweet, they got me away through the crowd in a van. My sister was asked to leave school. But that was mostly my own fault—the magistrate asked me why all the poems seemed to be about sex, and I said. “Write what you know”—just showing off. I was practically a virgin, but it got me so thoroughly into the newspapers my name rings a bell even with the wife of a bloody jute planter or something in the middle of Rajputana, damn, damn, damn, no, let’s go inside.
Codswallop! Your “house within a house,” as anyone can see, is a mosquito net. And the book is Emily Eden, it was in her suitcase. Green with a brown spine. You should read the footnotes!
It is all bosh! The Theosophical Society is bosh! His Highness the Rajah is bosh! I must leave you, Miss Crewe. (He hesitates.) I think I will not be coming tomorrow.
FLORA There is enough light. Mr Coomaraswami was quite right about the moon. (Flora unwraps the paper.) It’s going to be a drawing, isn’t it? … Oh!
DAS (Nervous, bright) Yes! A good joke, is it not? A Rajput miniature, by Nirad Das!
FLORA (Not heeding him) Oh … it’s the most beautiful thing …
DAS (Brightly) I’m so pleased you like it! A quite witty pastiche—
FLORA (Heeding him now) Are you going to be Indian? Please don’t.
DAS (Heeding her) I … I am Indian.
FLORA An Indian artist.
“Heat collects and holds as a pearl at my throat,
lets go and slides like a tongue-tip down a Modigliani,
spills into the delta, now in the salt-lick,
lost in the mangroves and the airless moisture,
a seed-pearl returning to the oyster—
et nos cedamus amori …”
It’s no go the records of the Theosophical Society, it’s no go the newspaper files partitioned to ashes … All we want is the facts and to tell the truth in our fashion … Her knickers were made of crêpe-de-Chine, her poems were up in Bow Street, her list of friends laid end to end … weren’t in it for the poetry. But it’s no go the watercolour, it’s no go the Modigliani … The glass is falling hour by hour, and we’re back in the mulligatawny … But we will leave no Das unturned. He had a son.
The terror of the Empire Day gymkhana, the thrower of mangoes at the Resident’s Daimler.
“Darling, that’s all from Jummapur, because how I’m packed, portrait and all, and Mr Coomaraswami is coming to take me to the station. I’ll post this in Jaipur as soon as I get there. I’m not going to post it here because I’m not. I feel fit as two lops this morning, and happy, too, because something good happened here which made me feel halfway better about Modi and getting back to Paris too late. That was a sin I’ll carry to my grave, but perhaps my soul will stay behind as a smudge of paint on paper, as if I’d always been here, like Radha who was the most beautiful of the herdswomen, undressed for love in an empty house.”
