In Indian Ink, events from two distinct time periods—the year 1930 and the mid-1980s—meld together onstage. They take place within the same set, and they interrupt and comment on each other. (For instance, Anish Das and Eleanor Swan talk about Flora Crewe’s letters while she acts them out elsewhere on the stage.) This format isn’t just a kind of nostalgia: rather, it shows how the act of remembering can both illuminate and distort the past. In turn, the play suggests that our sense of history deeply reveals—and affects—who we are.
The play explores the purpose of memory by contrasting two different ways of thinking about the past: Eldon Pike’s academic research on Flora Crewe versus Anish Das and Eleanor Swan’s family histories. Pike writes a definitive scholarly account of Flora’s life and work, full of detailed footnotes that Eleanor and Anish find ridiculous and distracting. The wider public may not have known about Flora if it weren’t for Pike’s research, but Eleanor and Anish feel that Pike distorts the most important truths about Flora’s life and work—like her passion, audacity, and sexual liberation—by limiting himself to biography. Yet Eleanor and Anish also clash over their incompatible views of the past. Eleanor celebrates the glorious British Empire, doesn’t think much of her sister’s opposition to it, and views Nirad Das as a criminal for his pro-Independence politics. But Anish celebrates Flora’s open-mindedness, his father’s activism, and the Empire’s collapse. Their conflict over how to remember Flora and Das’s romance is really just one small aspect of the broader fight over colonialism’s legacy and the true meaning of freedom in the contemporary world.
History and Memory ThemeTracker
History and Memory Quotes in Indian Ink
“Jummapur, Wednesday, April the second. Darling Nell, I arrived here on Saturday from Bombay after a day and a night and a day in a Ladies Only, stopping now and again to be revictualled through the window with pots of tea and proper meals on matinee trays, which, remarkably, you hand back through the window at the next station down the line where they do the washing up; and from the last stop I had the compartment to myself, with the lights coming on for me to make my entrance on the platform at Jummapur. The President of the Theosophical Society was waiting with several members of the committee drawn up at a respectful distance, not quite a red carpet and brass band but garlands of marigolds at the ready, and I thought there must be somebody important on the train—”
The Shepperton garden is now visible. Here, MRS SWAN and PIKE are having tea while occupied with a shoebox of Flora’s letters.
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 We had been loyal to the British right through the first War of Independence.
MRS SWAN The … ? What war was that?
ANISH The Rising of 1857.
MRS SWAN Oh, you mean the Mutiny. What did you call it?
ANISH Dear Mrs Swan, Imperial history is merely … no, no—I promise you I didn’t come to give you a history lesson.
MRS SWAN You seem ill-equipped to do so. We were your Romans, you know. We might have been your Normans.
ANISH And did you expect us to be grateful?
ANISH Mrs Swan, you are a very wicked woman. You advance a preposterous argument and try to fill my mouth with cake so I cannot answer you. I will resist you and your cake. We were the Romans! We were up to date when you were a backward nation. The foreigners who invaded you found a third-world country! Even when you discovered India in the age of Shakespeare, we already had our Shakespeares. And our science—architecture—our literature and art, we had a culture older and more splendid, we were rich! After all, that’s why you came.
But he has misjudged.
MRS SWAN (Angrily) We made you a proper country! And when we left you fell straight to pieces like Humpty Dumpty! Look at the map! You should feel nothing but shame!
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.
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 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!”
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.
DURANCE Would you marry me?
FLORA No.
DURANCE Would you think about it?
FLORA No. Thank you.
DURANCE Love at first sight, you see. Forgive me.
FLORA Oh, David.
PIKE Do you think he had a relationship with Flora Crewe?
DILIP But of course—a portrait is a relationship.
PIKE No, a relationship.
DILIP I don’t understand you.
PIKE He painted her nude.
DILIP I don’t think so.
PIKE Somebody did.
DILIP In 1930, an Englishwoman, an Indian painter … it is out of the question.
PIKE Not if they had a relationship.
DILIP Oh … a relationship? Is that what you say? (Amused) A relationship!
PIKE This is serious.
DILIP (Laughing) Oh, it’s very serious. What do you say for—well, for “relationship?”
PIKE Buddies. (Dilip almost falls off his chair with merriment.) Please, Dilip …
I went home. It was still “home.” I learned that my father had left me his tin trunk which had always stood at the foot of his bed. There was nothing of value in the trunk that I could see. It was full of paper, letters, certificates, school report cards … (He takes a newspaper clipping from his wallet and gives it to Mrs Swan.) There was a newspaper cutting, however—a report of a trial of three men accused of conspiring to cause a disturbance at the Empire Day celebrations in Jummapur in 1930. My father’s name was there.
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!
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.
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.
Quite possibly. Or with Captain Durance. Or His Highness the Rajah of Jummapur. Or someone else entirely. It hardly matters, looking back. Men were not really important to Flora. If they had been, they would have been fewer. She used them like batteries. When things went flat, she’d put in a new one … I’ll come to the gate with you. If you decide to tell Mr Pike about the watercolour, I’m sure Flora wouldn’t mind.
“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.”
“Twenty years ago no European had ever been here, and there we were with a band playing, and observing that St Cloup’s Potage à la Julienne was perhaps better than his other soups, and so on, and all this in the face of those high hills, and we one hundred and five Europeans being surrounded by at least three thousand Indians, who looked on at what we call our polite amusements, and bowed to the ground if a European came near them. I sometimes wonder they do not cut all our heads off and say nothing more about it.”