Indian Ink is a mystery composed of three love stories: the passionate painter Nirad Das, the haughty English officer David Durance, and the charming, extravagantly wealthy Rajah all court Flora Crewe during her short stay in Jummapur, but the audience never learns if any of them succeed. It’s easy to assume that Flora and Das fall in love when their artistic collaboration culminates in Das painting Flora nude, but the play intentionally leaves this up to the audience’s imagination. Indeed, by suggesting that Flora could have formed relationships with none, any, or all three of her suitors, the play challenges audience members to separate their opinions about her from conventional ideas of sexual morality. In colonial India in the 1930s, it would have been scandalous for a high-society Englishwoman like Flora to sleep with a middle-class Indian like Das—or, really, anyone but a colonial official like Durance. But Flora was already famous in London for courting scandal: she wrote forthright poetry about love and sex in an era when women were scarcely expected to write at all, and she refused to let puritanical critics stop her. The play thus presents Flora’s search for artistic and personal freedom as a model for how people can live more meaningful lives when they throw off repressive norms and take passion and desire seriously.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Sex and Love ThemeTracker
Sex and Love Quotes in Indian Ink
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—”
DAS May I ask you a personal question?
FLORA That is a personal question.
DAS Oh my goodness, is it?
FLORA I always think so. It always feels like one. Carte blanche is what you’re asking, Mr Das. Am I to lay myself bare before you?
DAS (Panicking slightly) My question was only about your poem!
FLORA At least you knew it was personal.
DAS I will not ask it now, of course.
FLORA On that understanding I will answer it. My poem is about heat.
I did say that but I think what I meant was for you to be more Indian, or at any rate Indian, not Englished-up and all over me like a labrador and knocking things off tables with your tail—so waggish of you, Mr Das, to compare my mind to a vacuum. You only do it with us, I don’t believe that left to yourself you can’t have an ordinary conversation without jumping backwards through hoops of delight, with whoops of delight, I think I mean; actually, I do know what I mean, I want you to be with me as you would be if I were Indian.
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!
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 …
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!
“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 …”
DURANCE Where did you get such a thing?
FLORA His Highness gave it to me.
DURANCE Why?
FLORA Because I ate an apricot. Because he is a Rajah. Because he hoped I’d go to bed with him. I don’t know.
DURANCE But how could he … feel himself in such intimacy with you?
[…]
DURANCE … but I’m in a frightfully difficult position now.
FLORA Why?
DURANCE Did he visit you?
FLORA I visited him.
DURANCE I know. Did he visit you?
FLORA Mind your own business.
DURANCE But it is my business.
FLORA Because you think you love me?
DURANCE No, I … Keeping tabs on what His Highness is up to is one of my … I mean I write reports to Delhi.
FLORA (Amused) Oh heavens!
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.”
