Tom Stoppard’s play Indian Ink emphasizes the British Empire’s responsibility for India’s deep poverty and inequality. As the British poet Flora Crewe visits India and mingles with the English elite and the absurdly wealthy Rajah, she recognizes that they’re only rich because they have subjugated the vast majority of Indians for centuries. She also sees how this hierarchy affects every aspect of colonial life. Ordinary Indians—like Flora’s servant Nazrul—labor tirelessly but invisibly in the background of the play to make the people who colonized them wealthy and comfortable. Meanwhile, educated upper-class Indians like the painter Nirad Das and the Theosophical Society president Coomaraswami treat Flora with excessive respect and deference. Perhaps they have internalized the colonial hierarchy and learned to view English people as superior to themselves, as Flora suggests, or maybe they simply know that they’ll face consequences if they do not play along with the hierarchy. Indeed, Nirad Das fully understands how the British Empire has systematically plundered India, and he supports Gandhi’s independence movement in secret—but the play’s conclusion strongly suggests that the government actually imprisons him in part because his taboo relationship with Flora threatens the colonial hierarchy.
Most troublingly, the scenes set in the 1980s show that similarly unequal dynamics continue today—decades after Independence—in both England and India. For instance, Flora’s sister Eleanor lectures Das’s son Anish—who lives in England and is married to an Englishwoman—about how the British Empire brought justice and civilization to India. Meanwhile, when he travels to impoverished Jummapur, Flora’s biographer Eldon Pike gets the same royal treatment that she did. He also receives all the credit for reviving Flora’s story, even though the person who made his work possible—an ordinary servant named Subadar Ram Sunil Singh, who is the only person who actually remembers Flora—never even gets to speak in the play. In short, Indian Ink shows that colonialism isn’t just a relic of the past in England and India—rather, the British Empire still forms the template for their deep but fraught interconnections.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Effects of Colonialism ThemeTracker
The Effects of Colonialism 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—”
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 …
“The sightseeing with picnic was something of a Progress with the president of the Theosophical Society holding a yellow parasol over me while the committee bicycled alongside, sometimes two to a bike, and children ran before and behind—I felt like a carnival float representing Empire—or, depending how you look at it, the Subjugation of the Indian People, and of course you’re right, darling, but I never saw anyone less subjugated than Mr Coomaraswami.”
“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.
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.
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.
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.
DAS Nazrul was delayed at the shops by a riot, he says. The police charged the mob with lathis, he could have easily been killed, but by heroism and inspired by his loyalty to the memsahib he managed to return only an hour late with all the food you gave him money for except two chickens which were torn from his grasp.
FLORA Oh dear … you thanked him, I hope.
DAS I struck him, of course. You should fine him for the chickens.
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.
DURANCE Indianization. It’s all over, you know. We have Indian officers in the Regiment now. My fellow Junior here is Indian, too, terribly nice chap—he’s ICS, passed the exam, did his year at Cambridge, learned polo and knives-and-forks, and here he is, a pukkah sahib in the Indian Civil Service.
FLORA Is he here?
DURANCE At the Club? No, he can’t come into the Club.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
