Indian Ink

by Tom Stoppard

Flora Crewe, a young poet travelling in India in 1930, has her portrait painted by a local artist. More than fifty years later, the artist's son visits Flor'as sister in London while her would-be biographer is following a cold trail in India. The alternation of place and period in Tom Stoppard's new play (based on his radio play In The Native State ) makes for a rich and moving exploration of intimate lives set against one of the great shafts of history, the emergence of the Indian subcontinent from the grip of Europe.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, Historical Fiction, India, Fiction, British Literature

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Sir Tom Stoppard was a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.

Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.

He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.

Reviews

[Miki]

Of all the Stoppard plays I've read thus far, this was my least favourite. In my humble opinion, I think that Stoppard's plays are meant to be seen and are, therefore, less enjoyable if read. Indian Ink was still good. But I felt it was just a bit flat, in spite of reviews about it being erotic, evocative, and charged.

I'm glad I read another of Stoppard's plays. But my favourites remain to be Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, and Arcadia.

[Ebook, Scribd]

[Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not one of Stoppard's best, although I do appreciate his attempt to write an interesting woman as protagonist. Don't bother with it unless you're a Stoppard completist.

[Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

So some context: I'm reading this for a class I'm taking on 20th Century Drama, and prior to read this I read another of Stoppard's works called In the Native State, which was a radio play that he then adapted into this one, Indian Ink.

After having read the radio play, reading this was a bit boring. But I can't fault Stoppard at all for that. Instead, I can praise him highly for the alterations he made for the stage production.

The play deals with a poet named Flora Crewe who is in India in the 1930's and forming a relationship with an Indian painter there. It also follows her sister, in the present day, who meets up with the painter's son. The interchange of past & present was so well-crafted, much like in Stoppard's Arcadia.

There is a strong commentary on colonialism, national identity, and the power of art to persist over time. I really loved it.

[Angie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still my most favorite play that I have ever read.

Stoppard is a genius at action and intrigue happening as part of the setting. The main character knows very little of the political situation that she has arrived in, but it continues to color her experience.

The part of Flora Crewe was written for Felicity Kendall and it shows. I can't help but see her in the role as I read it.

[Paul Secor · Rating 4 out of 5]

People and politics. People prevail.

[Sara Ghanem · Rating 4 out of 5]

مسرحية حبر هندي مسرحية استثنائية بالنص وبكل شيء ..

[Trudi · Rating 5 out of 5]

The focus, at least at first, is on a young English poet, Flora Crewe, who has traveled to India in the 1930s for her health, her relationship with an Indian artist who is painting her, and the growing nationalism in the country. Yet there is a second storyline involving the now elderly sister of the English woman, her rather grasping acquaintance (Flora's biographer), and the son of the artist. These two storylines, from the 1930s and the 1980s, circle and intersect in a way that I found eminently satisfying. I know little of Tom Stoppard's work, and none from the act of reading it. I am hooked, though I would also love to see this play performed.

[Mayode · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's just for school

[Hank Lin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Indian Ink, or In the Native State in its previous incarnation, is a delicate and thoughtful piece, touching ever so subtly into genre writing. I think it's also Stoppard's best work for radio to date, incorporating many of the skills he had gained through Albert's Bridge, Artist Descending and The Dog It Was That Died. The principal aspect explored, much more richly in radio than on stage, in my opinion, is the aspect of the beautifully alien exotic. Everything is left to the audience's imagination in conjuring the Indian jungles, the Maharaja's extensive Bentley collection, the exquisite reveal of the portrait (perhaps one of the most subtly evoked reveals in modern theatre) and the unseen love between Flora and Nirad. Everything is left for the audience to fill in the blanks, making it one of Stoppard's most trusting and assured works. The sense I get from it is what Nirad describes as one of the images associates with the rasa of Shringara: an empty house. It's our prerogative to fill that house.

I only give it a three-rating instead of higher because I prefer its radioplay version.

[Valeri Drach · Rating 4 out of 5]

With Tom Stoppard, the personal becomes personal and the personal becomes political. Indian Ink follows poet Flora Crewe on a train to a fictional town in the heart of India during the 1930s. The story is told through letters Flora wrote to her younger sister in England. While Eleanor Swan , the younger sister now in her 80s recounts her sisters life to her biographer and to the son of the Indian painter who produced two portraits of her sister, one public and one private, Flora comes to life. Flora is a force of nature, a free spirit who refuses to be confined by strict caste systems, racial profiling or nor the colonization of India. Flora does find a kindred spirit in Mira's Das, the Indian painter who feels her pain and her creative spirit. A very touching play about politics, art and the spirit.

[Kevin Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stoppard in the 90s wrote a number of very intelligent plays that interrogated the present as well as the past, especially vis-a-vis gender and or sexuality (besides this play, Arcadia and The Invention of Love form a sort of trilogy.) this play throws colonial politics/race into the mix. But the integrity of the art never stumbles into a period piece of "politically correct" social drama, if for no other reason Stoppard actually is more fascinated by frustrated exotics than any political statement. I quite enjoyed this play and especially enjoy whenever Stoppard sets academics up to be a straw man for thinking seriously about issues of art -- he clearly loves the theatre more than any classroom!

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a lovely play -- minor Stoppard to be sure, but as such, the characters actually have a little more room to breathe without being smothered by weighty concepts. Given that this is based on an even earlier radio play by Stoppard, it is interesting to see just how long he has been playing with multiple time streams on stage; there are definitely seeds of Arcadia here, but the effect hasn't really matured yet.

[Elyse]

It's been a long time since I have allowed myself such a free fall into the lush arms of a story.

As usual, Stoppard is astute, with a take no prisoners attitude, poking lightly at the British Raj, the native Indians, and hapless English academics, while spinning an impossible romantic tale of possible romance, a lost portrait and a life in letters, across 60 years and two continents. Good fun.

[Steve Mayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a Tom Stoppard junkie, and reading this right after seeing it for the second time was delightful. The end is changed, for the better I think, but still this is not one of his best. Seeing it, rather than reading it, made me think it was a trifle long. The characters, while affecting, are not emotionally captivating as the ones in Arcadia, for example, or even the Invention of Love. Still in all, it is a fascinating meditation on the emotional, political and economic costs of Empire.

[jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think Stoppard must be read multiple times. Short of seeing these incredibly intelligent and complex plays produced, it should be the only way to wrap one's head around them. I think not being able to see his plays staged is what might be preventing me from rating them higher. There is yet too much distance...

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wanted to read this one in anticipation of upcoming production-- a rich, complex character study/metaphysical mystery in the manner of "Arcadia" (his best imho). Stoppard is probably the greatest living playwright. His language and structures are never less than masterful, and that he is so funny, intellectual and prolific makes him all the more amazing.

[Zachary Lacan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can hear the radio show now, the rubber words bouncing on the airwaves making me laugh like there's nothing better to do on a rainy, wet, Saturday afternoon with the furnace turned up.

[dead letter office]

Seen in SF, ACT production circa 2000. I haven't yet found a used copy lying around, but when I do I'll pick it up.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, not read but saw.

[Af · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this so much less than the radio play, I think because I could imagine my aunt laughing loudly during a performance.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

great stuff, but the structure was halfassed and it ended too abruptly. Do like him

[D. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really need to stop reading an author's next work after I really loved something of theirs--it always leads to disappointment.

[Joel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't think it did anything that Arcadia didn't do better. Certainly enjoyable, though.

[Roxana · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful and moving play, history intertwined as Stoppard does so well; less force and electricity than Arcadia has, but an appropriately dreamy rhythm.

[NABILAH DAWJEE]

If everything a great playwright wrote were top-drawer, the drawer probably wouldn’t open. That’s one reason the Roundabout’s fine mounting of Indian Ink — which is second-tier Tom Stoppard but excellent by almost any other standard — is so welcome. It allows us to see more deeply into the interior of his best works, which get further with many of the same techniques and hide them better.The portrait that links these two seekers also links the two time periods. References to it in Crewe’s letters home (and to at least two other artworks, including a Modigliani nude) excite a buffoonish mid-1980s academic named Eldon Pike to visit Nell — now a formidable widow in her 70s called Mrs. Eleanor Swan. Disdainful of his scholarly pretensions and also a bit mischievous, she sends him on a wild goose chase. A second visitor, Anish Das, the son of Nirad Das and now a painter himself, gets a better reception. In a series of deliciously written scenes, both warm and tart, she and Anish become friends without ever agreeing on an interpretation of the past. Were Flora and Nirad lovers? (We know, but they don’t.) Did England civilize India, or vice versa? In any case, one of Stoppard’s points is that each person’s reality is someone else’s distortion. The play thus works like a game of Hot Potato, with the bag of misprision being passed round and round the circle of characters, from one decade to the other and back, until it is left in the hands of the loser: the poor academic. He’s a straw man and, naturally, an American.

There’s no denying the astonishing craft of the individual scenes, the masterly way Stoppard plays with echoes and reversals, tossing themes this way and that like pizza dough. The dialogue, too, is deeply entertaining — sexy or funny, and often both, as the case requires. And if everyone talks beautifully regardless of background, it makes some of the lumps of historical background go down more easily. But Stoppard’s uncharity toward Pike is a tip-off to the play’s underlying problems. Eventually everyone must get hammered into place in the abstract superstructure, which causes a problem of diminishing returns. By the middle of the second act, the characters are far more interested in creating or solving the mystery of the portraits than the audience can reasonably be. The scenes set in the 1980s, particularly the biographer’s retracing of Flora’s steps in India, become distractions from the story of the people we’ve come to care about. Eventually the play — like Pike’s Collected Letters of Flora Crewe, in which “there are pages where Flora can hardly get a word in sideways” — starts to disappear among the theatrical equivalent of footnotes.

If the various elements and time periods never satisfactorily emulsify despite Stoppard’s tireless whisking, the problem may stem from the play’s origin as a radio drama. Unlike Arcadia and The Invention of Love, Indian Ink is about a subject — portraiture — that, paradoxically, may be easier to render in a nonvisual medium than it is onstage. In any case, director Carey Perloff’s physical production (with awkward sets by Neil Patel) feels underdeveloped. Happily, the performances she gets from the principal cast are not. Romola Garai, best known for Emma and Atonement, makes a heartbreaking Flora, painfully alive to the provocations that make her bold and to the damages that make her regret it. She even makes a good case for Flora’s poem about the heat — not a Stoppard high point, unless he meant to demonstrate her mediocrity. And Firdous Bamji as her painter brings the audience deep into the divided soul of an Indian in thrall (in both senses) to the English. In an especially thrilling moment, he finally yields to Flora’s pressure to be “less Indian,” or “more Indian,” “or at any rate Indian, not Englished-up and all over me like a Labrador.” At this command, his voice completely changes and the necessity of a romance between them begins to emerge from the characters instead of just the playwright.

I am leaving to last Rosemary Harris, who at 87 has no trouble playing a younger woman. Her scenes with the excellent Bhavesh Patel as Anish are acting classes, or would be if you could see any acting. Granted, she spent part of her own youth in India, but the simple glow of reality she exudes in this as in every role she plays is not nature. It’s something that, as Indian Ink demonstrates, is far more satisfying, at least when it works. It’s brilliant artifice.

[Avni Vallab]

This was kinda fun? Like it sorta ate except for the fact that it was a book commenting on India and Indian culture/feminism and women's issues but all from the perspective of a white man

so outside of snippets in a school setting, this is the first time I've like red a play and it was fun but also pretty confusing. Having this take place in two time periods at the same time is a great concept and a cool way to create a narrative, but I think reading the play without seeing a visual reference can make ti confusing to keep up with who's who and when. Especially because theres a parallel narrative of a white woman talking to an Indian man.

Seeing like the one mind clip from the NYT play review showed a really cool set and fun quippy dialogue.

Which makes me think I sort of missed a lot of the wit and nuance of the dialogue because I couldn't hear the delivery. That being said the dialogue was fun and wity to read, Flora and Das had a fun back-and-forth dialogue that didn't hold back.

On top of that the blocking and set direction was well done. The scenes where the same sets/background actors were used for both time periods was pretty cool. And the NYT pics showed an older Elanor looking onto a younger flora as she would like read a letter was is sweet!

So the transitions between each time period were done well. Having it seamlessly shift from Flora reading poetry or writing a letter to Elanor reading the letter or incorporating it into a conversation she's currently having was fun to read.

I feel like I learned a lot of Indian things here surprisingly? Like rasa, punka's, and the 16th of a Ruppee. on that note the rasa scenes were beautifully written, the way they talked about rasa and incorporated it into their art was lovely, like truly can't believe a white man is writing abt rasa like that.

Having the play mainly take place in the veranda where Das is painting Flora's portrait was a nice way to create dialogue and plot thru art. We see floras poetry and Das's painting kinda mix in a way that reflects their cultures and personalities.

The like pseudo-feminist angle this takes where we see that Flora is a woman who displays agency and some sexual independence as something that she gets ridiculed and pushed down by society for. Yet at the same time any time she interacts with an Indian character, they like bow down to her like she's a god. The gender-race dynamic was interesting to explore.

That coupled with the whole nude painting concept was cool to see how gender, societal and race norms are reflected in the creation of that painting. It was also really sweet to see how in the present dilip and Elanor kept that to themselves despite the world wanting to see it. It was a great moment of a type of unexpected-ish solidarity. But the way they used Das's painting on millions of books yet he or his family never got money or credit was wack.

Also, the like general concept of the Indian characters being kinda berated for not being indian enough and loving western/eurpoean culture was weird...bc while yes that kinda is true it's because of an intentionally targeted effort of the British to make Indians hat their own culture and want to be like the brits. It's a systemic colonizer thing that's not really intentional when Indians have an affinity for British-ness. So it's a little off when white characters are telling the Indians to be more Indian and not too European even if they kinda have a point and it's not maliciousness in nature.

(ok and I also don't think I understood any of the scenes with Flora and like the white rulers in india)

Over all, I really kinda loved this play. It felt very grounded and homey, the language describing India and its culture was well-written. I loved the quippy fast dialogue and the fact that flora and Das were sort of punchy friends instead of being overtly in a racially hierarchal relationship. The ambiguity of how far their relationship went was great!

For this being the first play I've ever red I loved it, would've really loved to see It live but onto the next play about India, actually written by an Indian!

(4th july went to the OG halph price books in dallas w bro and suprisingly he was the one that picked this for me!)

[Andrew Benzinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like Mouawad’s play and film Incendies, Indian Ink’s interplay of timelines serves multiple purposes stylistic and thematic, but perhaps the best success of Stoppard’s bi-temporal plot lies in its blending of the two periods’ colonial-postcolonial social and political realities.

Oftentimes laypeople and academics alike digest history through filters and film (literal and figurative), forming walled notions of an enlightened present versus unenlightened past. To dip into personal anecdote, a friend says he never recognized historical figures like Churchill or Hitler as everyday people until he saw colorized archival footage of World War II. Stoppard directly challenges these psychological borders and barriers to understanding the past as, in Faulkner’s words, never dead, “not even past.” With this technique, colonial and post-colonial settings no longer appear so ironclad, no longer sealed behind 1945 (or ‘47 in the case of India’s decolonization).

Stoppard’s no stranger to the technique of entertaining two timelines simultaneously on stage, as his previous plays Arcadia and The Invention of Love have strikingly similar structures and stage blocking. What’s most intriguing about this storytelling style is the seamlessness with which the periods and settings are told in tandem on stage, past and present cooperating rather than competing to present their stories.

Throughout the play, characters half a century apart appear on stage together, as with Flora acting out in 1930 what others read aloud in her letters in 1985. At the bottom of the cast list, Stoppard notes that “[i]t is not intended that the stage be demarcated between India and England, or past and present. Floor space, and even furniture, may be common.” And not only floor space and furniture are shared, but even extras. A stage direction in Act Two calls for Dilip and Pike to be served “by a waiter decked out in the authentic livery of the old regime. / Thus, the servants operate freely between the two periods.” (Stoppard 59) This conjures the idea that the peripheral worker of either period, colonialism or independence, remains just that, the peripheral worker, whether serving the corporate/neocolonial clientele of the Jummapur Palace Hotel in 1985 or the colonial upper crust of the Palace of the Rajah of Jummapur in 1930.

Needless to say, there were multiple passages I found myself having to reread and re-reread to delineate past and future, and these backtracks almost brought me into agreement with the New York Times’ and Variety’s heckles of “overpacked”, “overwritten”, and “clunky.” But ultimately, the play’s commitment to its bi-temporal plot and themes scratched my brain somewhat satisfyingly.

Stoppard’s story also helps to rebut Bernard Porter’s assertion in the introduction of The Lion’s Share that “[m]odern Britons are not to ‘blame’ for the nineteenth century empire, any more than most of them (anyone born after about 1925) can take any credit for resisting Hitler in the 1940s; events whose only connection with them is that they happen to have been perpetrated by people occupying the same patch of ground as they do today…. No-one living in Britain today should feel either proud or ashamed of the old empire; it had nothing at all to do with them.” (Porter 11) I, perhaps along with Stoppard, disagree. Far more than the same “patch of ground” — or stage space and furniture — connects the colonial past and post-colonial present. Power, wealth, and institutions — even ones viewed as antiquated or on their way out — have a stubborn way of reproducing themselves in novel and newly legitimized ways (see The New Jim Crow and America's transitions from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration). True, people today can’t be blamed for their country’s empire a century ago, but privileged people today can be blamed for benefitting from past empire even one or two hundred years later, hence the argument in the US and UK in support of reparations to their minority populations and to a Global South still yoked in debt to the West.

Thanks to its bi-temporal structure, Indian Ink breaks the illusion of an enlightened present set against an unenlightened history and create a living past, one that is never dead, “not even past.”

[Akshat Sharma · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd read Arcadia when I must have been 16 or so. I hadn't read a lot of drama at that age so Thomasina, Septimus, Lady Croom...they kinda broke my brain. In the way it needed to be.

Yet, the Stoppard play that has lingered longer than any of the others is Indian Ink. I came across it in this collection my friend, Ari, gave me, like, fuck, 16 years ago now...damn...

For one, the play gives us this haunting quote: "Only in art can empires cheat oblivion."
Second, it is, perhaps, Stoppard's most unabashedly romantic play. Third, in a weird way, it shaped my strongly held belief that cultural/artistic exchange is what will heal the world. Simplistic, perhaps. My literary friends, whom I have long-suspected think me simple but amusing, would roll their eyes were they to read this.

Indian Ink is a minor work and decidedly flawed. Stoppard's little explainers of Hinduism, Navras etc. grow tedious. You're better than this, Tom! You also have these moments where the older British lady calls a canon event in Indian history The Mutiny (1857) while the young Indian artist calls it The Uprising ,(or, The Rebellion, maybe) feel rather heavy-handed, especially since the iniquity of Colonialism (and the woman's pro-Raj bent) has already been well-established both in the play and for anyone who has ever read a book in their life.

I still adore this play, though. It is, and maybe, this is by design, potent and unadulterated Shringar Ras: a heady, affecting admixture of beauty, longing and memory.

I re-read it this evening, if only to honour the memory of this towering playwright.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom Stoppard's INDIAN INK is nothing short of a masterpiece. It's an early work, and one that lays the seeds for his later ARCADIA, but in my mind, it's a better play, more rooted in the characters and more clearly laid out in terms of time periods. About a poet traveling to India for her health who is painted by an Indian artist, and then, in a later generation, her sister being interviewed about her life while a biographer chases the details of the poet's life, unsuccessfully, INDIAN INK explores issues of both how we make sense of the past. The play is also informed by India's push for independence. It's funny, but also poignant and romantic. I couldn't help but think of the first act of Tony Kushner's HOMEBODY/KABUL, because the poet reminds me of the homebody who encompasses the first act of that brilliant play. I can't imagine giving this anything but 5 stars and I'm excited to see the first restaging of this while I'm in London, right after Stoppard's passing. This is one play that reads as well as it can be staged.

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating and multi-layered, but perhaps too many layers that keep you from connecting with the characters and their complex relationships. Stoppard is, of course, incredible at dialogue and wit, but I think the play format detracts from creating an in-depth analysis of someone so complex like Flora. It would be interesting to see live instead of just reading the script, since the visual element is definitely lost, but I at least had enough time to digest the work and understand what exactly was being said. I think the most remarkable thing about this work is that Flora feels wonderfully real and intricate; I wish she was actually existed because I would love to study her poetry and life.