Stoppard_Representation of India

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Reinventing India through A quitewitty pastiche: Reading Tom

Stoppards Indian Ink

nandi bhatia

Tom Stoppards Indian Inkbelongs to the corpus of post-war British drama

that has taken up the subject of colonial history, a corpus that also includes

John Osbornes Look Back in Anger(1956), Caryl Churchills Cloud 9(1979),

and David Hares A Map of the World (1983), among others. The colonial

question in these plays marks an implosion in British theatre to

convey a sense of the political upheavals on the colonial periphery rever-

berating inwards on metropolitan society, turning the theatre into a multi-

cultural space for audiences (MacKenzie 21).1

Thus, the small space of theattic in Look Back in Angerwhere the protagonists of the play reside is ana-

logous to the reduced space of the empire in post-colonial times. Cloud 9

transforms the stage in Act One into imperial Africa, enabling the interplay

in that space of gender, race, and imperial politics in the nineteenth

century and tracing their implications for sexual politics in the 1970s.

And, in A Map of the World, the lobby of the Bombay hotel, where the

main action is staged, is the primary setting throughout the play.

Simultaneously, Asian playwrights such as Jatinder Verma, Harwant

Bains, Hanif Kureishi, Ayub Khan Din, and Rukhsana Ahmad have reconfi-gured the space of theatre by foregrounding coloured Britain, on the one

hand, and those at the centre of British society, on the other, highlighting

experiences of racism and gendered violence in their plays. In so doing,

they transform theatre spaces into sites for staging the social tensions

that emerge in the wake of decolonization.

Such an implosion is all the more visible in Stoppards Indian Ink.

Written and produced in 1995, Indian Ink consciously shuttles between

pre- and post-colonial India and 1980s Britain, through a hodge-podge of

situations, time-periods, and spatial mergers, demanding through explicitstage directions that the stage not be demarcated between England or

India, or past or present. Even floor space, furniture, and other props

220 Modern Drama, 52:2 (Summer 2009) doi:10.3138/md.52.2.220


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are common, suggesting a desire to erase easy distinctions between the two

geographies, spaces, and temporalities. Within this theatrical layout,

Stoppard locates an American academics search for the lost portrait of

an Englishwoman, who was painted in the nude by an Indian artistduring her travels in India in the 1930s, to call into question what he ident-

ifies as the ethics of empire. To this end, Stoppard intertwines the central

action with numerous references to key colonial signposts: Macaulay,2

Hobson-Jobson,3

Gandhi, protests and imprisonment, the Indian nationalist

movement, and so on. These signposts provide an opportunity for reflect-

ing upon India as a subject of representation in contemporary British

theatre and for bringing an additional perspective to ongoing debates

about notions of home, multiculturalism, and the rights of minorities,

especially during the Thatcher years when the other was interpreted as asign of violence, danger, and threat to British society.

Such engagement with the colonial past places Indian Ink among his-

torical fictions that aim to destabilize colonialist myths, examine contradic-

tory outcomes of colonialism, and interrogate the impartial claims of a

historians history. Subaltern Studies scholars have pointed out the need

to retrieve marginalized voices that can critically interrupt the truth

claims of elite histories and have identified literary and cultural texts as

important sites that can enable this task. The term subaltern, as Ranajit

Das Gupta argues, functions both as a substitute for peasantry or labour-ing poor or common people as well as a concept implying a dialectical

relationship of superordination and subordination, a concept which is of

importance in analyzing the interplay of this relationship (109).

Das Guptas formulation is significant for its insistence on the need to

attend to questions of power between various social groupings, collectiv-

ities, and institutions and has especial relevance for cultural reconstruc-

tions of history. It suggests that acts of writing and representing colonial

history should carefully account for such interrelations, if we are to retrieve

accounts (however partial) of the marginalized. Like many cultural criticscommitted to rewriting histories from below, Stoppard attempts to

recuperate subaltern language and memory and search for what David

Ludden calls fragmentary testimonies, and lost moments, to restore the

integrity of indigenous histories that appear naturally in non-linear, oral,

symbolic, vernacular and dramatic forms (Introduction 20). In the

context of 1980s Britain, this effort seems especially laudable. The years

between 1980 and 1985 witnessed the rise of antagonisms, and there

were uprisings against the policing of areas of black settlement. Such devel-

opments received significant attention from black and Asian communityorganizations, civil liberties groups, activists, trade unions writers, critics,

and filmmakers, who rendered visible questions of ethnicity, cultural differ-

ence, and the contradictory practices of the nation.

Reading Tom Stoppards Indian Ink

Modern Drama, 52:2 (Summer 2009) 221


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However, postmodern ironies, jokes, wordplay, and the juxtaposition

of conflicting levels of narration elements viewed as compelling modes

of critique in Stoppards historical plays (Innes 236) consign questions of

power and colonial violence to invisibility and obscure the hierarchies gen-erated by colonial policies. Additionally, Stoppards conscious erasure of

spatial, cultural, and temporal borders between India and Britain remains

problematic. In dismantling these borders, the play may be attempting to

disrupt the rigidly assumed boundaries between empire and colony and

engage its audience in a rethinking of the cross-cultural fluidity between

the two. In light of the discourses of globalization of the 1990s (when the

play was written), which celebrated easy mobility across borders and ren-

dered nationalist modes of thinking obsolete, it appears to move beyond

narrowly conceived nationalistic paradigms to provide, instead, a morecomplex analysis of the complicated interrelations between empire and

colony. Yet the preoccupation with spatial erasures, the collapsing of tem-

poral differences to make the past and the present indistinguishable, and

the political conversations conducted through a quite witty pastiche

(Spivak 74) together obscure knowledge of social relations which, as

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues, is crucial to acts of history writing

and representation that account for the uneven outcomes of imperial his-

tories and allow subaltern subjects to speak or be heard (81; emphasis in

original).Antoinette Burton has argued that Indian Ink is a critical addition to

films such as The Jewel in the Crown (1984), Gandhi (1982), and A

Passage to India (1984), which fed into the mechanisms of the Raj nostal-

gia of the 1980s through the revival of memories of objects, characters,

themes, and situations from the colonies. Among the plays many features,

she identifies the physically larger than normal playbill, which included

imperial symbols in the form of words from Hobson-Jobson, excerpts

from Emily Edens Up the Country (1866), and a picture of Charles

Allens BBC-sponsored coffee table book Plain Tales from the Raj (1976)as contributing to the extra-theatrical life of the play by playing out publicly

the nostalgia that supported the anxieties of a middle-class Anglo-

American public, schooled in the stereotypes about minorities that were

normalized during the ReaganThatcher years. Another way of thinking

about the play is to see it as moving beyond nostalgia, since nostalgia

implies a wistful longing for something lost in this case, the empire.

This is because the playwrights intentions were not to recreate an uncriti-

cal image of the imperial enterprise, as is evident in the plays critique of

Flora Crew, Mrs. Swan, and Pike, two of whom (Pike and Flora) are culturaltourists in India during and after the empire, while the third (Mrs. Swan), is

a colonial officials wife. In fact, the storyline sets up characters and situ-

ations in ways that involves a critique of all of them. So we have Flora

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Crew and Nirad Das, the artist who paints a portrait of her, set in opposi-

tional terms, he identifying with European painters and her willing to

appreciate him only if he resorts to the Indian style of painting with all

its rasas. The aftermath of the empire in post-colonial India is portrayedthrough anglophile attitudes rather than through anti-colonial ideologies

in characters such as Dilip (Pikes guide and translator) and a retired

soldier who has remained loyal to the empire. These stories are connected

to 1980s Britain through Anish Das, Nirads son, who lives in England, and

Mrs. Swan, Floras sister, who lives in Shepperton, a London suburb.

Stoppard also claims that, in foregrounding British Indian relations,

he made a self-conscious attempt to get away from what Stuart Hall has

identified as

an indigenous British racism in the post-war period. [Such racism] begins with

the profound historical forgetfulness . . . the loss of memory, a kind of historical

amnesia, a decisive mental repressionwhich has taken over the British people

about race and Empire since the 1950s [and attempts to] wipe out and efface

every trace of the colonial and imperial past. (qtd. in Smith 132; emphasis

in original)

Rather, as he asserts in his interviews, he wrote Indian Inkthinking that

there would be something to explore in the huge subject of colonialism,and the British Empire, and all that (qtd. in Kelly and Demastes 14) and

avoided writing characters who appear to have already appeared in The

Jewel in the Crown and Passage to India (qtd. in Paul Allen 242). From

such statements, it seems that Stoppard wanted to attend critically to ques-

tions regarding the connections between Indias imperial past and post-

imperial Britain and to depart from the orientalist representations of

India in canonical works. Such representational practices, in Edward

Saids assessment, have served historically to promote imperial and colo-

nial interests through a system of representative statements about orien-tal cultures that positions the latter as inferior in relation to the west.

Instead, Stoppard provides us with a story that approaches Floras and

Mrs. Swans attitudes from a critical perspective and makes fun of Pike,

who travels to India in search of clues to Floras missing painting so that

he can successfully complete his biography of her. The contexts of

empire and colony are spatially located through the train a symbol of

colonial expansion and in colonial clubs, hotels, palaces, the dak bunga-

low, and so on. The several plot-lines also provide the contexts for the tem-

poral and spatial shifts between 1930s India and 1980s Britain and betweenRoyal India not directly under British rule and colonial India, which was

directly under the Crown. All of these are presented in typical Stoppard

style, with numerous jokes on empire and colony through which he seeks




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to highlight the contradictions of empire, especially against what

MacKenzie identifies as the persistence of empire in political, social, and

imaginative terms even after its formal retreat from India in 1947 (2136).

Stoppards awareness may be informed by the politicalcritical debatesthat shaped the 1980s, when monolithic constructions of the nation came

to be severely questioned in cultural, literary, and critical spheres. To take a

small sample, Hanif Kureishis playBorderline(1981), Harwant Bainss play

Blood (1989), and Gurinder Chadhas film Im British But . . .(1989) in one

way or another conveyed the authors views on Thatcherism, imperial

decline, and the effects of decolonization on the Asian postcolonial

subject. Several Asian-music Bhangra groups made an appearance to rep-

resent the inevitable fusion of cultures and also convey, through the rhyth-

mic and lyrical energy of their creations, a sense of the political upheavalsof the 1980s (Sharma, Hutnyk, and Sharma). Theatre groups such as Tara

Arts questioned the implications for black immigrants of exclusionary defi-

nitions of the nation (see Verma 5561). And British playwright Peter Brook

attempted to counter narrow nationalistic paradigms through a cosmopo-

litan, intercultural performance in his version of Mahabharata (1989) by

bringing the great Indian epic onto the world stage with an international

and multi-racial cast of actors who delivered the play in multiple accents.

The same decade saw the production of Stephen Frearss films My

Beautiful Launderette (1985) and Sammie and Rosie Get Laid (1987),which attempted to understand the ways in which imperial history

played out in the social and political landscapes at home under

Thatcher. Simultaneously, these films disrupted the ideological biases of

films such as David Leans A Passage to India (1984), Peter Duffells The

Far Pavilions (1984), Christopher Morahans The Jewel in the Crown

(1984), and Richard Attenboroughs Gandhi (1982), which recast empire

either in the form of imperial history or in that of colonial romances that

evoked the themes of imperial nostalgia and the loss of Britains overseas

territories. The decade also produced some of the most critical and ener-getic debates regarding immigration in the works of Stuart Hall, Avtar

Brah, John Solomos, and Pratibha Parmar, among others. Overall, what

this decade saw were multiple crossovers of positions and alignments

that cut into and critically interrupted each other, mobilizing analyses of

different diaspora formations which as transnational processes deeply

unsettle[d] the idea of self-contained, culturally inward-looking nationalist

identities (Hesse 2; emphasis in original).

Yet reading the play against the grain of its intended meanings and

through the creative choices of the playwright reveals a version of Indiathat is consistent with the kind of orientalism that framed earlier writings

of the Raj. To this end, two points that Said makes are worth noting. The

first is that the historic patterns of representing oriental societies in the

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days of high imperialism continue to persist in the postcolonial world, as

individual writers reproduce stereotypes found in earlier writings without

a careful examination of the cultures represented. Even though Stoppard

had lived in India as a child and made a trip to India after he wrote theradio version of this play, In the Native State, he did admit that many of

his ideas were derived from other peoples fictions. The second point

that Said makes pertains to the complicity of literary forms realism,

fantasy, adventure, for example in reducing the colonized intellectually

and existentially to a point where the east becomes what Disraeli identified

as a career (132). It is to the latter that I would like to return in order to

argue that the plays witty pastiche neutralizes the power-dynamics that

frame Anglo-Indian relations, represents anti-colonial struggles as a joke,

and reduces empire to an enterprise that pushed the colonized into a per-manent state of hypnotic stupor and fascination with the colonizer.

One such joke is the portrayal of the intellectually hybrid artist Nirad Das

and of the effects of English education on him. Nirad is described as a

typical Macaulayan product, an old gentleman who liked to read in

English, Robert Browning, Tennyson, Macaulays Lays of Ancient Rome,

and Dickens (16), went from a vernacular school to Elphinston College

in Bombay . . . that was meant to give a proper English education (16),

and became involved in the fight to drive out the British. This description

is substantiated by Das himself, who tells Flora that he acquired all hisknowledge from Dickens and Browning and Shakespeare and would

like to write like Macaulay:

I have to thank Lord Macaulay for English, you know. It was his idea when he was

in the government of India that English would be taught to us all. He wanted to

supply the East India Company with clerks, but he was sowing dragons teeth.

Instead of babus he produced lawyers, journalists, civil servants, he produced

Gandhi! We have so many, many languages you know, that English is the only

language the nationalists can communicate in! That is a very good joke onMacaulay, dont you think? (19)

Politically speaking, the joke takes a jibe at both colonizer and colonized.

It pokes fun at the consequences of Macaulays imperialist nationalism and

suggests that his aspiration of introducing English in India in order to

produce a class of interpreters between us [English] and the millions

whom we govern a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but

English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect (Minute on

Education 601), produced instead subjects who became vocal critics ofimperialism. On one level, the play chuckles at the Macaulayan dream by

showcasing Nirad as someone who knows the map of London by heart

even though he has never been to England, possesses a keen knowledge




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of European painters, and disrupts the imperialist mission of English

language and education through the use of Hindi-Urdu words. While not

accessible to a non-Hindi-Urdu-speaking audience, these words reinforce

the cultural and linguistic pluralities that mark the world of Anglo-Indiaand reveal traces of a local consciousness and vernacular interruption in

Macaulays purist project.

Performed for a largely English-speaking audience, the Hindi-Urdu

words and phrases also have the potential to cause some kind of disruption

in a clear understanding of the play, with an effect of alienation on specta-

tors unfamiliar with its local flavours and meanings. However, the use of

Hindi-Urdu is such that it does not give legitimacy to its culturally

encoded meanings. Rather, these words and concepts are strategically

interwoven with terms and phrases from Hobson-Jobson, Shakespeareantexts, Emily Edens diary, and poetry readings to heighten the dramatic

effect of the performance. For instance, terms such coolie and punkah-

wallah that carry connotations of colonial violence and exploitation are

simply inserted to enable a performative playfulness rather than to

signify their meanings under the empire. Such evasion occurs in a

playful speech on footnotes by Mrs. Swan, who attacks the futility of the

exercise: Far too much of a good thing, the footnote, in my opinion; to

be constantly interrupted by someone telling you things you already

know or dont need to know at that moment (2526). Instead, what theplay reinforces is the Indian fascination with English language and

culture. Says Dilip:

Fifty years of Independence and we are still hypnotized! Jackets and ties must

be worn! English-model public schools for the children of the elite, and the

voice of Bush House is heard in the land. Gandhi would fast again, I think. Only,

this time hed die. It was not for this India, I think, that your Nirad Das and

his friends held up their homemade banner at the Empire Day gymkhana. It was

not for this that he threw his mango at the Residents car. (6061)

Dilips observations regarding the inability of Indians to shake off the hang-

over of English are offered in place of a more nuanced understanding of the

persistence of English as a deep-rooted symptom of the lingering effects of

colonization, a complex psychological response to colonization, or even a

simple linguistic reality in a country that has claimed the language as its

own. Rather, his suggestion that the post-independence India he knows is

not the India that freedom fighters such as Gandhi dreamed of reinforces

notions about the inability of Indians to govern themselves. This beliefis shared by Stoppard himself who, as Fleming argues, finds it

difficult to swallow the idea that India is better off having the right to

self-governance (223).

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Notions about the inability of Indians to govern themselves are also

reinforced through the story, in the second act, about Subadar Ram Sunil

Singh, a crippled Old Soldier, formerly in the 6th Rajputana Rifles (49)

who had been awarded a ribbon for his part in World War II and given theBurma Star. This ex-soldier has three daughters, two of whom are unmar-

ried, and in order to marry the third he sold his army pension and

secured for himself a job which is cleaning toilets (50). Incidentally, it is

Singh who provides a few leads to Pike for the latters project on Flora

Crew, as he is the small boy from the 1930s who pulled the punkah (fan)

in Floras guest house. The representation of Singh is particularly proble-

matic. On one level, he reminds us of the old soldier from the 1857

mutiny in Kiplings Kim (1901), who gets a space in Kiplings novel

because he is a loyal soldier. Laurie Kaplan sees Singh as almost a caricatureof postcolonialism whose condition, along with the disease, squalor, and

beggars, stands in stark contrast to the palatial buildings in India and the

Indians continuing nostalgia for the Raj (341). Yet interestingly, while the

play brings the two time periods into the same theatrical space, with charac-

ters from one era walking into another, the Indian soldier who fought for

Britain and later made it his home disappears from the national conscious-

ness of the post-imperial centre and from Stoppards play. A recent contro-

versy regarding an exhibit about an Indian War veteran now living in Britain

makes such an absence particularly glaring. This exhibit about Swaran Singh,who joined World War II at the age of 20, served in Africa, the Middle East,

and Burma during British rule and has lived in Coventry since 1957, was

installed on Remembrance Day in 2004 to honour war veterans from the

ex-colonies who have never been invited to Remembrance Day celebrations.

Once the exhibit went up, the Local Lord Mayor John Gazey ordered the

removal of the exhibit from the Coventry Council House. Such an enact-

ment of power4

through a disruption of an artistic display that articulates

postcolonial struggles in the public sphere is yet another reminder of the

ways in which the present-day post-imperial state obliterates a significantpiece of its colonial history (Row Erupts).

5

And while Stoppard pays significant attention to the poverty of the ex-

soldier in India, we find that one of the most political discussions,

between a conservative defender of colonialism and an Indian immigrant

who lives the consequences of such conservatism, loses its sharpness in

a battle of wits that Stoppard himself seems to thoroughly enjoy.

Verbiage gives the exchanges between Anish and Mrs. Swan a humorous

edge that undermines the possibility of political analysis and makes the

viewer/reader lose track of the beneficiaries and casualties of colonialism.Two moments that could have enabled a fuller analysis of imperialism

are both truncated in their exchange. One is the reference to Nirads

protest during the Empire Day celebrations in India, for which he receives




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a six-month prison term in Jummapur (part of royal India). When Anish

mentions his fathers protest to Mrs. Swan, she trivializes the attack by

first reminding him that the protest took the shape of a mango thrown at

the Residents car, which belies any serious revolutionary potential, andthen remarking on the length of the punishment:

In British India he would have got a year at least. After the war it may have

been different. With independence round the corner, people were queuing up

to go to prison, it was their ticket to the top. Theyd do their bit of civil

disobedience and hop into their paddy-wagon thoroughly pleased with them-

selves. Eric thats my husband would let them off with a small fine . . . and

theyd be furious. (24)

The other moment occurs in Anishs rejoinder to Mrs. Swans playful asser-

tion that the English were like Romans for Indians and, by implication,

brought civilizational wealth to India. Taking the form of literary refer-

ences, Anishs retort once again becomes a device for provoking laughter.

We were the Romans! says Anish:

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, thats why you came. (17)

Anishs reference to Shakespeare is packed with suggestions about the

authority that Shakespeare came to signify in the colony (see, e.g.,

Singh). It also responds to the consequences of policies that produced post-

colonial subjects, such as Anish, who, by virtue of attending a convent

school, are well-versed in English and speak better English than most

young people (15), while their knowledge of English language and litera-ture enables them to oppose colonial ideology through an equal rhetorical

exchange. However, the place of this dialogue in the play dilutes the effect

of Anishs resistance: by this time, the play has introduced Nirad to the

audience, presented him as a co-opted subject who loved everything

English (language, literature, arts, cities, and Bloomsbury), and dismissed

his protest during the Empire Day celebrations as an impulsive and misdir-

ected act performed for the sake of achieving fame through imprisonment.

Combined with such a representation, Mrs. Swans comparison of India to

a Humpty-Dumpty that crumbled after the fall of the empire is particu-larly horrible in its undermining of any suggestion that Anish and Nirad

might have revolutionary potential. Additionally, Mrs. Swans metaphoric

allusion to the 1947 partition obscures the painful story of the forced

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relocation of millions of people at this moment of rupture, when there was

large-scale loss of life and property and women were abducted and threa-

tened with rape and subsequent rejection by their families. Thus it deflects

attention from the role of the British in splitting the nation into India andPakistan at the time of independence, over which imperialist historiogra-

phy continues to maintain silence.

Political analysis in the play is further compromised in the somewhat

blunted critique of Mrs. Swans imperialistic leanings and exclusionary

conceptions of the nation. In part, the critique is implicit in what Burton

sees as Mrs. Swans uncritical nostalgia for India, for the privileges she

enjoyed as the wife of a colonial official and her memories of objects

such as tea, tea trays, and the Himalayan water that made the tea ever so

sweet. Yet, in attacking Mrs. Swans position, the play loses sight of nation-alisms multiple facets. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson

asserts the need to acknowledge different kinds of nationalisms: an imper-

ialistic, official nationalism and a popular nationalism emanating from and

in response to histories of oppression. Stoppards unequivocal trivialization

of all nationalisms (Nirads, Anishs, and Mrs. Swans) is, instead, worked

into creative linguistic frames and a theatrical layout that levels off the

very different ideological and counter-hegemonic positions that one

encounters in the play.

Such an approach (that attacks nationalism) places the play in the genreof immigrant literature, which, as Rosemary George argues, is

marked by a disregard for national schemes, the use of a multigenerational cast

of characters and a . . . tendency towards repetitions and echoes a feature

that is often displayed through plots that cover several generations. Most impor-

tantly, the immigrant genre is marked by a curiously detached reading of the

experience of homelessness. (171)

Given Stoppards migration and relocation from Czechoslovakia toSingapore, then to India, and finally to Britain, his disregard for national

schemes and borders is understandable. Yet the circumstances of journeys

and migrations themselves have political underpinnings that reveal social

relations of power (Brah 1996). Stoppards dismissal of rigid national

borders is one in which the possibility of such analysis is undermined,

even as it is brought into conversations between Mrs. Swan and Anish in

her home in Shepperton. As evident in the following conversation, Mrs.

Swan assumes that Anishs homeland is elsewhere, even though he is

married to an Englishwoman and claims England as his home.

mrs. swan . . . Will you be going home?

anish (bewildered) I . . . Would you like me to go?




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mrs. swan (equally bewildered) No. What do you mean?

anish (understanding) Oh home! I didnt mean I was a guest in England.

England is my home now. I have spent half my life here. I married

here. (1718)

The tenor of the conversation, along with the responses of the two charac-

ters, as emphasized in the authors parenthetical notes, unsettles Mrs.

Swan about the precise location of Anishs home. Mrs. Swans position is

reflective of what Hall (2000) calls a renewed form of imperialistic logic

in multicultural Britain that tolerates the immigrant but, on the basis of cul-

tural explanations, assumes his natural homeland to be elsewhere. For Mrs.

Swan, the question itself might not have arisen had Anish been Caucasian.

But that this question even comes up has to do with Anishs racialized pres-ence in a nation imagined as a homogenous space inhabited by a racially

homogenous group of people.

Anish challenges Mrs. Swans nostalgic memories of the empire and her

inability to question her own ideological position by reminding her that his

presence in Britain is located in imperial history. His presence enforces the

need to recognize Britain as a diaspora space that is marked by the pres-

ence of people from the ex-colonies who serve as reminders of the endur-

ing impact of Britains imperial past on its emotional, cultural, political,

and demographic landscapes (Hesse 11). Yet Mrs. Swans attitude is some-what protected by her age and role as hostess, and thus any serious critique

of her views is always blunted (Fleming 218). Additionally, her announce-

ment that she worked for a Communist paper in the 1930s neutralizes her

conservativism, and the last scene, which shows her crying in the cemetery

as she remembers Flora, humanizes her to the extent of creating empathy

for her (Fleming 218). Her being represented as sympathetically human

ultimately masks the paternalism underlying the pedagogy of culture

(see Chatterjee 4155) communicated through her references to cake,

China, and flowers. These items function as symbols of the high societyto which she belongs and exemplify the pedagogical aspect[s] of civilising

(Chatterjee 4155) and educating the colonized about the cultural attributes

of English civilization. And even though Anish resists her chauvinism when

he tells her, Mrs. Swan, you are a very wicked woman. You advance a pre-

posterous argument and try to fill my mouth with cake so I cannot answer

you. I will resist you and your cake (17), it seems that the conservative

Anglophile in Stoppard has trouble overtly criticizing the means it took

for the upper class to enjoy that life (Fleming 218). Such truncation of

Mrs. Swans conservatism further underplays nationalist paranoiatowards Britains non-white minorities.

As well, the witty exchanges between Flora and Nirad based on a voca-

bulary derived from Hobson-Jobson, the dictionary of Anglo-Indian terms

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produced during colonial rule for the benefit of European travellers, along

with other linguistic trivia, appear to be private language games that do not

address the complicated politics of language behind this exchange. While

bearing what Rushdie calls eloquent testimony to the unparalleled inter-mingling that took place between English and the languages of India

(81), the Hobson-Jobson terms and phrases are filters through which

Flora visualizes and constructs India for herself. Her version of India is a

fantasy based on an imperialistic framework of knowledge that romanti-

cizes India in mythical terms and yet misrepresents it. She does not want

to acknowledge or deal with the actual India or its hybrid products, such

as Nirad, whose keen interest in and knowledge of European painters she

finds contemptible and in violation of her own idealized conception of

Indian tradition and its rasas. She wants to experience India as a placethat embodies a rich and glorious tradition and, upon arrival, treats it as

an antiquated object of her interest, which, in turn, enables her to critique

her own artistic and social heritage. Her purpose in travelling in search of

the authentic India is, then, about her search for the self and for a

place that literally offers an antidote to her failing health. Perhaps

Stoppards portrayal of Flora in this light is intended to critique the orien-

talist framework of knowledge that constructed myths about India and

obscured its contradictions. Yet the relationship between Flora and Nirad

is divested of the power differential that defines it. Like manyEnglishwomen who remained, according to Burton (2001), complicit with

the empire, Flora both romanticizes India and falsifies it. For Flora, the

empire offers the freedom to lecture and allows her to be part of the

Theosophical society and be treated in the most hospitable terms. For

Nirad, on the other hand, the empire is an oppressive institution against

which he protests, being given a six-month jail term as a consequence.

The exchange derived from Hobson-Jobson, thus, does not evoke the

larger political and ideological conflict and power dynamic that enables

Flora to assert her linguistic authority. Rather, its linguistic referencing isa convenient device for complicating the plot that covers the lives of

Indians (such as Anish) in 1980s Britain.

The play also overlooks the connection between ongoing constructions

of the Indian males sexual fascination with white women and earlier colo-

nial representations. The plot involving Nirads painting Flora in the nude

is turned into a story about the missing painting through Pikes academic

interest in her. Yet, here, Stoppard seems to be repeating a stock theme

that emerged during the 1857 mutiny, surfaced again in the 1920s in

A Passage to India, and appeared yet again in films such as ShakespeareWallah (1965; Ivory) and Foreign Body (1986; Neame). In fact, the plays

representation of India, of Indians, and of Englishwomen (despite

Stoppards claims about not mimicking characters in works such as




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A Passage to India) bears a strong resemblance to that ofA Passage to India.

The opening scene announces the resemblance through references to a

picnic and a trip to the temple, events and spaces that constitute the epi-

centre ofA Passage to India and have disastrous consequences for Aziz per-sonally and for his reputation. Also of note is the similarity between Floras

and Adela Questeds fascination with the realIndia, their relationships with

Indian men, disdain for English arrogance in India, and simultaneous sus-

picion of Indians. Similarly, it is difficult to overlook the parallels between

Das, the artist, and Aziz, the poet, both of whom have an anglicized

upbringing, turn nationalistic after relationships with Englishwomen, and

are equally fascinated and revolted by the English presence in India. And

Captain Durance, who remains committed to Britains civilizing

mission in Indian Ink, bears an uncanny resemblance to RonnieHeaslop from Forsters text. While supportive of British and Indians

mixing with each other, both remain committed to strict social, class,

and racial hierarchies, protect Englishwomen from Indians, and have

some degree of romantic interest in them. The presence of royalty in

both texts further reinforces the similarities between them. While the simi-

larities speak to the intertextual connections of the two texts, the orientalist

undertones that one detects in A Passage to India are heard equally in

Indian Ink. Such repetition only speaks to the durability of an orientalist

discourse immortalized through cultural productions that circulatewidely. It is noteworthy that Indian Inkwas performed in prominent thea-

tres in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. If anything, the

carnivalesque elements of the play, the multiplicity of plots, voices, and

situations, stifle subaltern resistance even more than does A Passage to

India, which at least gestures towards the threatening fists and fingers

emerging from the Marabar Hills. Additionally, Forsters novel allows the

reader to uncover alternative meanings in local festivals and in the collec-

tive cry for Mrs. Moore (heard as Esmiss Esmoore) outside the courtroom

when Aziz is on trial for the charge of sexual assault brought by AdelaQuested.

Important evidence of the validity of this analysis is Stoppards attack on

academia through Pike, Professor of English at the University of Maryland,

who is meticulously aware of the twenty-two separate collections on Flora

Crewe at the University of Texas.6

Stoppard casts Pike as the superficial and

privileged cultural tourist who becomes an object of ridicule because of his

literalism, academic juvenilia, and limited knowledge of India. The aca-

demic obsession with publishing criticism, asserts Stoppard, ruins the

experience of literature and particularly of theatre. Stoppard expressesdisdain for academics, saying that he is bothered by this American

phenomenon . . . the sheer disproportionate scale of the enterprise [of criti-

cal writing], theres just so much writing about writing about writing, its

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just such a major industry and theres something wrong about the scale of

it all (qtd. in Joost 50). While such criticisms seem justified in the context

of Pike, one wonders whether the attack on Pike serves to foil academic

reassessment of imperial history and of the play itself. If, indeed,Stoppards intention is to reveal the unknowability of history and the

impossibility of reconstructing history through academic analyses, then it

is all the more ironic that his play is extremely academic and keeps provid-

ing footnotes to his own construction of the empire and its aftermath.

These include references to the British Library, the University of Texas

Library, and the University of Maryland English Department, and to the

letters of Emily Eden, Macaulay and the politics of English, the

Theosophical society, Bloomsbury, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf,

Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, Gunga Din, and A Passage to India.Additionally, the details about Indian aesthetics, painting, and locales

also demonstrate that careful research went into the play. Thus, while

Stoppard dismisses academic research as opportunistic (mis)representa-

tions of the truth, his own representation also constructs a partial truth

about India, especially when we consider the India we are introduced to:

colonial clubs, palaces, upper-class Indians wallowing in nostalgia, and ser-

vants who are capable of stealing. Such a representation seems to rely

greatly on the grand narratives of empire and sustains the otherness of

India.On one level, Indian Inkfunctions as a play that, in the words of Burton,

represents a return to and ultimately a disavowal of the end of empire,

rehearsing for us the role that imperialist nostalgia continues to play in

the late twentieth-century British cultural imagination (230). On another

level, however, its apparent cosmopolitanism that permits the cross-

border mobility of characters across time and space is one that does not

fully render visible the effects of colonization or its lingering effects in

the aftermath of empire. Rather, the trivialization of Nirads protest on

Empire Day, attention to the persistence of English language and culture,and focus on clubs and hotels that are presented as sites for Indians to

indulge in Raj nostalgia through waiters who serve customers decked out

in the authentic livery of the old regime (Indian Ink 57) makes Anishs

anti-colonial fervour in the 1980s seem irrelevant. Such representation

serves to mask the Raj nostalgia that played out in Indian restaurants in

Britain after the end of empire, where those connected to the Raj would

attempt to relive their experiences in India through the consumption of

curry and reenactment of the master servant relationship by calling

the waiters bearers as they were called in India and insisting that thewaiters call them Sir (see Lahiri 200 16).

If we are to heed Ngugi wa Thongos assertion that there is no per-

formance without a goal (23), then, on the surface, the goal of




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Stoppards play is to break down barriers among people, stage, and time

periods and move away from an identity politics that is exclusionary. Yet,

while space and time are collapsed, the characters living in post-imperial

Britain relate to colonial time in ways that generate conflicts. For Mrs.Swan and Anish, for example, colonial India carries different memories

that create a differentiated sense of longing, one marked by nostalgia in

the case of Mrs. Swan and by memories of the freedom struggle for

Anish. This, in turn, generates differentiated levels of nationalistic

responses, which have the potential to turn the performance space into

what Ngugi calls a site of physical, social, and psychic forces (14) and

address the tensions of empire and its implications for post-imperial

Britain. However, that potential is undercut throughout the play by jokes,

parody, and a truncation of history, which is telescoped into instances ofirony and linguistic hybridism. In the process, the elision of questions of

power that are germane to postcolonial societies transforms the play into

a primarily theatrical show, where the selective presentation of colonial

history suppresses the struggles between the defenders of colonialism

(such as Mrs. Swan) and its opponents (Anish) and casts the empire as a

benign enterprise.

NOTES

1 John MacKenzie describes implosion as a dramatic word, which happens

rapidly, dramatically, and indeed painfully (21).

2 Thomas Babington Macaulay went to India in 1834 to serve in the colonial

administration. He advocated the inclusion of English literature in higher edu-

cation in India and authored the infamous Minute on Indian Education, dated

1835, where he makes a case for the advantages of English over Sanskrit or

Arabic.

3 According to Wikipedia, Hobson-Jobson is the short (and better known) title of

. . .

a historical dictionary of Anglo-Indian words and terms from Indianlanguages which came into use during the British rule of India . . . [T]he dic-

tionary has over 2,000 entries . . . many of which date to the first contact with the

Indian subcontinent, frequently in other non-English European languages. It

was first published in 1886, and in 1903, an index and extra quotations were

added.

4 I am drawing here on Ngugi wa Thongos analysis of the politics of performance

in the theatre space.

5 I am grateful to Nirmal Puwar for alerting me to this controversy. The exhibit was

produced by Mr. Singhs grandson Kuldip Puwar and Dr. Nirmal Puwar, who

arranged the exhibition during a Peace Month event in Coventry. The installationhad been put together with 250 worth of Council funding.

6 Ira B. Nadel attributes Stoppards continual distrust of biographical truth to his

own incomplete biography, caused as much by family silence as by the

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displacement brought by World War II. His life before England in

Czechoslovakia, Singapore, and India endured as an erasable inscription to his

English identity (158). Therefore, he argues, it is not surprising that, as in his

other plays, Stoppard also exhibits in Indian Ink a certain scepticism about

biography through playful jokes on the American academic.

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ABSTRACT: In his playIndian Ink(1995), Tom Stoppards juxtaposition of different time-

periods from colonial and postcolonial India and Britain to make past and present indis-

tinguishable, his collapsing of spatial particularities, and the insertion of conflicting con-

versations through a quite witty pastiche are elements that aim to dismantle rigid

boundaries between India and its empire and critique exclusionary identity politics inpost-imperial Britain, especially during the Thatcher years. Such engagement with the

colonial past places Indian Inkamong historical fictions that aim to destabilize colonialist

myths, examine contradictory outcomes of colonialism, and interrogate the impartial

claims of history. Yet, I argue in this article, that such strategies of representing colonial

history, which obscure questions of power that are germane to postcolonial societies,

remain inadequate for acknowledging the uneven outcomes of imperialism and transform

the play primarily into a theatrical show that represents the empire as a benign enterprise.

KEYWORDS: Indian Ink, India, colonial history, postcolonial diaspora, post-war British

drama, orientalism, nationalism



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