Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink

In his 1995 stage play, Indian Ink, Sir Tom Stoppard offers an insightful examination of conflicting yet compassionate Anglo-Indian relations, set against a backdrop of the intertwining artistic and political narratives of 1930s India and those of India and England in the mid-1980s. Boundaries between the fictional and the factual dissolve, as the playwright vacillates between past and present, India and England, and cultural, artistic, and political lenses, focusing on Anglo-Indian paradoxes pertaining to colonial and post-colonial periods in the two countries. Using dovetailing as a dramatic device, Stoppard makes various cultural and artistic references in this play, along with frequent literary allusions to pre-existing Anglo-Indian and English literature. Philosophical and linguistic border-crossing is much in evidence, helping to strengthen the sense of paradox seen in the words of the characters and the setting of their lives. Thus, European and Indian artistic concepts mix freely, enhancing a realistic sense of the inconsistencies and confusions of Anglo-Indian history. Interweaving cross-cultural artistic and political exchanges, Stoppard’s multiple themes of the ethics of Empire, the relationship between art and politics, the nature of love, differences in individual perceptions, and the difficulty of recovering the past, combine to produce an atmosphere of ‘rasa’ (artistic and aesthetic inspiration) for the readers and the audience. This paper explores the ways in which Stoppard uses these themes and allusions to add extra theatrical dimensions to Indian Ink, as he explores the inter-personal and inter-national relationships resulting from assimilated and ambiguously shared cultural, artistic, historical, and political perspectives.