A Postcolonial Perspective on the Ethics of Empire: Contextualizing Stoppard's Indian Ink

This paper examines Stoppard's stage play Indian Ink (1995) within the broad context of postcolonialism Reflecting on Stoppard's representation of the British Raj, the paper contextualizes Indian Ink by showing how it responds to previous dramatic representations of imperial India, with reference to David Edgar's Destiny (1976) and Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good (1988), as well as a series of film and television adaptations, mostly from the first half of the 1980s. Dealing with the ethics of the British imperialism, the play's scope is widened through recontextualizing earlier works of Anglo-Indian literature. This intertextuality is one of the dramatic devices used in the play to foreground its postcolonial perspective, along with doubling, the use of a character as a bridging role, and the motif of the Indian miniature painting. In conclusion, it is argued that Stoppard's British Raj play approaches the issue of the ethics of empire from a human, rather than political angle, offering an alternative perspective on colonial history in terms of mutually defining or culturally hybrid social identities, constructed around ambiguous encounters between its English and Indian characters.