Tom Stoppard’s play Indian Ink was written in 1995 on the basis of his 1991 radio play In the Native State. It deals with Britain and India in the 1930s and 1980s, which means the setting of the play includes the colonial India under the control of the British Empire, the post-colonial India and Britain. In an interview with BBC Radio in 1991, he said that he wanted to “write about the Empire, and more particularly the ethics of empire.” This article examines the embodiment of the ethics of empire in this play and its relationship to Stoppard’s view of the empire.
Das, an Indian painter, is a typical example of the Indian interpreters whom Thomas Macaulay, a 19th century British politician, insisted on nurturing during the colonial period. Das likes to read the British literature and is fascinated with the British culture, even though he has never been to Britain. Stoppard causes him to metamorphose into a nationalistic activist as his relation with Flora, an British poetess, becomes deeper. However, the relation between Flora and Das highlights the unequal power relationship in a matrix where a dominant culture rules over a minority culture. Flora’s scandalous, ambivalent, and even sensual character also makes the transformation of Das less persuasive.
The conversation between Anish, Das’ son, and Mrs. Swan, Flora’s sister, often shows the conflict reflecting the acute relations between the British Empire and colonial India, even though it takes place in the 1980s. Mrs. Swan’s nationalistic opinion that the British Empire aided India’s development is a very biased one. That is why she is called “the defender of colonialism” and her opinion reflects lingering remnants of British imperial thinking about India and Indians. Of further interest in this play is the presence of Anish. Having come to Britain to study painting, he married a British woman and has been living in Britain. As compared with his father who stayed in India all his life, Anish displays the cosmopolitan traits resulting from his diasporic existence.
According to Richard Russell, Stoppard attempts in this play to establish a new notion of mixed and cosmopolitan Englishness, which results in a reconfigured English identity. In contrast, Antoinette Burton says Indian Ink represents “a return to and ultimately a disavowal of the end of empire” and John Fleming’s analysis is that this play is mostly written from “a privileged perspective, one that regrets Britain’s leaving India.”When he decided to write about the ethics of the British Empire, Stoppard began from a biased perspective, one from which he justifies the empire and colonialism. It might be said that his biased perspective about this play is unexpected, particularly when we think of his liberal and progressive views on political repression and human rights problems in Eastern European countries in the latter part of 1970s and 1980s. In Indian Ink, Stoppard’s biased (British-oriented) perspective on the colonial policy of the British Empire toward India shows a lack of political and social consistency as a playwright.