Reinventing India through A quite witty pastiche: Reading Tom Stoppards Indian Ink

nandi bhatia

Tom Stoppards Indian Ink belongs 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 reverberating inwards on metropolitan society, turning the theatre into a multi1 cultural space for audiences (MacKenzie 21). Thus, the small space of the attic in Look Back in Anger where the protagonists of the play reside is analogous 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 recongured 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 explicit stage directions that the stage not be demarcated between England or India, or past or present. Even oor space, furniture, and other props

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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 artist during her travels in India in the 1930s, to call into question what he identies as the ethics of empire. To this end, Stoppard intertwines the central 2 action with numerous references to key colonial signposts: Macaulay, 3 Hobson-Jobson, Gandhi, protests and imprisonment, the Indian nationalist movement, and so on. These signposts provide an opportunity for reecting 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 a sign of violence, danger, and threat to British society. Such engagement with the colonial past places Indian Ink among historical ctions that aim to destabilize colonialist myths, examine contradictory 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 identied 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 labouring 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 signicant for its insistence on the need to attend to questions of power between various social groupings, collectivities, and institutions and has especial relevance for cultural reconstructions 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 critics committed 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 developments received signicant attention from black and Asian community organizations, civil liberties groups, activists, trade unions writers, critics, and lmmakers, who rendered visible questions of ethnicity, cultural difference, and the contradictory practices of the nation.

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However, postmodern ironies, jokes, wordplay, and the juxtaposition of conicting 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 generated 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 uidity 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 rendered nationalist modes of thinking obsolete, it appears to move beyond narrowly conceived nationalistic paradigms to provide, instead, a more complex analysis of the complicated interrelations between empire and colony. Yet the preoccupation with spatial erasures, the collapsing of temporal 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 histories 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 lms such as The Jewel in the Crown (1984), Gandhi (1982), and A Passage to India (1984), which fed into the mechanisms of the Raj nostalgia of the 1980s through the revival of memories of objects, characters, themes, and situations from the colonies. Among the plays many features, she identies 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 AngloAmerican public, schooled in the stereotypes about minorities that were normalized during the Reagan Thatcher 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 uncritical 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 cultural tourists in India during and after the empire, while the third (Mrs. Swan), is a colonial ofcials wife. In fact, the storyline sets up characters and situations 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 oppositional 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 portrayed through 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 identied 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 Ink thinking 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 questions regarding the connections between Indias imperial past and postimperial 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 colonial interests through a system of representative statements about oriental 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 da k bungalow, and so on. The several plot-lines also provide the contexts for the temporal and spatial shifts between 1930s India and 1980s Britain and between Royal 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 identies as the persistence of empire in political, social, and imaginative terms even after its formal retreat from India in 1947 (21 36). Stoppards awareness may be informed by the political critical debates that 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 play Borderline (1981), Harwant Bainss play Blood (1989), and Gurinder Chadhas lm 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 represent the inevitable fusion of cultures and also convey, through the rhythmic and lyrical energy of their creations, a sense of the political upheavals of the 1980s (Sharma, Hutnyk, and Sharma). Theatre groups such as Tara Arts questioned the implications for black immigrants of exclusionary denitions of the nation (see Verma 55 61). And British playwright Peter Brook attempted to counter narrow nationalistic paradigms through a cosmopolitan, 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 lms 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 lms disrupted the ideological biases of lms 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 energetic 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 India that 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 rst 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 the radio version of this play, In the Native State, he did admit that many of his ideas were derived from other peoples ctions. 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 identied 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 permanent 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 ght to drive out the British. This description is substantiated by Das himself, who tells Flora that he acquired all his knowledge 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 on Macaulay, 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 of imperialism. 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-India and 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 spectators unfamiliar with its local avours 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, Shakespearean texts, Emily Edens diary, and poetry readings to heighten the dramatic effect of the performance. For instance, terms such coolie and punkahwallah 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 (25 26). Instead, what the play 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 lite, and the be worn! English-model public schools for the children of the e 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. (60 61)

Dilips observations regarding the inability of Indians to shake off the hangover 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 ghters such as Gandhi dreamed of reinforces notions about the inability of Indians to govern themselves. This belief is shared by Stoppard himself who, as Fleming argues, nds it difcult 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 Ries (49) who had been awarded a ribbon for his part in World War II and given the Burma Star. This ex-soldier has three daughters, two of whom are unmarried, 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 problematic. 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 caricature of 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 characters from one era walking into another, the Indian soldier who fought for Britain and later made it his home disappears from the national consciousness of the post-imperial centre and from Stoppards play. A recent controversy 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 enact4 ment of power 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 signicant 5 piece of its colonial history (Row Erupts). And while Stoppard pays signicant attention to the poverty of the exsoldier in India, we nd 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 beneciaries 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 rst reminding him that the protest took the shape of a mango thrown at the Residents car, which belies any serious revolutionary potential, and then 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 themselves. Eric thats my husband would let them off with a small ne . . . and theyd be furious. (24)

The other moment occurs in Anishs rejoinder to Mrs. Swans playful assertion that the English were like Romans for Indians and, by implication, brought civilizational wealth to India. Taking the form of literary references, 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 postcolonial 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 literature 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 misdirected 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 particularly 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 threatened with rape and subsequent rejection by their families. Thus it deects attention from the role of the British in splitting the nation into India and Pakistan at the time of independence, over which imperialist historiography 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 ofcial 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 nationalisms multiple facets. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson asserts the need to acknowledge different kinds of nationalisms: an imperialistic, ofcial 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 genre of 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 importantly, the immigrant genre is marked by a curiously detached reading of the experience of homelessness. (171)

Given Stoppards migration and relocation from Czechoslovakia to Singapore, then to India, and nally 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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NANDI BHATIA 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. (17 18)

The tenor of the conversation, along with the responses of the two characters, as emphasized in the authors parenthetical notes, unsettles Mrs. Swan about the precise location of Anishs home. Mrs. Swans position is reective of what Hall (2000) calls a renewed form of imperialistic logic in multicultural Britain that tolerates the immigrant but, on the basis of cultural 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 presence 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 presence of people from the ex-colonies who serve as reminders of the enduring impact of Britains imperial past on its emotional, cultural, political, and demographic landscapes (Hesse 11). Yet Mrs. Swans attitude is somewhat protected by her age and role as hostess, and thus any serious critique of her views is always blunted (Fleming 218). Additionally, her announcement 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 owers. These items function as symbols of the high society to 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 preposterous argument and try to ll 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 paranoia towards Britains non-white minorities. As well, the witty exchanges between Flora and Nirad based on a vocabulary derived from Hobson-Jobson, the dictionary of Anglo-Indian terms

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produced during colonial rule for the benet 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 intermingling that took place between English and the languages of India (81), the Hobson-Jobson terms and phrases are lters through which Flora visualizes and constructs India for herself. Her version of India is a fantasy based on an imperialistic framework of knowledge that romanticizes 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 nds contemptible and in violation of her own idealized conception of Indian tradition and its rasas. She wants to experience India as a place that 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 orientalist 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 denes it. Like many Englishwomen who remained, according to Burton (2001), complicit with the empire, Flora both romanticizes India and falsies 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 conict and power dynamic that enables Flora to assert her linguistic authority. Rather, its linguistic referencing is a 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 colonial 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 lms such as Shakespeare Wallah (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 of A 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 epicentre of A Passage to India and have disastrous consequences for Aziz personally and for his reputation. Also of note is the similarity between Floras and Adela Questeds fascination with the real India, their relationships with Indian men, disdain for English arrogance in India, and simultaneous suspicion of Indians. Similarly, it is difcult 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 Ronnie Heaslop 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 similarities 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 circulate widely. It is noteworthy that Indian Ink was performed in prominent theatres in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. If anything, the carnivalesque elements of the play, the multiplicity of plots, voices, and situations, stie subaltern resistance even more than does A Passage to India, which at least gestures towards the threatening sts and ngers emerging from the Marabar Hills. Additionally, Forsters novel allows the reader to uncover alternative meanings in local festivals and in the collective cry for Mrs. Moore (heard as Esmiss Esmoore) outside the courtroom when Aziz is on trial for the charge of sexual assault brought by Adela Quested. 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 6 Crewe at the University of Texas. Stoppard casts Pike as the supercial and privileged cultural tourist who becomes an object of ridicule because of his literalism, academic juvenilia, and limited knowledge of India. The academic obsession with publishing criticism, asserts Stoppard, ruins the experience of literature and particularly of theatre. Stoppard expresses disdain for academics, saying that he is bothered by this American phenomenon . . . the sheer disproportionate scale of the enterprise [of critical 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 justied 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 providing 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)representations 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 servants 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 Ink functions 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 crossborder 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 the waiters call them Sir (see Lahiri 200 16). ongo s assertion that there is no perIf we are to heed Ngugi wa Th 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 conicts. 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 of irony 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 education 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 Indian languages which came into use during the British rule of India . . . [T]he dictionary has over 2,000 entries . . . many of which date to the rst contact with the Indian subcontinent, frequently in other non-English European languages. It was rst published in 1886, and in 1903, an index and extra quotations were added. ongo s analysis of the politics of performance 4 I am drawing here on Ngugi wa Th 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 installation had 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 play Indian Ink (1995), Tom Stoppards juxtaposition of different timeperiods from colonial and postcolonial India and Britain to make past and present indistinguishable, his collapsing of spatial particularities, and the insertion of conicting conversations through a quite witty pastiche are elements that aim to dismantle rigid boundaries between India and its empire and critique exclusionary identity politics in post-imperial Britain, especially during the Thatcher years. Such engagement with the colonial past places Indian Ink among historical ctions 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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