The Edusites Guide to Tom Stoppard’s ‘Indian Ink’
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Synopsis and Overview
In 1930 Flora Crewe, an English upper- class socialite and poet, travels to India where she believes the hot weather will be good for her developing tuberculosis. She is 35, a model, a communist and her poetry has become controversial because of its open sexuality. She stays for five days in the town of Jummapur ‘up from Bombay’. She is on her way further north but has a speaking engagement on ‘London Literary Life’ to the local Theosophical Society at the home of Mr. Coomaraswami, its President.
Theosophy was popularised in the late C19th and early C20th by Madame Blavatsky (see the references to “Bagpipe Music’ later). It was supposed to reveal the eternal secrets and cohering forces of all world religions together in one set of beliefs: principally Buddhism, Christianity and Hinduism. It is important here because it provides a controversial venue for Flora’s lecture and, later, when it is closed down because the British authorities worry that it is a nest of rebellion. History has not decided on whether it was a genuine attempt at theological and philosophical enquiry for the betterment of mankind: or a complete fake.
Amongst the people she meets are Nirad Das, a local amateur artist who starts a portrait of her; David Durance the Junior Political Agent whose proposal of marriage she refuses; and the local ruler, the Rajah, who treats her to ‘tiffin’ (here a generous ‘light meal’) and a cavalcade of his fleet of over eighty luxury…
