History can turn on a style of painting. Paintings can also be emissaries from one age to the next, clues in the puzzle of life, endlessly in need of decoding. Art historians might dream of writing like great historians and prose stylists, but in truth, as Nirad Das, the Indian painter in Tom Stoppard’s play Indian Ink suggests, where they might aspire to Dickens or Macaulay, their role model is more likely to be Agatha Christie.
Nirad Das’s confession is to Flora Crewe, a free-spirited experimental (that is, sex-obsessed) poet, whose mother died with her lover on the Titanic, who has had numerous lovers and argued with Gertrude Stein in Paris, and who now (1930) has decamped to India, to the imaginary “native state” of Jummapur, on the mistaken understanding that the warm weather would be good for her failing health (“Have you seen the English cemetery?”, she is asked).
Flora is giving lectures on English literature, composing poems, and writing letters to her younger sister, Eleanor. Not long after arriving in her guesthouse, a “Dak Bungalow” with a veranda, Nirad Das appears and offers to paint her portrait.
This production at the Hampstead Theatre is a revival marking thirty years since its premiere. Indian Ink began life as the radio play In a Native State. It was written by Stoppard for Felicity Kendal, who played Flora in the original radio and stage versions, and plays her surviving sister now – all the more moving in that the play was in part inspired by Kendal’s relationship with her own older sister, Jennifer, who died while still relatively young.
At the Hampstead Theatre, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis gives a thoroughly absorbing performance as Flora, perfectly capturing Edwardian manners, and with the occasional Flora-like departure from the script. “Oh fuck that’s good”, she says, when doused in water after a bout of heat-sickness. Gavi Singh Chera as Nirad Das plays brilliantly across from Serkis, their stage relationship evoking the very tender romance that, in its physical manifestation at least, is otherwise left to our imagination.
Time is collapsed into two moments, deftly evoked in Jonathan Kent’s production: India in 1930 and the garden of a bungalow in Shepperton in the mid-80s, where Flora’s sister, Eleanor, is being interviewed by Eldon Pike, an American academic involved in publishing Flora’s collected letters, and angling to write her biography (“the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong”, Eleanor protests).
Pike is sycophantic and parasitic by turns, the archetypal obsessive academic whom Stoppard treats with Nabokovian disdain: “That is why God made poets and novelists”, Pike says, without a jot of self-irony, “so the rest of us can get published”.
Eleanor laments Pike’s meddling interest, and the legions of young women in America “doing” Flora Crewe. “Nobody gave a tuppence about her while she was alive except to get her knickers off”. After her death Flora was known only for her affairs with rich and famous writers (H. G. Wells got very little writing done when I was around, she says). She was painted by Modigliani, but the portrait was burnt in a bathtub in the Ritz by a jealous and short-lived fiancé.
The mismatch of Flora’s Bloomsbury freedoms and the rigid cultural codes of imperial India give the play much of its energy. She plays a round of Hobson-Jobson with Nirad Das, composing sentences with as many Anglo-Indian words as possible. She is invited to the English club and sees the real shabbiness of the imperial brigade – “I wouldn’t trust some of them to run the Hackney Empire”.
Indian Ink captures this shabbiness, but the focus is more on mutual admiration, love even, between India and England, although it is only the Indians, represented by Nirad Das, who seem to have any depth of knowledge of the other’s culture. “Yes it’s a disaster for us!”, says Dilip, a professor of English in an Indian university who is helping Pike on his research in the contemporary part of the play, “Fifty years of Independence and we are still hypnotised!”.
Flora’s unofficial minder, the “clean Englishman” Durance, proposes marriage while they are out riding, and is flatly turned down. The scenes in the English residence are grimly awkward, and you want Durance off the stage (for his character, rather than the acting), just as Flora wants the British out of the Indian artistic mind, urging Nirad Das to paint in his “own” style of painting.
It is for Das to explain that this would mean the tradition of miniature painting in watercolours inherited from the Mughal empire, and which in the 1930s had for decades been compromised by English-run art schools promoting a western, academic style of naturalism. The first portrait Das makes of Crewe is done with Winsor & Newton oil paint in the western style. The second, “secret” painting is made using his own “authentic” voice.
It might be a narrow view of Indian painting that it should be done in ink and watercolour in a flattened, decorative style, and that oil paint is the preserve of the world west of Suez. It is a knot in a play which makes no strong statements about colonialism, recording, rather than condemning privilege and prejudice. Traditions mix and mingle and art moves on. There were of course good Indian painters, such as Ravi Varma, who painted in oil – although the problem with this “influence”, it might be said, was the timing, the British establishing art schools in India just as the dull-minded pre-Raphaelites were at their zenith.
And yet traditionalism is also a matter of personal authenticity, of staying true to one’s own environment, part of a much wider feeling in Stoppard’s work of the importance of independence, of self-confidence, of remaining in one’s “native state” (V. S. Naipaul was on Stoppard’s reading list for Indian Ink).
It is a view that provokes the most moving speech in the play, Nirad Das describing the great tradition of Indian poetry and painting:
[…] I am Rajasthani. Our art is narrative art, stories from the legends and romances. The English painters had the Bible and Shakespeare, King Arthur… We had the Bhagavata Purana, and the Rasikpriya which was written exactly when Shakespeare had his first play. And long before Chaucer we had the Chaurapanchasika, from Kashmir, which is poems of love written by the poet of the court on his way to his execution for falling in love with the king’s daughter, and the king liked the poems so very much he pardoned the poet and allowed the lovers to marry.[…]
But the favourite book of the Rajput painters was the Gita Govinda….
The story of Radha from the Gita Govinda, a twelfth-century Hindu poem telling of the love of Krishna for Radha, a milkmaid, inspires Nirad Das to paint the portrait of Flora, undressed, in the “old Rajasthani” style.
The painting is revealed to Eleanor by Nirad Das’s son, Anish (also a painter), who visits Eleanor in her garden in Shepperton, hot on the heels of Pike (“Having an artist to tea was beyond my fondest hopes for my dotage”). Eleanor already has Nirad Das’s first “western” painting of Flora, which is on the cover of the Pike- edited collected letters. Anish’s second painting reveals their true relationship.
Beyond all the plot twists, snappy and informative dialogue, and wonderfully jolting misunderstandings, it is the intimacy and tenderness of the relationship between Flora Crewe and Nirad Das that stands at the heart of Indian Ink. It is a feeling echoed in the Rajput miniature paintings that, with exquisite tact, we never actually see (and also in the enchanting music scored here by Kuljit Bhamra).
We are left with the ineffability of art – the rasa that Nirad Das describes as the essence of Indian painting: “Rasa is what you must feel when you see a painting, or hear music; it is the emotion which the artist must arouse in you”(Stoppard learned the term by chance browsing in a second-hand bookshop on the Tottenham Court Road). Nirad Das is deeply read and cultured, and Flora learns more from him than the other way around. It is this sense of mutual admiration that emerges throughout the play, empathy overriding politics.
That the play ends with Felicity Kendal as Eleanor standing at her sister’s grave is a remarkable moment of art and life coming together, memorializing and illuminating by turns. Flora, standing opposite Eleanor over her gravestone, has the final word: “Perhaps my soul will stay here as a smudge of paint on paper …”, leaving us to reflect on how history can turn on a painting: how an image can link moments in time and, as Stoppard so beautifully and movingly suggests, how the world continues just as before, and yet somehow forever changed, when an artist dies.
John-Paul Stonard’s most recent books are Creation and Chatsworth, Arcadia, Now, 2021. His next, The Worst Exhibition in the World, will be published this year.
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