?It will make us friends?: Cultural Reconciliation in Tom Stoppard'sIndian Ink

Abstract

JT lay wright Tom Stoppard was born in the Czech Republic and grew up in Singapore, India, and England. His global origins have inspired a fascination with national identities, particularly the ways in which these identities are interrelated. In his recent drama, Indian Ink (1995), he suggests the promise and possibility of cultural reconciliation between English and Indian characters across two generations. Its two narratives set in the mid-1980s feature the literary scholar Eldon Pike collecting information in both England and India on the deceased English poet Flora Crewe for his edition of her Collected Letters, while her much younger sister, Mrs. Swan, living in London, interacts with both him and the son of Nirad Das, Anish, whose father had painted Flora many years ago in India. In the third plot strand, Flora travels to Jummapur, India in 1930 and tours the country while writing poems that would be published in her posthumous volume, Indian Ink (1932). Through depicting a series of aesthetic interchanges between Flora and Nirad Das in the past and the aesthetic exchanges between Mrs. Swan and Anish Das in the present, Stoppard demonstrates how these processes can heal the distrust fostered by decades of English colonial rule in India. His