![]() She wants to shower, but the running water is broken, so Das helps her bathe with a jug of water. She admits that she has come to India because she is dying (likely of tuberculosis). ![]() When he tries to destroy his canvas portrait, too, he and Flora start fighting over it-but she quickly collapses in exhaustion. Meanwhile, Pike and his friend Dilip show up in Jummapur in search of information about Flora-especially a lost watercolor portrait of her in the nude by Das.īack in 1930, Das tears up his pencil sketch of Flora because he’s insulted that she didn’t say anything when he showed it to her. In the 1980s, Eleanor Swan tells Anish Das that Eldon Pike’s footnotes to Flora’s poems and letters are highly unreliable. Meanwhile, during their painting sessions, Das and Flora chat about politics, the Hindu story of Radha and Krishna’s love affair, and the concept of rasa (or the emotional “essence” of a work of art). She finds him pompous and distasteful, but she agrees. The same day, Captain David Durance visits Flora’s house unannounced and asks her to dinner at the official British Residency. (In fact, Eleanor’s husband was a British army officer who was long stationed in India.) Anish explains that he’s a painter, just like his father, and Eleanor agrees to let him sketch her.įifty years before, Flora and Das also discuss the budding Indian nationalist movement-Das supports it but is afraid to say too much and incriminate himself to an Englishwoman. Anish and Eleanor get into a heated political argument: he believes that the British Empire exploited and impoverished India, while she views it as the best thing to ever happen there-and thinks that Anish’s father deserved jail time for opposing it. Later, Anish Das visits Eleanor and explains that his father, a little-known artist who was imprisoned for supporting Indian independence in 1930, painted the portrait on the cover of Eldon Pike’s Collected Letters of Flora Crewe. Das even gifts Flora a copy of Emily Eden’s colonial travelogue about India, Up the Country. But Eleanor Swan nonchalantly mentions that Modigliani once painted Flora, too.) Flora and Das struggle to communicate at first because of cultural barriers, but soon, they hit it off. (Eldon Pike is astonished when he learns this: there are no known portraits of Flora. ![]() She agrees, and he starts biking to her bungalow to paint her as she writes. She strikes up a conversation with the painter Nirad Das, who asks if he can paint her portrait. She is surprised to learn that her Indian audience knows almost everything about the London literary scene. Coomaraswami, the Theosophical Society president, gives Flora a tour of Jummapur and hosts her lecture at his house. While Flora acts out the letters she wrote to Eleanor in 1930, Eleanor and Eldon Pike read the letters and discuss Flora’s legacy in the 1980s. ![]() The play begins with Flora Crewe arriving in Jummapur to speak at the local Theosophical Society, which accommodates her in a sparse but functional old bungalow. ![]() In the other timeline, in the 1980s, Flora’s elderly sister, Eleanor Swan, meets with two men interested in Flora’s legacy: Eldon Pike, a literary critic who is compiling Flora’s letters and writing her biography, and Nirad Das’s son Anish, who wants to learn more about his father. Meanwhile, two other men also court Flora: a chauvinistic young English official, David Durance, and the elegant and extravagantly wealthy Rajah (king) of Jummapur. Das paints portraits of Flora as she writes poetry about sex, love, and India it’s never entirely clear whether they become lovers. In 1930, the fiery, controversial English poet Flora Crewe goes to the fictional city of Jummapur, India, where she meets Nirad Das, a brilliant, passionate local painter. Tom Stoppard’s play Indian Ink interweaves two storylines set more than 50 years apart. ![]()
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