Reinventing India through “A quite witty pastiche”: Reading Tom Stoppard's Indian Ink
2009; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3138/md.52.2.220
ISSN1712-5286
Autores Tópico(s)Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East
ResumoIn his play Indian Ink (1995), Tom Stoppard's juxtaposition of different time-periods from colonial and postcolonial India and Britain to make past and present indistinguishable, his collapsing of spatial particularities, and the insertion of conflicting 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 fictions 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.
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