Tom Stoppard died in England, the country he once described as a coat he put on at eight and never took off. The label inside that coat, though, might as well have read: “Made in Zlín. Fitted in Singapore. Lined in Darjeeling.”

In India, we have a touching habit of adopting anyone who has once broken a sweat on our soil as “basically one of us.” Tom Stoppard is not ours in any literal sense, but the idea isn’t entirely outlandish.

To London and New York he was a ubiquitously adulated playwright: a mainstay of the National Theatre and the West End, a knight, an Oscar winner, an apparently inexhaustible source of cricket lines and Pinter anecdotes. He had made the English-speaking stage a place where rapid talk and large ideas shared the same few square feet of floorboard. The plots moved quickly, the scenes were full of jokes, but the mechanism underneath was set to questions of time and chance, of how language clarifies and misleads, of what happens when private feeling collides with public history. The arguments did laps round the stage in disguise; audiences thought they were keeping up with the quips and only later realised they had been handed a set of problems.

All of that was true. None of it accounts for why this famously enviable, beautiful man kept returning, in life and in art, to a corridor in a hill-station school where, as a boy, he trailed a finger along a raised edge on the wall and felt the absolute, unjustifiable certainty that “everything was all right and would always be all right.” He later fed that private flash into his 1973 radio play Where Are They Now?, whose narrator treats childhood happiness as a comprehensive “state,” the sort of unverifiable claim Stoppard spent five decades interrogating through jokes, paradoxes and epistemological traps.

The corridor mattered because it was his first experience of safety, and safety, for him, happened to come from his brief time in the Himalayas. Telling that story is not, however, an attempt to smuggle Stoppard into the vast and unruly category of “Indian writers who happened to live elsewhere.”

A boy in Darjeeling

Tom Stoppard arrived in India as Tomik Sträussler, a four-year-old Czech refugee. India was already his second refuge. In 1939 his parents left Zlín for Singapore, part of a transfer arranged by the Bata shoe company, which was moving staff out of occupied Czechoslovakia as German pressure intensified. Then the Japanese forces closed in on Singapore in early 1942 and the Bata community had to be evacuated in haste.

Marta Sträussler and her two sons sailed for India and docked in Bombay on St. Valentine’s day of 1942. His father, Eugen, being a physician, left later, among the last Bata employees to be evacuated. The ship was sunk by Japanese forces off Sumatra on a day before his family’s arrival in Bombay. News of what had happened did not reach the families in India. In Nainital, where the Bata wives and children were housed together in a large rented building, the women sent a joint telegram to the Czechoslovak government in exile in April, asking for information about husbands from whom they had heard nothing for months. By then Eugen Sträussler was already dead.

Marta eventually moved from Nainital to Darjeeling via Lahore, where she took over management of the local Bata shoe shop. Her sons were sent up the hill to Mount Hermon, an American Methodist boarding school whose first premises happened to occupy a house called Arcadia. Years later he gave this name to his most intricate play, Arcadia, set in a Derbyshire country house where two centuries of inhabitants, from a teenage mathematical prodigy to modern academics, circle the same questions about desire, landscape and entropy, and about how much of the past can ever be recovered from the scraps it leaves behind.

Stoppard lived in India from the age of four until a little over eight, leaving at the beginning of 1946. It was the first country that gave him clear, continuous memories of childhood. Darjeeling was the first landscape he remembered. Kanchenjunga, “lit like theatre,” floated in the sky when the mist lifted, so solid and so improbable that everything else seemed trivial beside it. He bought The Dandy and The Beano near the Capitol Cinema. At school, on a fir tree, he and his brother carved their initials while waiting for Sunday visits from their mother. He was the “famous triangulist” in the school band, a detail he later used in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, his Cold War piece with André Previn in which a political prisoner shares a cell with a man who hears an orchestra in his head, while an actual orchestra sits on stage. The title, functioning as both joke and accusation, is the mnemonic for EGBDF – a schoolchild’s way of remembering the notes on the musical stave.

India, for Stoppard, was a “lost domain of uninterrupted happiness”, which felt “familiar and safe”. Europe, by contrast, barely existed for him as a feeling. “I had enormous nostalgia for India, and no emotional feeling for Europe at all,” he said later. The railway of his life, he liked to say, began properly when his mother married an English major in Calcutta soon after the War, became Bobby Stoppard, and shipped the family to England.

By then, the boy had learned two things that never left him. First, that chance rules the plot. If the Sträusslers had caught a different ship, or Bata had favoured dismissal over transfer for its Jewish doctors, there would be no Sir Tom to write about – perhaps only another émigré Czech writer wrestling with identity in exile, ending up somewhere near Kundera on the bookshelf. Second, that safety can sit on the edge of catastrophe and still feel like happiness. That is India in his imagination: not an idyll, but a remembered pocket of security whose unreliability he understood and whose warmth he never disowned.

Becoming Tom Stoppard

For a long time, India remained with him as a sensory residue: heat, dust, smell and sound, rather than narrative fuel. To the small Czech schoolboy, the gum-chewing American officers in the bazaar were more exotic than the Nepali porters or Tibetan traders. The theatre that formed him came later, and came from England. His true university was the Bristol Old Vic in the late 1950s, where Peter O’Toole’s performances in Man and Superman, Waiting for Godot (“I was immobilised for weeks after I saw it”) and Hamlet, together with the shock of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, worked as what he later called a “delayed fuse” on his desire to write plays.

Beckett showed him that jokes and metaphysics could share the same bare boards; O’Toole’s dark, scrawny Hamlet showed him that Shakespeare could be as exciting as anything new. The talk-drunk absurdities of N.F. Simpson and James Saunders, plays that made the irrational feel perfectly reasonable, told him something equally seductive: he might be able to do it too. The success of that generation, and the noise around it, gave him the ambition he was honest about: “I’d like to be famous.”

In the early 1960s he was a provincial journalist in Bristol who spent his evenings trying to write something that would last longer than tomorrow’s paper. A stretch of apprenticeship followed: short stories, a novel, radio pieces, plays that nearly worked and then had to be taken apart. His first full-length play, A Walk on the Water, went out on television in 1963 and immediately embarrassed him. Its ageing dreamer, George Riley, owed more than a little to his stepfather, Kenneth Stoppard, then a frustrated salesman who believed that to be born English was “first prize in the lottery of life” and who could not fathom why his clever stepson wanted to live among “arty types”. Stoppard later rewrote the piece as Enter a Free Man. 

With radio, at the BBC he found a form that rewarded formal tricks and quick thinking. Albert’s Bridge won the Prix Italia in 1968. The real break, though, came with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. A student production at Edinburgh in 1966 drew a single ecstatic notice; the National Theatre asked to see the script, and within a year, it was on the Old Vic stage and then on the way to Broadway. When an American interviewer asked what the play was “about”, he said it was about to make him rich.

Also read: British Playwright Tom Stoppard Dies Aged 88

What it did, lastingly, was to mark out his territory. He took two “attendant lords” from Hamlet and gave them the kind of inner life like Eliot’s Prufrock, the man who knew he was “not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.” Shakespeare’s plot stayed, but the focus moved to the edge of the frame, where two baffled courtiers kill time with coin-tossing, word games and bad information while the great events of tragedy keep happening just offstage. They knew, dimly, that their fate was written elsewhere and that probability had deserted them, yet kept arguing as if that might save their situation. Nearby, a shabby touring troupe treats death as a matter of stagecraft and exits as a practical matter of cues and timing. It was Beckett with better jokes and a visible script on the table: a world in which language is all you have to go on, and even that cannot quite be trusted.

Rosencrantz confirmed what he could do: supply an Elizabethan spear-wielder with interiority at the edge of the plot, enough to carry a play. It also set the pattern for the next fifty years, in which his characters would go on asking the wrong questions and suspecting that they had been written into someone else’s story. 

Then came Jumpers, Travesties, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, The Real Thing, Arcadia – the durable sequence that defined his middle years. By the late 1980s he was the person you meant if you said “the theatre of ideas” and did not have to explain yourself.

The driving force behind the Stoppardian stage was a delightful perversity: the cheerful habit of burying serious contradictions under high farce and verbal fireworks. His style, running on a double engine of philosophical fencing and music-hall routine, thrived on high-low incongruity: logic beside low comedy, schoolboy jokes next to scientific digressions, and a theorem punctuated by a pratfall. He liked folding abstruse subjects into theatrical shenanigans, never hiding his affection for outrageous puns and comic confusions, sometimes carrying a gleefully sexual undertone. He described his working method as an "endless leapfrog down the great moral issues," where you put a view, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and then rebut the refutation, indefinitely and with pleasure. He liked to say that writing dialogue was "the only respectable way of contradicting yourself," and he built a career out of proving it. This taste for antithesis sprang from a life loosened early from a fixed history, providing him the licence to invent. The contradictions were real; the jokes, brilliantly executed, were the camouflage.

'I’ve got India'

Within all that, India sat somewhere underneath. “I’ve got India,” he would say. In the practical argot of a professional writer it meant he possessed experience that no one else in his club could quite counterfeit. It also meant he suspected he was dodging it.

When India finally surfaced, it did so with his characteristic inversion of sequence, appearing on the page before it appeared before his eyes. He wrote the radio play In the Native State before his return journey to India in 1990–91. The fictional “native state” of Jummapur had been sketched in full before he travelled to Madras, Jaipur, Delhi and Darjeeling to verify the colours of his mind. 

Stoppard’s India was filtered through Anglo-Indian prose. He read Forster, Emily Eden, Naipaul, Nirad Chaudhuri, Hobson-Jobson. Critics of the “write what you know” school would find this rather annoying, but he cheerfully admitted that his knowledge of how Indians in the 1930s spoke and behaved was “derived from other people’s fictions.” What he trusted from his own childhood were memories of temperature, light, the feel of a room; atmosphere, not anthropology.

In the Native State, and its stage incarnation Indian Ink, are the harvest of that instinct. Both were written for Felicity Kendal, whose own Indian childhood made her the nearest thing he had to a mirror in casting. The radio script is dedicated to her; the stage play to her late mother, with the bond between sisters in the play doubling as a consolation for Kendal’s loss of her elder sister – Jennifer. Outwardly the story is about an English poet, Flora Crewe, and an Indian painter, Nirad Das, in a fictional princely state in 1930. Inwardly it is about how a life refuses to be written down, even by the people closest to it.

Unique in his oeuvre, this play is distinguished by its palpable eroticism and emotional tenderness. Stoppard began with a simple formal conceit: a poet and a painter, each making a work about the making of the other’s work. While Das paints Flora, she writes a poem about being painted; the poem alters the atmosphere in the studio, and that altered atmosphere enters the portrait. As the scenes go on, her clothes come off and the play circles a secret image: a nude Englishwoman rendered as a Rajasthani miniature of sexual delight. He worked harder on Flora’s poems than on almost any other verse in his plays, revising them again and again; this was the one time he allowed himself to insert his private wish to be a poet into the script.

Midway through the writing, Stoppard wandered into a Tottenham Court Road bookshop, picked up B. N. Goswamy’s Essence of Indian Art, and discovered rasa, the classical, hard-to-define term from Indian aesthetics. He seized on it, and attributed the intervention to “the God of Playwrights.” In the play, Das explains to Flora that rasa is not in the painting itself but in the feeling it arouses; that there are nine rasas; and that the one that matters here is shringara, erotic love, summoned by “the moon, the scent of sandalwood, or being in an empty house.” The heat, the illness pressing on Flora’s lungs, the flirtation that may or may not become an affair—everything in Indian Ink is awash with shringara. The politics of the 1930s are present and explicit, but the dominant key is erotic and aesthetic rather than polemical.

As a radio play, In the Native State shifts between India in 1930 and England decades later, worrying at how far the past can be recovered by painting, letters and biography. In its theatre version, Indian Ink, 1930 Jummapur and a cooler mid-1980s present share the same stage: heat, politics and the machinery of the Raj set against the cardigans of researchers and widows. Flora is dead; her younger sister Eleanor lives in Surrey with prayer wheels on the sill and a mind that has never quite left the Himalayas. Flora has become a feminist icon with a Collected Poems; Eleanor is proud and mildly cross that her sister “missed it all.” The arguments about empire and independence pass between her and Anish Das, the painter’s son – Mutiny versus First War of Independence, “made you a proper country” versus “we were up to date when you were a backward nation” – without tilting towards one or the other.

At the centre of Indian Ink is a joke aimed at his own profession. Eldon Pike, Flora’s tireless American editor, is the “wrong-headed recorder” who tries to reconstruct her life from smudged poems and half-legible notebooks. He prefers an unfinished portrait because a completed one is like a “stopped clock,” then builds an elaborate but entirely wrong theory out of a second, secret miniature of Flora in the nude. “This is why God made poets and novelists, so the rest of us can get published,” he exclaims on learning a crucial fact. “Biography,” Mrs Eleanor Swan tells him, “is the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong.” Since Rosencrantz had made him famous Stoppard had watched his own life flattened into neat origin stories. India gave him the right setting to make that unease comic. 

Around these structures he allows himself a linguistic game that reaches back to his own schoolboy ears. Flora and Das share a running joke about Anglo-Indian words, a parody of Hobson-Jobson that lets him enjoy a register he has known since childhood:

Flora: While having tiffin on the verandah of my bungalow I spilled kedgeree on my dungarees and had to go to the gymkhana in my pyjamas looking like a coolie.

Nirad Das: I was buying chutney in the bazaar when a thug who had escaped from the choky ran amuck and killed a box-wallah for his loot, creating a hullabaloo and landing himself in the mulligatawny.

The exchange is a joke about language and about power. Flora mocks his Anglophilia and urges him, in art and in politics, to stop being grateful and start taking what is his. He, in turn, teaches her how much of his “double” education – vernacular school and English boarding – has left him split between Macaulay and the Bhagavata Purana. The play’s instruction works both ways and the politics remain clear. But they are carried, as so often with Stoppard, by jokes, stories and the stubborn gaps that no amount of fact-gathering can quite close.

The criticism of the play was not entirely misplaced. Stoppard’s India, like Forster’s, which hovered over him like a ghost, is a carefully lit set, not ITO at rush hour. He never pretended otherwise. What rescues the play from becoming a heritage postcard is the double awareness it carries. First, that his “lost domain of uninterrupted happiness” is childish, partial and selfish. Second, that it is nonetheless genuine. An eight-year-old Czech boy at boarding was not morally obliged to anticipate Partition. When Mrs Swan insists that the British “made you a proper country,” he lets an Indian character puncture the line. When Nirad Das speaks in passable English about Byron and the Blue Guide, Stoppard understands that this is also how colonial schooling worked. He writes both sides of the conversation and trusts the audience to notice who is winning.

The slow fish called grief

Indian Ink does illuminate the core of Stoppard. His political nerve was not driven by nostalgia for the Raj, but by a deep anti-totalitarian instinct. He came to the conclusion that he was a “lucky man, leading a charmed life,” a phrase suffused with half gratitude, half guilt. This settled suspicion of tidy ideals and of any politics that claimed to know, in advance, what was best for everyone grew from that nerve rather than from love of hierarchy. He kept faith instead with a single principle: that free speech and due process are the only reliable defences against the knock on the door. That is why so much of his public life was spent in the work of advocacy—writing articles and letters for Amnesty International and PEN, lending his celebrity to the cause of Soviet Jews refused exit visas, and turning up whenever Václav Havel or the Belarus Free Theatre needed someone in London to say, in a good suit and with good jokes, that censorship is terror conducted in anticipation.

The play’s function as a mirror of biographical failure is a theme through Stoppard’s career. The same unease about how lives are written down shapes his great late play about A.E. Housman, The Invention of Love. Housman had wandered through Indian Ink in passing – the Resident tells Flora he was taught by him at Trinity – but here he is at the centre, split in two. A seventy-seven-year-old AEH looks back on his younger self, the romantic undergraduate whose life breaks on an unrequited love for his friend Moses Jackson. Stoppard is drawn to the doubleness: the chilly, pernickety Latinist who believes in “useless knowledge for its own sake” and the poet of A Shropshire Lad, whose lyrics carry all the feelings he will not admit aloud. 

In The Invention of Love the biographical game becomes explicit. Oscar Wilde is brought on as Housman’s foil, the man who “made my life into my art,” set against the scholar who seems to have done the reverse. Wilde supplies Stoppard with one of his sharpest definitions of the problem: “Biography is the mesh through which our real life escapes.” The play suggests that Housman’s apparent failure in love is also the condition of his success. The grief is sublimated into scholarship and into poems. 

Elsewhere in his work the same tension occurs under very different surfaces. Arcadia turns landscape gardening, translation and thermodynamics into a quiet tragedy about irretrievable time. Leopoldstadt, his last play, is the moment when he finally looks straight at the family history he had avoided for most of his life. Only in late middle age, nudged by Hermione Lee’s questions and his own enquiries, did he uncover the list of camps – Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, Riga – in which his grandparents and aunts were murdered. Leopoldstadt is his answer to that knowledge, a grave turning of his powers towards Jewish memory and the question of what it means to have spent a lifetime passing, gratefully, as something else.

The source of his dramatic form could be traced into his foreignness, which was also in some sense a gift. As one director told Kenneth Tynan,“ you have to be foreign to write English with that kind of hypnotised brilliance.” Stoppard had been “made British,” and given a new name. In India he was neither British nor Indian, a marginal presence in the world of the Raj, neither sahib nor subject. In England he lived for decades as an exemplary Englishman who had half-forgotten that he was also a Czech Jew. That in-betweenness – between countries, between languages, between the story on his passport and the one in the archives – was his first training in the incurable tendency to see both sides of every argument. The entirety of his dazzling output, from the logical pirouettes of Jumpers to the tragic geometry of Arcadia, was rooted in that deep emotional contradiction. He liked to borrow Christopher Hampton’s line, “I’m a man of no convictions – at least, I think I am,” as a motto. Yet when he tried to describe what lay underneath the wit, he reached not for an argument but for an image he had once recognised in a James Saunders monologue and never quite let go of:

“There lies behind everything... a certain quality which we may call grief. It’s always there below the surface, just behind the facade. Sometimes... you can see dimly the shape of it as you can see sometimes through the surface of an ornamental lake the outline of a carp... The name of this quality is grief.”

The ornamental lake of his life has, somewhere beneath the witty ripples, a slow fish called grief. India was the place where the fish was first invisible, and the place he later went to look underneath.

When he finally went back to India, in his fifties, he did what he usually did with sentiment: turned it into a joke. He wrote of the trip as “a rueful comic meditation on the impossibility of going home again.” The Bata shop in Darjeeling that had paid for his mother’s survival, and, indirectly, his English education, was now a blackened shell. Mount Hermon looked tired. The fir tree where he and Peter had carved their initials had been cut down years earlier.

He came back more than once after that, to Prithvi Theatre, later as a serial grandee of the Jaipur Literature Festival, bemused to find himself on a lawn in Rajasthan answering questions about Hamlet and Bollywood. But remained, as ever, sceptical about “knowing” India.

Nikhil Kumar is an independent writer.

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.