The dream of Darjeeling: How Tom Stoppard’s childhood in India forged the playwright

Finally home after a fraught begining

Stoppard was born Tomáš Sträussler in 1937 in Zlín, then in Czechoslovakia. His family fled the Nazi invasion for Singapore and, after the Japanese attack there, were evacuated again, this time to India.

“I was in India between the age of four and the age of eight,” said Stoppard, reflecting on the years spent in Cawnpore, Lahore, Calcutta, Bhattanagar and finally Darjeeling. These were the years he remembered for the comfort it brought him after a tumultuous start to life.

“The one sense of self which I did not have as a child in India was that something tragic had happened to me,” he said. The tragedy was there nevertheless. His father, Eugen, was killed during the war; his mother later remarried a British officer, Kenneth Stoppard, whose name the young Tomáš eventually took. But none of that defined his childhood as he remembered it.

A landscape that returned in dreams

Stoppard has often resisted autobiographical readings of his work. Yet at Jaipur he allowed that India shadowed his interior life more strongly than he had ever suggested in public. “I used to dream about India for years… waking up with a sense of great regret that I was no longer in the dream,” he said.

When he returned to Darjeeling decades later to write about those years, the experience was familiar and alien at the same time. In one of his driest, most Stoppardian observations, he noted the town’s only perceptible change: “It used to smell of ponies and now it smelled of Land Rovers.”

The most intimate recollection he offered was of a school corridor in Darjeeling, at Mount Hermon. There, walking with one hand sliding along a ridge on the wall, he experienced a sudden, almost metaphysical calm. “Wherever I looked, nothing was wrong… Everything was all right and would always be,” he remembered.

“My childhood in India, generally speaking, felt like a piece of good fortune,” he said.

He later transplanted that sensation into a play. That uncertainty, the memory absorbed so deeply it dissolved into his art, says much about the forces that shaped his imagination long before he began mapping it onto the stage.

Affection, revision, and the Raj

Among the play’s themes is the contrast of Indian and European styles of poetry and visual art.

Discussing Indian Ink, his 1995 play entwining British and Indian histories, Stoppard spoke of his ambivalence in revisiting the colonial past through the lens of his own childhood. “It’s actually one of my favourites because I have a huge feeling about India. Complicated feeling,” he said.

He added, “If I were writing the play again… I would have to take account of whatever has entered my consciousness since.”

That consciousness increasingly included the discovery, made in the 1990s, that he was fully Jewish and that all four of his grandparents had been murdered in the Holocaust, revelations that ultimately led to Leopoldstadt, one of his most personal and searching works.

A career that spanned continents, ideas, and centuries

The rest of Stoppard’s life was spent in England, where his career unfolded. He is remembered for the philosophical comedy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the emotional and formal daring of The Real Thing, the lush intellectual architecture of Arcadia, and the panoramic sweep of The Coast of Utopia.

He won Tony Awards, an Academy Award for Shakespeare in Love, and a reputation as the most erudite playwright of his era.