Indian actors are thrilled to be appearing in Tom Stoppard's play "Indian Ink," which just opened in San Francisco. But their deepest hunger is for scripts that reflect their contemporary lives -- not the age old stereotypes of the British Raj. PNS commentator Sandip Roy-Chowdhury is a film critic and contributing editor at "India Currents," a Bay Area magazine.

SAN FRANCISCO-- Anil Kumar is thrilled. He is working. On stage. And his part not only has lines, it is a meaty role. And for once, the young actor, who is of Indian origin, gets to play an actual Indian. "I learned more about my Indianness, my culture, in the past three weeks than in my whole life," he says excitedly.

He can be allowed a little hyperbole. After all, Tom Stoppard's "Indian Ink" is one of the only major English plays out there with roles actually written for Indians. "The best roles for Indian men in the canon" proclaims Kumar. Not just the stock ones, says Kumar's fellow performer, Shelly Desai, "mystic, yoga teacher, cab driver and cornershop owner."

In fact, Desai's role in "Indian Ink" isn't that far from a popular stereotype -- he plays a Rajah. And the entire play is about a very time-tested stereotype -- consumptive British poet Flora Crewe goes to hot tropical India and meets sensitive passionate dark Indian painter, Jatin Das. Cultures clash, history intrudes, tongues wag -- but no one quite knows what happened. Just like Adela Quested in those dark caves in Forster's "Passage to India" or dashing young Hari Kumar daring to love a British girl in Paul Scott's "Jewel In the Crown."

Stoppard, unlike Forster or Scott, has the advantage of hindsight. So he can cleverly play with the colonial experience by looking at it from the viewpoint of an obtuse academic in the 1980s trying to reconstruct it from the poet's letters and scattered personal effects. It's a clever ruse, and allows him to deliver both the romance of the Raj and poke fun at the attempts of stuffy academics to recreate it.

Yet at the end of the three hour production, despite the witty dialogue, I was left somewhat bemused. So this fictive British poet might have slept with this Indian artist. And maybe she posed nude for him. Should we care?

I guess we should. An elegant Caucasian man in finely pressed Indian clothes sat a few rows behind me with a big ruby-red bindi on his forehead, like some exotic raspberry Jello treat. He certainly did care. I hoped his outfit was part of some camp joke, but I had a dreadful feeling he was serious.

"Indian Ink" is not just a rare opportunity for actors like Kumar and Desai. It is also a chance for Indophiles of all persuasions to come out for an airing.

While "Indian Ink" does offer a chance to see several Indian actors come together on stage, in a twist of color-blind casting, an African-American actor Steven Anthony Jones gets to play an Indian theosophist. I wonder if that doesn't sting for some of the other Indians in the cast, especially the ones who get hardly any lines -- like the waiter at the club.

The actors are philosophical -- after all most of the time they play Latinos and other races -- "temporary Cubans -- anything we can pass for," says Desai. But Anil Kumar cannot keep the annoyance out of his voice as he talks about how invisible Indians are in the media. "How many times have you gone to a hospital and heard someone announcing 'Dr. Sharma, please report to the I.C.U.'? But do you ever see that on a show like E.R.?"

In the end, it boils down to Kumar's earnest plea, "We need the writing. We need the material. We can't depend on a predominantly Caucasian paradigm to provide it for us." Perhaps it is a sign of the South Asian immigrant community's coming of age that actors like Kumar are looking for stories that reflect their lives. Real stories -- contemporary stories, maybe even color-blind stories.

And hopefully when we get them, we won't need to rely on the largesse of a Czech-Englishman, no matter that he is hailed as a great playwright, to give Indian actors a chance to strut their stuff on stage. Then they can speak lines written with real Indian ink. Just ordinary Indian ink. Not colonial blue.