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Nil Darpan (The Indigo Mirror) History, Story, Author, Indigo Revolt, Theatre, Drama
Nil Darpan (The Indigo Mirror) History, Drama, Author, Influence in arts and theatre development in Bengal, The Story of Indigo Revolt 1859
Nil Darpan (Bengali: The Indigo mirror) is a Bengali play written by Dinbandhu Mitra in 1858–1859. The play was published from Dhaka in 1860, under a pseudonym of the author.
The play was essential to Nil videoro, better known as the Indigo Revolt of February–March 1859 in Bengal, when farmers refused to sow indigo in their fields to protest against exploitative farming under the British Raj.
It was also essential to the development of theatre in Bengal and influenced Girish Chandra Ghosh, who, in 1872, would establish The National Theatre in Calcutta.
The indigo plant, the original source of the dye used for bluing cotton textiles, formed the basis of a flourishing sector of commercial agriculture in Bengal by the beginning of the nineteenth century.
From the very outset, however, the ryots, that is, the tenant cultivators were made to grow indigo under much coercion, for the surplus appropriated by the planters, mostly Europeans, and the methods they used, made this crop most uneconomic for the producers.
A slump in the London prices of indigo between 1839 and 1847, the fall of the Union Bank of Calcutta, a consequent credit squeeze and the takeover of smaller concerns by larger ‘indigo seignories’ increased the pressure on the ryot and his misery still further.
