Nil Darpan : how a mistakenly published play helped force labour reforms in British India

Crisis

During the period of British rule of the majority of India, Calcutta was, for most of Britain’s reign, the nation’s capital. Kolkata, as it is called today, situated in Bengal on the banks of the Hooghly River, a tributary of the Ganges, is now the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. As the capital of British India, much of the anti-British sentiment that was expressed here by Bengalis set the tone for the rest of the country through Bengalis’ arts and politics. This includes patriotic, therefore implicitly anti-British, songs and plays.

Some native Bengali children, mostly boys at first, attended Christian missionary schools and colleges, where they learnt about, and were influenced by, western playwrights, especially UK playwrights, whose plays were crafted using a traditional five-act plot structure, ranging from Shakespeare to Shaw.

But what about outside of Calcutta in the rest of Bengal? As you might imagine, the land was chiefly rural and therefore chiefly agricultural. During the nineteenth century, a major cash crop in Bengal was indigo, the plant from which blue dye is made, and from which blue clothing was manufactured. Indigo imported from India made blue clothing highly fashionable, and England now had a corner on the blue fashion market. It was a win-win for everybody, except for the Indian indigo workers.

The British Raj welcomed foreign business interests, especially British business interests, to invest in Indian commercial endeavours. In the mid-nineteenth century, a group of British businessmen set up shop in rural eastern Bengal, now the nation of Bangladesh, and got into the indigo game by forming the British Indigo Planters Association. The word ‘planter’ is rather misleading. They weren’t there to work the fields, they were there as indigo dealers, to set up indigo processing plants and to offer incentives to Bengali landowners and labourers to grow indigo in addition to, or instead of, their usual staples like rice. So far, so good, at least for these British businessmen.

Keep in mind that the Sepoy Mutiny occurred in 1857. This rebellion was a watershed moment in Indian, and British, history. In broad strokes, sepoys were Indian soldiers who served in the vast private army of the British East India Company. Their violent uprising is remembered proudly by many Indians as the First War of Independence against the British. The rebellion started in the city of Meerut in the modern-day state of Uttar Pradesh and soon spread to other locales, including the garrison city of Lucknow in the same state. Unspeakable civilian atrocities were committed by both sides.

For Queen Victoria and her cohorts, the rebellion was their excuse to finally wrest control of India from the East India Company and administer it directly by setting up a satellite government there, giving birth to the British Raj, and allowing Queen Victoria to ultimately proclaim herself Empress of India.

Not everyone in England was happy about the hostile takeover of India. An article from a UK newspaper, the Glasgow Herald, relates part of a lecture given by one Dr Hunter entitled ‘The Resources of India’ in which he stressed:

Now that the rebellion is to all appearance put down in India, and peace restored, it becomes our duty to think seriously how that peace is to be permanently maintained, and the affections and sympathies of the natives of the country be gained; for there is no denying the fact that, for some time past, we have maintained our rule in India more by the power of our arms than by, or through, the affections of the people. ¹

The British Indigo Planters Association apparently did not get the memo on this suggested new approach to winning Indian hearts and minds. Soon after the Sepoy Mutiny, the Indigo Revolt took place in Bengal. It was an uprising by peasant farmers, who were called ryots, against cruel and oppressive tactics being systemically used by the British Indigo Planters Association to bring Indian labourers to heel. By most accounts, the revolt was relatively passive in terms of widespread acts of violence. Primarily, Bengali landowners and labourers boycotted the planting of indigo in an act of nonviolent resistance.

Legally under the Penal Code administered by the British Raj, Indians could not be forced to plant indigo, but far from Calcutta where police and courts were sparse, the British Indigo Planters Association became the law, including setting up their own jails within their factories, hiring criminals as their de facto police force, and kidnapping resisters to beat them into compulsory cultivation of indigo. Sexual assaults against Bengali women by their British bosses were also reported.

News of the Indigo Revolt regularly reached newspapers in the UK, but they offered a skewed account at best. For instance, the Western Daily Press in April of 1860 published a reprint from the British-owned Bengal Hurkaru based in Calcutta, in which the writer insists that the ryots were the cause of all the strife by strong-arming their fellow farmers into joining the boycott. ² Likewise, the Sheffield Daily News in January of 1859 reprinted an article from the Calcutta-based and British-owned Englishman newspaper in which the editors complain that the British army was being too kind to armed Indian factions still threatening the British army after the Sepoy Mutiny, and that Lord Clyde, who was commander-in-chief of the British forces of India during the Mutiny, was to blame for being too soft on Indians. ³

During the Indigo Revolt, these two British-owned Calcutta newspapers, The Englishman and the Bengal Hurkaru, the editors of which had close ties to the wealthy men running the British Indigo Planters Association, regularly wrote articles siding with their friends, depicting the ryots as unappreciative rabblerousers, troublemakers and thugs.

In the aftermath of the Indigo Revolt, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Sir John Peter Grant and his Secretary, Mr W. S. Seton-Karr, established an Indigo Commission to look into the ryots’ complaints and see what reforms, if any, ought to be enacted. The Commission placed a short announcement in Indian newspapers urging the public to share any knowledge regarding the condition of Bengali indigo workers with the Lieutenant-Governor’s office, and providing a mailing address in Calcutta. ⁴ I believe it represents a sincere effort by Sir John Peter Grant to let Indians know that they had his ear, and that he truly wanted to learn all he could about the causes of the revolt.

Not everyone was on his side. To wit, in June of 1860 the Hertford Mercury’s regular ‘India’ column reprinted a dispatch from the London Times’ Calcutta correspondent, who is very much on the side of the British planters and who paints native labourers as the troublemakers. The writer conspiratorially accuses the protesting farmers of being secretly controlled by:

a native junta, composed of wealthy Bengalees . . . which desires nothing less than the expulsion of the [British] indigo planter from Lower Bengal. To such an extent has this proceeded that the Lieutenant Governor . . . has determined no longer to delay the appointment of a committee which shall possess full powers to sift the question to its foundation . . . [I]t will contain representatives of every interest. The president, Mr. Seton Karr, is known as one of the ablest civilians in Bengal, as a really practical man, thoroughly acquainted with the indigo system. ⁵

The writer is referring of course to the start of the aforementioned Indigo Commission. ‘The committee’, the article continues, ‘would also consist of a Civil Servant . . . a British planter as representative of the indigo interest, [a missionary] on behalf of the ryots, [and] an Indian magistrate’ (emphasis added). The Commission was only missing one thing: any actual ryots. Who would speak for this largely illiterate, impoverished and uneducated population?

Enter the play Nil Darpan. Sometimes anglicised as Neel Durpan, Nildurpan, Nildarpan and other variations, the title literally means ‘Blue Mirror’ in Bengali. In this case, nil, or blue, refers to indigo. The play, written by a Christian missionary school graduate and postman named Dinabandhu Mitra, is a five-act social drama in the Realist style coming out of Europe. Realism means, in short, a play that examines a social problem. Realism is not a genre but a style, meaning one could have a Realist comedy, a Realist drama or anything in between.

Nil Darpan is a Realist tragedy that holds a mirror up to the indigo industry, with an agenda to expose the cruel abuses being inflicted upon ryots by the British Indigo Planters Association. It was performed frequently in Dacca, also known as Dhaka, in eastern Bengal, now the capital of Bangladesh, by an amateur Indian theatre club called the Purvavanga Rangabhumi, or East Bengal Stage, starting in September 1860. Public readings and amateur productions spread across the region.

The British Raj, still naïve about Bengalis’ particular knack for expressing their political messages through songs, plays and poems as a means of mobilising the public, paid such Bengali literature no mind, seeing it all as a harmless folk tradition. Nil Darpan marks the start of the British Raj’s awakening to the fact that they had been living in blissful ignorance.

Flashing forward for a moment, decades later in 1908, this ignorance would lead to their dealing with armed Bengali revolutionaries influenced by the Bengali press and Bengali plays and songs, but that is another conversation, as covered in my previous article in 2023. ⁶ In many ways, my current article is a prequel to those unfortunate events.

In Nil Darpan, the British Indigo Planters Association, embodied by the white bosses Mr Wood and Mr Rogue (later changed to the less obviously villainous Mr Rose), played by Bengali actors in whiteface, is explicitly the play’s target. The play does not condemn the entire British Raj. To the contrary, it is a heartfelt cry to Bengal’s Lieutenant-Governor, Sir John Peter Grant, for help. If only he knew the truth of what was happening in eastern Bengal, the play’s Indian heroes tell us, he would surely put a stop to it. Many of the play’s events and characters are based on real people, especially the ingenue Khetramoni, the victim of a brutal sexual assault by a British indigo planter, whom Mitra allegedly based on the real-life Haramoni, a villager who was abducted and raped by one Archibald Hills. ⁷

A drama about two families, the play features a large cast, an intricate plot and plenty of action. Thematically, it features Hindu and Muslim ryots working together against a common enemy. Its most controversial scene features Mr Rose violently attempting to sexually assault an already pregnant Khetramoni, and her last-minute rescue by the young hero Nobin and his Muslim friend Torapa, who beats up the white villain onstage while Nobin tends to Khetramoni. Torapa later proudly displays a relic he keeps with him, Mr Wood’s nose, which he bit off during a separate offstage attack.

The play’s tragic ending, with the destruction of two Bengali families, is nothing short of a call to action. It was not a call for violence or a revolutionary uprising, but a call to the Lieutenant-Governor to take action and intercede on their behalf. As a step toward that end, playwright Mitra approached his friend, the Anglican priest, missionary and schoolteacher Rev. James Long. Mitra gave Long a copy of Nil Darpan and urged him to read it.

Rev. Long became an instant fan of the play and approached Mr Seton-Karr, the aforementioned Secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, who had been instrumental in setting up the Indigo Commission and had served as its first president. Rev. Long told him all about the play and urged him to have it translated into English to share with the Commission, as an insider’s view of what daily life was like for farm workers under the British Indigo Planters Association.

Seton-Karr gave Rev. Long the nod, telling him in so many words, Sure, get me a copy in English and I’ll see what I can do. Seton-Karr also casually informed his boss, Lieutenant-Governor Grant, what he was up to, and Grant said, Yeah, sounds good. Get me a couple of copies because I’d like to read it myself and share it with a few colleagues. Obviously, I’m paraphrasing their words. I’m doing that because determining what exactly they said to each other would soon become the cause of a major crisis.

So, Rev. Long set to work. First, he would need a good translator who would know the nuances and idioms of both heightened British stage English and the colloquial rural Bengali in which the play was written; someone extremely talented but who wasn’t so egotistical that they’d refuse to keep the project top secret; someone willing to never openly take credit for the translation. He might have found the right candidate in Bengali Christian playwright Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Many insist that it is so, committing to Dutt’s authorship of the translation as fact, but in truth, Dutt’s authorship of the translation has never been confirmed. The translator could just as easily have been one of Rev. Long’s top students from the school where he taught.

Regardless of the translator’s true identity, the two worked closely together, with Reverend Long acting as supervisor. Long wanted the translation to be accurate, but not so vulgarly written as the original that Sir John Peter Grant would react against the play’s message. The end result contains awkward, heightened theatrical British dialogue peppered with Bengali vernacular words. It contains almost no stage directions that might offend British readers. For example, the sexual assault of Khetramoni and subsequent assault of Mr Rose by the Muslim Torapa can only be inferred.

In other words, the translation was perfect. When Long was satisfied, he wrote an introduction and preface, in which he writes in part, ‘[B]oth the original and the translation are bona fide native productions and depict the Indigo planting system as viewed by natives at large. The Drama is the favourite mode with the [Bengali] Hindoos for describing certain states of society.’

From Long’s point of view as a Christian missionary he writes:

[T]here is little prospect or probability of ameliorating the mental, moral or spiritual condition of the ryot, without giving him security of land-tenure. If the Bengal ryot has to be treated as a serf, or mere squatter, or day labourer, the missionary, the schoolmaster, even the developer of the resources of India, will find their work like that of Sisyphus – vain and useless.

He next directly addresses the British Indigo Planters Association, writing, ‘Oh, ye indigo planters! your malevolent conduct has brought a stain upon the English nation . . . The editors of two daily newspapers’, he doesn’t name them but they are the aforementioned British-owned Englishman and the Bengal Hurkaru, ‘are filling their columns with your praises . . . What a surprising power of attraction silver has . . . [T]he proprietors of two newspapers, becoming enslaved by the hope of gaining 1000 rupees, throw the poor homeless people of this land into the terrible grasp of your mouths.’

Lastly, he calls directly upon Queen Victoria, Governor-General of India Lord Canning, and most importantly in a practical sense, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, to take action:

Mr. Grant, who always suffers in the suffering of the people, and is happy when they are happy, who punishes the wicked and supports the good, has taken charge of the Lieutenant-Governorship . . . [I]t is becoming evident that [he] will very soon take hold of the rod of justice, in order to stop the sufferings which the ryots are enduring. ⁸

The cover read, in addition to the title, the phrase ‘Translated from the Bengali by A Native’. Neither the Bengali playwright Mitra nor the Bengali who translated it, appear anywhere for their own legal protection. Rev. Long’s name doesn’t appear either, but he had already openly identified himself to Seton-Karr and Sir John Peter Grant when he initially approached their office, operating perhaps under the extremely mistaken impression that the British government wouldn’t dare mess with the Anglican Church.

Next, a comedy of errors ensued ripe for an Oscar Wilde play. Accounts vary as to what happened next and in precisely what order. Somehow we got from Seton-Karr requesting an English translation from Long, and Grant making an off-the-cuff remark to Seton-Karr that he wouldn’t mind having a few copies himself, to five hundred copies of a play that is highly critical of some of British India’s wealthiest and most influential men being printed and distributed as an official government publication – not only to a handful of men in Bengal, but to members of the British Parliament and the Secretary of State for India all the way across the ocean in London. Worse, it appeared to have been ordered by the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal himself.

Controversy

All hell broke loose. This is how Nil Darpan went down in history as a controversial play. The Indigo Commission was already well on its way to siding with the labourers and instituting reforms before this new crisis erupted. No one outside of eastern Bengal would have ever heard of this play had there not been a, pardon my language, royal fuckup. The most we can say about the play itself as a change agent is that it helped ensure that the recommendations of the Indigo Commission were indeed instituted by putting the embarrassed Lieutenant-Governor under an international media spotlight, as we shall see. I’m loath to admit that positive change for indigo workers was not the result of the play being a brilliant work of literature, but of its mistaken distribution in English. That the error was the result of a simple miscommunication between two prominent white men was, as they say, a one-in-a-million shot.

Heads would roll, and Grant’s head was first on the chopping block. The Landholders and Commercial Association of British India, on behalf of British indigo interests, took immediate action, sending a letter formally enquiring of the Lieutenant-Governor’s office whether the play had indeed been circulated with the Government of Bengal’s sanction, and threatening that if they did not receive a prompt response, they would reach out to the government in England.

The story soon broke in newspapers across the UK. The British Raj, embodied by its Governor-General, aka Viceroy Lord Canning, wasn’t at all happy about the debacle, and called upon Grant to furnish an explanation. The Dublin Evening Mail in its coverage was sympathetic to the native labourers. This is not surprising to me. I’ve learnt, and described further in my previously published article, that the Irish press tended to see themselves as brethren to Indians who opposed British rule. We often see the Irish press and Bengali press tipping their hats to each other during this era. In an article published on 20 April 1861 under the headline ‘The Indigo Question in India’, the newspaper quotes from a London dispatch from a sympathetic Secretary of State for India Sir Charles Wood which reads in part:

I entirely concur . . . that the evidence . . . is conclusive as to the fact that the cultivation was unprofitable to the ryot, who was required to furnish the plant at a price which, with the extra charges to which he was subjected, did not reimburse him for the cost of production. The unwillingness of the ryots to cultivate indigo was the natural result of the unprofitableness of the cultivation. The testimony to the compulsory character of the system . . . is abundant . . . There is nothing . . . which more painfully shows the evils of the indigo system . . . than the evidence contained in them of the oppression practiced upon the ryots, and the amount of violence and crime to which it has given rise . . . [K]idnapping, confining, removing ryots from place to place, were offences of no uncommon occurrence. ⁹

Wood goes on to say that such criminal practices were allowed to go on because of a lack of police and impartial courts in rural areas, and that these shortcomings would soon be addressed through new legislation. He concluded, ‘The true remedy . . . is to be found in dealing fairly by [indigo farmers]’.

Meanwhile, the Landholders and Commercial Association of British India filed a libel suit against one Mr H. C. Manuel, whose company, the Calcutta Printing and Publishing Press, had been hired to print the scripts. Manuel was arrested and charged on 7 June 1861. Through his lawyer, he immediately pled not guilty, but on the first day of the trial, he changed his plea to guilty and identified the anonymous promotor of the play as Rev. Long. Because Manuel had cooperated, he was given the light sentence of a ten rupee fine.

Soon, Rev. Long came forward in the Bengali press to identify himself as the only one behind the play’s translation and publication, selflessly protecting the anonymity of playwright Mitra and the English translator. The Landholders Association, along with the Englishman newspaper, targeted Rev. Long for having published what they characterised as a ‘foul and malicious libel upon indigo-planters’. ¹⁰

At the conclusion of his four-day trial in July 1861, presided over by Calcutta Supreme Court judge Sir Mordaunt Wells, Rev. Long was fined 1,000 rupees and sentenced to one month in jail. Immediately, a gentleman stepped forward from the gallery and paid Long’s fine. He was none other than famed Bengali playwright Kaliprasanna Sinha, who had been watching the trial with interest.

A month later, Rev. Long’s trial was still making the UK press. The London Daily News reported on 28 August that:

All Calcutta had been interested in the trial of Rev. J. Long, of the Church Mission, for libel, at the instance of the editor of the Englishman newspaper . . . Mr. Long was charged with publishing a pamphlet called the Nil Darpan . . . [T]he printer, the editors of the Englishman and Hurkaru, and the official in the Bengal office [i.e., Mr. Seton-Karr] who circulated the pamphlet under frank of government were examined the first day for the prosecution. ¹¹

Two weeks later, UK citizens could read of Long’s sentencing as exemplified in the Fife Herald:

The indigo question has been further embittered by a public trial – ‘The Queen v. James Long’, for publishing a libel upon the indigo planters and the Englishman newspaper . . . The jury brought in a verdict of guilty . . . the judge sentenced the Rev. Mr. Long to one month’s imprisonment and a fine of 1000 rupees.

We also learn that Seton-Karr, ‘implicated in the circulation of the libel, has averted a probably similar punishment by a public apology’. ¹² So, if you issued an apology, you didn’t get charged. The problem with Long was that he was unapologetic, remorseless, and said he’d do it again. ¹³ Not surprisingly, Sir Wells had thrown the book at him.

On 16 September, the London Daily News summarised coverage from the British-owned Calcutta press regarding the ongoing controversy. At a special conference of Christian missionaries, Dr Alexander Duff, who had helped found Calcutta’s Scottish Church College and the University of Calcutta, expressed disappointment that Rev. Long ‘had been subjected to a persecution in the harshest form known to English law’, which might be hyperbolic, but the comment makes his anger clear. Still, the conference countered ‘that in the introduction to the play, Rev. Long might have guarded himself more carefully against the supposition of having adopted as his own all the sentiments and representations of the native author’.

The Bengal Hurkaru newspaper, which remained staunchly on the side of the British planters, ‘states that they would have asked for a mitigation of [Rev. Long’s] punishment had he not declared just before receiving his sentence that the irreligious lives of Europeans formed the grand obstacle to the spread of Christianity in India’, meaning the natives were learning all about Christianity from Europeans but didn’t see many Europeans in India living Christian lives, especially not the indigo planters. ¹⁴

A week and a half later in the Cork Examiner came news that Seton-Karr, despite avoiding a trial by apologising, had been forced to resign by Lord Canning, because he ‘could no longer be considered qualified to fill the office of Secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal’. ¹⁵

Two days later came the most detailed story I found in the UK press about this entire tragicomedy. In ‘The Indian Case – Nil Darpan’ in the Morning Advertiser, UK readers heard from Lieutenant-Governor Grant himself, who insisted that he had never seen or read the play until after it had been printed and distributed by Seton-Karr, who had made:

A very unfortunate error . . . I wished to see the work, partly as a curiosity, and partly because I thought it likely that it would show what the real popular feeling was on the subject better than anything else . . . On my first interview with the secretary, which was before the excitement caused by the official circulation of the pamphlet . . . I found that he had been under some impression that the translation and printing was to be a Government act . . . which impression I immediately corrected.

Seton-Karr chimes in with written testimony giving his side: ‘I mentioned the work to the Lieutenant-Governor in the belief . . . that it was my duty to bring to his notice all native publications illustrative of popular feeling. [He] . . . expressed a desire to see a translation . . .’. He insisted that everything had been done with the knowledge and sanction of the Lieutenant-Governor, ‘but he never intended that so large a number as 500 copies should be struck off’. Seton-Karr continued, ‘When the work . . . was completed the copies were brought to my office, and Mr. Long gave me the names of several persons whom he was desirous that the work should be sent; other names were also added by me to the list.’

Seton-Karr notes:

Unfortunately, I did not reflect that it was one thing to send off copies of official documents printed by order of Government . . . and another thing to send off copies of a translation of a native play [which had been] merely mentioned in the course of a conversation. ¹⁶

Such articles continued in the British and Irish press well into October. While the play’s accidental dissemination might not have been big news to anyone outside of British India and the UK, the British Raj’s imprisoning of an Anglican minister sent the story leaping across the Atlantic to a Christian publication in the US. In November, the New York Observer and Chronicle, published by the Presbyterian Church, wrote, under the headline ‘A Missionary Imprisoned’, a lengthy defence of Rev. Long, who was ‘for twenty years a missionary of the London Church Missionary Society, and one of the most zealous, able and highly esteemed of the many labourers in and around Calcutta’. Not surprisingly for a northern US readership on the brink of the Civil War, the article tells us that ‘the planters . . . have obtained a control over the [workers] similar to that of masters over slaves . . . The natives rebel against it, but find no redress in the courts.’

The article goes on:

In utter defiance of all law and authority, large bodies of armed men are avowedly entertained for the express purpose of taking or retaining forcible possession of lands or crops. Violent affrays, rather regular pitched battles ensue, attended with bloodshed and homicide . . . Private assassinations occasionally occur, and forgery and perjury have their full sway . . . A drama was written to expose these crimes.

The article provides unusual detail describing popular reaction to it in Calcutta, where we see a rare coming together of coloniser and colonised:

Numbers of sympathisers from all classes, European and native, from those high in authority, have called upon the missionary in his prison. Rev. Dr. Duff relates that no sooner had the sentence been pronounced than a native gentleman [i.e., Kaliprasanna Sinha] stepped forward and at once paid the fine and other native gentlemen were ready to have done the same, even had the fine imposed been five or ten times the amount . . . and upwards of 3000 natives have signed an address to the missionary, in which they state their hope that ‘he will have the consolation of having suffered in the cause of justice and humanity, in promoting the vital interest of the poor, the weak, and the suffering of this country’. ¹⁷

This Presbyterian Church article suggests that these events might offer Indians ‘new proof that the missionaries are their real friends, and thus assisting in preparing the way for the gospel to reach their hearts’. As a case in point, it recounts missionary Rev. Cuthbert describing the experience of reaching a Bengali village and when starting to preach being asked, ‘Is your religion that of the nil shahebs? Because if it is, we wish to have nothing to do with it.’

The article concludes with a letter written by Rev. Long from jail, in which he discusses in part how pleasantly surprised he was with the tone of the Bengali-owned press of Calcutta, ‘who were astonished at the fact of a Christian missionary cheerfully going to prison in the cause of the oppressed’. The editor of one Bengal paper writes, ‘If this be Christianity, then we wish Christianity would spread all over the country.’

In the end, after the Indigo Commission had issued their report in August of 1860 that was highly critical of the planters’ practices and ruled that the ryots could not be forced to grow indigo, and after the Nil Darpan controversy of 1861, the indigo industry in Bengal quickly declined.

But that’s not quite the end of the story. According to Hemendranath Das Gupta’s 1938 book The Indian Stage, Vol. II, eleven years later Nil Darpan would have its Calcutta premiere when it was revived by a new Bengali theatrical group known as the National Theatre on 7 December 1872. The Bengali press generally praised the production as a work of national importance. Not surprisingly, the Englishman newspaper condemned it and demanded that the play’s ‘libellous parts’ be removed. The Government of Bengal was alarmed enough that the Deputy Commissioner of Police attended the second performance on 21 December, although insisting to everyone’s scepticism that he was only there as a spectator.

That didn’t stop one of the play’s promoters from appearing onstage at the end to apologise to the audience. Despite no censorship laws being on the books yet, the fact that Bengali artists were shaking in their shoes and felt the need to apologise afterwards simply because a British policeman was in the audience, speaks volumes about daily life for Indians under British rule. ‘We act this drama because the state of the village-life has been vividly described, but not from malice, nor for the disgrace of any community’, the speaker reportedly said.

As Das Gupta summarises for us, British letter writers in the Calcutta newspapers generally found the National Theatre’s revival of Nil Darpan offensive and obscene despite its omissions, while Bengalis writing in the native press complained that omissions meant that the play failed to bring the atrocities committed by British indigo planters vividly to life.

Despite these rumblings in the press, however, this 1872 revival caused little to no real controversy and no action from the British Raj. By now, Nil Darpan was old hat. In fact, the ensemble was emboldened enough to request of the government the use of Calcutta’s Town Hall to perform it again for an even larger audience on 29 March 1873. None other than the latest Viceroy of India, Lord Northbrook, happily granted his approval, showing just how non-controversial the play had become. Ironically, during the scene in which Mr Rose attempts to rape Khetramoni, an enrapt Indian citizen in the audience, not a British policeman, screamed out for the police to come and arrest Mr Rose.

In 1875, some members of a breakaway rival theatre company, the Great National Theatre, made the decision to perform Nil Darpan while on tour. The city of Lucknow in the state of Uttar Pradesh, which had been the site of a month-long siege during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, was probably not the best choice of locale to perform this particular play. But as they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and controversy always sells a show. If that was their reasoning, they weren’t disappointed.

During the scene in which Mr Rose, played by actor Abinash Chandra Kar in whiteface, attempts to sexually assault the four-months pregnant Khetramoni, played by the single-named actress Lakshmi, and she cries out, ‘Shaheb, I am [like] your daughter, leave me, you are [like] my father!’, and he drags her toward the bed shouting sadistically, ‘I wish to be the father of your child!’, and then Torapa, played by Motilal Sur, and Nobin, played by Nagendra Bannerjee, crash through the window, and Nobin tends to Khetramoni while Torapa beats up the white Mr Rose, a group of British soldiers in the audience rushed onto the stage to assault not the rapist Mr Rose, mind you, but the Muslim character attacking him, Motilal Sur as Torapa. The local District Magistrate stopped the production and ordered the theatre company out of Lucknow under police escort. ¹⁸

This scandalous incident, on the heels of several other controversial anti-British rule plays written by Bengali playwrights in the early 1870s, would lead to the Bengal government creating the Dramatic Performances Control Act a year later in 1876, the same year that Queen Victoria was named first Empress of India. At the time of the original Nil Darpan controversy in the early 1860s, neither the playwright Mitra, nor its anonymous Bengali translator, could be charged with sedition. Such artistic freedom for indigenous playwrights would no longer be allowed.

Consequences

After the 1875 Lucknow debacle, Nil Darpan seems to have mostly lain dormant as a commercially viable play for professional Indian theatres for nearly thirty years, but the controversy surrounding it remained a fixture in Bengali pop culture. In 1901, The Bengalee newspaper published a lengthy editorial trying to lay the matter to rest once and for all. It reminded readers of the fact that Sir John Peter Grant had defended the play as follows:

I have always been of the opinion that considering our state of more than semi-isolation from all classes of native society, public functionaries in India have been habitually too regardless of those depths of native feeling which do not show upon the surface, and too habitually careless of all means of information which are available to us for ascertaining them. Popular songs everywhere, and in Bengal popular native plays, are amongst the most potent and most neglected of those means. I have always attributed our unforewarned condition when the shock of [the Sepoy Mutiny of] 1857 occurred to this popular defect. ¹⁹

Although Sir John Peter Grant had gotten off without any official censure, he was soon forced into early resignation as Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, serving a term of only three years before he was forced out of British India in 1862. He could never wash out the indigo stain on his record. Viceroy Lord Canning could never forgive him for it and ordinary Indian citizens would never forget him for it. As the editorial presciently concludes, ‘In Bengal, his memory will long be cherished lovingly and reverentially as that of the man who freed the province from the oppressions of indigo-planters.’ We don’t need to feel too bad for him: Grant went on to become Governor of the British colony of Jamaica.

Since India’s independence in 1947, many British place names have been replaced with Indian names, but there is still today a little road in Kolkata called Grant Lane, as he was indeed cherished and remembered by the people. There’s also a James Long Sarani (Road), a James Long Clinic and even a James Long Pet Shop.

I was disappointed in reading all of these articles that playwright Dinabandhu Mitra’s name was never mentioned at the time of the controversy, largely because his name did not appear on the English translation. Rev. Long was proud to take the heat for all parties in their joint mission to see it published. But in Bengal, everybody knew who Mitra was; everybody knew about the postman who wrote Nil Darpan. He was, and remains, well-known, and he went on to write several other plays. Bengalis will never forget his name.

In May of 1903, the Bengali-owned Classic Theatre revived the play. The next day, their chief competitor, the Bengali-owned Star Theatre, announced that they too were mounting their own competing production of it. The Classic advert reads in part, ‘That marvellous drama which created history, averted a national calamity, changed the policy of Government and raised the Bengali in the estimation of the British nation has been refurnished and remounted by Girish Chandra Ghosh’, a major Bengali director, playwright and actor of the era who had performed in the aforementioned National Theatre’s 1872 Calcutta premiere of the play thirty years earlier, ‘who said the great Indigo Revolt laid the foundation of his unique reputation as first actor on the native stage by his marvellous representation of some of the leading characters of Nil Darpan. Babu G.C. Ghosh will again appear on the stage to show a glimpse of the past.’ To be clear, he would be wearing whiteface to play the villainous Mr Wood. The family matriarch Savitri would be played by Tincowrie Dasi, affectionately referred to in the advert as ‘Miss Tincowrie’. ²⁰ The Star’s advert calls it a ‘Thrilling Drama’ and ‘the only Bengali book which has been honoured by being translated into several European languages’. ²¹

I might have found the reason for these two simultaneous revivals of Nil Darpan in a short article from three months earlier, at the end of 1902, entitled ‘Indigo Planters vs. Indians’, about a new indigo disturbance:

Another sensational case between an indigo planter and 50 Indians at Motihari is pending . . . In this case the story of the complainant Mr. Sale, Manager [of] Gavandra factory, is that one afternoon he was walking in his bungalow compound, when all the 50 accused suddenly without any reason came up there, fully armed with lathies [i.e., long sticks], abused him with filthy words and quietly went away. The most curious part of the story is that none of the accused persons even touched Mr. Sale but they simply brandished their lathies in the air and retired. ²²

Do you think perhaps the factory manager Mr. Sale is leaving something out? I certainly do. I have a difficult time believing that fifty workers with clubs showed up at their boss’s house and threatened him ‘without any reason’. I’m disappointed that the reporter didn’t bother interviewing any of the workers to hear their side of the situation. Separately, note that Motihari, where this incident occurred, is in Bihar, a state in eastern India, which will shortly become extremely important to the story.

Two years later in 1905, an advert for a self-published book entitled Indigo Disturbances by one Lalit Chandra Mitter (i.e., Mitra), ran in The Bengalee. For all of these decades later, the Nil Darpan controversy remained a popular subject. ‘It is a history of indigo disturbances in Bengal in 1859 to 1861, containing a full report of the Nil Darpan case’, the advert states, ‘with 6 half-tone photo etchings of the distinguished men who stood manfully against the oppressors of the ryots. Price, 2 rupees.’ ²³ The book is now available online in the public domain. Worth noting is that the ‘distinguished men who stood manfully against the oppressors’ were a rare example of Indians and Brits seeing eye to eye and standing shoulder to shoulder against the British Raj during the colonial era.

I stated earlier that indigo cultivation in Bengal declined after the Nil Darpan controversy of the 1860s, but sadly the abusive practices didn’t go away. The British indigo planters simply moved their operations to a more remote area, in what is now the Indian state of Bihar, and carried on as usual; hence my pointing out previously that Motihari, site of the aforementioned 1902 ‘sensational case’, is located here.

Their cruel practices didn’t end until 1917 when Gandhi organised the indigo farmers of Bihar to go on strike in what would be his first direct action in India, as reported in the Civil & Military Gazette:

News has been received here from Motihari . . . that Mr. M. K. Gandhi, who has gone there on a mission to investigate the relations between the planters and their tenants, has been served with a notice . . . to leave the district, and that Mr. Gandhi has refused to obey these orders. ²⁴

Conclusion

In 1952, a now obscure, even in the Bengali-speaking world, black-and-white film adaptation of the play was released in India. One can find occasional bootleg uploads of the low-budget effort on video-sharing sites. Given the incredible cinema coming out of India, specifically West Bengal, during that era, the film is underwhelming at best.

Even so, Nil Darpan and its legacy remain a hot topic in the Bengali-speaking world. I was able to experience this phenomenon up close while living and working in Kolkata during 2019, when I was asked to play the minor role of an angry British policeman in the full-length historical film drama Manbhanjan. The two-part series, starring Anirban Bhattacharya and Sohini Sarkar, is an adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s short story ‘Giribala’, a Realist drama about a scorned upper-caste Bengali wife who gets back at her womanising husband and his actress mistress by sneaking out at night and becoming an actress herself. What starts out as a prank becomes her career, bringing her empowerment for the first time in her life, despite the shame it brings to her husband and family.

The film is set in the late nineteenth century against Calcutta’s Bengali theatre scene. The screenwriter, Sougata Basu, made it his own, introducing subplots and depth of character that don’t exist in the original short story. When Manbhanjan director Abhijit Chowdhury first approached me to ask if I would be willing to act briefly in his film, which he was directing for a major Bengali streaming platform called Hoichoi, he explained that I would be playing a policeman who gets offended and makes a fuss while watching a Bengali play.

‘Is the play Nil Darpan?’ I asked.

His eyes lit up. ‘How did you know?’

The tenor of our conversation shifted from my thinking I was doing him a favour because he needed a white-looking guy to play a British policeman, to my being grateful to him for giving me the opportunity to become a tiny part of Nil Darpan’s legacy. When I walked onto the set the first time, in an old playhouse in which the stage had been dressed to look like the set for the village in Nil Darpan, and when actors in period attire, right down to an Indian actor in whiteface playing Mr Rose, prepared to shoot the controversial attempted sexual assault scene in which Torapa assaults Mr Rose and Nobin rescues Khetramoni, before an enrapt audience of extras dressed in nineteenth-century Indian attire, I felt as though I was stepping back in time to the period of my research.

I’m saddened that this play isn’t taught more often in world theatre classes in the West. I daresay I might be the only person in the US who has taught a theatre history course in which students read, discussed and performed scenes from Nil Darpan as part of my curriculum, when I taught a course that I created for the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute called Theatre History for Actors. When it comes to Indian historical theatre, western academics only ever want to produce Sudraka’s The Little Clay Cart, an ancient Sanskrit drama which has now become a cliché in theatre history classes as representative of all that Indian theatre has to offer.

At this point, I have read extensively on Nil Darpan and found to my dismay that no one ever gives a precise summary of the plot. No author seems interested in telling us what the play is about, focusing instead on the granular details of Rev. Long’s trial. I have to wonder how many writers, especially those publishing online articles about it, have ever actually bothered to read it. So here I present to you and to posterity my own scene-by-scene summary of Nil Darpan, as the odds of your ever seeing a performance of it are slim and none: https://tinyurl.com/2d8h55kh. Please take a few minutes to read it someday at your leisure.