Nil Darpan

Nil Darpan (Bengali: নীল দর্পন।, The Indigo mirror) is a Bengali play written by Dinabandhu Mitra in 1858–1859. The play was published from Dhaka in 1860, under a pseudonym of the author.The play was essential to Nilbidraha, 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 theater in Bengal and influenced Girish Chandra Ghosh, who, in 1872, would establish The National Theatre in Calcutta (Kolkata) where the first ever play commercially staged was Nildarpan.

The play was received with mixed results upon its release. Due its limited appeal outside of India due to language constraints, Mitra himself translated the play into English

"I PRESENT" The Indigo Planting Mirror "to the Indigo Planters' hands; now, let every one of them, having observed his face, erase the freckle of the stain of selfishness from his forehead, and, in its stead, place on it the sandal powder of beneficence, then shall I think my labour success".

It was evident from this wish that it is a piece meant to raise a voice among the elite intellectuals of Kolkata so that the farmers revolt will be integrated with the urban thinkers. Unlike the Sepoy Revolt, the Indigo revolt is effectively a revolt integrating the whole population of Bengalis with no distance kept between the several classes of society, which can be attributed to the effort by Mitra and Rev. James Long and Michael Madhusudan Dutt.

Indian literature has a long-standing tradition of drama writing. Almost for a millennium the only form of literature other than odes was drama. The distinction of the genre of Sanskrit Drama by the luminaries like Kalidasa were strong enough to keep the millions absorbed for centuries. But it was coming at a dwan by the mid 1800 in Bengal where the Bengal Renaissance say the rise in western education and ideas, and therefore the styles of new forms of literature were seeping in. For example, Ram Narayan Tarkaratna (1823–1885) had already left the Sanskrit tradition and started writing about social realism. The drama is markedly different from the earlier dramas of that period, notably the first modern drama written in Bengali by Ram Narayan still had the old sadhu bhasa the artificial sanskritised dialect of modern Bengali as the writing medium.

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