Nil Darpan (Bengali: নীল দর্পণ, The Indigo Mirror) is a Bengali-language play written by Dinabandhu Mitra in 1858–1859. The play was essential to Nil Vidroha, 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 working conditions during the period of Company rule. 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 (Kolkata), where the first play ever commercially staged was Nildarpan. Critical summary The play was received with mixed results upon its release. It was allegedly translated by Michael Madhusudan Dutta and published by Reverend James Long, for which he was sentenced to prison and charged with sedition. 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 is evident from this wish that it was a piece meant to raise a voice among the elite intellectuals of Kolkata so that the farmers' revolt would be integrated with the urban thinkers. Unlike the Sepoy Revolt, the Indigo Revolt was 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, Rev. James Long, and Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Indian literature has a long-standing tradition of drama writing. For almost a millennium the only form of literature other than odes was drama. The distinction of Sanskrit drama by luminaries like Kalidasa was strong enough to keep audiences absorbed for centuries. But a dawn was coming by the mid-1800s in Bengal where the Bengal Renaissance saw 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 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. The characters in the drama are the villagers and the