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Neel‐darpan: The image ofa peasant revolt in a liberalmirrorRanajit Guha aa Lecturer in History, School of African andAsian Studies, Sussex University,

Version of record first published: 05 Feb 2008

To cite this article: Ranajit Guha (1974): Neel‐darpan: The image of a peasantrevolt in a liberal mirror , Journal of Peasant Studies, 2:1, 1-46

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Neel-Darpan1: The Image of a PeasantRevolt in a Liberal Mirror

byRanajit Guha*

The indigo plant, the original source of the dye used for bluingcotton textiles, formed the basis of a flourishing sector ofcommercial agriculture in Bengal by the beginning of the nine-teenth century. From the very outset, however, the ryots, thatis, the tenant cultivators were made to grow indigo undermuch coercion, for the surplus appropriated by the planters,mostly Europeans, and the methods they used, made this cropmost uneconomic for the producers. A slump in the Londonprices of indigo between 1839 and 1847, the fall of the UnionBank of Calcutta, a consequent credit squeeze and the take-over of smaller concerns by larger 'indigo seignories' increasedthe pressure on the ryot and his misery still further. By 1860the regional grievances and localized acts of resistance amongthe peasantry snowballed into a general uprising in nine Bengaldistricts. Later on that year Dinabandhu Mitra published a play,Neel-darpan, with the planters' atrocities as its theme. Trans-lated into English, the play soon became the focus of a legaland political contest between the Calcutta liberals and Euro-pean planters. For over a century this play has enjoyed thereputation of a radical text. How radical was it? In an exegesisundertaken in answer to this question an attempt has beenmade in this essay to document the response of Indian liberal-ism to one of the mightiest peasant revolts in the sub-continent.A glossary of Indian terms has been inserted at the end of theessay.

'There appeared among the ryots a general sense of approaching freedom.They behaved as if about to be released from something very oppresive,and as if impatient of the slowness of the process.'—W. J. Herschel,Collector and Magistrate of Nadia, in his evidence to the Indigo Com-mission (RIC 2819e).

ISivnath Shastri has recorded the impact Dinabandhu Mitra's play

about the indigo ryots had on his generation: 'Neel-darpan involvedus all' [21: 224]. One wonders why. The author was far from well-known yet. He was one of those young men, patronized byIshwarchandra Gupta, who managed to have some bad prose andworse verse published in the Sambad Prabhakar between 1853 and1856. Then he seems to have disappeared from the Calcutta literaryscene altogether for a number of years until he surfaces again, in1860, with a play published, far from the metropolis, in Dacca. All* Lecturer in History, School of African and Asian Studies, Sussex University.

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of which makes of this a pretty obscure story so far. Was it thenthe literary and dramatic merits of the work that made such animmediate impression on its contemporaries? The answer, alas,must be in the negative, if Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay's some-what left-handed tribute2 and Dwarakanath Vidyabhushan's un-enthusiastic response [11 IV: 689] to the play are any measure ofprevailing critical opinion. Was the impact, then, due to the author'sdocumentation of despotism and distress? Not likely, becausethere was nothing in Neel-darpan in terms of information that couldnot have been known already to the Calcutta intelligentsia. Manyof them came from the indigo districts and continued to maintainclose links with the villages there. Some of the leaders of thesocial and intellectual life of the city—the Tagores of Jorasankoand Pathuriaghata, for instance—were planters themselves. More-over, an influential section of the press, owned and edited by theBengalis, had been reporting the plight of the indigo ryots and thetyranny of the European planters at regular intervals throughoutthe eighteen-fifties. These reports could leave no one in doubt aboutwhat was going on in these parts of the province, particularly inJessore and Nadia districts. Harish Mukherji's Hindoo Patriot cameout very strongly indeed on this subject, and at least nine of thosehistoric despatches from its brave Jessore correspondent, the youngSisirkumar Ghose, had already appeared in its pages betweenMarch and August 1860, that is, during the six months thatpreceded Neel-darpan [2: 7-36].

What, then, was it that made the publication of not-so-bright aplay in the mufassil by not-too-well-known a writer on not-too-unfamiliar a theme appear like 'a comet on Bengal's social horizon'[21: 224]? The answer is simply that it was the European planters'reaction to the play that triggered the baboos' response to it. For,it is indeed curious that although Neel-darpan was published inSeptember 1860, it was not until May 1861 that the Calcuttaintelligentsia began to take any serious notice of it. During theseeight months a number of things happened due to an apparentlyaccidental lapse in communication between the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal and the Secretary to the Government of Bengalon what was indeed a routine administrative matter [3: 197-205;14: 201-02] and culminated in the planters' decision to make theplay a cause for libel. It was at this point that the literati of Bengalcame to realize that the defence of Neel-darpan could be madeto look like the defence of the peasantry without anyone riskinghis head at the hands of the planters' lathials. So when JamesLong, inspired equally by his concern for the ryots and his eager-ness to shield the Lieutenant-Governor from embarrassment [14:202], stepped out to receive the day's crown of thorns, the leadinglights of Calcutta rallied behind the good Englishmen (missionariesand officials) as against the bad Englishmen (planters). And thusNeel-darpan became the instrument—one could almost say, pre-

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text—for the fabrication of a nice little middle-class myth abouta liberal Government, a kind-hearted Christian priest, a great butimpoverished poet and a rich intellectual who was also a pillarof society—a veritable league of Power and Piety and Poetry—standing up in defence of the poor ryot. Coming when it did,this myth did more than all else to comfort a bhadralok conscienceunable to reconcile a borrowed ideal of liberty with a sense ofits own helplessness and cowardice in the face of a peasant revolt.

IIThe response to Neel-darpan during its first fifty years could be

best characterized as liberal-humanitarian. It was liberal in thepolitics that inspired it and humanitarian in the idiom that expressedit. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay who knew the author very well,defined this idiom thus:

Dinabandhu used to feel greatly moved at other people's distress andNeel-darpan was an outcome of this particular quality. It is only becausehe sympathized so completely with the misery of the ryots (projas) ofBengal that Neel-darpan was written and published. [4: 825J

It is this empathy that makes Neel-darpan the most forceful ofDinabandhu's plays, as Bankimchandra rightly observes [4: 835].How forceful, can be judged from the anecdote about an outragedIshwarchandra Vidyasagar hurling his sandal at an actor playingthe role of the senior planter with a particularly vicious realism. This,as we know, never actually happened [13: 594f]. Yet like allmyths it refers to reality a few removes away. It is, in this case,an idealized description of the manner in which the middle-classaudience would itself respond to the play with a mixture of pityand indignation: for Vidyasagar was known to be a most com-passionate and fearless man3. Sivnath Shastri sums up the emotionsevoked by the play when he says:

Neel-darpan engrossed us all; Torap ran away with our affection;Kshetramoni's distress made our blood boil with anger; and we thoughtthat if the planter Rogue fell into our hands, we would, in the absenceof any other weapon, tear him to pieces with our sheer teeth. [21: 224]

Brave words. In reality, however, this show of righteous angerturns far too soon into a tearful supplication. The liberal feelsgenuinely outraged by the tyranny of the planters. Their predatoryways violate his own attitude to the ryot, which is a curiousconconction of an inherited, Indian-style paternalism and anacquired, western-style humanism. To the extent that with all hisgrowing association with the big city he has, still in the eighteen-fifties, vital links with the village, he feels both his economic posi-tion (as one who lives off the peasantry) and his socio-culturalauthority (as a member of the rural elite) threatened by theplanters. He wants to stand up for the peasantry and in doing so

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defend himself. Yet he is unable to act on his own. He is readyto connive at the ryot arming himself against the planter. Buthe would not take up arms. That would be as illegal as theoutrages committed by the planters themselves. The only wayto end oppression is for the law to assert itself. It is the Govern-ment, the true custodians of the law, who alone can restore therule of law. Hence, in a land of superstitions, the new theology ofliberalism introduces yet another superstition to fit the politics,the morality and the sensibility of a colonial middle-class: corres-ponding to the illiterate peasant supplicating the gods againstblight and drought we now have the highly literate baboo suppli-cating the local magistrate, the Lieutenant-Governor, the Governor-General or the Queen—the status of the member of the pantheonaddressed depending on the degree of deprivation—for relief fromthe 'blue monkey' overrunning the countryside.

The stand taken even by the most advanced liberals like Sisir-kumar Ghose illustrates this. His involvement with the jacqueriesof 1860-61 in Jessore, the hottest district, went further thanperhaps that of most other intellectuals of the time. Long beforeit became customary for eye-witness accounts of popular strugglesto be fabricated in cool interiors around Chowringhee, Sisirkumar,at great personal risk, insisted on being where the action was inthe deep countryside and reporting it to Haris Mukherjee for pub-lication in the Hindoo Patriot. Scion of a rich talukdar family he hadbeen involved in disputes over land with the planters long enoughto know their ways. With his intimate knowledge of the Jessoredistrict and his grassroot links with the peasantry he had nodifficulty in reading the signs that were there, in the spring of1860, of a rapid build-up towards armed conflict. The planters weredriving the ryots up the wall be terror; the Government had movedin troops who joined the planters in hunting down the ryots; thelatter were firm in their resolve not to grow indigo. Yet, hopefully,Sisirkumar described the mood of the ryots on the eve of theclashes as 'passive'. He was obviously indulging in wishful thinkingwhen he wrote that the ryots 'will neither attack nor defend, butare ready to suffer' [2: 8]—a statement so Gandhian that it seemsto have inspired Jogesh Chandra Bagal, the distinguished authorityon nineteenth-century Bengal, to characterize the indigo peasants'revolt as 'the first non-violent mass movement' [2: 5]. In a letternarrating in detail how the ryots were getting ready to deal withrepression measure for measure—villagers being arrested en masse,peasants in north-western Jessore pledging themselves never tosow indigo, nine hundred of them marching from Kalopole toCalcutta—Sisirkumar could still exhort the rest of the populationin words like these:

Rise, rise, ye countrymen with supplicating hands, fall prostrate beforethe Governor, catch his feet, and do not let him go unless he has grantedyour requests. [2: 8-9]

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His faith in the raj remains unshaken even when he is himself madean object of official persecution. Incensed by his exposure of thecollusion between planters and the custodians of the law, avindictive magistrate starts a district-wide hunt for him forcinghim to go to the ground. 'Yet1, he writes, 'I hope Mr. Belli, one ofthe best of Judges . . . will not leave me unprotected'. When thegood judge does not seem to be responsive, and the magistrate,failing to lay his hands on Sisirkumar, starts harassing the restof his family, the prayer is simply addressed to the next higherauthority, the Lieutenant-Governor 'who, I hope, wil l protect them(his family) from such unjust attack of the Magistrate' [2: 23,28, 32].

In the event the Ghoses of Polua-Magura came out of all thisless battered than the Basus of Swarapur whose faith in the rajdid little to save them from disgrace and ruin as described inNeel-darpan. For the play, its author's intentions notwithstanding,is a clear indictment of the futility of liberalism as a deterrent totyranny. It is the story of the failure of a liberal government toshield its subjects from oppression and of the liberals to defendthemselves.

IllDinabanduh was himself a distinguished product of that historic

hot-house of liberal culture, Hindhu College, Calcutta. He exempli-fies much of mid-nineteenth-century liberalism both in his ownlife and that of his characters. To identify a Hindu liberal of thisperiod is easy enough. One has simply to find out where he stoodon some of those great questions relating to Hindu society thatseparated the reformists from the no-changers. As a firm opponentof child marriage and kulin polygamy, and equally firm supporterof Vidyasagar's campaign for legalizing the marriage of widows,Dinabandhu ranks high as an advanced liberal. These themes figureprominently in many of his plays. What, however, is even moreimpressive is the radical sentiment, dating from his days in theHindu College, that anticipates the reformism of the later yearsin much juvenile verse and prose. A poem written in 1853 callsfor defiance of customary prejudice—lokachar—on these socialissues and appeals to reason:

Once upon a time people used to believe that the sun goes round theearth once every year, whereas it has now been established, thanks tothe advancement of knowledge, that it is the earth which goes round thesun. [15: 412-13]

It is less than flattering for us to recognize that in order to justifyReason against Authority we have to recall Copernicus for thevery first time in 1853 in a manner which in the West had alreadyturned into a platitude by then! Yet, it is this very awkwardnesswhich is so attractive about it. It is the fumbling and fall of a new

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scepticism that has just come into being and not found its feetyet. Its weakness is congenital and it wil l never qualify for Tagore'simagery of the Puranic fledgling shooting up through space todevour the sun. For Reason is born spastic in a colony. This isprecisely why one must be prepared to acknowledge the patheticdignity of its attempt to assert itself. In Dinabandhu's case we havehis admiration for physics blasting tunnels for railroads, formuseums as the store-house of scientific objects and literature,and for Cautley's engineering which in the teeth of Hindu super-stition forced the waters of the Ganges into a canal [24: 10]—all to testify to a sense of wonder about science as an agent ofchange [ 15: 342-43, 380, 404].

If change, technological as well as social, is an achievement ofscience, the latter is itself a gift of education which, as Bankim-chandra was soon to point out, had already become synonymouswith western-style education by this time [4: 680]. In recordinghis own enthusiasm about it Dinabandhu speaks for the greatliberal illusion of his age regarding the ability of a bourgeoisintellectual culture to free society from feudal ideas all by itself.In Neel-darpan we have the response of an affluent Kayastha familyto the new education. The father who apparently has had nowestern-type schooling himself, is still very proud of Bindumadhab,his younger son, going to college in Calcutta [Act IV, Sc. 3]. Hehas in fact considerably added to his own status by getting forhis son a bride from a leading suburban Kayastha family who,normally, would not marry their daughter off to a lad from anobscure village, but were persuaded to do so when they foundout how well educated Bindumadhab was [Act V, Sc. 1]. Theyoung wife shows something of her relatively urban and emanci-pated upbringing when she soliloquizes about the dull domesticityof her existence thus:

We are bom women. We are not allowed to go for a stroll as far asinto our own garden even when we are a company of five girls together.We are not allowed to go for a walk in the town. It is not possible forus to set up welfare societies. We have no colleges, no law courts, noBrahmo Samaj to go to. There is nothing to entertain a woman whenshe is sad in her heart. [Act II, Sc. 2]

She is obviously familiar with the fruits of western culture herself,for she has been pestering her husband for a volume of Shake-speare's works translated into Bengali. The young man, writing toher from the big city, enthuses about the benefits of literacy, for'I am able to speak directly to you even over such a great distance!'But communication, alas, has to be an one-way traffic: his motherwould not permit her daughter-in-law to write to him [Act II, Sc. 2].For female education is still at this time anathema even among themore advanced Hindus, particularly those who were country-based,and it is a measure of the still unimpaired feudal values that a girlof her social standing must not be allowed to make her sentiments

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so public as to write privately to her husband!4 The women ofthe family, however, are not against putting her literacy to gooduse and have her to read out the tales of Vidyasagar's BetalaPanchavimsati for their benefit during the afternoon break betweenchores [Act I, Sc. 4]. Finally, note must be taken of the importanceNavinmadhab, the principal protagonist of the play and elder sonof the family, attaches to education. He hopes, when the planters'depredations are over, to set up a school within the grounds ofhis own homestead: for, 'nothing could make me happier than tohave our native boys schooled in my own house; this would indeedbe a true fulfilment of my wealth and my exertions' [Act II, Sc. 3].Apart from projecting the author's own enthusiasm for the new edu-cation—he ran away from his village home, when still very young,in order to avoid old-fashioned schooling at the local pathshala andto seek 'English education' in Calcutta [21: 249]—this confirmshow by the middle of the nineteenth century, schools had alreadyjoined the list of traditional public works such as temples andtanks as an index of a landlord's munificence as well as of hisobligation to the rural populace. It was partly thanks to suchpatronage and official encouragement (Navinmadhab found theInspector of Schools most responsive to his idea) that a networkof colleges and secondary schools spread fast throughout theindigo districts during the eighteen-fifties [ 14: 61]—a developmentregarded by the planters and their barely literate minions5 withutter hostility. 'My Lord', says the indigo factory's dewan to hisboss in Neel-darpan, 'the establishment of schools in the country-side has made the peasants more turbulent than ever', to whichthe planter replies, 'Yes, I must write to our (Indigo Planters')Association to petition the Government on this issue. We shallfight to stop schools from being set up.' [Act I, Sc. 3].*

As the reader familiar with the text may well recall, these extremesentiments follow immediately upon an exchange betweenSadhucharan, a principal ryot, and the officials of the Begunbereyfactory. In a cleverly engineered dialogue Dinabandhu drops aword that explodes like a bomb. The ryot's use of an elegant,polysyllabic, sanskritized word, 'pratapshali' (meaning 'mighty'),sets off a series of interlocking reactions. The dewan, an upper-caste Hindu, asks him to shut up, because for a common peasantto use sadhubhasha to is to overreach himself. The planter picksup the cue and (in a sentence which schoolboys have made alltheir own: banchat bada pandit hoiachhe) admonishes him for hispretension to learning. The amin is outraged that a man from afamily that works on the land should use a language so far abovehis status. But he is not surprised. Such insolence is only to beexpected of a trouble-maker like this particular ryot who had thecheek to advise the peasants on points of law relating to indigoand thus stir them up.

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IVIt is this link between an awareness of the law and what looks

even remotely like education that the planters detested so much.The amin was furious because he suspected Sadhucharan of want-ing to sue the planter. This bastard wants to take this matter tothe Court', he reports to his master [Act I, Sc. 3]. The fear wasnot unjustified. In the very first scene we find Navinmadhab press-ing his father to take the Basu family's dispute with the factoryto a court of law. Throughout the indigo districts the victims ofthe planters had been trying to seek the law's protection. ACollector of Jessore observed early in 1862 how the ryots 'hadacquired a fondness for litigation' [14: 189]. And it was true, too,that a man who was literate, had a better chance of securingjustice than one who was not. Sisirkumar reported a casefrom Jessore in 1860 to illustrate this point. A number ofpeasants falsely charged with assaulting a factory official wereall convicted in a magistrate's court, whereas a zamindar'snaib, accused at the same time of leading those very men intoprecisely the same affray, was acquitted, 'no doubt the Magistratenot daring punish a man so unjustly, who knows how to readand write' [2: 13].

No wonder that the educated Bengali found in the law a greatally and an object of the highest admiration. Throughout much ofthe nineteenth century he went on propagating, defending andpopularizing it. He brainwashed himself and others in favour ofwhat he believed to be its impartiality and its powers to defendthe poor. He queued up for jobs in the civil service as its juniorcustodian. He passed the law examination and set himself up tointerpret and practise it in various roles as barrister, advocate,vakil, mukhtar and attorney. He stuffed his samiti, samaj andsammelan with lawyers. He recruited lawyers to his dawl. Hemade the bar library the centre of local politics. He elected lawyersto represent him at the Indian National Congress. He sent lawyersto lobby for him in England, a mission greatly admired by ourauthor [15: 404]. Above all, he made law into the most lucrative ofthe liberal professions. In some verses (Asha' in Dwadas Kavita)about an unemployed youth frustrated in his attempts to finda job, Dinabandhu leads him on to conclude:

Oh, I have been quite mistaken . . . I shall no longer go on supplicatingthose men of affluence . . . I shall devote myself to the study of law,pass the law examination, set up as a vakil, make money on my ownand share it with the poor . . . This wi l l make my family happy;

and of course, it all ends happily:

He studied law, took the examinations, passed, enrolled as a vakil, becameprosperous and all his hopes were fulfilled at last. [15: 401]

This association between law and literacy is far from fortuitous.

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These are two of the more essential components of the culture,respectively, of the British ruling class and of their Indian collabo-rators. They mutually sustain each other. The institutional networkof education and that of the law soon become interdependent.Education helps in schooling the bureaucracy that runs the colonialapparatus which it is the task of the law to define (by juris-prudence), regulate (by the judiciary), defend (by penalties)and rationalize (with the aid of the legal profession). They bothhelp the violence of the State to express itself in a cultural idiom.The two work fairly closely together throughout the entire periodof British rule in India. It is true that as we move towards the endof the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, certain non-antagonistic contradictions arising from the progress of a sectionof our bourgeoisie from infancy to adolescence, begin to maketheir appearance. But there can hardly be a doubt about thethoroughness of their collaboration in the earlier period.

The Bengali lawyers' attitude towards the indigo peasants' revoltoffers some evidence in this respect. In Neel-darpan the authorbuilds up the lawyers as defenders of the ryots against the planters.Wood is very angry about a law graduate who writes against theplanters in the press [Act III, Sc. 1], and Navinmadhab, his prin-cipal enemy, is said to have worked closely together with somevakils and mukhtars in a recent law suit against the factory [ActI, Sc. 3]. Dinabandhu Mitra thus helps to promote a myth aboutthe morality of the legal profession.

The truth of the matter is that with the exception of a fewindividuals like the mukhtar Titu Chakravarti whose incarcerationcaused much noise at the time [5: 183-4; 14: 152] the lawyerssided with the ryots only so far as it was either safe or profit-able to do so. Thus, they figure prominently in the list of signa-tories in the anti-planter petition addressed to the Lieutenant-Govemor in 1854 from Nadia while the agitation was still at alow key. A similar petition addressed to the Lieutenant-Governorfive years later by the people of the same district when it isalready poised on the brink of an armed encounter betweenplanters and ryots, carries not a single lawyer's signature on it[14: 65, 76]. There were, indeed, a number of legal practitioners—'small number', according to Kling [14: 86]—who helped theryots by acting for them in the mufassil courts and reporting ontheir plight to the Calcutta press. Most of them had their servicespaid for by Harish Mukherjee [14: 121], and the young man who,in Neel-darpan. became the cause of the planter's displeasure, mightwell have been one such mukhtar-correspondent of the HindooPatriot. Some lawyers did better than others and were said tobe receiving a monthly salary of a hundred rupees each from theBritish Indian Association for pleading for the ryots, an allegationwhich, it must be recorded, the Association was unable to confirm[14: 119-20]. In fact, when at the height of the revolt the planters

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went on a rampage and the local European officials in many areasswung into their support and venal rewards were not much insight, legal advice for the ryots was not easy to mobilize. EvenHarish Mukherjee with all his immense prestige barely managedto recruit three lawyers from Calcutta and send them up to defendsome peasants hauled up before the law in Nadia. No mukhtarin that district outside the sadar station 'could be induced to takeup a ryot's case', a fact remarkable enough to be noticed both bythe editor of the Hindoo Patriot and the Lieutenant-Governor ofBengal [5: 183-84; RIC 3878 e, 3880 e]. And in Jessore, the sceneof many clashes, the local lawyers were, as we gather fromSisirkumar Ghose's biographer, deterred by the fear of the planters'reprisal from holding brief for the peasants [ 19: 404}.Whatever the truth of the lawyers' attitude to the peasant revoltof 1860, Dinabandhu Mitra's enthusiasm for the legal professionwas quite in order. By speaking well of it, he was speaking up forthe law itself. For Neel-darpan is dominated by the idea of legality.The opposition between good and evil is represented throughoutthe play as a fairly straightforward opposition between those whoare for the law and those against. Navinmadhab and his familyare for the law, lawyers and legal processes; Wood and his menare against all these. What complicates matters is the undoubtedexistence of bad laws. Act XI of 1860 which gave criminal juris-diction to magistrates in civil cases of breach of contract andthereby made indigo cultivation into a form of 'forced labour'[14: 137], was precisely such a bad law. The planter gushes overit and regards it as an improvement on the shyamchand [Act III,Sc. 1], the dreaded instrument of torture used so often to breakthe peasants' resistance to indigo.

The bourgeoisie, in the period of their ascendancy in the West,made defiance of bad laws into a political virtue of the highestorder and invested the best of their heroes with it. By contrast,for the leaders of our up-and-coming liberalism the law, howeverharsh or wicked, is sacrosanct: not beyond question, it is stillsomething that must not be actively defied. They would bendbackwards to be considerate about it and explain away its iniquitiesin terms of maladministration. That they could adopt such anattitude even to an obvious monstrosity like Act XI—nicknamed'ryot coercion act'—should be particularly revealing for those whoretail the myth of a 'progressive' intelligentsia acting as a firmally of the indigo peasantry in 1860. Even for Harish Mukherjeewith all his involvement in the cause of the indigo cultivators 'itwas not the law itself but its administration that was crucial'[14: 137]? And Dinabandhu Mitra expresses a central tenet ofthe political philosophy of his class in the words of his hero,Navinmadhab, thus:

What a cruel Act has been introduced! But why blame the law or thelaw-makers? It would not have been so disastrous for the country had

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the custodians of the law handled it without partisanship. Alas, howmany innocent persons are crying their eyes out in prison, thanks to thisparticular Act! . . . 0 Lieutenant-Governor, none of these ills would haveoccurred if only you had matched your laws with the appointment ofequally good men to administer them. [Act III, Sc. 2]

The merit of this attitude is that it opens up for the liberal animmense hinterland of compromise and reformism into which toretreat from a direct contest for power with the colonial masters.Once the law and the law-maker—the rulers and the sanction bywhich they rule—are thus exonerated, one can settle for minoradjustments to make the State apparatus perform more smoothlyand less offensively. The adjustments may be sought in the formof additions to the statute book or of administrative pawns pushedaround form square to square. And, thus, 'improvement', thatcharacteristic ideological gift of nineteenth-century British capital-ism, is made to pre-empt and replace the urge for a revolutionarytransformation of society. In Neel-darpan, Navinmadhab pleads,appropriately enough, for the addition of a dhara (meaning 'article'or 'clause' rather than 'regulation', as Madhusudan translates it)to Act XI to make it hot for the planters [Act III, Sc. 2]. Appro-priately too, all the planters' victims in the play, from landlord today labourer, are seen to be discussing the relative merits of goodand bad officials all the time and, taken together, making out ageneral case for the Government to substitute wicked magistratesby nice ones. Fair enough, if this is all that you want out of amassive, well-organized, armed uprising of the peasantry.

VIn other words, it is the function of Neel-darpan to generate

illusion about British rule in India as a good thing with only a fewminor faults here and there that can be easily mended. Put sobluntly, it might hurt liberal sensibilities. These had fed for overa hundred years on its reputation as predominantly a play ofprotest. Bankimchandra called it the Uncle Tom's Cabin of Bengal[4: 834]. Priests, professors and politicians have been unanimousin their description of the work as exclusively an indictment of theplanters' tyranny. One has to turn to the text to see for oneself howpartial and misleading such a description is. For the author's aver-sion to the planters is equalled by his reverence for the raj. Oneis a measure of the other. The blacker the planters, the whiter theregime.

There was nothing self-contradictory about the mid-nineteenthcentury liberal being anti-planter and pro-raj at the same time. Aunited front of the sarkar and the baboo against the planters wasalmost a historical necessity. For by 1860 the predatory phase ofBritish rule in India was coming to an end. Not many princelyvaults remained to be plundered. Many of the most importantstrategic annexations had been already made. Colonialism had by

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then found its social base in a neo-feudal class of its own creationand its cultural base in an emergent middle class capable of com-bining traditional values with a received, western-style enlighten-ment. Reform had struck roots. The 'classes' were queuing upfor B.A. degrees and jobs. The 'masses' went on fighting untilthe Titu Mirs and the Dudu Mians, the Sidhus and the Kanus, theNana Sahibs and the Tantia Topis had all been driven out, exiled,hanged, blown up. It was time now for the erstwhile conquistadorto settle down nicely and respectably in his estate. In this processthe indigo planters were of no help at all. On the contrary, theywere an embarrassment. For the consolidation of Britain's powerbase in India it was essential that the Government should acquirethe image of a well-run concern based on legality, order andresponsibility. The planters undermined all these. The SambadPrabhakar had noted as early as 1853 that the planters behaved asif they were above the law [11 I: 200]. To Edward De-Latour who,as a district official, had seen the Farazis of Faridpur being goadedinto rebellion by the planters, the latter seemed 'neither to recog-nize the existence of a Magistrate on earth nor a God in heaven'/•RIC 3977 e]. They flouted the law whenever it suited them andopenly perverted its processes. Their private armies weakened thestanding of the official law and order at the local level. Theirindulgence in torture, murder, rape and arson made the nativesquestion the superiority of the white man's religion, civilizationand morality. The long-term interests of the raj, therefore, de-manded that the planters should be disciplined. To the extent thatthis perspective was not yet clear to many, if not most, of thejunior European officials, they could still be seen to act in collusionwith the planters. But at the higher levels of authority the planterswere often regarded with contempt, although pro-planter pressuregroups did succeed from time to time—as for instance, in thecase of Act XI—in forcing the hands of the Government. On thewhole, the anti-planter agitation had all the official wind in its sails.This is quite clear from the complicity of the Lieutenant-Govemorand the Secretary to the Bengal Government in the translation,printing and circulation of Neel-darpan. In view of this it is difficultto understand Bankimchandra's somewhat belated tribute to itspublication as an act of exceptional courage [4: 825]. The way theauthor advertises his loyalty throughout the play makes it quitedear that he had no intention of harming the prospect of hisprofessional advancement.

In a foreword (left out of Madhusudan's translation) Dinabandhudefines what he wants his play to achieve. This is to influence theindigo planters to turn from 'self interest' to 'philanthropy' so that'Britain's face could be saved', for their cruel ways 'have giventhe British a bad name'. He condemns their greed, rapacity andhypocrisy, but notes hopefully 'the signs of a new dawn of happi-ness for the ryots'. These signs are described as follows:

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The great Queen Victoria, compassionate mother of the projas, considersit improper that her children should be suckled by her wet-nurses. Soshe has taken them up in her arms and is feeding them at her ownbreast. The even-tempered, wise, courageous and liberal Mr. Canning hasbecome the Governor-General. The high-minded and just Mr. Grant whopunishes the wicked, protects the innocent, and shares with the ryotstheir weal and woe, has been appointed Lieutenant-Governor. And truth-ful, astute, non-partisan officials like Eden, Herschel and others are gradu-ally coming to blossom as lotuses in the lake of the civil service. It must,therefore, be clearly evident from all this that we have an indicationnow of the great souls mentioned above taking up soon the Sudarsandisc of justice in order to end the unbearable misery of the ryots whohave fallen into the clutches of the wicked indigo planters. [15: 1]

This declaration of faith in the ultimate triumph of British justiceis based on the illusion that the law is fair in absolute terms andall one needs is the fairy godmother of an impartial bureaucracyto make it available for all. It is a measure of this illusion that theBasu brothers in Neel-darpan remain unshaken in their faith inthe Lieutenant-Governor and the Commissioner despite thealtogether unwarranted imprisonment of their ageing father. Whensomeone suggests that the magistrate who sent old Golok Basuto jail is no more wicked than the Commissioner, Bindumadhabflares up. 'Sir/ he says, 'you talk like this about the Commissionerbecause you don't know him well enough. The Commissioner isvery impartial indeed. He cares for the advancement of the natives'.He and his brother are both convinced that the Governor is juston the point of quashing the sentence so that their father can beset free [Act IV, Sc. 2]. The curtain goes up on the next sceneto reveal Golok Basu's corpse hanging in his cell.

In real life, too, we find some of the most radical of the con-temporary liberals sharing the same sort of illusion. Even HarishMukherjee appears to have been enthusiastic about the civilservants as late as February 1860 when the stage was alreadyset for the first round of jacqueries [14: 149]. Sisirkumar Ghose'sdespatches to the Hindoo Patriot document this illusion in detail.In mid-August, 1860, he writes bitterly about the 'partiality' ofM. G. Taylor, a magistrate recently posted in Magura. In anotherdespatch next week he talks about Mr. Taylor having 'considerablychanged' for the better. His letter of 19 December 1860 is a longcatalogue of Taylor's misdeeds and it concludes with the hopethat the Lieutenant-Governor, 'highly spoken of here', might beless unheeding 'to the cries . . . of the indigo districts' than hislocal subordinates [2: 30, 36, 42 ft].

Thus, the liberal looking for perfect justice climbs, toehold bytoehold, the edifice of colonial authority from its sub-divisionallevel to its gubernatorial summit. His faith in the morality ofcolonial rule survives all the evidence he has of collusion betweenplanters and civilians and of the resulting perversion of the pro-cesses of the law. These latter are sought to be explained awayas mere aberrations of an otherwise faultless system. Or, as

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Dinabandhu Mitra suggests more than once in his play, there aregood sahibs and bad sahibs: the good ones run the Governmentand the bad ones run the indigo factories. Savitri, the Kayasthamatron in Neel-darpan, spelt this out in terms of her own under-standing of social distinctions when she described the planters asthe white men's chandals [Act I, Sc. 4J. And in this she came veryclose to the distinction that the more sophisticated TattvabodhiniPatrika had made a decade ago between 'bhadra Englishmen ofgood character' who never took up the indigo trade and 'the cruel,abhadra men' among them who did [11 II: 129]. Collaborationbetween the bhadra Bengalis and the bhadra Englishmen was,clearly, the need of the hour. In emphasizing this Neel-darpan wassimply upholding an ideological tradition already well establishedamong our liberals by the middle of the last century.

VIThe urge for collaboration runs through the entire range of

Dinabanduh's literary works. The theme of the British conquestof India which for so many of our patriotic writers served as acue for strident anti-British declarations, occurs in his SuradhuniKavya as a vehicle of loyalism. The sad maiden haunting the groveat Plassey was for him not a symbol of the loss of Bengal's inde-pendence but the fall of the hateful Mughals [15: 363 f]. Thecareers of Sirajuddowla and Mir Kasim provided GirishchandraGhose with material for seditious plays [12: 39] about the collu-sion between foreign invaders and native traitors against Bengalimonarchs. Dinabandhu describes Sirajuddowla as a monster whorichly deserved his cruel end [15: 362 f]. And he invests hisaccount of the defeat of Mir Kasim's troops and the rescue of theNawab's enemy, Krishnachandra Ray, by the British with the auraof a miracle comparable to the rescue of Bharatchandra's Sundarby the goddess Kali and of Mukundaram's Srimanta by the goddessChandi [15: 360]. Still another idol of latter-day nationalism—Nana Sahib—was denounced by him as a brute and a coward,while he was no different from any other Bengali baboo of histime in representing the rebellion of 1857 as a senseless orgy ofviolence [15: 345]. For the permanence of the raj and the removalof all threat to it were for him highly desirable ends [15: 443].And if these attitudes are about the same as those held by otherstalwarts of the Bengal Renaissance, Dinabandhu excelled manyof them in the obsequiousness with which he could put theseinto words. Anyone who wants this confirmed may do so byturning to his poem, 'Loyalty Lotus or Rajbhakti Satadal'. Renderedinto English, it reads as follows:

Hail, Alfred, our brother, priceless object of our affection! The descendantsof the Aryans are dancing with joy to-day. For, at this auspicious houron this auspicious day they will all rejoice at the sight of royalty as theygaze upon your face which is handsome like the moon. Queen Victoria,

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our gracious mother, sheds lustre upon the realm as she manifests herselfthrough you to-day.

O scion of our Queen, take your seat on this mighty throne. The Lord ofthe Universe is thrilled by the beauty of this spectacle. It is after a lapseof a hundred years that the Queen, our mother, has been so kind as tosend her beloved son to visit her Indian home. With all this display ofaffection for her Hindu children who can complain that our motherremembers us no longer?

A hope dawns irresistibly in our hearts that the Prince, our Emperor-designate, will, as a gesture of affection and in order to rear his subjects,bring along with him a venerable woman. An ocean of happiness willthen flood this land of the Hindus. Long live the Princel Long live thePrince! Long live the Prince!

And we hope that later on our mother Victoria who is so full of devotionto God, the Queen who has given birth to heroes and is by heroes muchadmired, will herself, together with her family, pay a happy visit to Indiawith a joyous heart. The multitudes of her subjects are crying for theirmother. She will, when she is here, take them up in her arms and kissthem.

Please be seated, brother Duke, among your Hindu brethren. Let us puta garland of white lotus on your neck. Let us in all affection feed youwith milk, cream, cheese and some delicious motichur as well as withwell-made and seductive chandrapuli cakes. And let us offer you eventhe tastier gift of love.

Strike up the music on tabla. flute, violin and sitar. When again shall wehave a joyful day like this? Dress up in your peshwaz, put on youranklets and dance, 0 dancing-girl, matching your movements to the beatof the music. Sing, O singing-girl, such divine tunes as would excelthose heard at Indra's8 court in melody and in rhythm.

The Prince is holding court with Lord Mayo. Calcutta has been lit upby the sovereign's lustre. This city, bejewelled with lights, radiates aglow. To this has been added a glow radiating from the hearts of thesubjects. And pious Hindu women with their moonlike faces are ululating(as they do on sacred occasions) and decorating their verandahs withearthenware lamps.

The women of Bengal are decorating their homes ingeniously with tradi-tional designs (alpana) as an auspicious measure. With all their heartsthey are engaged in worshipping the King with ceremonial offerings offragrant flowers, paddy seeds and grass. Glory to you, the women ofBengal, in whom is stored up all that is beneficial: where else could onefind females to equal you in chastity and piety?

The Prince has ascended the throne on this highly auspicious day. Whocan now complain that India is unfree? You have now seen this land ofIndia with your own eyes. You have seen how everything here hasdissolved in an ocean of joy. On your return to England you can carrywith you the good tidings that the sea of Indian loyalty has indeedflooded over.

What is left to us to set down as an offering at our Queen's feet? For,all that we have already belongs to her. Please accept this loyalty lotus,the best thing we have in India. Let us melt in sentiments of loyalty. Let

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us cry, 'Victory to Victoria'. Let us applaud and rejoice. We have atlast found ourselves in our mother's arms. Cry, 'Victory to Victoria'.Cry, 'Glory to Hari'. [15: 437 f]

We have quoted this poem in extenso not only as a representa-tive sample of middle-class grovelling but also as a specimen ofthe canker that had eaten into elite nationalism at this early forma-tive stage. Four out of the above ten stanzas talk of the Hindus andone of 'the descendants of the Aryans' as if they alone constitutethe nation. India is, in fact, identified as the 'land of the Hindus',and correspondingly, in the poem 'Yuddha' [15: 398], the Musal-mans are described as foreigners. This fragmented nationalismwhich excludes millions of Indians simply because they do notconform to the dominant religion, fits very well indeed with theparochial character of Dinabandhu Mitra's patriotism. At one pointhe appears to enthuse about the railways as a unifying factor. Ona closer scrutiny, however, this turns out to be no more than arecognition of the way the railways physically brought togetherthe peoples of the different parts of India across great distances[15: 404]. Far from embracing the whole of India, his image of'the motherland' hardly takes in even the whole of his nativeBengal. In 'Prabasir Bilap' [15: 392 f] his protagonist starts off hislament in exile promisingly with 'Oh my native land, the holy landof Bengal,' but ends up by leaving the reader in no doubt that thisBengal, is, for him, merely the sum of his own village and hisfamily. It is not surprising therefore, that this immature senseof nationhood was gifted with an equally puerile idea of politicalindependence. Since a member of the royal family favoured Indiawith a visit, 'who can now complain that India is unfree?'

That a writer with such a communal, parochial and loyalist out-look should come to be regarded as a great nationalist, indicatesthat our nationalism has in it an ideological element with a fairlylow anti-imperialist content. This element represents the contri-bution of that section of our bourgeoisie who are interested inopposing imperialism but cannot do so firmly and consistentlyowing to the historical conditions of their development. So theirantagonism is compromised by vacillation and expresses itselfspasmodically. Middle-class Bengalis in search of a radical tradi-tion during one such spasm that culminated in the swadeshimovement, settled on Neel-darpan as a patriotic text [20: 274].We thus got what we deserved: a loyalist play glorified as a mani-festo of petty-bourgeois radicalism.

This had a rather sinister consequence for the historiography ofthe indigo rebellion. Adopted by many generation of baboos asa theme for their literary and artistic self-expression, this peasantrevolt came to acquire the respectability of a patriotic enterpriseled by benevolent talukdars like Navinmadhab with peasants likeTorap following them with all the loyalty, strength and intelligenceof a herd of cattle. (Torap is in fact likened to a buffalo in Act V,

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Sc. 2) . The emphasis has thus been laid on the unity of interestbetween the village poor and their native exploiters against acommon, foreign enemy. This has helped to mask the truth abouttwo important aspects of the upper class participation in thisstruggle—first, about the opportunism of the landed magnates andthe fierce contest between them and the peasantry for theinitiative of the strugle against the planters, and secondly, aboutthe feebleness and defeatism displayed by the people 'of inter-mediate means', that is, the rich peasants and the lesser landlords.

VIIOne can hardly expect to understand the character of the upper

class response to the events of 1860 unless one is prepared toset aside the conventional view of the rebellion as an undifferen-tiated phenomenom. It is not enough to distinguish between thephases of the struggle in terms of its progress from lower tohigher levels of militancy and organisation, as Suprakash Ray doesin his most valuable work on peasant revolts [19: 391 f]. Whatis important is to recognize that in the course of this developmentthe struggle went through significant changes in leadership andalignment, too. Ray does not seem to take these into accountand the rebellion, as described by him, looks like an event witha uniform social content. Inevitably, as a result of this, he getsentangled in a number of confusing, if not mutually contradictory,statements about the nature of landlord and middle-class partici-pation in the rebellion.

Since the zamindars and big talukdars were the leaders of ruralsociety, 'it was inconceivable', according to him, 'that this classwho were themselves created by the British, would be opposedto the class of indigo planters who enjoyed the patronage of theBritish rulers and ranked with the latter as exploiters. Further-more, they used to make a great deal of money by leasing outparts of their estates in patni to the indigo planters at extremelyhigh rates. It was, therefore, in their own class interest that theyopposed the indigo rebellion' [19. 402]. Yet, the evidence of theclash of interests and of arms between zamindars and plantersis far too vast and significant to be altogether ignored. Ray himselfnotes that 'some zamindars, urged by a spirit of revenge and byself-interest, went so far as to organise and lead the rebel peasantry'[19: 394, 402]. However, he regards this as exceptional, andconcludes that 'but for a mere handful of the more humanitarianand vengeful zamindars and big talukdars the entire class ofzamindars and talukdars stood by at a distance as silent onlookers'while the peasants were fighting [19: 402]. About the attitudeof the middle classes, too, he is equally categorical. He regardsthe rural middle classes as 'reactionary' and 'degenerate', andfinds it 'natural' that they should have opposed the rebellion,'devoted their utmost efforts to the defence of indigo cultivation

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and of their masters, the indigo planters', and thereby brought uponthemselves the wrath of the rebel peasantry [19:403, 404]. Theurban middle classes 'displayed indifference and satisfied theirsense of duty by a little expression of sympathy from a distance'[19: 404], although there were among them some 'liberal andhumanitarian' individuals like Harish Mukherjee and DinabandhuMitra who, according to him, were 'progressive' and came out'more or less' in support of the peasant struggles [19: 188]. Hereagain, the burden of his conclusion appears to be that 'the middleclasses, far from joining in the rebellion as a class opposed it andhelped the indigo planters in various ways' [19: 389].

Two points thus emerge from these statements: first, that thelanded and the middle classes were in general opposed to the indigorebellion, and secondly, that such opposition was altogether con-sistent with the interests and outlook of these classes, so thatany act or expression of sympathy for the rebels on the part ofindividual members of these classes must be regarded as excep-tional. Both these points merit serious consideration not merelybecause they occur in what is unquestionably the most importantwork published so far on Indian peasant revolts, but also becausethey are representative of an influential and widely held view.

To turn first to the question of upper- and middle-class partici-pation in the indigo rebellion, it would appear in the light of con-temporary accounts that Suprakash Ray has grossly underestimatedit. Eighteen-sixty was a well-documented year. Thanks to thepassions that scored it, we have been left with a vast amountof evidence originating from parliamentary, administrative, mis-sionary, journalistic and literary sources. Taken together it clearlytestifies to the fact that the support offered by the zamindars,talukdars and the rural middle-classes to the rebel peasantry wasfar from fortuitous, rare or negligible.

Long before the rebellion of 1860 armed clashes between thezamindars and the white planters had come to be established asa notorious and recurrent feature of life in the indigo districts.The Tattvabodhini Patrika mentioned this in 1850 as a mostfamiliar phenomenon and quoted an instance dating back to themiddle of that decade when 'a fierce battle of staves' foughtbetween the private army of a planter and that of a Muslim land-lord in Krishnanagar had resulted in the killing and wounding ofmany on both sides and the drowning of four to five hundredheads of cattle belonging to the ryots [11 II: 130 n]. The SambadPrabhakar in two of its leading articles in 1853 and 1854 regardedviolent disputes between zamindars and planters as fairly wide-spread throughout Bengal [11 I: 98, 200]. These were commonenough to be treated as typical by Peary Chand Mitra in his novel,Alaler Gharer Dulal, published in 1858. Its debauched and accident-prone hero has a pleasure trip to his zamindari estate rudely spoiltby an affray between the lathials of his own cutcherry and those

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led by the manager of the local indigo factory [16: 79-82J. Theplanters are being increasingly oppressive in Jessore', says theauthor. Subsequently that year the Hindoo Patriot echoed the sameconcern and went on to record its appreciation of the zamindarssiding with their ryots against the planters [ 14: 118 & n 38].

By 1860 as the revolt broke out in earnest, it appeared at leastduring its initial stages as if zamindari feud and peasant jacqueriehad merged into a common resistance. A large number of thelanded magnates—far in excess of the two families who comeup for mention by Suprakash Ray [19: 402]—became activelyinvolved in the struggle against the planters. The most formidableof them all was Ramratan Ray of Narail. His enmity towards theplanters and the spectacular ways in which he expressed it,became legendary. He was said to have destroyed an indigofactory and covered up the traces by transplanting a coconutorchard onto its site—all done in a single night's work [22: 14 f].He owned extensive properties in Jessore, Faridpur and Pabna,and in each of these districts his lathials fought the planters'mercenaries [14: 87]. In 1860 the rebel peasants of Kushthiaenjoyed his active support and patronage. Insurgents in a Pabnavillage who chased away a party of policemen headed by a DeputyMagistrate, were reported to have been led by one of his agents[14: 156 f]. And later on that summer the lathials of the Narailzamindars fought a pitched battle against those of the Meerganjconcern [2: 24 f]. In most of these exploits Ramratan Ray had apowerful accomplice in his naib, Mahesh Chatterjee. It would bewrong, however, to regard the latter's opposition to the plantersas merely derivative. He was a big zamindar in his own right andowned much property in the neighbourhood of the Katchikattafactory in Nadia [R\C 2921 e]. By the middle of February 1860we find him stirring up the Katchikatta ryots against the planters/•RIC 3111 e]. Soon afterwards a complaint was lodged againsthim and his naib for inciting the villagers of Pachlia against thePoamaree concern and organising a murderous assault on one ofits employees [2: 12-15]. By the end of March he had alreadybeen blacklisted by the District Magistrate as 'the most dangerousagitator in Nadia' [14: 87 n 11]. Another officer of the same districttestifying before the Indigo Commission accused Mahesh Chatterjeeof holding nightly meetings where he exhibited parwanas hostileto indigo cultivation and of dissuading the ryots from sowing and'encouraging them to refuse to allow the factory servants to enterthe villages' fRIC 3077 e j . By April he was being blamed by theguardians of law and order for masterminding the Pabna riotsagainst the planters on behalf of Ramratan Ray [ 14: 157 f]. ThePal Chaudhuris of Ranaghat, too, counted among the leaders ofthe landlord opposition. They had never been reconciled to thepresence of European planters in western Jessore where theyhad their extensive zamindaris. Their Ranaghat home often served

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as a rendezvous for the anti-planter landlords of the region [ 14: 89].Shyam Chandra Pal Chaudhuri had a long-standing feud withRobert Larmour of Mulnath, the notorious General Mufassil Man-ager of the Bengal Indigo Company. Lathials of the two partieshad already clashed as early as January 1858. Two years later,in January and February 1860, a number of affrays occurredbetween them again [14: 90]. Another redoubtable enemy ofthe planters among the Jessore zamindars was Mathur Acharyaof Shadooty (Sadhuhati). A report from Sisir Ghose to the HindooPatriot in October 1860 mentioned that 'the villagers with Mothoorat their head threw off the factory yoke during the late crisis' andthat the planter was trying to persuade the authorities to sendup to Shadooty a battalion of police for his own protection[2: 41 f]. According to Satishchandra Mitra, the Acharyas 'sidedwith the peasantry and incited and organized them' into a forceof thirty thousand men who easily overpowered the planter'sretainers and plundered the houses of the factory employees[19: 394]. Yet another zamindar who allied himself for a whilewith the indigo ryots was Brindaban Sarkar of Sibnibas. The Sarkarshad been involved in a long-drawn litigation with Larmour overthe ownership of Sibnibas. During the very early stages of therebellion they incited the ryots against the planter and helped themwith advice and money to the extent of paying off the fines imposedby the courts on those found guilty of violation of Act XI of 1860[14: 90 f; RIC 2172-2174 e]. Then, there was Jagadbandhu Ghose,a zamindar, who, in the spring of 1860, was directly responsible forprovoking a revolt among the ryots of the Aurangabad concernin a manner that had some unforeseen consequence as noticedlater on in this paper (see pp. 31-33 below). Subsequently thatsummer Sisir Ghose sent up to the Hindoo Patriot a story about'a great battle . . . fought at Mullickpore between the owner ofthe villages and John MacArthur of Meergunge' [2: 16]. Theowner mentioned above was Haranath Ray, zamindar of Mallikpur.Srihari Ray of Chandipur, too, a proprietor of seven villages, tooka conspicuous part in the rebellion, according to SatishchandraMitra [19: 391]. So, it appears, did Prankrishna Pal, identified byJames Forlong of the Nischindipur factory as an influential zamindarand an enemy of the planters, who had been trying 'to induce theryots not to sow indigo and to sow a large breadth of rice culti-vation' fRlC 56 e j . Two other landlords, Ramnidhi Chatterjee andNabokisto Pal, both big talukdars, are also named by Forlong asactive and powerful opponents fRIC 2924 e, 2925 e, 3505 e].This roll-call is necessarily incomplete. But I do not think it ispossible to regard this an indicative of anything but a fairly largeparticipation of the landed magnates in the rebellion during itsearlier stages.

As for the middle classes, the distinction between an urbansection 'somewhat sympathetic' to the rebellion and a rural one.

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hostile to it, is perhaps a bit too neatly drawn. Physically as wellas culturally, town and country still formed a smooth continuumduring the middle decades of the nineteenth century: physically,because the metropolis shaded off into the deep country by degreesalong a gradient of suburban villages and rural towns; and cultur-ally, because the metropolitan society itself was still 'subject toa strong rural pull' as the nouveaux riches in Calcutta and itssuburbs continued to cherish all the more important • traditionalvalues, while the ancestral village 'continued to exert a spiritualinfluence even on the new generation which had grown almostentirely on urban soil' f22: 12, 63, 79, 80, 85]. It is, therefore,difficult to agree with Suprakash Ray that the division of themiddle-classes between those who were 'permanently residentin the country' and the rest, 'predominantly resident in towns',corresponded to a general division between a 'relatively reaction-ary' section and a 'progressive' one [19: 188, passimj. And thiswas true of attitudes relating to social reform as well as to politics.The middle classes, in town and country, were all equally attachedto the raj. If anything, the Calcutta baboos, judging by the noisydisplay of their solicitude for their 'guardians' in 1857, appearedto be quite capable of outshouting their mufassil class brethrenin protestations of loyalty. Again, if sympathy for a peasant revolt(not to be confused with pity for the victims of repression aftera rebellion has been crushed) is any measure of a progressiveoutlook, the urban middle-classes could hardly be credited withit. Thus, the revolt of the Santals, the other big uprising of thedecade just ended, proved to be a cause for much concern to theSomprakash, identified by Benoy Ghose as 'an organ of theeducated and liberal Bengalis of intermediate means during thesecond half of the nineteenth century' [11 IV: 25]. One of itscorrespondents reported how a great fear spread among the richrural gentry as in a particular area the rebels approached theneighbourhood, while, editorially, the Somprakash pleaded withthe authorities to garrison the small towns so that the insurgentswere contained in the jungle until the cold season when the troopsmight enter it and deal with them [11 IV: 790, 791]. The SambadBhaskar, edited by Gourishankar Bhattacharya who in his youthhad learnt the art of liberal journalism as an assistant at theJnananveshan, the organ of the Young Bengal 'ultras', was worriedthat 'the Muslim infidels of Bihar were spreading a rumour to theeffect that the Santal insurrection would soon force the BritishGovernment out of power', and that the Kols, too, felt encouragedto take up arms against the Government, thanks to 'the mildmanner' in which the latter had treated the Santals [11 III: 34, 298,300]. Residence in towns could, thus, hardly be an influence onmiddle-class opinion in favour of a peasant revolt, particularly ifthe latter bore even the least tinge of disloyalty to the raj. For,

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as the milkman in Neel-darpan put it. The city baboos are pro-British' [Act V, Sc. 1J.

This, however, is not to deny that some elements of rural societywho had, customarily, stood between peasant and landlord, fedas parasites on the latter's resources and been the agents of histyranny over the ryots, were now in the planters' employmentand sided with them against the enemies of the factory. Alreadyin 1850 the Tattvabodhini Patrika had noticed the presence of 'acommunity of ruffians engaged at many places in the countrysidein oppressing the people' under the planters' patronage [11 II: 129].They were still there, a continuing scourge, when the Somprakashwrote bitterly about them fourteen years later [11 IV: 80]. Thecharacters, Dewan, Khalasi and Amin, represent them in Neel-darpan. The khalasi has considerably added to his authority byallowing the junior planter to sleep with his sister [Act III, Sc. 1],But the amin who also made a gift of his sister to the sahebs,has not been promoted to the post he had expected as a fair return[Act I. Sc. 2]. The dewan laments that his services are not appre-ciated enough, although he has allowed himself to sink, morally,to the lowest depths in order to do his master's bidding. Yet heis determined not to shrink from anything, however base, for 'onceI have taken up this job', he assures his boss, 'I haven't been theleast swayed by any consideration of fear, shame, timidity, honouror prestige; incendiarism, cow slaughter and the slaying of brah-mans and women have all become habitual with me' [Act I, Sc. 3].

Suprakash Ray has quite rightly emphasised the role of thesecorrupt elements as the planters' henchmen [19: 403 f]. But hereagain one must be careful not to oversimplify. There were, indeed,some outstanding cases of the planters' own managerial staffturning against them and actively participating in the rebellionor even leading it. Morad Biswas who led the Aurangabad rebelsup to a point, had for some time acted as a rent collector for thefactory which his men were to attack later on [14: 94]. The Mallikbrothers, Ramratan, Rammohan and Girish, who led the insurgentsin Jessore, had all been factory karmacharis [14: 96]. And,Digambar and Bishnucharan Biswas, whose reputation as leadersof the rebellion became legendary, had also served as senioremployees of the Bansberia Concern [14: 95]. What is even moreimportant to recognize is that the rural middle class was by nomeans coterminous with the group of factory karmacharis. Itconsisted of two very large sections of the rural population. First,there were many small landholders including jotedars, talukdarsand mahajans who obviously belonged to this category. Not allof them were friendly to the planters. It was they who petitionedthe Lieutenant-Governor during his tour in 1859 seeking his inter-vention against the tyranny of William White of the BansberiaConcern [14: 76 f]. It was the opposition of these small landholderswhich the planters, Maurice Tweedie and Adam Hume Smith,

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complained of in their evidence before the Indigo Commission/•RIC 3409, 3494]. Some of the most formidable leaders of therebellion came from this class. There were the Biswases ofPoragachha, minor landlords and moneylenders9 who organised,armed and financed the insurgents [14: 95 f; 19: 386, 390 f]. Thenthere were the Malliks of Jayrampur whose anti-planter sentimentsreceived much encouragement from the Pal Chaudhuris of Ranaghat[14: 89]. The manner of their militant opposition to the plantersearned for Ramratan, the head of the family, the heroic sobriquet,'Nana Saheb of Bengal' [14: 96 f]. Sisir Ghose, too, came from amiddle-ranking talukdari family. Unlike the other talukdars men-tioned above he wielded the pen rather than the lathi againstthe factories at the height of the rebellion [2: 22 f, 28, 30, 36; 19:220, 389, 391, 402]. He was, indeed, a member of that small butincreasingly important section of the rural madhyabitta who com-bined landed interests and country connections with a western-style education and a liberal professional training acquired in thecities. Operating from the rural towns and the larger villages, theyconstituted a vital link between the indigo ryots and Calcuttapublic opinion. It is they who acted as Harish Mukherjee's eyesand ears, for the Editor of the Hindoo Patriot had never been toany of the indigo districts himself except Barasat and Hugli /"RIC3876 e]. No wonder that they were not popular with the plantersand their friends among the local bureaucrats. According to SisirGhose, members of 'the anti-indigo party' blacklisted by the Jessoreauthorities in July 1860 included, among others, a court official,a post-master, a teacher and three other educated natives for allof whom the gravest consequences were predicted if the lawcould lay its hands on them [2: 22 f].

Apart from these junior representatives of the rural gentryendowed with talukdaris and/or a little western-style education—the bhadrasantans whose distress had provoked a protest in thecorrespondence column of the Sambad Prabhakar in the summerof 1859 [11 I: 105 f]—there was still another section of the non-urban middle classes whose attitudes must be taken into account.These were the rich peasants10 who, acting as modols (or, moreelegantly, mandals i.e., headmen) occupied a strategic positionboth in indigo production and in village society. Benoy Chowdhurydraws upon a contemporary account of the role and resourcesof these elements to conclude that the planter found them'eminently useful in enforcing his system', and the modols, thanksto their triple function as principal tenants, moneylenders andleaders of the local community of ryots, 'misappropriated thepeasants' surplus' as the reward of their collaboration [5: 169 f].A pucca house adorned with a string of golahs (granaries) forrice was the visible symbol of a headman's affluence in a villagein the indigo districts. But the collaboration was short-lived andthe planters by their rapacity alienated this useful section of the

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middle classes, too. A modol family mentioned in the openingscene of Neel-darpan owned not so long ago ten ploughs, fortyto fifty bullocks, a massive cowshed, a big courtyard, a large annualcrop of monsoon paddy and money enough to provide sixty mealsa day for its members and dependants. But within less than threeyears after the planters had acquired a lease of the village, thefamily was altogether ruined: two of the three brothers who wereseverely beaten up by the men of the factory for refusing to changeover from rice to indigo, had fled the village, and the other too,was about to do so. It was oppression of this sort that drove therich peasants throughout the indigo districts to make a commoncause with the rest of the peasantry against the planters in 1860.More often than not it was they who emerged at the flash pointof a local insurrection as its grass-root leaders inciting, leadingand organising the ryots. In Lai Behari Day's Bengal Peasant Lifeit is the intervention of the mandal 'who seemed to be somewhatbetter dressed than the rest and to exercise some sort of authorityover the assembly', that swayed village opinion decisively in favourof action against the planter, Mr. Murray. 'Man Saiake maro!(Strike the scoundrel Murray)—that should be our battlecry', heexhorts. The indigo planters have been the ruin of our country.Before those salas came, this country was as happy as Ayodhyain the time of Rama. But now everything has gone to wreck andruin. They oppress us; they beat us; they imprison us; they tortureus; they dishonour our wives and daughters. Down with the bluemonkeys! Man salake maro!' [10: 247]. All contemporary observerstestified to the rich peasant's oppositional role as indicated by Dayin his novel. Herschel, the highly knowledgeable Nadia official,claimed to know of 'hundreds' of village headmen who had actedas the local leaders of the insurgents /"RIC 2832 e]. And for BlairKing, a modern historian of the 'Blue Mutiny', the evidence isample and eloquent enough to allow him to state 'that the villageheadmen or mandals whose names appear as leaders in the indigodisturbances are too numerous to recite' [14: 97].

VIIIIt should be clear from all this that the indigo rebellion which

was primarily the work of the great majority of the villagers rangingfrom middle peasants to the rural proletariat, was still hot withoutparticipants, and occasionally leaders and organizers, drawn fromthe classes above that level. But those upper-class elements con-sisting of zamindars, talukdars and rich peasants, although theyopposed the planters up to a point, did not do so all for quitethe same reason as the rest of the rural society. Their resistancediffered from that of their poorer neighbours in its aims as well asin its quality.

Let us turn to the landed magnates again. Rabindranath Tagoreretailed a myth about the zamindars rescuing the ryots from 'the

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usurious noose' by which it was the planters' policy to try andhang them [23: 342]. The truth is that the big landlords were quitehappy to let the white planters do what they liked with the ryotsso long as they did not themselves feel threatened. The poet'sgrandfather, Dwarakanath Tagore earned some at least of hisprincely fortune from bargains made with the planters /"RIC 3997 e j .He was emphatically in favour of 'the cultivation of indigo andthe residence of Europeans' as a result of which, he claimed, 'theryots materially improved in their condition'. And it was as a tokenof the white seigneurs' coexistence with the brown ones that hewas quoted by the former in their memorial to the Secretary ofState in defence of the indigo system [17: 44 f]. But the era ofmutual tolerance, never altogether free of feuds, was not destinedto last long. Dwarakanath's death in 1846 may be said to havesymbolized its end. The Union Bank crashed the following year.As capital dried up, the rush to acquire more land for indigo, whichhad already started in 1829 and considerably intensified since1837, developed into a scramble. It was the ryots, inevitably amarauder's first kill, who were hurt most as the wicked weedfought, burnt and litigated its way into paddyfields, residentialplots, country paths and the borders of village ponds—lands notyrant had ever laid his hands on. The zamindars cashed in onthe peasants' distress. The landholders knew that the planterscould not do without their land. This immensely strengthened theirbargaining position'. This comment, by a modern historian [5: 166],on the venality of the zamindars is confirmed by the views of manycontemporary observers including some who testified before theIndigo Commission. Among these were Maurice Tweedie of theLoknathpur factory, who was no friend of the native landlords/•RIC 3407 e], Mahesh Chatterjee who, as noticed above, was nofriend of the planters [R\C 3526 e], and James Forlong, a liberalplanter friendly to both sides [14: 27, 59 f]. 'While I have beenin this district', said Forlong after thirty years' residence in Krish-nanagar, 'I have never yet found a zamindar hesitate in handingover his ryots to the planter as soon as his terms are compliedwi th ' fRIC 2902 e]. It is the near unanimity of all on this pointwhich led the Commission to conclude 'that the only difficultyexperienced by the planter has been that of settling the pecuniaryterms' with the landlord concerned in a dispute, and that 'in anycase there is usually but one termination to these disputes', thatis, an agreement on 'the price demanded for a putni' or 'the bonusdemanded for a lease' /"RIC 42-43 r].

But an agreement was often not so easy to reach. The landlordswould try to exact 'the largest possible rental and the largestpossible price' fRIC 2977 e], anything up to four times the annualrental as the price of a patni, amounts ranging from 25 to 100per cent as the selami for an ijara, and so on [5: 176 f]. Only thelarger indigo concerns backed by the agency houses could afford

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to buy on such terms, and even they found their resources badlystrained when the failure of the Union Bank made funds hardto come by. And thus as the normal procedure of buying andselling was hindered by a shortage of credit, both parties weretempted to use non-economic measures of persuasion. The zamin-dar would try to force his own terms for a lease on the planterby inciting the ryots against him. The planter, on his part, woulduse the obliging and sinister authority of the local police and thecourts in order to bully the landlord into a settlement favourableto himself. If such devices failed, they would directly resort toviolence and allow the question of prices and perquisites to bedecided by combats between their respective bands of lathialsand spearmen.

The use of such non-economic measures was, in a certain senseappropriate for these transactions. For, what was at issue herewas not just a price regulated by demand and supply, but feudalrights of access to the peasant's land and labour. The zamindarsof Bengal already enjoyed these rights which they used, until1829, to stop the planters from contracting directly with theryots for indigo [14: 52], and after that date, to boost their bargain-ing power in deals over patnis and ijaras in the manner mentionedabove. Inevitably, therefore, during the three decades precedingthe rebellion and particularly after 1837 when legal restraints onthe acquisition of property were all removed, the planters intensifiedtheir drive to acquire and expand their ilaka (proprietary) estateswhere they could get the ryots to grow indigo without havingto go through the zamindars as in be-ilaka (non-proprietary) areas.An ilaka offered the planters a two-fold advantage. First, they coulddevelop the cultivation of indigo here on a traditional ryoty patternbased on small peasant holdings worked by family labour. Thisconsiderably reduced the managerial costs and the uncertaintiesof labour supply which made the plantation type of agriculture innijabad lands unattractive for them [5: 124-30]. Their preferenceshowed up clearly in the fact that by 1860 for every bigha ofnijabad growing indigo in Lower Bengal there were almost as manyas three bighas of ryoty [RIC 1 a]. Secondly, ilaka cultivationequipped the European planters with socio-political powers overthe peasantry on a par with those held by the native landlords.This was recognized by all concerned—by the Government, by theplanters themselves and, of course, by their rivals the zamindars.A Midnapur official pointed this out in 1855 when he observedthat by securing 'the proprietary right in the land where his futureoperations are to be carried on' the planter 'obtains power overthe ryots' [5: 166]. The planters' view was represented, amongothers, by James Forlong of Nischindipore factory. He preferredilaka because, he told the Indigo Commission, 'the authority of thezamindar seemed to me to be the only authority possessing anypractical character whatever as to rights over the people'. Pressed

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further by the Commission to state whether these 'rights' con-stituted 'feudal power', he answered in the affirmative [RIC 54 e,65 e]. The consensus in favour of such power had, by 1860, ledthe planters to acquire vast propietary estates throughout theindigo districts. A little over seventy-seven per cent of all landgrowing indigo for the Bengal Indigo Company was ilaka; so wasnearly seventy-four per cent of the area under James Hills' con-cerns [14: 53 f]. It was inevitable, therefore, that expansion onthis scale should end up in clashes between planter and zamindar.The zamindar felt that the planter operating independently of himin the neighbourhood, was a challenge to his own authority overthe peasantry. Disputes between their servants exacerbated feel-ings on both sides. The ryots often sought the zamindar's protec-tion against the planter's brutalities, while the zamindar would nothesitate to use armed bands of ryots to discourage a planter fromintruding into lands he owned or coveted. All such conflicts, asnoticed in the Report of the Indigo Commission /"RIC 41 r], werecharacteristic of the rivalry between an established feudal magnateand an aspiring one. No wonder that these were widespread inareas where the planters had expanded most, such as Nadia, wherethey set up as landlords over two-thirds of the district [14: 55].

This acute and often violent contest for 'feudal power' explainsmuch of the landlord opposition that merged up to a point withthe resistance of the peasantry in 1860. Yet this opposition wasby its very nature limited. W. J . Herschel, Magistrate of Krish-nanagar, was quite accurate in his observation that the prinicpalzamindars did 'on the whole' throw their weight into the scaleagainst the planters, but by no means to the extent they couldhave done /"RIC 2833 e]. The limitations of the landlords' involve-ment in the rebellion showed up in a number of ways. There werethose who, like Srigopal Pal Chaudhuri, intrigued and sympathizedwith Ramratan Mallik and other rebel leaders against the planters,but would not refuse them leases or defy them openly in any otherway for fear of expensive and protracted litigation fRIC 3557 ej.It is this prospect of harrassment generated by long-drawn judicialprocesses and by the partisan intervention of the local officialsthat made even such inveterate foes of the planters at RamratanRay and Mahesh Chatterjee weaken sometimes /"RIC 3526 e] orwithdraw temporarily from a confrontation /"RIC 3576 e j . EvenMathur Acharya who once led a miniature peasant army againstthe factories, chose after some time to act as a mediator betweenplanters and ryots and persuaded the latter to disarm [19: 394].And we have it again on the authority of the knowledgeable Mr.Herschel that Robert Larmour, once the bete noire of the PalChaudhuris of Ranaghat, owed 'a great deal to the ultimate assentof the two principal zamindars. Sham Chunder Pal Chowdhuryand Habib ul Hossain' /"RIC 2834 e] for the suppression of therebel peasantry.

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Common to all these retreats and betrayals was a logic ofproprietary interests which led the native zamindars to go alongwith the ryot so long as he refused to grow indigo but back outthe moment he decided to defy the planter-landlord by withholdingrents. The development of the struggle against indigo into a rentstrike is thus of immense importance for the history of the rebellion.It was, however, the inevitable consequence of the planters'accession to zamindaris. This equipped them with the power toimpose advances on the ryots and enforce the cultivation ofindigo in a manner they could never hope to do in be-ilaka villagesthanks to the 'constant and capricious interference' of the nativelandlords [RIC 2928 e]. As a district official observed in 1859,it was 'compulsory' for the ryots in ilaka areas to accept advancesfor indigo [5: 166]. The procedure for compulsion consisted, first,of a planter's 'use of the power of summoning ryots to increasehis indigo cultivation' /"RIC 2607 e]. Once forced into the planter'spresence, the ryot could be coerced in a variety of ways rangingfrom blackmail to bastinado to contract for indigo. The pressurethat often told most was the threat of a rent increase [5: 168]. Itwas stepped up after the failure of the Union Bank in December1847 when in conditions of a reduced supply of capital the plantersbecame 'more careful in collecting arrears of rent from the peasants'[5: 194]. In the absence of a law enabling them to choose cropsfor the ryots to grow the planters fell back on their right to increaserents as the next best inducement in favour of indigo. An unobligingtenant could always be charged a higher rental and be thrownout for not paying it. It is not that enhancement and evictionactually took place on a large scale [5: 182]. The threat was oftenenough to break down an individual peasant's opposition. To pressa ryot for rents was to press him for indigo. Or, as the planterswould say, 'When we settle for rent we settle for indigo' [5: 189].The intensity of their feeling against the Rent Act of 1859 (Act X)which appeared to curb their power of enhancement (though inreality it did not, as the planters were soon to recognize), wasindeed a clear indication of the value they put on it as an instru-ment of their 'practical authority' in the ilaka areas [5: 187; RIC2266 e, 2932-33 e j .

Thus, the increasing use of rent as a lever to impose indigo onthe ryots forced the latter to react to this, inevitably, as a con-comitant evil. As a result, what had been so far a resistance toindigo began to take on the shape of a rent strike too. Thus beganthe 'rent disturbances' which, as Kling explains, was the officialdescription for 'the refusal of the ryots who were tenants-at-willto submit to eviction from lands claimed by planters' [14: 173].Although this aspect of the rebellion became most pronouncedafter September 1860, that is, during the period immediatelyfollowing the publication of Nee!-darpan, it had already made animpact earlier that spring as a growing and potent element of class

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antagonism which could hurt all landlords, white as well as brown.Some of the latter who knew how to read the signs, startedimmediately to decelerate on their collision course. JagadbandhuGhose made his peace with the Aurangabad concern by March1860; Mahesh Chatterjee, too, withdrew to Calcutta that spring;Shamchandra Pal Chaudhuri negotiated a truce with his enemyRobert Larmour by the summer of 1860 [14: 88, 90, 92]. For bythen a tocsin had been sounded in the ilaka areas for all to hear.As early as March the peasants of northwestern Jessore had goneon a rent strike against the planter-zamindars of the Joradah con-cern. And within three months it spread to the Salmagudia concernin southern Pabna and from there to the northern part of thatdistrict and to Jessore, Nadia and western Faridpur [14: 173].By autumn rents emerged as the 'central issue' of the conflictbetween planters and ryots, and the rebellion assumed the characterof a struggle fought more closely than before on class lines.

An important feature of this later and more determined phaseof the rebellion was the increasing solidarity of the poorer sectionsof villagers. It is not merely the tenant-cultivators who weretyrannized by the planters. Poor and landless peasants, hired foran assortment of jobs connected with the transport of the indigocrop and with the making of the dye [14: 29], were also sub-jected to iniquities of all kinds. They had, of course, their shareof the physical brutalities, the regime of the shyamchand, which theplanters and their myrmidons inflicted on all and sundry.11 Equally,if not more, galling was fact that they were underpaid for theirlabour. An editorial in the Sambad Prabhakar of 12 March 1860noted how a rising cost of living had been pushing up agriculturaland industrial wages for all except those employed by the factories.Consequently, 'the peasants of Nadia have united in a strike(ekatra hoia dharmaghat sthapan kariachche) determined not towork for the planters for unremunerative wages'. The Prabhakarwent on to describe the intensity of local feeling thus: 'In certainvillages the peasants have built up such a solidarity among them-selves that even the servants of the factories, however armed withlathis, dare not confront them' [11 I 112 f]. A most remarkablefact about this solidarity is that it appears to have cut across theethnic diviison between the local poor and the tribal poor—theso-called buna coolies brought over annually in large numbersfrom the districts of Bankura, Birbhum or the South-West FrontierAgency [R\C 24 r] to serve as a cheap labour force for the planters.We have nothing on record to show that the tribal labourersparticipated in any armed action during the rebellion. But thereare some clear indications that they, too, were caught up in thespirit of the dharmaghat against ill-paid work. A letter to theEnglishman (7 June 1860) from a Jessore planter complained ofthe 'ingratitude' of the tribal workers for demanding an advanceof five rupees and a monthly wage of five rupees as against the

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customary advance of two rupees and an equally low wage permonth. Less than two-thirds of the usual number of tribal labourershad turned up to work for him [14: 166 f]. That they were nogreat friends of the planters, but, on the contrary, ready to sym-pathize with their opponents, is also indicated by Navinmadhabin Neel-darpan when after rescuing Kshetramoni he decides totake the path that leads through the tribal quarter of the villageas the safest escape route, because the tribals, he is sure, 'willdo us no harm if they come to know what has happened' [Act III,Sc. 3J.

Solidarity of this kind between the poorer sections of the ruralpopulation contrasted sharply, at this particular point of the rebel-lion, with the increasing dissociation between the militant peasantsand the landed magnates. The latter had already, as noticed above,started back-pedalling. This had sometimes a most disastrousconsequence for the rebels, particularly when they failed tosustain a struggle all on their own and looked up to the biglandlords for leadership. What could happen in such cases, isillustrated by a story published by both the Hindoo Patriot and theSambad Prabhakar in January 1860 [11 I: 109-12]. The peasantsof Goahpota, Shyamnagar and Badochuluri, three small villages inNadia district, were subjected continuously to a series of harrass-ments by the gomasta of a local indigo factory until their patienceran out and they banded together, beat up the planters' henchmenand rescued from their custody a village headman and an agedryot who had been quite unjustly put under arrest. On hearingabout these incidents, the European chief of the Bhajanghata factorydecided to try and bully the villagers into submission. So heparaded through the area with a posse of lathials and orderedthe modols of each village to report to him at the local factory,which they refused to do. Defied thus, the planter immediatelylodged a false complaint to the local magistrate alleging that theryots had raided the houses of the Europeans and robbed them.Not content with invoking the law in his favour, he also hired acontingent of fifty spearmen from Jessore and began systematicallyto spread terror in the neighbourhood. 'But what could the soli-darity of the villagers hope to achieve by itself?' asks the SambadPrabhakar. 'For they were all poor and of course, no one evercomes forward to help the poor. They became very scared indeedfor having been involved thus in a dispute with the planter. Sothey conferred among themselves and decided that they musthave someone who was wealthy enough to be able to protectthem'. The person whom they begged for help was BrindabanPal Sarkar, a big zamindar, who owned a large number of villagesin the area. He refused to help because, he said, he had far toomany quarrels of his own with the planters to take over otherpeople's disputes. Thus ended the hope the villagers had ofsecuring help from affluent quarters and as a result, they lost

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heart.' They appealed to the magistrate, but to no avail. And yetthe planters had no difficulty in persuading the same guardian ofthe law to sanction the employment of two dozen armed guardsfor the protection of the gomasta whose misdeeds had actuallytriggered off these troubles. Eventually, 'the ryots who had by thistime lost all hope and could no longer bear up with oppression,presented themselves in a body to the planter one day and askedfor his forgiveness.' The planter responded by imposing on thethree villages a collective fine of three hundred rupees in additionto an equal amount they were obliged to pay to the gomasta asthe price of peace. The story ends by noting that these villagers'are now altogether subservient to the planter and bear up, headsbent, with all his ukases.'

All this was in 1858. When, subsequently, the rebellion breaksout, we find the peasants in a more aggressive and resolute mood.W. J . Herschel's summary of violent incidents, appended to theReport of the Indigo Commission, offers some insights into theinsurgents' temper. Case no. 62, Government vs. MuniruddinBiswas and 22 others, may be cited as a typical instance:

Resistance to the Police. A petition was sent to the Darogah of Bagdaby one of Mr. Larmour's people to say that, on their going to Barakhan-pore, they were driven out by the villagers; the Darogah went to thespot, saw the Naib reading the Parwana and Proclamation of March 29and April 9 to some 25 ryots. They laughed at it and swore not to obeyit; the ringleaders, four, were arrested and presently rescued by a partyof latTiials, two hundred. Subsequently the Military Police under theMagistrate (Mr. Macneile) arrested 18 men and one more was nextday arrested and identified'. fRIC 11 a]

This militancy was informed with a sense of independence whichthe Hindoo Patriot had already noted, disapprovingly, in 1854 asa product of the 'growing estrangement' between ryots and zamin-dars—'their natural heads' [5: 200]. When by the spring of 1860the rent question began to assume a critical importance, thisspirit of independence contributed much to strengthen the peasants'morale. For, 'their natural heads' had by then started ganging upagainst the ryots with their not-too-natural heads, the whiteplanters. A common proprietary fear cut across ethnic distinctions.A zamindar would often call it a day after a mere round or twoof sharp encounter and hasten to settle with a hostile concernfor a small consideration, such as an ijara or a job for a kinsman.The ryots, left in the lurch by such a sordid compromise, would,at this point, need all the initiative they could summon in orderto continue independently their struggle against the planters.Blair King has put together detailed first-hand evidence about onesuch ongoing struggle [14: 91-93] in a manner that proves howbeyond a certain point the indigo rebellion became the peasants'own show.

In this case again the insurrection broke out when in February

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1860 the ryots of the Aurangabad concern in Murshidabad districtwere pushed beyond their customary threshold of forbearanceby a factory gomasta's oppressions. Neither the manager nor hisassistant, both Europeans, did anything to stop this wicked manfrom screwing out of the ryots large cash payments as the priceof their freedom from sowing and weeding indigo. His retainersbound up some of the headmen for refusing to oblige him withmore than half the sum he demanded on one occasion. This wasa signal for the villagers to rebel. They rescued the captives, andchased, seized and beat up the gomasta himself. As tempersrose, three thousand peasants gathered and marched on thefactory. All this provided the big local zamindar with a handle toadvance a cause he had long cherished: he wanted the gomasta'sjob for his brother. He now set to exploit the situation by usingsome of the lesser landlords to work on the peasants' wrath forhis own benefit. These leaders put up a spurious fight 'by callingout the ryots for further attacks and lathiyal battles and then dis-missing them before the battles materialized,' until the planter,scared out of his wits, decided to buy his peace by dismissing theunpopular gomasta and appointing the zaminar's brother in his place.

That was the end of round one. The zamindar, pleased with hisbargain, withdrew from the conflict. But the peasants were nolonger in a mood to give up resistance. Having got rid of an oppres-sive employee of the factory, they now demanded a reduction ofthe amount of indigo to be sown. And as the struggle developed,they raised their sights still higher and resolved to do away withthe cultivation of indigo once and for all. This radical enhancementof the aims of the insurrection corresponded to an increase in itsthrust as it spread across the borders of Murshidabad into Maldadistrict. The spontaneity of the initial jacqueries, too, matured intoa conscious drive for unity and organisation. Hindus and Muslimsswore together never again to sow indigo. Villagers subscribedto common funds to finance the struggle. Drum-beats and otheragreed signals were used by them to warn each other of animminent raid by the planters' men and to mobilize large numbersof armed villagers in defence of their homes. 'In fact, they had it alltheir own way', observed an official investigator and added ruefully:The Police were afraid'.

The lesser landlords who, earlier, had acted as the zamindar'sinstruments of incitement, wanted nothing better than to drawin their horns at this point and opt out of the struggle. But thepeasants would not let them. 'At this stage', says Kling, 'the ring-leaders found themselves borne along by the torrent which theyhad set loose; they were no longer in control of the ryots, butprisoners of a movement which they still appeared to direct'.Failing to stop it, they tried to use it for their own ends. MoradBiswas, the leader of this group, instigated the ryots to concentratetheir attack on another factory in the neighbourhood in order to

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force its manager to employ him as its gomasta. As he was aboutto clinch his deal with the planter, the peasants, betrayed by thezamindar not so long ago in precisely the same way, refused tolet Morad withdraw from the campaign and forced him to commithis son to join in an assault on the fatory scheduled for the follow-ing morning. The assault failed and Morad, a reluctant rebel, wastaken prisoner.

The history of the struggle against the Aurangabad concernillustrates much of what was typical of the landlords' involvementin the rebellion of 1860. It shows that they did participate in itand even led it sometimes, but that this participation was inspiredby opportunistic and limited aims which took it no further thanthe point beyond which their interests were antagonistic in absoluteterms to those of the peasant masses. Hence, the emergence ofrents as a central issue in the struggle against the planters con-stitutes a historic turning point. Lardlord leadership weakens con-siderably thereafter and is increasingly characterized by vacillation,compromise and betrayal. Not to acknowledge the fact of thelandlords' participation in the rebellion amounts, therefore, toexonerating them for all their capitulation and treachery during thesubsequent phase of the rebellion, and correspondingly, to takingthe edge off the sharp contest between them and the poorersections of the village for the initiative of the struggle.12

IXIf the landed magnates proved to be opportunist in their support

for the rebellion, the rural middle classes proved to be defeatist.Their opposition to the planters was inspired by a relatively greaterdegree of self-interest. More often than not they had to opposein order to survive. Forced into a conflict they were almost exclu-sively dependent on the ryots for combat power, if only becausethey had no private armies of their own to match those of thecutcherries or the kuthis. Yet with all the backing they receivedfrom the poorer sections of the village, they were tempted to throwup their arms far too soon in any encounter that promised no easyvictory.

It is this inclination to run away from a fight that made suchmiddle-class leadership particularly short-lived. This is indicatedin a statement made by a contemporary observer who was secondto none in his knowledge of the indigo districts. Asked by theIndigo Commission if he knew of 'any head ryots who have suffi-cient resolution and knowledge to stir up their own ryots andalso to communicate with other ryots in other parts of the districtand thus create a combination among themselves', W. J . Herschelof Nadia said: 'I could point out hundreds such. But the villageleaders in this case, with few exceptions, had a strong interestin the question themselves. Leaders have sprung up in one village,who have, in an incredibly short space of time, gained an enormous

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influence in numbers of adjacent villages, and have lost it almostas quickly' /"RIC 2832 e]. Suprakash Ray quotes this statement[19: 388] minus the twenty-five words we have italicized above.Shorn thus of much significant information about the rich peasants'motivation and the limited character of their influence, the state-ment serves for Ray as evidence of 'a collective leadership of therebel community of peasants' [19: 387]. Read in full, however,Herschel's testimony can mean only one thing; that is, the classinterests of the rich peasants acted as a brake on their participa-tion, and consequently, the leadership of the village headmenproved to be far too transient for the poorer ryots to develop anyabiding trust in it. The fragility of rich peasant leadership is wellillustrated by Lai Behari Day in his account of the taming of aloud-mouthed modol who had, earlier, incited the ryots to a fightagainst the local factory, but agreed, after a little third-degree treat-ment, to accept advance for indigo and lie to the police in orderto shield the planter from criminal charges [10:252-59]. No wonderthat the influence gained by some rich peasants 'in an incrediblyshort space of time' was lost 'almost as quickly' for want of asustained combativity.

This feebleness was characteristic of the other groups of middle-class leaders, too—the talukdars and the lesser landlords abovethe rich peasant level. Neel-darpan is the story of such a minorlandowning family, the Basus of Swarapur. It has as its hero theelder son of the family, Navinmadhab. Before the planters cloudedhis horizon, his annual income amounted to seven hundred rupeesin rents alone and his other assets to fifteen warehouses for grain,sixteen bighas of garden land, twenty ploughs and fifty day-labourers. He could afford to celebrate the Pujas in great style,throwing large banquets, distributing gifts, entertaining his guestswith music and jatra [Act III, Sc. 2]. They grew enough food tofeed the family for the whole year and still had a good deal leftover [Act I, Sc. 1]. They made a bit of money by selling a partof their own produce of mustard and tobacco. And all this incomefrom land was supplemented by usury [Act III, Sc. 2]. It is anindex both of Navinmadhab's culture and of his resources thathe could afford to have a siesta in the middle of the working day[Act I, Sc. 4J.

His affluence impresses by contrast. Sadhucharan, described asa matabbar, i.e. principal ryot of the village, has only one and ahalf ploughs and twenty bighas of land [Act I, Sc. 3] of whichabout half has been rendered unproductive by saltwater [Act I,Sc. 2]. He cannot afford to have his house protected by a fence,so that his wife and daughter are quite defenceless once the menhave left for the fields [Act I, Sc. 4]. Talk of security under theraj, it does not apply to chasha families like his own. Old GolokBasu can boast of growing enough mustard to meet his family'sannual requirement of oil and still have sixty to seventy rupee

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worth of seed to spare [Act I, Sc. 1], The matabbar's wife mustbeg for a little oil from the kolus (oil-men) before she can lightup for the evening [Act I, Sc. 4]. And to complete the picture ofthe relative prosperity of the Basus,we have in the play an agri-cultural labourer, a Tikiri by caste, who, representing as he doesthe very lowest depth of village society, comes from a family thatnever possessed a single plough and he has no land, no cattle,no cowshed [Act IV, Sc. 1].

Neel-darpan is a play about this Basu family. But it is not aplay that invites us to witness the authentic aspects of the economicand social operations of these not inconsiderable exploiters in avillage of impoverished peasantry where even a matabbar ryotis not better off than a middle peasant of the poorer sort. Theauthor appears to be primarily concerned to emphasize the paternal-istic element in the given agrarian relationship. Navinmadhab isso utterly dedicated to the welfare of the ryots that the planter'sdewan is tempted to jibe. That bastard talks like a missionary'[Act I, Sc. 3]. Even in the midst of his worst trials our hero sticksto his principle that 'to do good unto others is the highest virtue'[Act II, Sc. 3]. And the ryots persecuted by the planters turn tohim as their provider. An innocent peasant dragged away fromthe fields by the guardians of the law accompanied by the planter'shirelings, cries out to Badobaboo (as Navinmadhab is called bythe villagers) to save his two children from starvation during hisinvoluntary absence from home [Act II, Sc. 3], and sure enough,in the next scene, we have the dewan complaining to the planterhow Badobaboo was indeed providing food for the families offour of the arrested ryots and having their lands cultivated at hisown expense with his own ploughs, cattle and hired labour [ActIII, Sc. 1].

Far from exposing the less benevolent side of the Badobaboo'stransactions as a landlord, the play goes so far as to make a virtueof an even more sinister aspect of his r6le in the village economy—that of a moneylender. We gather from Act III, Scene 2, thatusury is, for the Basus, a subsidiary, though not meagre, sourceof income. We gather, too, that even the matabbar's family—notto mention others poorer still—have to share their hard-earnedincome with the mahajans every year [Act I, Sc. 2]. Yet in aplay supposed to uphold the cause of the peasantry, moneylending,that scourge of the rural poor, appears as the theme for a panegyric[Act V, Sc. 1]. The moneylender is a well-wisher of his debtors',we are told (Madhusudan Datta misses out on this key sentencein his translation). Or, again. The mahajans never sue their debtors'.The two speeches where these nuggets occur, are quite explicitin their praise of mahajani not merely for its alleged superiorityto dadni favoured by the planters, but in absolute terms for theadvantages it is supposed to have for the peasants. The speaker,in both instances, is the dewan who with all his wickedness is

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still endowed by the author with enough sympathy for the ryotsto make him suspect in the planters' eyes. In choosing such arelatively positive character to plead in favour of mahajaniDinabandhu Mitra set himself up as a defender of the contem-porary landlord-money-lender as typified by Navinmadhab, hishero. And he was by no means the only liberal of his age to holdthis particular brief. Lai Behari Day does precisely the same thingin his Bengal Peasant Life [10: 219-23]. Here we find the villagemahajan insisting on 'interest at the rate of two payasa per takaa month' that is, 37.5 per cent per annum, from a heavily indebtedpeasant whose house has been burnt down by the landlord's men.Yet the author describes Golaka Poddar, the moneylender, as 'amost respectable man' who 'never cheated anyone and was honestand upright in his dealings'. Should the reader be tempted tocredit men of Golaka Poddar's class with anything but the purestof motives. Day warns: The reader must not suppose that allmahajans of Bengal are as hard-hearted and inhuman as Shakes-peare's model Jew . . . we do not believe that, in Bengal at least,the moneylender is so much detested by the peasantry as aportion of the Indian press represents him to be.13 Indeed, but forthe good offices of the mahajan, many a Bengal raiyat would haveto cool his heels in the cells of some prison-house'. In real life,however, few mahajans would come as clean as that. Take, forinstance, the case of Sri Hari Rai of Chandipur who testified beforethe Indigo Commission. It was his custom to charge the ryotsinterest at an annual rate of 24 per cent on loans made up ofmoney, 37.5 per cent on composite loans of money and grain,and anything up to 50 per cent on loans made up of grain alone/•RIC 3487 e]. Operating on these lines he got a decree against aryot called Selim Biswas, attached his property and arrested him.But Biswas happened to be a ryot who grew indigo for theKhalbolia factory. As the peasant was thus sent 'to cool his heelsin the cells' of the moneylender's cutcherry, the planter retaliatedby seizing Sri Hari Rai's gomasta and imprisoning him in a godown/•RIC 3477 ej.

This story contradicts not merely the liberal missionary LaiBehari Day, but the arch-liberal Rabindranath Tagore himself. ForSri Hari Rai, the mahajan of Chandipur, was also 'a zemindar ofmoderate substance' who owned seven villages /"RIC 3473 e j .And his record is a part of the massive evidence which shows thatcontrary to Tagore's claim about the zamindars saving the peasantryfrom the planters' 'usurious noose', the landlord-usurers often actedas the hangmen themselves. Moneylending was a common prac-tice with landowners of all kinds—large, medium and small. Itwas so with magnates like Jaykrishna Mukherjee of Uttarkpara (towhom Lai Behari Day dedicated his famous work as to 'one ofthe most enlightened zamindars in Bengal') who had vast estatesin Hugli and the Twenty-four Parganas, paid an annual sadar jama

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of ninety thousand rupees and had, on his own admission, nearlya hundred thousand rupees 'floating' as money lent on 'interestfrom twelve to twenty-four per cent'. No wonder that half of hisryots were in debt fRIC 3807 e, 3821 e, 3825 e]. There wereothers like Prankrishna Pal of Latoodaha and Sri Hari Rai ofChandipur who, though not of the magnate class, still combinedtheir extremely large zamindari incomes with mahajani fRIC 2978 e,3473 e, 3562 e]. And there were, of course, those 'numberlesssmall talukdars' mentioned by James Forlong in his evidencebefore the Indigo Commission, who—like the Basus of Swarapur—had 'very strong mahajani interest to promote' /"RIC 2970 e].It is these large usurious interests of the rural gentry which weredirectly threatened by the planters. An exchange between thePresident of the Indigo Commission and Prankrishna Pal put thenub of the matter thus:

President: You are a mahajan as well as a zamindar, does Indigo cultiva-tion interfere with your lending money?Prankrishna Pal: It does interfere, because the ryots are not allowed tosow rice until the Indigo is sown and afterwards weeded, and it becomestoo late to do anything for the crop, and consequently poor ryots arenot able to pay off their rice as well as cash debts to me fRIC 3562 e j .

The mahajan's sense of loss was particularly heightened by thefact that 'rice debts' made up of grain for the ryots' use as foodas well as seed, which normally fetched a rate of interest rangingfrom twenty-five to fifty per cent fRIC 3487 e, 3482 e j , tendedto be more lucrative than ever before precisely at this time whenthe price of rice was rising steeply [5: 197; RIC 3824 e j . It wasinevitable, therefore, that in 1860 leading planters like Larmour andForlong should complain about the mahajans trying 'to induce theryots not to fulfil their indigo engagements' and doing 'all in theirpower to induce the ryots not to sow Indigo and to sow a largebreadth of rice cultivation' fRIC 2024 e, 2970 e j . Thus, in spiteof Jaykrishna Mukherjee's hypocritical plea for a peaceful co-existence of planters and landlord-usurers fRIC 3822 e, 3823 e]a direct clash between them could hardly be avoided under thesecircumstances. For what was at issue here was neither the zamin-dar's urge to protect the ryot from the money-lender, as Tagorewanted us to believe, nor, as Maurice Tweedie of LoknathpurFactory righteously claimed fRIC 3407 e], 'the opposition shownto him (i.e. the mahajan) by the planter when he endeavours toscrew too high a rate of interest out of the ryot'. The truth simplywas that the poor ryot was caught in a cross-fire between dadniand mahajani, two contending systems of usury patronised respec-tively by the planter and the landlord both of whom were equallyinterested in appropriating the peasants' surplus f7 : 229 & n].The two systems, as the Somprakash perceptively observed, borea close family resemblance f 77 IV: 89]. In upholding the landlord-

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usurer against the planter-usurer, Dinabandhu Mitra was, as theBengali proverb would put it, siding with the crocodile in thewater against the tiger on the bank. In doing so he, a 'progressive'writer, was at the same time striking a blow, however uncon-sciously, for an emergent class who, as Kling points out, benefitedmost from the indigo rebellion: 'Ultimately they snatched thefruits of victory from the peasants, and the indigo disturbancesmark the transfer of power from planter to moneylender in LowerBengal' [14: 75]. In this, too, he anticipated by many decades anelement of liberal-nationalism which insisted on the unity betweenthe rural poor and their feudal and semi-feudal exploiters as acondition of success in the struggle against the raj. Representedin all its maturity in the political philosophy of Gandhism, it isexpressed with characteristic vigour by Vallabhbhai Patel duringthe Bardoli satyagraha. The Government wants to divide you andthe shahukar (money-lender)', he said in an address to Harijans,Dublas and artisans in the spring of 1928, 'but for you yourshahukar is everything. You should laugh at and consider him tobe a fool if somebody says that you should change your shahukar.It is just like saying to a pativrata (a chaste and dutiful wife)that she should change her husband. How can you leave theshahukar who has helped you in your difficulties?'14

iX

We have already noticed how so many of the political beliefs andsocial attitudes of the Basu family were almost identical with thosecherished by Dinabandhu Mitra himself. This is of course quiteappropriate in view of the author's affinity to his protagonists inclass terms. It adds greatly to the authenticity of the Basu family'sideological portrait as presented in the play. What, however, comesthrough as less than authentic is the ideological portraiture ofthe peasantry. A close look at Dinabandhu's characterization ofTorap should make this clear.

Torap is largely responsible for Dinabandhu's fame as a 'pro-gressive' writer. For each successive generation of middle-classBengali radicals throughout the twentieth century — and thisincludes even such a perceptive historian as Suprakash Ray[ 19: 500]—Torap has been the symbol of peasant insurgency. Thatthis has been so reveals much about the baboo's mental imageof peasants and rebels. For, the author of Neel-darpan has en-dowed this agricultural labourer with so much of his own virtuesof liberalism and loyalism that he has, in fact, turned him intoa perfect petty-bourgeois. One is, therefore, not surprised to learnfrom Sivnath Shastri how, on the publication of the play, Torapimmediately endeared himself to the readers. What could, indeed,be more endearing to the Calcutta intelligentsia of 1860 than toread about someone who thought like themselves and was helpedby his fictive existence to perform such brave and noble deeds

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as beating up a wicked white planter and saving a pregnant peasantwoman from his lust?

The opening scene of Act II provides us with some details ofTorap's ideology. He is seen as a prisoner here in the warehouseof the Begunberey indigo factory. Four other ryots are his fellowcaptives. Of these at least one is an agricultural labourer, theTikiri whom we have already met. The rest, too, are either labourersor poor peasants. Torap dominates the conversation as one whoobviously is a leader of the village poor and deals with the doubtsand questions of the others with a certain amount of knowledge-ability and authority. One of the ryots seems to have little faithin the sahebs. He has been the victim of false criminal chargestwice. The second time his accuser was the white planter of theBhabnapur factory whom some people regard as such a nicefellow. Torap, however, jumps to the saheb's defence. The ryotmust have done something wrong to merit his punishment, hesays, for 'the saheb of Bhabnapore wouldn't cause trouble unlessthere was good reason for it. . . . Had they all been like him,none would have spoken ill of them'. The ryot retorts by pointingout that this nice saheb has in fact been found to have illegallydetained seven persons including a small child and that he stillcontinues to rob the peasants of their cattle. Torap changes thesubject, but not the theme. 'As soon as they come across a sahebwho is really a good chap,' he says, 'they want to destroy him'.Which then raises the interesting question of the distinction be-tween good and bad sahebs—a distinction the other ryot is unableto grasp. Torap explains this in terms similar to those used bythe matron of the Basu family: the magistrates are scions ofrespectable families (badonoker chhawal) while the planters arethe low-caste people of England (belater chhotonok). Then',quips another captive peasant, 'how come that our former Governorwent around the factories being feasted like a bridegroom justbefore the wedding?' The much-harrassed ryot appears to haveshared the view Sisir Ghose found common among the villagersin the indigo districts that the British officials lived off (patramara)the planters' bounty [2: 35 f]. Unable to shake off his suspicionabout the mutuality of interest between the Government and theIndigo Establishment, he suggests that the late Governor Saheb—that is Halliday—judging by his cordiality towards the kuthis,must have been linked with the planters as a business partner.Torap dismisses this as absurd, but not being in a position tosay much in favour of Halliday, passes quickly on to the latter'ssuccessor who provides him with another toehold for his undauntedloyalty to the raj: 'If by the grace of God our present Governorlives long enough, we shall have all we need for two square mealsand the spectre of indigo wil l no longer press on our shoulders.'

This Torap has nothing in common with a peasant up in armsagainst his oppressor. He, like the baboo who created him, is full

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of a sweet reasonableness which is ready to exonerate the colonialregime for all its crimes against the peasantry. For every badplanter, bad magistrate, bad Governor named by the harrassed andembittered ryots, our so-called rebel has a good planter, a goodmagistrate and a good Governor to name. This tendency to leanbackwards in order to accommodate a 'moderate' point of viewessentially hostile to that of the insurgents is clearly illustratedby Torap's attitude to the crucial question about the future ofindigo cultivation in Bengal. A decisive swing away from indigoappears to have begun already in the summer of 1860 in partsof Jessore, where, according to one of Sisirkumar Ghose's reportssent in as early as May, the peasants 'with one voice . . . saidthat they would no longer cultivate indigo'. Pressed by the JointMagistrate, Mr. Skinner, to carry on with indigo, they firmlydeclared, 'We won't sow indigo any longer' [2: 10J. Later on, inAugust, in another part of the district they defied still anotherofficial plea for indigo by saying, 'No, Saheb, if you cut our throats,even then we won't, if we die for this Indigo, the majority of ourcountrymen will in future live happily' [2: 27J. Mahesh Chatterjeetold the Indigo Commission on 18 July 1860 that 'according totheir present temper and feeling' the ryots were unlikely to sowany indigo again /"RIC 3529 e]. And here is a selection of answersfrom the peasants themselves to the Commission's questionwhether they would want to cultivate indigo in future.

'No, not at a rupee for two bundles, nor at a bundle the rupee.''Not for two bundles a rupee, not for a bundle a rupee nor for 100 rupeesa beegah.''I would rather go to a country where the indigo plant is never seen ornamed."'Rather than sow indigo I will go to another country; I would rather begthan sow indigo.' fRIC 7732 e, 7763 e, 7780 e, 7276 e]

The authorities appear to have taken this defiance seriously enough.'Reports that the ryots would oppose the October sowings', wroteO'Malley, 'led Government to strengthen the military police inthe indigo districts and to send two gunboats to the rivers ofNadia and Jessore, and Native Infantry to the headquarters stationsof these two districts' [18: 106]. It is clear thus that by the summerof 1860 masses of armed, angry peasants were fighting to endthe cultivation of indigo once and for all, and the struggle had bythen nearly gone beyond the bounds of the immediate economicissues involved. Yet it is precisely at this apical hour that the rebelpeasant, thought up by a luminary of Bengal Renaissance, is busytrying to reform the planters. He still seems to be hoping that theywould give up their predatory ways and take up indigo cultivationas a regular agricultural pursuit in which, Torap assures them,they can depend on the cooperation of the peasantry [Act II, Sc. 1]\And he continues in this vein—backed by a nodding assent fromPodi Moirani, the white man's procuress [Act II, Sc. 3]—right up

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to the rescue scene when after he has beaten up Mr. Rogue, hestill finds it useful to try and persuade him to 'carry on yourbusiness by mutual consent' [Act III, Sc. 3]. This is not an angry,insurgent peasant's voice addressing an enemy; it is a baboo's voicebegging the saheb to come to terms with the turbulent chashasbefore they get out of hand.

Which brings us the question of violence. The widespread useof violence by the ryots against the combined forces of planters,police and troops is a fact about the indigo rebellion recorded inall contemporary evidence. A few words from a local observer,such as those of Sisirkumar Ghose from Jessore in August 1860,can even at this distance in time sum up for us a quickening situ-ation: The planters are collecting revolvers, ammunition and lathials. . . while the villagers are gathering clubs and spears . . .' [2: 26].Neel-darpan, published within weeks of this despatch, has nothingin it even remotely approaching the coiled tension of these lines.This is so because the author is simply not responsive to themusic of a clash of arms between the peasant and his oppressors.

It is not that there is no violence in the play. There is indeed alot of it, in the form of the planters' terror backed by the officialengines of repression. But the theme of a retaliatory violence onthe victims' part is kept firmly under control throughout the text.The author does not allow his realism (for which he is so highlyrated by the literary pundits) to get the better of his philosophy.He is ready to douse with moderation every surge of people'sanger. When two hundred ryots, armed with lathis, are poisedfor an attack on the factory, Sadhucharan is made to pacify them[Act V, Sc. 2]. When Torap succeeds at last in laying his handson the wicked junior planter, Navinmadhab, our hero, tries toreason with him: 'Why beat him, Torap? We don't have to becruel to them even if they are so themselves' [Act III, Sc. 3].And it is a measure of Navinmadhab's sense of values that heallows himself to get into a fight with one of the planters whoinsults his dead father's memory but not with the other planterwho tries to rape a pregnant peasant woman. In any case, hisadvice is not lost on Torap who, after he has bitten off Mr. Wood'snose in the affray involving Badobaboo, says that he would haveinflicted further physical punishment on the planter if he had achance, 'but I would not have killed him, as he is a creature ofGod' [Act V, Sc. 2].

This highly sanctimonious tone, this neatly drawn distinctionbetween chastisement and annihilation can come only from onewho can afford not to have his hatred boiling over, not to indulgein 'excesses' when the planters are looting, burning, raping allaround. This cannot be the attitude of an indigo peasant of 1860involved, by all accounts, in a most sanguinary battle for survival.Torap is a pseudo-peasant and a pseudo-rebel.

Note how, in the first place, he displays none of the initiative with

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which all contemporary observers credit the peasant rebels. Infact, he hardly ever confronts the planters on his own. On eachof the two occasions when he actually puts up a fight, he doesso as the Badobaboo's strong-arm man. The author endows himwith only as much militancy as would be needed to highlight theoverriding quality of all—that is, his loyalty to Navinmadhab. Andit is precisely because of this—and here is a second importantthing to note about him—that his militancy has little in commonwith that of the rebels of 1860. All contemporary accounts agreeon the highly organized and steady combativeness of the insurgentpeasantry, such as was exhibited in that minor epic of a peasantwar fought against the Aurangabad Concern. By contrast, Torap'scombativeness appears to be spasmodic. It is not disciplinedbecause it is not informed by the consciousness of the ruralproletariat. Gifted by his liberal maker with a petty-bourgeois con-sciousness his militancy explodes in brief, intermittent bursts.What goes well with this is the politics of the bomb and of middle-class terrorism, and not the politics of a revolutionary peasantwar. Finally, it should be noted that he is not even all that brave:he confesses to being mightily scared at the sight of Navinmadhabbeing hit on his head by the planter, and in his very last speechhe says: 'Let me now hide myself inside the barn. I shall give themthe slip after dark. The scoundrel will let hell loose on the villageto make up for his lost nose' [Act V, Sc. 2]. This does not strikeone as exactly the sentiments of peasant hero, a fish in water,at the height of a popular rebellion sweeping the countryside.

The defeatism of Torap's parting words represents the spiritof the play as a whole. Forced into a confrontation with the powerof the planters, he wants to run away as soon as possible. He isnot the only one to do so. At one point Sadhucharan, too, thoughtof leaving the village with his entire family in order to take refugein a neighbouring zamindar's estate [Act I, Sc. 2], And althoughin the opening scene Golok Basu rejects all advice in favour ofdesertion, the idea occurs to his son soon afterwards when hefinds the old man threatened with imprisonment under the new law[Act II, Sc. 3]. This temptation to run away is only equalled byall the principal protagonists' efforts to placate the planters,reason with them and arrive at a compromise—and failing all this,to try and defend themselves by litigation. The only character totake a stand of total defiance is a poor ryot who, even as he isforcibly led away from the fields, asserts that he 'would ratherrot in jail than grow indigo for that skunk of a planter' [Act II,Sc. 3]. But this one firm voice of a genuinely rebellious peasantis drowned in the chorus of petty-bourgeois wailing of the restof the cast. In the end there is nothing in all their faith in thelaw, the civil service, the Lieutenant-Governor and the Queen thatcan save the Basus of Swarapur from being utterly ruined. Neel-darpan, written by a liberal in the midst of a peasant revolt, shows

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where the liberal stands at the time of a peasant revolt: he standsclose to the power of the state seeking cover behind the law andthe bureaucracy. It also shows what happens to him if he doesso: he is destroyed.

NOTES1 We have used the text of Neel-darpan (which means, literally, 'a mirror

of indigo') as given in Dinabandhu-Rachanavali (Sahitya Samsad Edition;Calcutta 1967). Translations are own own. We have not used MichaelMadhusudan Datta's rendering into English, because it is slipshod,inaccurate and altogether unrepresentative of the brilliant colloquialismof the better parts of the original.

Bibliographical references are indicated by sets of numerals enclosedwithin brackets. The arabic numerals preceding and following a colonstand respectively for the serial number of a publication listed up at theend of the essay and its page or pages. A roman numeral indicates, whenit occurs, the volume number of the given publication.

The abbreviation, RIC, stands for Report of the Indigo CommissionAppointed under Act XI of 1860 with the Minutes of Evidence takenbefore them; and Appendix (Calcutta, 1860). Figures followed by 'e'refer to answers by witnesses to questions put to them by the membersof the Commission; those followed by 'r' indicate the relevant parts ofthe Report itself; and those followed by 'a' refer to an appendix in PartOne of the Report.

A much abridged and rather different version of this study was pub-lished in the Calcutta weekly. Frontier, in December 1972.

2 In his famous essay on Dinabandhu Mitra's life and works BankimchandraChattopadhyay appears to be torn between his critical judgement andhis loyalty towards a dear, departed friend. The verdict he reached aftera certain amount of beating about the bush, is perhaps best summedup as follows: 'Grantha bhalo hauk ar manda hauk, manushta badobhalobashibar manush', meaning 'Whether he wrote well or not, he wasa most loveable person' [4: 833].

3 One wonders if this should not be regarded as a classic example of mythresulting from a complete reversal of reality. For, we have it on theauthority of Binodini Dasi that Neel-darpan, staged in 1875 by the GreatNational Theatre Company in Lucknow, was broken up by the Europeanmembers of the audience when Torap, in the rape scene, forced his wayinto the planter's apartment and beat him up [8: 77, 98-100].

4 The attitude to female education continues, apparently, to divide Hindumiddle-class parents and children during the second half of the nineteenthcentury much as it did in the eighteen-twenties and thirties. How a child-wife of nine, married in 1826 to a boy of fifteen, pursued literacysurreptitiously in the midst of her domestic chores and with the soleencouragement of her husband, is described this in The Life of GrishChunder Ghose . . . by One Who Knew Him (Calcutta, 1911): 'In theintervals between her culinary operations she used to scrawl on thekitchen floor the letters of the alphabet with a piece of charcoal andthus learn to write. She would afterwards carefully rub out the letterslest she should be detected in the forbidden occupation. Her onlypreceptor was her husband who was then a student of the Hindu College.During his hebdomadal visits to Konnagar she used to learn from himto read and write at a late hour of the night when feeling quite wearyafter the day's hard work. . . . In the course of a few years she was ableto read all the best books then existing in the Bengali literature . . .'[1: 63].

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5 The Tattvabodhini Patrika (1850) had the following to say about theeducation of the planters' Karmacharis: 'A little arithmetic represents theupper limit of their education; they have never tasted true learning, norhave they acquired a moral education' [11 II: 129].

6 The European planters' objection to education for the peasantry in 1860on the ground that this would increase their resistance to indigo, isechoed twenty years later by the Bengali zamindars of Bakharganj because'they are afraid that education would make the ryots more obstinate inwithholding payments of their rents' [6: 289].

7 Harish Mukherjee advised the ryots strictly to abide by the law, evenby the wicked Act XI of 1860, and to go on begging for redress. 'Iinvariably advised them', he said, 'to apply to the district authorities inthe proper form for redress and to go to the next appellate authority,if they found no redress at the hands of the district auhorities. I cautionedthem against ever committing any breaches of the peace or committingthemselves in any manner by acting illegally. I explained to them thatthe operation of the Act was temporary, and that better measures wouldbe devised next year' (RIC 3873 e).

8 A god who, according to Hindu mythology, rules over the celestial king-dom. Many heavenly musicians are patronized by him at his court.

9 Suprakash Ray describes them once as 'middle class' [19: 389] and then,again, as 'primarily peasants' [19: 390].

10 To make doubly clear what should be quite obvious to the reader atthis point, the demographic difference between the total rural populationand the sum of all big zamindars, big talukdars, middle peasants, poorpeasants, landless peasants, agricultural labourers, bandits, vagabondsand lumpen, constitutes for us the 'rural middle classes' in 1860.

11 The Tattvabodhini Patrika wrote in 1850: 'It is not merely the peasantswho are subjected to coercion and punishment by the planters and theirhenchmen; the same treatment is meted out also to those who transportthe indigo leaves by cart or boat or on their heads and do any otherwork of this kind' [11 II: 128].

12 The betrayal of the upper classes became even more frequent and blatantas the rent struggle intensified after October 1860. As Kling points out,the planters began to play, with remarkable success, on the native land-lords' proprietary fears and enlist their support as allies [14: 173 f]. Butthey were not the only class to feel threatened by the increasing militancyof the ryots. A section of the rich peasants, too, appears to have goneover to the planters in some areas, generating, wherever this happened,jacqueries followed by the mass exodus of the ryots. A report fromPabna published by the Somprakash in 1864 said: 'Some planters . . .have appeased the principal and wealthier projas of the villages byoffering them employment at the factories, and consequently, the latterare now gathering up the helpless mass of the projas as fuel for theflames of indigo. Wherever the mandals are yielding to such temptation,affrays and associated acts of violence are invariably breaking out there.It is precisely because of this that many projas have deserted Khadampurand other villages' [11 IV: 79 f].

13 For a specimen of the hostile press the moneylenders got see an editorialpublished in the Sambad Prabhakar on 23 November 1863 [11 I: 113-15].

14 I am grateful to D. N. Dhanagare for drawing my attention to this extractfrom Satyagraha Patrika quoted in his D.Phil. (University of Sussex)dissertation, Peasant Movements in India, 1920-1950.

REFERENCES1 Anon., The Life of Grish Chunder Ghose . . . by One Who Knew Him

(Calcutta, 1911).2 Bagal, Jogesh Chandra (ed.), Peasant Revolution in Bengal (Calcutta

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1953).3 Buckland, C. E., Bengal under the Lieutenant-Governors. Vol 1 (Calcutta,

1901).4 Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra, Bankim Rachanavali. Vol. 2 (Sahitya

Samsad Edition. Third Impression. Calcutta, 1964).5 Chowdhury, Benoy K., Growth of Commercial Agriculture in Bengal (1757-

1900). Vol. 1 (Calcutta, 1964).6 Ibid., 'Agrarian Relations in Bengal, 1859-1885' in N. K. Sinha (ed.), The

History of Bengal. 1757-1905 (Calcutta 1967).7 Ibid., 'Growth of Commercial Agriculture and its Impact on the Peasant

Economy' in Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 7, no. 2(June 1970).

8 Dasi, Binodini, Amar Katha O Anyanya Rachana (Calcutta, 1969).9 Datta, Michael Madhusudan, Madhusudan Rachanavali (Sahitya Samsad

Edition. Calcutta, 1965).10 Day, Lai Behari, Bengal Peasant Life (Reprint of the 1878 edition incor-

porating the two-volume edition of Govinda Samanta published in 1874.Calcuta, 1955-66).

11 Ghose, Benoy, Samayik Patre Banglar Samajchitra. 4 vols. (Calcutta,1955-66).

12 Ghose, Girishchandra, Girish Rachanavali. Vol. 2 (Calcutta, 1971).13 Indramitra, Karunasagar Vidyasagar. (Calcutta, 1969).14 Kling, Blair B., The Blue Mutiny. Indigo Disturbances in Bengal 1859-1862.

(Philadelphia, 1966).15 Mitra, Dinabandhu, Dinabandhu Rachanavali (Sahitya Samsad Edition.

Calcutta 1967).16 Mitra, Peary Chand, Alaler Gharer Dulal in Tekchand Granthavali (Hitavadi

Edition. Calcutta 1912).17 Natarajan, L, Peasant Uprisings in India, 1850-1900 (Bombay, 1953).18 O'Malley, L. S. S., Bengal District Gazetteer: Murshidabad (Calcutta, 1914).19 Ray, Suprakash, Bharater Krishak Bidroha O Ganatantrik Samgram (Cal-

cutta, 1966).20 Reisner, I. M. & Goldberg, N. M. (ed), Tilak and the Struggle for Indian

Freedom (Indian Edition. New Delhi, 1966).21 Shastri, Sivnath, Ramtanu Lahiri O Tatkalin Bangasamaj (New Age Edition.

Calcutta, 1955).22 Sinha, Pradip, Nineteenth-century Bengal. Aspects of Social History

(Calcutta, 1965).23 Tagore, Rabindranath, 'Rayater Katha' in Rabindra Rachanavali. Vol. 13

(Centenary Edition. Calcutta, 1961).24 Whitcombe, Elizabeth, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India. Vol. 1

(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1972).

GLOSSARYAbhadra: not bhadra (see below). Amin: a native employee on the super-visory staff of an indigo factory. Banchat bada pandit hoiachhe: literally, 'Thesister-fucker is showing off his learning' Bhadra: pertaining to the bhadralok;~lok: a general term used to indicate the elite status shared by the threehighest ranking Hindu castes of Bengal; ~santan: scion of a bhadralok family.Bigha: a land measure which, in Bengal, stands for 1600 square yards or alittle less than a third of an acre. Blue Monkey: translated from the Bengaliwords 'neel bandar' used in a contemporary popular verse to describe thewhite indigo-planters. Chandal: one of the lowest and least pure castes.Chasha: peasant. Dadni: a system of cash advances made out to peasantcultivators in order to induce them to grow indigo and sell it to the factories.Dawl: faction. Dewan: a native employee on the supervisory staff of an indigofactory. Dharmaghat: strike. Dudu Mian: principal leader of the farazi peasantinsurrections in eastern Bengal in the nineteenth century. Gomasta: a native

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employee on the supervisory staff of an indigo factory. Ijara: lease. Jatra:a form of folk theatre. Jotedar: a class of rich peasant farmers. Kanu: oneof the two brothers who led the revolt of the Santal peasantry in 1855.Karmachari: employee, official. Kayastha: one of the elite castes of Bengal.Kulin: a term denoting some of the 'purer' groups among the elite casteslike Brahmans and Kayasthas. Kuthi: the headquarters of an indigo-planter.Lathial: a mercenary armed with a heavy bamboo cudgel. Madhyabitta: thosebelonging to middle income groups. Mahajan: moneylender. Mufassil: thecountry, as distinct from Calcutta. Mukhtar: a legal agent or attorney who,in most cases, is not allowed to plead. Naib: manager of a landlord's estate.Nana Sahib: one of the principal leaders of the Great Rebellion of 1857.Parwana: an order; a written command. Pathshala: a primary school of thetraditional, as against western, kind. Patni: lease of lands with zamindarirights. Proja; tenant. Pucca: brick-built. Puja: ritual worship often accompaniedby festivities. Putni: same as Patni above. Sadar: a principal seat of govern-ment in a province or district, as distinct from subdivisonal or other secondaryadministrative centres. Sadhubhasha: elegant, somewhat Sanskritized vocabu-lary associated with elite status in Bengali society. Sala: wife's brother; hereused as a term of abuse. Samaj: an association usually (though not always)based on the identity of its members' social status. Samiti: an associationusually (though not always) based on the identity of its members' professionalor occupational interests. Sammelan: conference, meeting, gathering, etc.Sarkar: government, regime. Selami: a gratuity or offering on receiving alease. Shyamchand: an instrument of torture used by landlords against theirtenants and by the planters against the indigo peasants. Sidhu: one of thetwo brothers who led the revolt of the Santal peasantry in 1855. Sudarsan:a mythical instrument of war, shaped as a circular blade, used by the god,Vishnu, to cut down his enemies. Swadeshi: the national protest movement(1903-1908) against the partition of Bengal. Talukdar: a hereditary landlordwhose rank, in Bengal, is usually inferior only to that of the zamindar.Tantia Topi: one of the principal leaders of the Great Rebellion of 1857.Titu Mir: leader of the famous peasant revolt of 1831 in Barasat near Calcutta.Vakil: a lawyer who is allowed to plead in a lower court. Zamindar: a Bengalilandlord of the highest denomination whose hereditary title to property wasconfirmed by the Permanent Settlement of 1793; ~i: (n.) a zamindar's estate,(adj.) pertaining to a zamindar.

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