"Neel Darpan", a play that depicted the atrocities on the indigo planters, was translated into English by:

Correct — B, Michael Madhusudan Dutta. Four names, four different roles, and the question asks for exactly one of them. Dinabandhu Mitra wrote the Bengali play, published anonymously at Dhaka in 1860 against the background of the Indigo Revolt in Bengal. Mitra sent a copy to the missionary Rev. James Long in 1861; Long passed it to W. S. Seton-Karr, Secretary to the Governor of Bengal and formerly President of the Indigo Commission, who mentioned it to Lieutenant-Governor Grant. Grant wanted to see an English version and to have a few copies printed for private circulation, and Seton-Karr asked Long to arrange the translation. The translator Long engaged was Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the poet of Meghnad Badh Kabya, who worked under Long's supervision while Long himself acted as editor — cutting some coarse passages, writing a short prefatory note, and sending the manuscript to the Calcutta Printing and Publishing Press. Five hundred copies were printed in April or May 1861 and posted out in official On Her Majesty's Service envelopes, which is what turned a private commission into a public scandal. The Englishman and a group of planters then sued, and it was Long, as the man who had given the printer the copy, who stood trial in the Calcutta Supreme Court from 19 to 24 July 1861, was fined one thousand rupees and imprisoned for a month. That is the publisher's story, not the translator's, and the question asks who translated.

• (a)Dinabandhu Mitra — He wrote the play, in Bengali, and published it anonymously in 1860 — the fact CDS's sibling papers usually test. He is the author, not the man who put it into English.
• (c)James Long — The strongest wrong option, and the one the stored answer takes. Long commissioned the translation, edited it, wrote its preface, had it printed and circulated it — and went to prison for the libel suit that followed. The English text on which he was tried was made by Dutt under his supervision. The 1861 title page's evasive line, that the play was translated 'by a Native', is what allows the confusion to survive.
• (d)James C. Scott — A twentieth-century American political scientist, author of Weapons of the Weak and The Art of Not Being Governed. He has nothing to do with the play; the name is here only to sit next to James Long.

Nil Darpan belongs to the aftermath of the Blue Rebellion of 1859-60, when the ryots of Bengal refused to sow indigo for the planters. The play dramatised what the ryots said was done to them, and its English version turned a Bengali provincial grievance into a metropolitan controversy: Long's trial was described at the time as the first state trial of India under the Empire. Natural indigo itself did not survive long afterwards; once German chemists synthesised the dye in the 1890s, cheap artificial indigo destroyed the market for the crop.

The item works because the story has three men in it and most people remember only two. A candidate who recalls 'Dinabandhu Mitra wrote it and James Long went to jail for it' has the frame but not the answer, and will pick Long. The safer route is to fix each role separately — author, translator, publisher — because CDS and NDA have asked for the author before and can ask for either. Two printed points deserve a note. The stem says the play 'depicted the atrocities on the indigo planters'; the play depicted atrocities committed by the planters upon the cultivators, so the printed preposition points the wrong way, and the sentence is reproduced here as the paper set it. And the paper writes Neel Darpan where the 1861 English edition wrote Nil Durpan; both transliterate the same Bengali title. One honest caveat on the answer itself: the printed English edition named no translator, and because Long shouldered responsibility at the trial a few accounts credit the translation to him, which is presumably how the stored answer came to say Long. The weight of scholarship, and the option list's own design, put Dutt in that place.

• Dinabandhu Mitra wrote Nil Darpan in Bengali and published it anonymously at Dhaka in 1860.
• Michael Madhusudan Dutt made the English translation under Rev. James Long's supervision; Long edited it, wrote its preface and arranged the printing of 500 copies in 1861.
• Long was prosecuted for libel by The Englishman and the planters, tried at the Calcutta Supreme Court from 19 to 24 July 1861 before Sir Mordaunt Wells, fined one thousand rupees and jailed for a month.
• The fine was paid on Long's behalf by Kaliprasanna Singha, the translator of the Mahabharata into Bengali.
• The printed English edition carried no translator's name, saying only that it had been translated from the Bengali by a Native.

• Giving the translation to James Long because the trial and the imprisonment are his.
• Giving it to Dinabandhu Mitra by collapsing author and translator into one person.
• Reading the stem's phrase about atrocities on the planters as a statement of fact; the play is about what was done to the cultivators.

Sometimes for the author, sometimes for the translator, sometimes for the man who was tried and imprisoned. The same three names are recycled across all three versions, which is why each role has to be fixed separately.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Rev. James Long was tried and imprisoned in 1861 in connection with which one of the following?

  • (a)The publication of the English version of Nil Darpan
  • (b)The founding of the Indian Association
  • (c)Evidence given before the Indigo Commission
  • (d)A petition against the Vernacular Press Act

  Answer(a) The publication of the English version of Nil Darpan — he was convicted of libel, fined a thousand rupees and jailed for a month; the fine was paid by Kaliprasanna Singha.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Blue Rebellion of 1859-60 in Bengal was a protest by cultivators against

  • (a)the compulsory cultivation of indigo for European planters
  • (b)the introduction of the Permanent Settlement
  • (c)the salt monopoly of the East India Company
  • (d)the levy of a house tax by the municipal police

  Answer(a) the compulsory cultivation of indigo for European planters — the refusal to sow indigo led to the Indigo Commission of 1860 and the Indigo Act of 1862.