Who among the following has authored the play ‘Nil Darpan’?

Correct — C. Dinabandhu Mitra wrote the Bengali play Nil Darpan ('The Indigo Mirror'), published in 1860, on the coercion of Bengal's ryots by European indigo planters.

Its timing is the point: it appeared alongside the Indigo Revolt of 1859-60.

The English translation was circulated by the missionary Rev. James Long, who was prosecuted and imprisoned over it in 1861. That trial is what turned a provincial play into a national controversy.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  Chittaranjan Das — Chittaranjan Das was a lawyer and Swarajist leader of the 1920s, remembered for the Swaraj Party he founded with Motilal Nehru. He belongs some sixty years after Nil Darpan.
• (b)
  Motilal Nehru — Motilal Nehru was a Congress president and the author of the Nehru Report of 1928 — a draft constitutional document, not a play about indigo.
• (d)
  Sarojini Naidu — Sarojini Naidu was a poet in English and the first Indian woman to preside over the Congress. She was born nearly two decades after Nil Darpan was published.

Nil Darpan is the standard example of nineteenth-century literature working as protest. The indigo system tied ryots to advances they could not repay and to a crop that exhausted their land, and the play put that on a Bengali stage.

The British response is the examinable half. Rev. James Long took responsibility for circulating the English translation, was tried for libel and jailed, and the prosecution made the play far better known than a suppressed text usually becomes.

An Indigo Commission followed the revolt in 1860, and indigo cultivation in Bengal fell away in the years after.

Key facts

• Nil Darpan was written by Dinabandhu Mitra and published in 1860.
• It depicts the oppression of Bengal's ryots by indigo planters.
• Rev. James Long was prosecuted and imprisoned in 1861 over the English translation.
• The Indigo Revolt in Bengal took place in 1859-60.

Common traps

• Picking a famous nationalist name because the question sounds political rather than literary.
• Confusing the author of the play with James Long, the man tried over its translation.

No directly related past PYQ was found.