World-Ecology, Commodity Modernity, and World-Literature in Victorian India: Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nil Darpan (1860)

The chapter will engage with indigo's dramatic rise to a world commodity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Bengal through East India Company's extractive plantation capitalism. It will read the commodity’s journey through the theoretical lens of world-ecology and argue that indigo’s socio-ecological impact was widely registered in the literary writings of the period, most notably in Dinabandhu Mitra’s play, Nil Darpan (The Indigo Mirror, 1860). Written during the social upheaval of the “Indigo rebellion,” this play not only addressed through its dissonant and patchy style the uneven case of modernity and culture in the peripheral world, it also anticipated the modern and nationalist beginnings of Indian theatre, making it into an important example of what Pablo Mukherjee calls “Victorian world literatures.”