Who, or What, is Victorian?: Ecology, Indigo, and the Transimperial

Abstract

Focusing on the injustices of European-controlled indigo plantation in Bengal in the mid-nineteenth century, Dinabandhu Mitra’s Bengali-language play, Neel Darpan (1860), attracted considerable attention upon publication. A performance of the play also marked the 1872 opening of the first public theater in Calcutta, thereby securing the play’s place in the annals of Indian theater history. Through a reading attuned to the relation that the play sets up between the land, its inhabitants, and indigo, however, I consider the ecological framework that the play and its performance history proffers. Such a framework, I propose, posits the “transimperial” in ways that supplement, and sometimes even counter, efforts to expand the purview of the “Victorian” by way of the “transnational” or “global.”

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