Page:Nil Durpan.djvu/216

 imprisonment, and to pay a fine of one thousand rupees.

The work itself is a Bengalee drama, purporting to depict the Indigo system as viewed by the Natives at large; the author's preface commencing, "I present the Indigo planting mirror to the Indigo planter's hands, now let every one of them observe his face." The translation is preceded by an introduction written by the Rev. Mr. Long who superintended the printing, paid the expense, Rs. 300/- received the whole edition of 500 copies, and who adopts the whole by stating in the preface that "language is plain but true."

The dramatis personae are the well-to-do and even rich ryots of a village in Lower Bengal; their wives and daughters; two Indigo planters, Mr. Wood and Mr. Rose; their dewans and factory servants; the Magistrate of the district; a sweetmeat maker who is also a procuress; and other inferior characters.

The play brings into action, as facts and actual occurrences, all those exploded and disproved falsehoods against Indigo planters, which are stated in the Report of the Indigo Commission to be so. The factory Ameen is made to say in the second scene, first act, that be gave his own sister to the young saheb; and that he will now try to get the ryot's beautiful daughter, who had just appeared, for him, in hopes of promotion. When the planters appear on the scene they recite, and glory in all the violence they have done, in the atrocities they have committed; they use the foulest language. Wood in the third scene of the same act, orders the "bloody nigger" to be beaten; and does it himself, with the whip, a leather strap, which is described to be always at hand and to be used by the planters also on their highest servants.

The ryots' wives and daughters are models of beauty and innocence; though one of them does say, in the fourth scene, that the wife of the planter is a great deal too intimate with the Magistrate, "and has no shame at all." Her power over, and conduct with, the Magistrate is again referred ta in scene 3, Act 4, by the Jemadar of the jail, who says that he had been a house-servant of Mrs. Wood's but, through the influence of one letter from her, had got from Magistrate the appointment he holds.

The first scene in the second Act is in the godown