Indigo revolt

[1] In the summer of 1859 in Bengal when thousands of ryots refused to grow indigo for the European planters with a show of rage and undying resolve, it became one of the most remarkable peasant movements in Indian history.

[2] Indigo planting in Bengal dates back to 1777, when Louis Bonnaud, a Frenchman, introduced it to the Indian subcontinent.

[3] With the Nawabs of Bengal under Company rule, indigo planting became more and more commercially profitable because of the demand for blue dye in Europe.

It was introduced in large parts of Burdwan, Bankura, Birbhum, North 24 Parganas, Nadia Jessore and Pabna, and by 1830 there were more than a thousand indigo factories throughout Bengal.

The farmers were totally unprotected from the indigo planters, who resorted to mortgages or destruction of their property if they were unwilling to obey them.

Bengali intellectual Harish Chandra Mukherjee described the plight of the poor farmer in his newspaper The Hindu Patriot.

Historians have noted that unlike the Indian Rebellion of 1857, members of the revolt did not direct their hostility towards the British colonial authorities but instead focused their attention towards European planters and merchants; historian Subhas Bhattacharya noted in The Indigo Revolt of Bengal (1977) that the "movement began and ended as a struggle against the planters."

The planters sued hundreds of peasants for breaking their indigo contracts, with over seventeen thousand rupees being spent defending these lawsuits.

[9] In the commission report, magistrate of Faridpur E. W. L. Tower testified that "not a chest of Indigo reached England without being stained with human blood".

For publishing the play, Long was put on trial by the colonial authorities and sentenced to a period of imprisonment and fine of 1,000 rupees.