Henry Louis Vivian Derozio Peary Chand Mitra (22 July 1814 – 23 November 1883) was an Indian writer, journalist, cultural activist and entrepreneur.

[2] His father, Ramnarayan Mitra, moved from Panisehala, Hooghli District to Calcutta in early life and made his fortunes as banians[3] to European merchants and officials.

At some point in time his friends Rasik Krishna Mallick, Radhanath Sikdar and Sib Chandra Deb joined him to bolster his efforts.

Mitra rapidly rose up the ladder as librarian, secretary and finally curator, a position he held till his retirement.

[1] That was the age when Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar was writing Bengali heavily loaded with Sanskrit words and Akshay Kumar Datta was experimenting with the language in Tattwabodhini Patrika.

Learned people used to poke fun at it and ridiculed the language, and a newspaper such as Iswar Chandra Gupta's Sambad Prabhakar published all that.

In 1857, Mitra and Radhanath Sikdar started a small magazine, Masik Patrika, which used simple spoken Bengali prose everybody could understand.

His novel Alaler Gharer Dulal, written under the pseudonym Tek Chand Thakur, used simple Bengali prose, closer to the spoken speech of the day, and was serialised in the magazine.

He was imprisoned and fined for writing a preface to the English translation of Dinabandhu Mitra's controversial play Nil Darpan.