Live or dye: the stark choice that confronted Bengal farmers
Daniel Nelson
Who knew? About the 1860s Indigo Rebellion that forced British planters out of Bengal?
Er, sorry, I don’t remember learning about that at school, or since.
About how during the British Raj large areas of the Bengali countryside were redirected to the cultivation of the indigo plant. Prices were forced down in order to increase the profits of the buyers, rice giving way to dye.
Yes, it’s part of Bengali, Indian, Bangladeshi history, but it is — or should be — part of British history, too.
So, thanks to writer Ben Musgrove, who spent four years of his childhood in Bangladesh, for personalising and dramatising this rapacity and uprising in his play, Indigo Giant.
He says the work was commissioned by Jatinder Verma at Tara Arts in response to Nil Darpan (The Indigo Mirror), which, as the programme notes at Theatro Technis records, “shook colonial India”
Indeed, thanks to everyone behind this production, which played in Norwich, Birmingham and Oxford before its brief run in London.
The doubling-up of the six actors emphasises the interplay of the play’s historical strands, which include a tentative inquiry initiated by a British buyer into employment conditions at a contemporary factory in Bengal in the wake of a worker’s suicide (touching on a set of moral, social and financial dilemmas worth a play of their own).
But the thrust of this economically staged work (where, unusually, the magical realism and songs add to rather than detract from the piece) is on the clash between the blundering 19th century British planter responding to his company’s need for indigo for 100,000 British Navy uniforms, and the couple who stand in his way.
It’s an important and well-told tale. Coming so soon after a BBC radio series on the 1943 Bengal famine — another terrible event little-known in Britain — it’s a further timely riposte to the anti-woke propagandists who see only good emanating from Empire.
Indigo Giant is at Theatro Technis, 26 Crowndale Road, NW1 1TT until 6 April. Info: https://www.theatrotechnis.com/whatson