lies in the absurd jargon interlarded with English words and the cant of debating clubs in which the characters speak. The scene is laid in the “Gyan Tarangini Sabha”—a sort of scientific debating society which chiefly devotes itself to nautch-girls and tippling. The types of life and character which it represents art sufficiently disgusting, and the important question is, whether the representation is correct.
To the shame of Bengal we must say that we fear the picture is a true one. The reformer who never gets beyond tipsy harangues full of English expressions, should not be confounded as he often is by Europeans with the really cultivated class. But it cannot be denied that he is a fair representative of that great horde of partly educated Babus, whose only claim to enlightenment lies in the fact that they drink, wear shabby trousers and stammer out barbarous English. These are the men who swarm in every office, and plague officials with endless applications for employment, crowd the thoroughfares of the native town in the evening, drain the liquor shops, and form the majority of his audience when Babu Keshub Chunder Sen lectures at the Town Hall. Of education, they have had nothing worth the name. Having spent a few years very unprofitably in learning a smattering of English at some Anglo-vernacular school, they started in life—if poor, at the age of eighteen, as umedwars. If rich, they devoted themselves from the same age with their whole strength to swinish pleasures. The country is overrun with men of this sort, and Mr. Datta’s picture is true to the life; but they must not be confounded with the really cultivated class, who, in spite of all that has been said regarding the spread of English education, are comparatively few in number.
The next author whom we must mention is Babu Dinabandhu Mitra, the best Bengali dramatist, indeed the only good dramatic author. He has written altogether five plays, of which two are farces. His earliest production, the Níl Darpan, is better known by name to the European public than almost any other Bengali book. Its connection with the indigo riots gave it a notoriety which it certainly would not otherwise have attained. When public feeling was excited on the subject, just after that conviction of Mr. Long, which fitly preceded the extinction of a Court which had thus proved itself unable to rise above the waves of passion and prejudice; at that time Nil Darpan was usually spoken of as a filthy and scurrilous production, entirely devoid of literary merit. In this judgment we do not altogether coincide; but at the same time we should give it a very low place as a work of art. The importance was political, not literary; and as literature rather than politics is our present theme, we shall not discuss it at greater length.
Of Babu Dinabandhu Mitra’s other plays, Lilábati is the most popular; but for our own part, though willingly conceding much
