I am painfully aware of my limitation in the knowledge of English. Yet I have tried to fill up the lacuna with my translations and to amend Michael's translation when lapses were patently evident. The defects have been mended in the present edition, and it may be said that an honest attempt has been made to publish here a full-bodied translation of the Nil Darpan with all errors corrected and all omissions made good.
Originally we thought of placing the mistakes and the corrections side by side in the body of the drama, but on further thought we have, for the sake of uninterrupted reading of the drama by our readers, refrained from doing so. The drama with all mistakes corrected may be now read without difficulty but at the end of the book an appendix is being given, containing a comparative study of such mistakes occurring in the first and second editions of the translation, and the corrections made in the present edition, the third Indian edition.
Footnotes explaining difficult words or expressions belonging to the dialect of the original have been given here for the convenience of the readers.
At the end of the book is given an English translation of the biographical sketch of Dinabandhu Mitra by Bankimchandra Chattopadhaya.
This task of bringing out a new edition of the translation of the Nil Darpan has been quite a venturesome and arduous task, and if it were not for the help of my friends I should have failed in performing it.
I express my grateful thanks to Sri Hemendra Prosad Ghosh, doyen of Bengali Journalism, for having allowed me to use his valuable library for this work.
Last of all, I must express my heartfelt gratitude to Sri Sailesh Sengupta who has helped me throughout the work as a co-editor.
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