Drama, Ecology, and the Ground of Empire The Play of Indigo

Abstract

By reading a mid–nineteenth-century Bengali play about indigo cultivation, Neel Darpan, this essay argues for the salience of drama—an overlooked form in Victorian studies—to ecocritical discussions. The essay also considers how the irreducibly ecological nature of colonialism recalibrates our analytical objects and impulses. In bringing ecology together with drama, the essay arrives at an idiom of “groundedness” as a critical imperative for ecologically minded scholarship, not least on empire.