Political dramas in colonial Bengali theatre have been written, acted and appreciated by many. Plays like Nildarpan, or written Dinabandhu Mitra or other plays stirred a lot of heat among audiences. More plays of so-called social protest, a large number of them in the darpan style, followed suit; plays that purported to hold up a mirror, as it were, to the oppressive ills of society. Most notable among them were Prasanna Mukhopadhyay`s Palligram Darpan [Mirror of Rural Life (1873)] on the troubled life of villagers, Mir Masharraf Hossein`s Jamidar Darpan [The Landowner`s Mirror (1873)], about the sufferings of the peasant class in the hands of the land-owning babus and two plays by Dakshinaranjan Chattopadhyay-Cha-kar Darpan [The Tea-Planter`s Mirror (1875)], dealing with the poor working conditions in the British owned tea-estates in North Bengal and Jail Darpan [Mirror of the Prison (1876)] that showed the terrible life of prisoners in the jailhouses of Bengal. There were plays; dramas there were being written to make a political statement. Plays during that time were often used to make a political statement.

All four plays drew the fire of the British and even of some prominent members of the Bengali intellectual elite who had by this time, generally, done a volte-face from siding with the peasants and/or opposing the European planters to defending their own economic interests as (often absentee) landlords.

Almost all of these plays, one has to note, were written in the safety of the cities, by writers who did not belong to the classes that were the immediate subject of the plays; they were urban intellectuals who mostly fed off the land they possessed in the countryside

The objectives of the plays, therefore, are not always at par with their contents. As a result, they read more like patronizing gestures the urban gentry were making to their own socio-political contradictions, defining their role in Bengali society as ideological leaders and enforcers of the discipline of the dominant. The plays, in this context become theatrically projected protests against the atrocities the colonial rulers performed on the lower classes, to whose exploitation, ironically, the urban gentry also contributed quite directly.