The Revolt of 1857 which engulfed north India in the summer of 1857 left Calcutta largely untouched. On 29th March 1857, a sepoy called Mangal Pandey attacked his British superior officers in Barrackpore. He was tried and hanged on April 6th, 1857. Conventionally this act of defiance by Mangal Pandey is seen as the beginning of the Great Rebellion. But, the Revolt actually began with the mutiny of the Sepoy regiments in Meerut on May 10th, 1857.

Michael Madhusudhan Dutt

The western educated literati of Calcutta remained steadfastly loyal to the British and they expressed this loyalty quite openly to Queen Victoria who took over the British possessions in India from the English East India Company after the Revolt had been suppressed in 1858. As a sequel to this, on Ist January, 1877, Queen Victoria was made the Queen Empress of India.

The impact of western education and western learning had a profound cultural impact on Bengal. It inspired Bengali writers and men of letters, based largely in Calcutta, to pursue literary forms which were previously unknown in Indian culture. Thus, Michael Madhusudhan Dutt chose to compose sonnets with Petrarch as his model and to write an epic poem in blank verse. Similarly, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay began the writing of novels in Bengali. Drama and theatre(on the proscenium stage) were two other fields in which Bengalis flourished. In this context the play Neel Darpan by Dinabondhu Mitra, written in 1860, deserves to be noted. The play exposed the oppression of the indigo planters in rural Bengal. It was translated into English by Michael Madhusudhan Dutt and the publication of this translation led to the arrest of the publisher, Reverend James Long. The Calcutta literati rallied to Long's defence and his bail was paid by Kali Prasanna Sinha who had translated the Mahabharata into Bengali in 1863.