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BOOK REVIEW
History stranger than
fiction
A Princely Imposter? The
Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of
Bhawal, by
Partha Chatterjee
Reviewed by Shailaja Neelakantan
 In the
early 1920s, an ash-smeared sanyasi, or holy man,
clad only in a loincloth, appeared in the Bengal town of
Bhawal, in India. Despite his protests, he was declared
to be Ramendra Narayan Roy, the heir to the estate of
the Bhawal zamindars - a man thought to have died 12
years earlier. The prince’s sister accepted the man as
her brother, and the tenants who lived on the estate
also supported him, believing that a holy man would not
be as rapacious a landlord as his predecessors.
But the former prince’s wife and the British
government contended that the man was an impostor. Both
the "widow" and the government had an interest in
denying the legitimacy of the sanyasi. After the
apparent death of the second kumar, or prince, in
1909, the Bhawal estate was taken over by agents of the
British.
The arrival of the mysterious man, who
came to be called "the Bhawal sanyasi," gave the
former owners a renewed claim to the land, threatening
both the British stake and the generous stipend received
by the prince's widow, who had been forced out of the
family after his supposed death.
A protracted
legal battle ensued, featuring an array of the country's
eminent lawyers and more than 1,500 witnesses. Stories
circulated that the prince was profligate and a sexual
philanderer, that his wife was having an incestuous
affair with her brother, and that the family squandered
its wealth. Both the Dacca District Court and the
Calcutta High Court declared the sanyasi the real
prince. But the case was not resolved until, on appeal
by the prince’s wife, it reached the London Privy
Council, which upheld his legitimacy in 1946. Two days
after the verdict, the man who'd appeared from the
jungle to become the talk of two continents suffered a
fatal stroke. His wife was a widow once again.
Visiting professor of anthropology at Columbia
University, Partha Chatterjee's book about the case,
A Princely Imposter? proves that history can be
more compelling than fiction. In essence, this is a
mystery that - as the question mark in the book's title
of the book indicates - even Chatterjee cannot solve.
Like a good mystery novel, the book is a gripping read,
racy and full of suspense.
Chatterjee recreates
the Bengal of the mid 20th century with Dickensian
flair. But this is also a serious work of history.
Without ever losing his grip on the taut narrative,
Chatterjee uses the case to discuss the issues of
nationalism, gender, caste and colonial oppression.
He argues that the Bhawal sanyasi became
a "focus of anti-colonial sentiments" and claims that
the case reveals the "secret history of Indian
nationalism". Anti-colonial sentiment gained strength
during the protracted legal battle, Chatterjee writes,
so that by 1946 India wasn't the acquiescing colony it
was in 1921. Educated, middle-class Indians now held
important positions in the judiciary.
According
to the author, "... there is no mistaking the
nationalist location of the legal-political thinking" of
the two Indian judges who were instrumental in declaring
the sanyasi as the bona fide prince. "[The
judges] represented the generation of Indians who had –
discursively, ideologically, often institutionally –
prepared themselves for a transfer of power."
And, since the British government claimed the
sanyasi was an imposter, the Indian judges'
verdict was an act of nationalist self-assertion. What
better way to cock a snook at their colonizers? The
local British received another slap in the face when on
appeal the London Privy Council, the final arbiter for
the case, upheld the Indian judgment.
The
decision sent a signal that Britain had begun to believe
that Indian affairs were now best left to the judgment
of Indians, Chatterjee argues. Though the possibility of
a tacit conspiracy of "secret" nationalism in the Indian
courts is intriguing, Chatterjee leaves too many
questions unanswered. Why would men whom Chatterjee
describes as "stalwarts among nationalist lawyers"
defend a debauched feudal lord who represented an
exploitive system the nationalist movement abhorred?
The prince had not been an exemplary human
being. As an affluent zamindar (landowner), he
had taken a child bride and devoted his life to hunting
and womanizing, rather than the improvement of his
estate - much less the lot of its tenants. Far from
being ignorant of his decadent life, these stalwart
nationalists called the prince's old mistresses to the
stand to prove that he suffered from syphilis.
In the final analysis, Chatterjee doesn't supply
enough convincing reasons to explain why the choice of a
domestic oppressor over a foreign one amounts to a
secret history of India’s nationalist movement.
A
princely imposter? The Strange and Universal History of
the Kumar of Bhawal, by Partha
Chatterjee, April 2002, Princeton
University Press, ISBN: 0-691-09031-9, Price US$19.95,
pp 429.
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