| BOOKS: INREVIEW
History Stranger Than Fiction
By
Shailaja Neelakantan/NEW DELHI
Issue cover-dated January 27, 2003
A Princely Imposter? The
Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal,
by Partha Chatterjee
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
princes 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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