Old plot, new yarn

The author has chosen to revive the century-old Bhawal case, interweaving facts with fiction.

“It is known that one deputy magistrate is examining local witnesses in Darjeeling in purdah in the Bhawal case. Everyone is aware that in this case it was revealed that 14 years ago it was given out that the second prince of Bhawal had breathed his last in Darjeeling, yet many people still believe he is alive.

Bhadra 9th, 1330

August 26, 1923

2nd year, 143th issue”.

The Mendicant Prince: A Novel

By Aruna Chakravarti

Picador India

Pages: 296

Price: Rs.599

This piece of news was published in the Bengali daily Anandabazar Patrika on the date mentioned above and reprinted in the century-old newspaper on August 26, 2022—such is the hold of the Bhawal case on the public imagination. One would have thought that one had heard the end of it after the publication of political theorist, anthropologist and historian Partha Chatterjee’s exhaustively researched book A Princely Imposter? first published in India in 2002.

But surprises never cease. Sahitya Akademi Award winner Aruna Chakravarti has chosen to revive the case of the mendicant who would be king and woven her own yarn interweaving hard facts with fictitious elements—mainly the “voices” of the characters, some real, some invented, who get enmeshed in the narrative. She takes liberties when articulating the mise-en-scène to build up atmosphere. These are the devices that come to her aid as she tries to flesh out dry facts and move the narrative forward.

Similar cases

The Bhawal case has similarities with the controversial Tichborne case that beguiled mid-Victorian London. A man referred to as “the Claimant” asserted that he was the missing heir to the Tichborne baronetcy in Hampshire. He was handed a 14-year sentence, but doubts remain about his true identity.

The Pakur case of 1933 was equally sensational and made waves internationally. Pakur was a fiefdom then in Bengal province, now in Jharkhand. Its heir, Amarendra Chandra Pandey (20), had died of bubonic plague after a contract killer injected him with plague bacilli at Howrah Station at the behest of the heir’s step brother. In spite of the cloak-and-dagger qualities of the narrative, the Pakur case is rarely heard of.

The Bhawal case, in contrast, had right from the beginning fired the imagination. Albeit with important variations of the plot, Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay wrote the novel Ratnadeep based on the Bhawal case. A sadhu—actually, the heir to a zamindari—found dead in a train compartment was the doppelganger of a humble railway employee. The latter convinces both the sadhu’s mother and his widow that he is the missing zamindar. But the imposter gives himself up as the titular ratnadeep, or bejewelled lamp, gives him a guilty conscience, and the widow remains unblemished. In 1951, Debaki Bose made a popular eponymous film based on the novel. Basu Chatterjee remade the film in Hindi in 1979.

A still from Sanyasi Raja (1975).

Even before that, in 1975, the megahit Sanyasi Raja was released. It, more or less, followed the Bhawal case narrative, with Uttam Kumar in the titular role.

It still resonates. As recently as in 2018, a modernised version titled Ek Je Chhilo Raja was made by Srijit Mukherjee with Jisshu Sengupta as the raja.

The story

The novelist follows in the historian Partha Chatterjee’s footsteps when it comes to the bare bones of the narrative.

Aruna Chakravarti follows in Partha Chatterjee’s footsteps when it comes to the bare bones of the narrative, although she casts readers in the thick of things without any prelude. We find ourselves confronting a fair, tall and well-built, half-naked, Hindi-speaking sanyasi sporting dreadlocks, body smeared with ash on “a raw, blustery morning” of January 1921 on the banks of the Buriganga river in Dhaka. He is silent and looks wistfully at the palace of the wealthy Bhawal estate in the distance, and curious people gather around him.

Some see a physical resemblance between the sanyasi and Ramendranarayan Roy, the missing second son of the Bhawal zamindar family, who was presumed to be dead. Scepticism persists, and they begin to whisper. In no time, whispers turn into an uproar as people are convinced that he is indeed Ramendranarayan. The latter was a womaniser, and feckless like his two brothers. Yet he was popular among local people. He was besotted with his mistress, a nautch girl named Elokeshi, and he had no time for his teen wife, Bibhavati. His brothers were no better and they treated their wives with equal indifference.

Flashback to 1909. Ramendranarayan had contracted syphilis and it had flared up so that ulcers erupted on his back, arms and legs. His doctor prescribed a change of air. His parasitical brother-in-law, Satyendranath Banerjee, arranged for Ramendranarayan, Bibhavati, a young doctor, Ashutosh Dasgupta, and, of course, himself to shift to a biggish house in Darjeeling, where, it was hoped, the second heir would regain his health. The opposite happened. Ramendranarayan fell violently ill and died on a stormy night. He was apparently cremated the same night, but conflicting and contradictory reports of the medicines administered, death and hurried last rites created a Rashomon effect.

Soon afterwards, Bibhavati, instigated by her brother, left the palace with her share of the booty and moved to Calcutta within six months of her widowhood. Thereafter, the other two Bhawal heirs died and by 1915, the British government had pocketed the Bhawal estate.

Then the fair and burly sanyasi arrived and after a period of hesitancy claimed he was indeed Ramendranarayan. He said he lay unconscious after those assigned to cremate him abandoned him owing to the fury of the elements.

A group of wandering sadhus rescued him and he went along with them. The tenants and the remaining Bhawal family swallowed the sanyasi’s tale.

But there were sceptics, and the British were unwilling to give up the estate. Bibhavati, too, was unmoved and when a protracted legal battle was fought for possession of the Bhawal estate until 1946, she opposed the sanyasi’s claim to the last—right up to the Privy Council. The end was dramatic, and questions still remained.

H.E.A. Cotton in Calcutta Old And New wrote: “Tradition has it that it was to Bally that the Brahmins, who stood round Nuncomar’s (Nandakumar) scaffold, ran in horror to purify themselves in the river with cries of ‘Ah baup-aree’ when they saw the Rajah really ‘turned off’.”

Random slip-ups

Like Cotton, Indo-Anglian writers are often inclined to sprinkle their prose with exclamations and words in local languages which add a touch of quaintness to their prose. Aruna Chakravarti is no exception. But she often does so without consistency. She uses petni without explanation, but do these female wraiths really hang from shaddock trees, as she writes? Not in Bengali folk tales. Chakravarti should have known that fairies don’t exist in Bengali, as Reverend Lal Behari Dey had realised long ago. What on earth are “tiddlers”? Why ghumta and not ghomta? Which Bengali says “bonai”? How can one be “plummeted to “the highest point”? Was “surreal” commonly used as an adjective in 1946? (Page 263) Highly unlikely. These are some random slip-ups.

More seriously, way back in 1921 and 1933, could an upper-class woman refer to her husband’s “hurried and passionless” “lovemaking” and harbour lascivious thoughts about her husband’s friend? In a closed society such as ours, repression becomes a way of life. Molly Bloom came to life in 1922. Was that even remotely possible in Bengal?

Soumitra Das is a freelance journalist based in Kolkata.

The Crux

• Sahitya Akademi Award winner Aruna Chakravarti’s retelling of the Bhawal sanyasi case is a mixture of fact and fiction.
• It is a real-life story about an heir of the Bhawal zamindari estate (in what is now Bangladesh) who is believed to be dead (1909) until a mendicant doppelganger turns up (1921) to claim his inheritance.
• The bare bones of the narrative follow the historian Partha Chatterjee’s book on the case, A Princely Impostor? (2002).
• The writer weaves fiction into the narrative in trying to recreate the “voices” of the characters, flesh out the narrative, and build up an atmosphere.