A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal.

• Author: Rocher, Rosane
• Position: Book Review

A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal. By PARTHA CHATTERJEE. Princeton: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2002. Pp. xvii + 429, plates, maps.

Subaltern Studies scholar Partha Chatterjee has treated us to a gripping work of narrative history. Written with uncommon flair, verve, and humor, as well as rigor and documentation, the story of the most celebrated and protracted civil trial in the history of Bengal reads like a novel at the same time that it brings into focus the ferment of nationalist sentiment in the last twenty-five years of colonial rule. After reviewing reams of witness testimonies, photo exhibits, legal briefs and arguments, judges' opinions, newspaper accounts, and pamphlets, not to mention plays and satirical poems, Chatterjee remains an "agnostic" (p. xii) on the identity of the sannyasi whom members of the princely family of Bhawal and throngs of tenants of what was the second largest zamindari in East Bengal recognized in 1921 as their returned mejo kumar "second prince," who had been declared dead and cremated in Darjeeling in 1909. The thrust of Chatterjee's account, which carries conviction, is that a claim which the colonial government opposed would not likely have succeeded at an earlier time in history, but that it is part and parcel of a "secret history of nationalism and decolonization" (p. xiii). Indeed, in a defamation suit in the 1920s, the Calcutta High Court had reliably taken the Government's side, overturning the Dacca district court's findings and convicting the publishers of a pamphlet that cast aspersions on one of the doctors who had attended the dying prince in 1909. By the 1940s a different mood prevailed. The suit filed by the sannyasi for his share of the Bhawal estate as its second prince was caught up in a newfound assertiveness of the colonized against the colonizing power. The claimant became a popular hero in his contest with the government, which ran the defendants' case, in particular that of the officially widowed second rani. The Court of Wards, which had assumed the management of the Bhawal estate, egregiously failed in its attempts to intimidate witnesses, and ended up being berated, even by a British judge, for its heavy-handed tactics. Dacca district judge Pannalal Basu stood up to official pressure and found on behalf of the claimant with a meticulously written judgment, which, to general surprise, the Calcutta High Court failed to overturn. Judging...