|
Literary Review
Back from the dead
THE currently popular status of narrative history is driven home afresh by the curious appearance of A Prince, Poison and Two Funerals: The Bhowal Sanyasi Case, by Murad Fyzee. Bhawal was the richest zamindari in Bengal and the man who came back to life, having been considered dead for 12 years, was supposedly the zamindar, a man who then fought to be reinstated among the living. The case was sensational in its time, with Calcutta newspapers devoting a page a day to it. Then, washed over by the sands of time and more recent sensation, it died from public memory. What makes the appearance of Fyzee's book curious is that it is the second book, in one year, about this forgotten case. Historian Partha Chatterjee's A Princely Impostor? The Kumar of Bhawal and the Secret History of Indian Nationalism appeared earlier in 2002.
Fyzee's book attempts neither the philosophical explorations of identity nor the link with nationalism that Chatterjee's does. It gives us the story of the trial and the medical evidence, interspersed with dramatic reconstructions of scenes from the Kumar's life. This story, returned conclusively from the dead, is gripping enough for it to be read again in its popular, shorter, cheaper incarnation.
A Prince, Poison and Two Funerals: The Bhowal Sanyasi Case, Murad Fyzee, English Edition Publishers, Rs. 295.
ANURADHA ROY
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
