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The return of Martin Guerre
RUKUN ADVANI
NEARLY 20 years ago a historian called Natalie Zemon Davis wrote a much admired book called The Return of Martin Guerre (1983). The book was slim — just over 150 pages — but it became influential in professional history circles because it cut the ever-thickening barbed-wire fence which, in our time, separates history from imaginative storytelling. Davis's work was unusual in being wonderful both as "story" — it was made into a film starring Gerard Depardieu — - and as "history". Her book was partly inspired by another pathbreaking treatise on peasant life, Montaillou (1975) by Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, but as a scholarly enterprise which spilled out of the professional history guild, Martin Guerre worked much better than Montaillou. This was because Davis structured her picture of the rustic world of medieval France with an intrinsically powerful true story.
The tale, in brief, was this: At the same time that Babur set off for greener pastures in the direction of Hindustan, a well-off peasant in the French Basque country set off eastwards to resettle his family in pleasanter climes. In his adopted home he shortened his name to "Guerre", farmed land, and raised a son, Martin Guerre. The son inherited his father's farm, married a local lass called Bertrande de Rols, and for some years caused her much unhappiness because, as they euphemistically said in the army, he couldn't present his salutations properly. A wise woman was called in to remedy Martin's organic lassitude, her wisdom worked — we can only conjecture how — and the result was that Martin and Bertrande soon had a son. Unfortunately, Martin now fell out with his father in a property dispute and was kicked out of his house. He disappeared in the direction of Spain, where he signed up as an army mercenary and befriended a fellow soldier called Pansette, who, it turned out, was adept at mimicry and had been an actor of sorts.
This Pansette is actually the hero of the story, for he soon acquired such intimate knowledge of Martin Guerre's past that he surreptitiously decided to try his hand at assuming the identity of his friend. Eight years after Bertrande lost her husband, a man called Martin Guerre showed up at her house, saying he was back to claim her and his property. The wife and villagers were initially sceptical, but he looked the part and remembered everything very well. What clinched matters in his favour was Bertrande's discovery that this new incarnation of her husband was an ardent lover sufficiently aroused by her charms to obviate the services of further wise women. Her scepticism vanquished, they now led a life happier than she had thought possible with a man earlier impotent. But the fresh Martin Guerre's new-found abilities did not extend to captivating various other kin who had established a hold on Bertrande's property while she was a single mother. These rapacious relations managed to poison her ears, arguing the new man was an impostor out to swindle her and them. Bertrande was forced to bring a case against her husband in the local court.
A riveting, Hindi-filmi court case takes the story towards a brilliant finali. The court finds there is no compelling evidence to prove that the new Martin Guerre is a trickster. The judge is in the process of pronouncing the court's view that the defendant is who he claims he is, he is free to reclaim his property. The wife is secretly happy, the wicked relations are now in the dock. And then, just at this moment, a man with a wooden leg walks in to the court, claiming he is the original Martin Guerre. He is thoroughly inspected and interrogated: there can be no doubt he is the real man, the defendant a fake. The defendant breaks down and confesses. He is condemned by the court and then, heartbreakingly for Bertrande, he is hanged. Not even Sidney Carton and Charles Darnay in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities manage an ending so heartrending.
Who would not want to read medieval academic history if it came packaged in a story as good as this? The problem for historians, of course, is partly that it is not all that easy to come by such tailor-made historically true stories, and partly that they have been trained to look at human beings through lenses made up of class, gender, ideology, community, race, ethnicity and other such worthy categories which tend to squeeze the life out of the lives they're writing about. In India, this deadening effect is compounded by the fact that most historians are not masters of the language in which they write, nor trained in the difficult art of crafting stories out of archival material. We have world class historians — Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, and Sumit Sarkar from the older generation, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Partha Chatterjee and Sumit Guha from the younger — but it cannot be said that any of their books has so far attracted the attention of the general reading public. Fiction writers trained in history, such as Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, and Mukul Kesavan, have written historical fiction which has made certain periods come alive, but I cannot think of an Indian history book which reads like a novel in the way that The Return of Martin Guerre does.
This may be about to change. Signs of a narrative shift in Indian historiography have been in the air. Several years back the Subalternist guru Ranajit Guha, in an essay called "Chandra's Death", deployed an abortion episode from rural Bengal to study rural mentality. His foremost student, the historian Shahid Amin, has trawled judicial records as thoroughly as Natalie Davis in his book Event, Metaphor, Memory, which reconstructs the Chauri Chaura violence from a variety of viewpoints to create a "Rashomon" effect. Tanika Sarkar's recent book Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation steeps itself powerfully in the world of scandal and sexual incident in order to enliven the colonial period it illuminates. Ramachandra Guha and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have written fine historical biographies of Vasco da Gama and Verrier Elwin.
Around the middle of this year, however, a new book of Indian history will appear which, if my instinct is right, will take Indian narrative history into the superlative Martin Guerre zone and appeal to a wide audience. Its title is Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal and its author is the Kolkata-Columbia political philosopher Partha Chatterjee. People who have read Chatterjee's earlier work will be sceptical: a lot of his early work is abstruse or stolidly worthy. They will have all the more reason, then, for being astounded by the self-transformation that Chatterjee has achieved as a writer in his forthcoming story book. This new book is based on a legal case well known among bhadralok Bengalis. It is called "the Bhawal case", and in many respects it is amazingly similar to the "Martin Guerre case". It involves the death in 1909 by syphilis of a zamindar, "the Second Kumar of Bhawal", who returns miraculously to reclaim his wife and property in 1921, after an absence of 12 years. He is recognised and accepted by his sisters but not by his wife, he files a case to reclaim his properties, and the case is finally decided only in 1946. The case was much written about in Bengali, and a film based on it was also made long years ago. But already well-known stories, as we know from Oedipus Rex, from the folklore retellings of A.K. Ramanujan, and from the many regional variants of the Mahabharata, lie in wait for a master narrator. Such master narrators come few and far between. In Princely Impostor... Partha Chatterjee manages to achieve something that takes one's breath away. His devout admirer Amitav Ghosh could not have written a better book. Chatterjee uses the Bhawal case as his entry point into philosophical questions on the nature of human identity; historical issues such as the relationship between judicial administration, British rule, and Indian nationalism; and everyday human problems such as the daily dealings between a patriarchal feudal lord and his child bride. Until the bitter end we remain unsure, as does Chatterjee himself, of whether the resurrected Kumar of Bhawal is genuine or duplicitous. This unending suspense, and the richer historical documentation, makes Chatterjee's book a more interesting and greater work than Natalie Davis's.
One could go on and on listing its virtues, its narrative tensions, its continuous fund of excitement laced with history, but it seems enough to say that, when it appears, Partha Chatterjee's Princely Impostor ... will signal the most exciting new direction that modern Indian history has taken since the appearance of "Subaltern Studies".
Rukun Advani is the author of Beethoven Among the Cows and runs a publishing company, Permanent Black, in New Delhi.
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