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The ‘poisoned’ prince of Bhowal who rose from his pyre, became a sanyasi & reclaimed his kingdom

Kumar Ramendra Narayan Roy ‘died’ in 1909, but an ascetic claiming to be the man surfaced over a decade later, saying his wife conspired to poison him. His ‘death’ remains a mystery.

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New Delhi: The elegant couples promenading on Dacca’s Buckland Bund had all heard the rumours: The light-skinned sanyasi who sat on the boulevard staring into the sacred flame had once been a prince.

The stories seemed improbable. The ascetic, a judge later recorded, was “naked except for a lengti loin-cloth, smeared with ashes, wearing a longish beard, his hair falling in matted cord-like strands behind his back.” There was also the minor matter that the prince in question was long dead.

Then, in May 1921, a few months after he had appeared, the sanyasi announced his ‘real’ identity. Kumar Ramendra Narayan Roy — hunter, clarinet player, lover of many mistresses, and prince of the zamindari of Bhowal (or Bhawal) — had risen from his own funeral pyre to reclaim his throne.

Even though the man’s claims would spark off legal proceedings that ran from 1930 to 1946 — going forward from a district court in Dacca (now Dhaka) to the high court in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and then the Privy Council in London — his allegations that his wife had conspired with her brother and a family physician to poison him have never been resolved. The bizarre circumstances of the ‘death’ were never investigated by the Imperial Police.

“The plaintiff’s story reads like a romance,” additional district judge Pannalal Basu, observed, “and what is fiction is generally so, but hundreds of people of all ranks and conditions, including all the relations, except six, have sworn to his identity”.


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The death of a prince

In April 1909, Ramendra Roy, then about 25 years old, had arrived in Darjeeling on vacation, travelling with his wife Bibhabati Debi, her brother Rai Bahadur Satyendra Nath Banerjee, a personal physician Dr Ashutosh Kumar, and a small army of servants. Within days of their arrival, Roy was dead, following an attack of what civil surgeon Colonel John Calvert attested was biliary colic.

Kumar Ramendra Narayan Roy, the prince of Bhowal | Commons

The story that the prince — or the sanyasi — told from that point on was surreal. The truth, Roy alleged in pleadings before judge Basu, was that he was poisoned and fell unconscious.

He claimed that he was taken for cremation on the night of 8 May 1909, but because a storm broke out, he ended up being abandoned on the pyre before it could be set alight.

After that, he said, he was discovered by a group of sadhus led by Guru Dharma Das Naga, who restored him to health. His story went that the poison had destroyed his memory, and he travelled with the sadhus across the country. In 1920, though, he recovered his memory, and returned to Dacca.

At a meeting held in the ancestral town of Jaidebpur on 16 May 1921, the sanyasi was declared the kumar, or prince, by popular acclaim, and the backing of his blood relatives. He subsequently began to receive rent from the estate.

The sanyasi-prince’s widow, Bibhabati Debi, wasn’t having it. She petitioned imperial authorities in Calcutta to intervene, insisting that the risen-from-the-pyre claimant was a fraud. In June 1921, an official declaration was issued declaring the new kumar an imposter. Local residents, though, continued to support the kumar. Eight years later, authorities served him a legal notice, demanding that he cease to enter Jaidebpur.

Questions of motive

Each side had compelling reasons to lie — even to kill. The zamindari of Bhowal was spread across a staggering 1,500 square kilometres of Mymensingh and Dacca in what is now Bangladesh. The estate brought in almost Rs 6.5 lakh in annual rent in 1931. To top things off, the prince had syphilis — contracted, rumour had it, from one of his many mistresses. Interestingly, the prince’s brothers Ranendra and Rabindra also passed away of mysterious ailments in 1910 and 1913 respectively.

Ananda Khansama, the prince’s old servant, would light incense each night in memory of his master — but life moved on. Local rumour held that the prince had been poisoned by his wife, together with a paramour, but no evidence to support the gossip ever surfaced.

The properties of all three princes were taken over by the Court of Wards, a British-era institution that administered properties when heirs were considered legally incapable. The court paid all three widowed ranis an income from the properties. This was a source of considerable friction with the tenants since the Court of Wards was a less forgiving landlord than the prince.

Bibhabati Debi flatly denied that the former sanyasi was her husband, and refused to meet him. The wives of his brothers, Sarjubala Debi and Anandakumari Debi, also took her side in the litigation that followed.

The princes’ sister Jyotirmoyee Debi — who had been turned out of the palace by the Court of Wards — supported the sanyasi’s claims.

Arsenic and old lace

The trial by judge Basu — which ran from November 1933 to May 1936, without a single break except for public holidays — heard testimony from 1,039 witnesses for the sanyasi-prince, and another 479 for the defence.

In an age before DNA sampling and modern forensics, the trial relied largely on eyewitness testimony. There were also a great many photographs used in an effort to establish likeness — or the lack of it. The photographs today form part of the Alkazi Collection of Photography in New Delhi.

Even though the trial involved a civil dispute, evidence was admitted claiming the prince’s symptoms suggested that he might have been administered arsenic. For her part, the rani claimed that the sanyasi-prince was in fact Mal Singh of the village of Aujla in Punjab, set up by her in-laws to seize the property. Among other things, the two sides brought in handwriting experts to press their case.

The trial involved close cross-examination on questions like the sanyasi-prince’s lack of knowledge of English words like “lounge-suit” and “cruet.”  While a lawyer S. Ghosal testified he had found the young prince fluent in English — “a well-educated, well-polished Bengalee aristocrat”— others disagreed. The prince’s tutor, Dwarika Nath Mukherjee, never succeeded in expanding his education beyond the alphabet in Bengali and English. An English tutor engaged to educate the young princes resigned in frustration.

Lawyers for Bibhabati Debi drew attention to the fact that the sanyasi spoke no English and little Bengali — but since his case was that his memory had been erased by his near-death experience, this did not settle the issue. The strong Hindi accent with which the sanyasi spoke Bengali, moreover, could be attributed to his years travelling in the north.

There were witnesses, moreover, who suggested the sophistication of the Bhowal family did not run deep. The prince and his brothers, Judge Basu observed, “would put on English clothes when they met Sahebs, or on ceremonial occasions, and occasionally shikar clothes when they went out on shikar, or because, it may be, because the Rajah once stayed at an English hotel in Calcutta.”

The palace, however, was cluttered with the accoutrements of “an ancient Brahmin Zamindar family, extravagant in servants, wasteful, unmethodical, uneconomical, noisy and barbaric without any real comfort.”

The final death

For judge Basu, the case was complicated by evidence that both sides had used corrupt means to buttress their case. For example, the prince’s funeral procession in Darjeeling had been led by Gurkha guards with reversed arms. There were suggestions, though, that the memories of purported witnesses had been lubricated with cash. Evidence also surfaced, handwriting experts in Scotland Yard testified that signatures on key documents had been tampered with.

Evidence from the doctors in Darjeeling indicated that the prince had suffered from a gallstone. Witnesses who testified in court, though, insisted he had suffered from severe diarrhoea, similar to that suffered by victims of cholera. Experts who testified in court, though, said the specific character of his diarrhoea suggested poisoning by arsenic.

The judge finally upheld the sanyasi’s claims — his order relying on physical features, like scars and scaly skin, as recalled by the preponderance of witnesses. The government, however, refused to restore his income, and moved the high court.  The high court upheld judge Basu’s findings, following which another appeal was lodged in the Privy Council.

Finally, in 1946, the sanyasi-prince moved back into his palace — only to die of a stroke two days later. The rani attributed it to divine wrath, and insisted he was an imposter until the end.

(Edited by Asavari Singh)


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