SVF

The Mysterious Bhawal Sannyasi Court Case That Inspired Srijit Mukherji’s Next

The National Award-winning director describes Ek Je Chhilo Raja as a take on what happens when Feudal India meets Spiritual India

Courtroom dramas make for fascinating film material, fiction or non-fiction: consider, for example, Judgment at Nuremberg, Witness for the Prosecution, Anatomy of a Murder among others. In India, however, the genre hasn’t quite taken off despite quite a few stabs at it, primarily because the courtroom in our cinema has largely been a space for high-octane rhetoric and dialogue-baazi bordering on the theatrical. Also, unlike a, say, Judgment at Nuremberg, we have very little when it comes to the cinematic depiction of real-life court cases. Add to that our propensity to take ludicrous creative licence with facts (the film versions of the K.M. Nanavati case, Yeh Raaste Hain Pyaar Ke [1963] and Rustom [2016], for example), and the wholly satisfying courtroom experience has more or less eluded our cinema.

Which is probably what has piqued interest in Srijit Mukherji’s film, produced by SVF Entertainment, based as it is, in the words of the director, on “one of the most incredible sagas ever to unfold in the annals of Indian judicial history, involving elements of politics, self-governance, identity as a philosophy, history, art, medicine, toxicology and aspects of behavioural sciences”. In terms of intrigue, including allegations of murder by poisoning, hints of an extramarital affair, unwanted pregnancy, incest, claims on the considerable fortunes of the estate, and involving elements of the classic “return of the missing heir” feature, there are few cases that can match the Bhawal Sanyasi trial.

The facts around the case are the stuff of the finest of thrillers. Ramendra Narayan Ray, the second kumar of Bhawal (a prosperous zamindari estate, now in Bangladesh) was declared to have died of syphilis in Darjeeling in 1909. His wife Bibhabati and brother-in-law were with him in his last moments. There was considerable uncertainty involving the cremation – a persistent rumour that although the kumar’s body had been taken to the cremation ground, it had not been cremated – amidst the sensational claim by one of the retinue of servants, Sharif Khan, that so corrosive was the kumar’s vomit that it made holes in his clothes!….Click here to read the full story