Bhawal case

The Bhawal case was an extended Indian court case about a possible impostor who claimed to be the prince of Bhawal and was presumed dead a decade earlier. Bhawal is a common surname of the people from East Pakistan (Bangladesh). The surname is rarely spelt as "Bhowal".

Ramendra Narayan Roy was one of the kumars ("prince") of the Bhawal Estate, a large zamindar in Bengal in modern-day Bangladesh. He was one of three brothers who had inherited the estate from their father. The Bhawal Estate spread over 579 square miles (1,500 km²) and included villages with a population of around 500.000, many of them tenant farmers.

Ramendra Narayan Roy, second kumar of Bhawal, spent most of his time hunting, in festivities and with women, having several mistresses. By 1905 he had contracted syphilis. In 1909 he went to Darjeeling , accompanied by his wife Bhibhabati Devi and her brother Satyendranath Banerjee and a large retinue to seek treatment but was reported to have died there on 7 May at the age of 25. The reported cause of death was biliary colic (gallstones). His body was supposedly cremated in Darjeeling the next day and customary funerary rites were performed on 8 May.

Later there was much discussion of what had exactly happened on 8 May and what was the exact time of the cremation and exactly who had been cremated. Some witnesses testified that a sudden hailstorm had interrupted the cremation just before the pyre should have been lighted and the body might have disappeared when the mourners had sought shelter.

His young wife Bibhabati Debi moved to Dhaka to live with her brother Satyen Banerjee. Over the next ten years the other Bhawal Estate kumars also died and the colonial British Court of Wards took control of the estate on behalf of their widows. Sometimes before the beginning of British Raj in Hindustan (India) 'Baro Bhuiya' (১২) (বারো ভুঁইয়া) or (12 great land lords) ruled over the lands of then Bangladesh (current day West Bengal, Assam, Tripura, parts of modern day Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha). One of them were the Bhawals.

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