Partha Chatterjee’s A Princely Impostor? (2002) is now widely recognised as among the all-time great works of narrative history.

It starts in 1921, when a half-naked sannyasi appears in Dhaka and is identified as a hunting-shooting-womanising zamindar – the Second Kumar of Bhawal – who was believed to have died in Darjeeling twelve years earlier. He is persuaded to visit his estate, and there interrogated. He is disowned as an impostor by his “widow” but his sisters recognise him as their long-lost brother.

Then begins a legal battle in which the sannyasi seeks to prove his identity while others try to destroy his claims. Soon the whole of British India is divided on the issue, and indeed on what constitutes human identity in relation to a man back from the dead.

This is the incredible story of the prince as pauper, of pauper as resurrected prince. Chatterjee’s enthralling retelling of the notorious “Bhawal Sannyasi Case” – a monumental legal battle – weaves Indian nationalism, British colonialism, and ideas of personhood into an utterly unputdownable classic that has enthralled thousands of readers.

In this reprint of 2024, some (not all) of the poor-quality photos of the earlier edition have been replaced by better ones.

Partha Chatterjee is a political philosopher who has been a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective, professor of anthropology at Columbia, and director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.