208 16 Lord-healer of lost cases Sunil Gangopadhyay† with Debolina Dutta and Oishik Sircar 1 There is a small village called Chingripota in the administrative district of Murshidabad. There aren’t more than six or seven concrete houses in the village. There is no school, no post ofce, but only a Saturday market – visited by people from faraway places. Those who live in Chingripota are mostly poor Hindus and Muslims. There is nothing much to see in this village, except a pretty old statue made from white stone that stands in the middle of the market. It is a statue of an oldish, sad-looking Bengali bhadralok, 2 dressed in choga chapkaan. 3 At the base of the statue something is inscribed in English – now hardly legible. No one in the village market knows who this man is. Our memories of old times are easily forgotten. If you ask the young boys who hang out at the tea stalls or near the river who this man was, none of them will be able to tell you. Sometimes you might hear some of them say, ‘We’ve heard that the man was a lawyer.’ Only a few very elderly people in the village will be able to tell you the history of this statue. I once travelled across some villages in Murshidabad on foot. The day I was in Chingri- pota, it rained very heavily and I ran to take shelter in one of the houses in the village. The owner of the house, Abdul Rab, took very good care of me. He fed me delicious food, let me stay at his house and narrated many stories. That is how I came to know the story of Beni Laskar. 1 We are grateful to Ranabir Samaddar for reading a draft of this work and for his feedback. Translated and anno- tated with an afterword by Debolina Dutta and Oishik Sircar. 2 Bhadralok: literally, a decent man. However, in the colonial context the term referred to a male member of the Bengali genteel class, considered efete in comparison to imperial projections of British masculinity. See Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Efeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Man- chester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 3 Choga chapkaan: ‘A Persian-Indian male attire’, possibly indicating a syncretic sartorial practice, ‘brought into vogue by the [social reformer] Rammohan Roy’ as a way to mark the diference between the educated Bengali and the suited Englishman. Simonti Sen, Travels to Europe: Self and Other in Bengal Travel Narratives, 1870–1910 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2001), 94.