ABSTRACT
‘Lord-Healer of Lost Cases’ is a Bengali short story in English translation. The original story – Beni Laskarer Mundu – published in 1972, is in the genre of historical fiction that Sunil Gangopadhyay’s key works are renowned for. Set in a fictional post-enlightenment nineteenth-century British-India, the story revolves around the head of a man called Benimadhab Laskar. His head, through a series of events, turns into a prospective artefact for juridical and medical inquiry because of his unique ability to accurately foretell whether a client was guilty or innocent. The translators’ afterword reads this story as an invitation to think about jurisprudence from a postcolonial location that acknowledges law to be a body of knowledge formed through contradictory inheritances. The translators foreground the way in which the story raises questions about law by unsettling the Manichean dualisms of reason/emotion, fact/fiction, science/supernatural, logic/superstition, modernity/tradition, religious/secular. At a political level, the afterword shows how the story helps to think of Southern histories as syncretic. It belies any nationalist claims to a pure past (in this case a Hindu one), ideas that are particularly significant for the current times in India, which is seeing a violent consolidation of Hindu nationalism.
