Ghosts of Justice: Sunil Gangopadhyay’s satire of law, power and the absurd

Lord-Healer of Lost Cases by Sunil Gangopadhyay, translated and annotated by Debolina Dutta and Oishik Sircar, in Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities, Taylor and Francis, Oxon, 2021; pp. 208–226, ISBN: 9781003170914

by Debashrita Mazumder

What if one could tell the difference between truth and lies in a single glance? Splendid, wouldn’t it be? But the truth might become inconvenient to those who wield that power. In Beni Laskar’er Mundu (Lord-Healer of the Lost Cases), Sunil Gangopadhyay tells the fascinating story of a struggling lawyer in colonial Bengal who acquires the eerie ability to detect guilt through the agony of headaches and visits from the dead. What begins as a dark comic courtroom drama quickly unravels into a powerful satire on the violence of law, the colonial fetish for scientific rationality, and the control of native bodies and belief systems.

This review is based on the English translation of Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Bengali short story titled Lord Healer of Lost Cases, which preserves the cultural cadence of the original while opening it to a wider readership.

First published in 1972, the story remains alarmingly relevant in present-day India, where the instrumentalisation of law, the erosion of dissent, and the state’s interference in personal rituals continue to plague public life. Through the figure of Benimadhab Laskar, a stammering, sickly man and a reluctant prophet, Sunil Gangopadhyay raises uncomfortable questions about whether justice is truly served, or if justice is in the hands of the powerful and wealthy. He asks if knowledge is universal and singular, and lastly, what kinds of truths are permitted to survive. This story recounts the era when history was often rewritten and institutional memory was manipulated. It emerges as both a literary ghost story and a political parable.

Benimadhab Laskar is depicted as a comical figure rather than your typical hero. He would expectantly sit under a banyan tree in front of the court for clients to no avail. His fortune, however, changed soon when he mysteriously acquired the ability to sense guilt with uncanny accuracy through visions accompanied by excruciating pain and ghostly visitations. His predictions began to overturn court verdicts which unsettled fellow lawyers, colonial officials and even clients. Beni’s reputation began to spread which improved his financial position, but it also came with uncomfortable moral responsibilities. A very common phrase appears in the Spider-Man movie (Sam Raimi, 2002): “With great power comes great responsibility”. Beni’s afflictions were similar. When he refused to defend the guilty son of a powerful landlord, he was threatened. Consequently, Beni retired from his job, but then the British judge intervened not to protect Beni but to claim his skull for scientific study. However, Beni regained control of his life in death. His final act of resurrection is both prophetic and poetic. It was his warning against the hubris of the state and science.

Satire of Law, Science, and Colonial Knowledge

While the insistence of the British judge on preserving Benimadhab’s skull for scientific research may seem like a narrative tool for comic relief or even absurdity, a deeper interpretation may reveal a political gesture. The narrative showcases the colonial practice of turning bodies into specimens, stripping them of autonomy even in death. Colonial powers did not just have control over the land but also over each and every citizen’s body. In Confessions of a Skull by Kim A. Wagner, it is noted that British officials used skulls of executed Indian men, often labelled as “thugs”, as scientific specimens to be cut open for phrenological studies (2010). Phrenology was a pseudoscience that examined the bumps and the shape of one’s head to determine the personality traits of that person. This macabre practice, Wagner argues, blurred the line between justice and violence for the sake of science: “The interrogation of the seven men…was thus continued through their skulls at the hand of phrenologists”(2010, 27). In Sunil Gangopadhyay’s story, Benimadhab is subjected to a similar logic. The British judge Wilberforce rationalised Beni’s prophetic headaches as pathological.

The translator’s afterword in Lord-Healer of the Lost Cases urges the readers to rethink the judiciary from a postcolonial lens. India’s legal system claims to be modern and neutral, but it carries the baggage of colonialism and cultural biases. Beni’s death resulted in a tense game of tug of war between the colonial desire to dissect his body and the village’s demand for ritual cremation. Beni was not given agency over his own body even in death. This struggle over the body is not confined to the colonial archive. Contemporary regimes continue to regulate autonomy over a person’s body through medical neglect, forced cremations, and bureaucratic violence. The language of such authority may have shifted from racial science to issues of national security or legal concerns, but the underlying matter of control persists. In 2020, the police of Uttar Pradesh forcibly cremated a 19-year-old rape victim without the consent of her family. Similarly, in the case of Father Stan Swamy, a Jesuit priest and a tribal rights activist, who died in custody after being denied medical care under the UAPA, we see the unencumbered control of the authorities over citizens. These cases emphasise how bodies, living or dead, have always been subjected to forms of bureaucratic violence under the pretext of law and national security. In both fiction and reality, death doesn’t free you from the shackles of the state’s control.

Benimadhab Laskar: Anti-Hero, Ghost and the Subversion of Colonial Knowledge

Benimadhab Laskar is not your conventional hero. His powers are not rooted in strength, charm or courtroom strategy, but in the unasked ability for truth-telling which is triggered by suffering, visions and spectral visitations. Unlike typical heroes, he doesn’t embrace these abilities; his visions of guilt are burdens he must endure. Yet it is Beni, not the colonial court, who delivers justice with consistency. When Beni refuses to defend the guilty son of the landlord despite being threatened, it is his form of quiet, reluctant resistance that speaks louder than law.

The very presence of Beni destabilises the binaries that support colonial rationality, which are science vs superstition, reason vs belief, and modernity vs tradition. His knowledge of truth cannot be medically explained. And the British Judge Wilberforce attempted to do exactly that: to quantify Beni’s powers. Wilberforce becomes the embodiment of the colonial desire to dissect and control what it cannot understand, to extract meaning even from the dead. Yet it should be noted that this impulse didn’t vanish with the end of the empire. In independent India, free of British rule, modernity implies logic supported by Western concepts. Indigenous forms of knowledge are often dismissed as dogmatic, superstitious or simply as relics of an irrational past. Although we are free of colonial powers, our thought process is still deeply influenced by colonial reasoning, where the hierarchy of knowledge is arranged with scientific Western rationalism at the top and embodied or cultural truths at the margins. Wagner rightly wrote that this fusion of science and punishment was not neutral but deeply embedded in the logic of empire (2010). This continues to echo in the present.

Gangopadhyay’s story critiques not only colonial science, but also the concept that Western epistemologies are universally valid. The translator’s afterword by Debolina Dutta and Oishik Sircar notes that the story compels us to understand the law as a body of knowledge shaped by contradiction, hybridity and power. These critiques were echoed by Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe in African colonial contexts, where the local beliefs and rituals were pathologised as signs of savagery, and a need to civilise them was invented. Similarly, Indian philosophers such as Sundar Sarukkai, in his co-authored work with Gopal Guru, The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory (2012), argue that Indian philosophy has long operated with logic distinct from Western rationalism. Beni’s visions may not be explained in Western science, but such forms of knowledge have been grounded in Indian experience and spiritual intuition.

Gangopadhyay doesn’t ask us to believe in ghosts. He merely asks us to question why we must confine our thinking or reject other possibilities of truth. It reinforces the postcolonial thought that rationality is not universal but shaped by culture.

Conclusion

Beni Laskar’er Mundu or the Lord-Healer of Lost Cases is a politically influenced ghost story. It is not the spirits of the dead that frighten us, but the injustices practised by the living. Sunil Gangopadhyay interrogates our understanding of law, reason, and justice through satire and postcolonial critique. In Benimadhab Laskar, we find a man who quietly bears the burden of truth. But he is also haunted. He doesn’t rebel; instead, he possesses moral clarity by refusing to bend the truth, even when threatened. He exposes the limits of colonial law and science. His knowledge is untranslatable to colonial logic/modern science. His character gives us a lesson that truth-telling often comes at a cost, especially in societies where power determines which truths are allowed to survive.

Written in 1972, this story remains unsettlingly relevant in contemporary India, where the law often fails the vulnerable, and even death is not free from state surveillance. This reveals the enduring violence of the state that demands control and conformity.

When Beni resurrects, although briefly, he delivers a final warning that the truth never remains buried. Beni Laskar’er Mundu not only entertains, but it also disturbs, provokes, and haunts. In a country where justice is elusive, stories like this should be written more often. We need stories where the dead speak so that we learn to listen. But we also need to listen to those who are not yet dead, those who whisper from the margins waiting to be heard.

TheDaak review