Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case
A project by Zuleikha Chaudhari | Staged at: Dhaka Art Summit 2018
Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case was instigated by an album of about 90 photographs that were used as evidence in the Bhawal court case, currently part of the Alkazi Collection of Photography.
The Bhawal case was an extended pre-independence Indian court case about a possible impostor claiming to be the second Kumar of Bhawal, Ramendra Narayan Roy, who was presumed dead a decade earlier. The claim was contested both by the British Court of Wards and by his widow, Bibhabati Devi. The case was on trial from 1930 to 1946. Over the course of sixteen years, the man’s physical attributes, birthmarks, portraits, testimonies and memory were put together as forensic evidence to establish his identity. Hundreds of witnesses, including doctors, photographers, prostitutes, peasants, revenue collectors, tenants, holy men, magistrates, handwriting experts, relatives, soldiers and passersby were deposed. The case went from a lower court in Dhaka to the High Court of Calcutta to the Privy Council in London.
The exhibition comprises select evidence from the trial including testimonies, photographs and drawings and includes documentation of the rehearsals, auditions and re-trial and explores the idea of rehearsal-as-exhibition.
The project uses this trial about a possible impostor to re-examine the enormous archive that the case produced through performance as a method of problematizing the notions of evidence, archive, identity, and most importantly, the question of law as performance; the role of performance in law and the performativity of legal truth-production.
