However, it’s not only the mode of murder but also the purpose for which [Benoyendra Chandra Pandey] wanted money, which was not simply to accrue land and power as brothers do when they’re feuding but because he wanted to remake himself in a way that I saw as a reflection of a very modern, 20th-century sort of antihero.

Benoy wasn’t satisfied just being the Raja of a dusty land full of exploited peasants. He wanted to be an impresario of the film industry, a movie mogul. Together, these two elements make it a modern crime. People around [Benoy] were essentially following rules set in the Victorian era or even the Mughal era in the sense that these estate rulers were rentiers, they were bred and built to collect and squeeze out money from agricultural workers, except only one man, this lawyer, Kalidas Gupta. The rest of the clan is unequipped to counter Benoy. They’re playing by old rules.

How did you come across Amarendra’s murder, and what made you write this book?

This story came to me as a tangent of a tangent of a tangent while I was researching the river Ganga. I travelled the length of the Ganga, from the [Gaumukh] Meru glacier down through Bangladesh and into the bay. One strand that caught [my attention] involved cholera, so I started researching cholera and the plague. I spent a lot of time in really interesting [but] profitless research into medicine, and I learnt that the first vaccines for both cholera and plague were developed by the same man named Waldemar [Mordechai Wolff] Haffkine.

Haffkine, who was a Ukrainian Jew, created the first cholera vaccine at the Pasteur Institute. He tested it on himself to prove it was safe and was invited to India to inoculate people against cholera. Then, the British Indian authorities brought him to Bombay when the third plague pandemic broke out, which affected mostly China and India.

While researching cholera and plague, I was looking for a missing manuscript, a missing biography of Haffkine. I sort of knew that one was being written or perhaps had been written, but I couldn’t find any hint of publication. What I ended up finding was a newspaper clipping that said words to the effect that ‘the plague used to kill the boy had come from the Haffkine Institute’. That was the lab that Haffkine had worked at. After his retirement, it was renamed in his honour. So, this was just a tiny little inch-and-a-half piece in a foreign newspaper that I found while living in Ireland when I was in the National Library of Ireland, going through newspaper clippings of the time. After that, everything diverted in that direction [points to the book].

Because you note that it was a ‘tangent of a tangent of a tangent’ that led you to Amarendra’s murder, I was wondering if you came across any other interesting tangents during your research.

Though I found several documentary sources from the time, they were all very academic and inaccessible to a normal human being. So, with this book, The Poisoner of Bengal, I sort of attempted a small, social history of Calcutta in the 1930s because I couldn’t find one. It’s crazy to me, you know because there has been a ton of work post-independence and quite naturally so, but these times and these characters, they are greater than fiction, right? How could someone not be interested? For example, there’s this defence lawyer, Barada Pain — he’s a scoundrel of a man. He’s a terrific character. I could find very little on him, but in Nirad C Chaudhuri’s book Thy Hand, Great Anarch! (1987), there’s a mention of Pain!

Chaudhuri was the secretary to Sarat Chandra Bose (elder brother to Subhas Chandra Bose). In the last moments of forming a Congress government, there was some upright guy who was supposed to get the cabinet position, but out of nowhere, Barada Pain seemed to make it to the Congress-led Bengal cabinet. And no one knows what has happened or why. Not even Chaudhuri, who was the right-hand man to Sarat, and it’s odd because Sarat has got a phone line in jail — he’s doing politics, building a cabinet behind bars. Chaudhuri describes a scene in [the book] in which Sarat is just abjectly apologising to Barada Pain for the failure to get him into the cabinet. And it’s baffling because Sarat Chandra Bose, he’s this giant of a man. And so far, as I can tell, Pain is a very good politician and a corrupt operator, as every democracy is rich with, but he’s sort of a minor historical figure compared to Sarat, but it’s the latter who’s begging for his forgiveness while in jail. What was that? I have no idea, but I hope that someday some scholar somewhere can tell us what was really going on.

One of the interesting bits to me was Sivapada Bhattacharjee (assistant professor at the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine) noting the following to Girija Sankar Chatterji (professor of Ayurvedic medicine) about the case: it was “like something out of a foreign novel”. In Bengali, Je rakam Bilati novele pora jay. Curiously, you have a parallel bit about Sherlock Holmes and several other cinematic influences alongside these real-life novelistic figures. Were you toying readers with these references while remaining true to the course of the events?

It gets better than that. Because Sivapada is one of the accused. He is called in to attend to Amarendra in Calcutta and maybe three or four days after the incident at the railway station, these two doctors are talking about this. Little did Sivapada know that he’d be facing the noose. It’s absolutely crazy, so novelistic. Both Sivapada and Durga Ratan Dar, each a doctor of great repute, were acquitted at trial, but their names were ruined.

In the book, there’s a reflection of newspapers happily spreading falsehoods. For example, the Bombay Gazette denied the spread of the plague. It could be noted as an incident of ‘fake news’ in the contemporary world. It’s as if nothing has changed. Your thoughts?

You know, the notion of the idea of journalism as a profession that adheres to the standards of seeking truth, reporting reality as close as one can in a non-partisan, non-motivated manner, it’s a relatively new phenomenon. From the 19th through the early 20th century, newspapers were partisan; they toed the line of their owners. They attacked the owners’ enemies and ignored the foibles of the party they were supporting, so it’s just something to note here.

I came across the same thing from the English-language newspapers of the 1890s. They were representing the British establishment and a minority of Indians who had received Western education and were involved in business or academia, which is why they were pooh-poohing the notion that the plague had come to Bombay because the establishment felt it to be kind of impossible. The plague was discovered in Bombay by an Indian doctor, and at first the powers that be refused to believe it.

So, during research, you’ve to vet your sources from the time with the same kind of rigour and scepticism that you would today.

How do you make sense of the contesting evidence?

You tell the story first to yourself. You try to see what makes sense to you. Then, you wonder that despite very strong police and legal minds working on a case, how can two innocent men be charged with a capital crime? How could you ruin someone essentially because of class assumptions? Taranath [Bhattacharjee, Benoyendra’s physician co-conspirator] is a nobody, so —in the eyes of the authorities — surely somebody else must have had a hand in the conspiracy. Two well-respected lawmen, the public prosecutor NN Banerjee and Deputy Commissioner EH Le Brocq of the Calcutta detective department charged Sivapada and Dhar with murder on what would today be considered unsupportable grounds. During my research, I made notes based on newspaper clippings, but eventually, these clippings became less and less useful because they often repeated allegations that didn’t hold up to scrutiny.

I started covering crime in 1995, and I know how to look at a case and take it apart. In this case, you’ve got Judge TH Ellis, who was later the Governor of East Pakistan, and you have a two-man High Court bench of Justices [John Rolleston] Lort-Williams and Syed Nasim Ali, who basically throw out half of the indictment and say, in the nicest way, that all that is garbage. They say Ellis was biased in favour of the prosecution. And they say that despite it all, Benoy and Taranath were guilty of sin.

So, just because something has been written down, it doesn’t mean it’s true. It might be useful and informative in other ways, in showing assumptions, prejudices, a lack of knowledge or a progression into acquiring knowledge. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that just because somebody wrote something down 90 years ago, then it becomes a fact. We are the fact-finders of the present, right? You and me. We’ve got to get as close as we can to the truth.

Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.