The Bhawal case was an extended Indian court case about a person claiming to be the prince of Bhawal, who was presumed dead a decade earlier. Apparent first death and cremation Ramendra Narayan Roy was a kumar ("prince") of the Bhawal Estate, a large zamindari in Bengal in modern-day Bangladesh. He was one of three brothers who had inherited the estate from their father. He was popularly known to people as "mejokumar". The Bhawal Estate spread over and included villages with a population of around 500,000, many of them tenant farmers. The second son, Ramendra Narayan Roy (b. 28 July 1884), was yet to take up the zamindari management when the famous incident of the Bhawal case took place. Ramendra Narayan Roy, second kumar of Bhawal, spent most of his time hunting, in festivities, having several mistresses. He was a lover of all his subjects too. He gave away many valuable possessions among his subjects. He was even slow poisoned by his adopted son a doctor. By 1905 he was said to have contracted syphilis. In 1909 he went to Darjeeling to seek treatment, accompanied by his wife, Bibhabati Devi; her brother Satyendranath Banerjee; and a large retinue, but was reported to have died there on 7 May at the age of 25. The reported cause of death was biliary colic (gallstones). His body was supposedly cremated in Darjeeling the next day and customary funerary rites were performed on 8 May. Later there was much discussion of exactly what had happened on 8 May, what the exact time of the cremation was, and exactly who had been cremated. Some witnesses testified that a sudden hailstorm had interrupted the cremation just before the pyre should have been lighted and the body might have disappeared when the mourners had sought shelter. His young wife, Bibhabati Devi, moved to Dhaka to live with her brother Satyen Banerjee. Over the next ten years the other Bhawal princes also died, and the colonial British Court of Wards took control of the estate on behalf of their widows. Regarding the family name, long before the beginning of the British Raj on the Indian subcontinent, 'Baro Bhuiya' (বারো ভুঁইয়া) (or 12 great landlords) ruled over the Bengal area (including present-day West Bengal, Bangladesh, Assam, Tripura, and parts of modern-day Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha) and resisted the occupation of Bengal by the Mughals during the 16th and 17th