The court of Krishnanagar, some time in the 1700s. The Maharaja has woken up in a foul mood. The pandits are studying the floor. The ministers are studying the pandits.
And every eye in the room is sliding, very slowly, towards one man at the back, who is already grinning.
That man is Gopal Bhar, the bhanr, the court jester, of Maharaja Krishnachandra of Nadia, and the hero of more Bengali stories than anyone has ever counted. In them the king is proud, the courtiers are jealous, the merchants are greedy, and Gopal, with nothing but his wits, sets every one of them straight and makes the whole court laugh while he does it.
Here are five of the best, retold in our own words. After them comes the question every Bengali asks sooner or later: was Gopal real?
1. The trip to heaven
The king’s barber had never liked Gopal. Gopal made the court laugh and the king listened to him; the barber shaved the king every morning and the king barely noticed he was there. So one morning, razor in hand, the barber made a suggestion.
“Maharaj, you often wonder how your late father is faring in heaven. Who better to go and find out than Gopal, the cleverest man in Nadia? We could send him up on a funeral pyre, with every honour.”
The king liked the idea rather more than he should have, and put it to Gopal. Gopal bowed low. “An honour, Maharaj. Only give me a month to prepare, and let the pyre be built in my own field, beside my house.”
For a month, by night, Gopal and his sons dug a tunnel from the middle of the field to his kitchen. On the day, the pyre was built right over its mouth. Gopal lay down on it, and the moment the smoke was thick enough he slipped underground and walked home. Then he stayed indoors for six months and let his hair and beard grow wild.
One morning he strolled back into court, as shaggy as a sadhu. “Maharaj, I have seen your father. He is well and sends his blessings. He has only one complaint: there are no barbers in heaven. Look at the state of me after six months there! He begs you to send him yours, at once.”
Every eye turned to the barber, who threw himself at the king’s feet and confessed the whole plot. The king laughed until he cried.
2. The price of a smell
A sweet-seller in Krishnanagar was famous for two things: the best sandesh in town and the meanest heart. One afternoon a poor man sat down outside the shop to eat his plain rice, and breathed in deeply as the syrup boiled.
“You’ve been enjoying my sweets,” said the sweet-seller. “Pay up.” “I haven’t eaten a crumb!” “You’ve eaten the smell, and smell costs money.” The quarrel grew so loud that it ended up in the king’s court, and the king, much amused, handed the case to Gopal.
Gopal listened gravely. “The sweet-seller is right,” he said. “A smell has its price.” The poor man went pale. Gopal untied the few coins from the corner of the poor man’s dhoti, held them beside the sweet-seller’s ear, and shook them. Clink. Clink. Clink.
“There. He enjoyed the smell of your sweets, and you have enjoyed the sound of his money. The debt is paid.” And he handed the coins back to their owner.
3. Half the reward
The new gatekeeper at the palace had a rule of his own: nobody went in to see the king without promising him a share of whatever they came out with. Gopal had a story the king was going to love. “Half,” said the gatekeeper. “Half of whatever he gives you.” Gopal agreed at once.
The story went down beautifully. Wiping his eyes, the king said, “Ask me for anything, Gopal.” “Then, Maharaj, I ask for a hundred strokes of the cane.”
The court fell silent. The puzzled king picked up the cane, and Gopal raised a hand. “Wait, Maharaj. I promised your gatekeeper half of whatever you gave me. Let him have his fifty first.”
The gatekeeper got his fifty, and lost his job. Gopal got a proper reward the next morning.
4. The painting of the cow
The king announced a painting competition, and every courtier was to bring a picture. Gopal, who could not draw a straight line, took his canvas home and brought it back a week later, perfectly blank.
“What is this?” asked the king. “A cow eating grass, Maharaj.” “Where is the grass?” “The cow ate it.” “Then where is the cow?” “Maharaj, once the grass was gone, why would the cow stay?”
5. The unlucky face
There was a man in Krishnanagar whom everyone called opoya, unlucky. See his face first thing in the morning, people said, and your whole day would go wrong. The king laughed at such talk, and to prove it nonsense he had the man brought to his bedside one morning, so that his was the first face the king saw.
That day everything went wrong. A messenger brought bad news, the king’s favourite horse went lame, and business piled up until he never sat down to eat. By evening he was furious. “The man really is cursed. Hang him in the morning.”
The man’s family ran to Gopal. Next morning, at the foot of the gallows, the condemned man asked for one last word with the king, and said what Gopal had taught him:
“Maharaj, it is true. You saw my face first yesterday, and you missed a meal. But I saw your face first yesterday, and today I am to be hanged. Tell me: whose face is the unlucky one?”
The king understood. He set the man free and never spoke of lucky and unlucky faces again.
Was Gopal Bhar a real person?
Nobody knows for certain, and Bengalis have argued about it for a hundred years. His king was certainly real: Krishnachandra Roy ruled Nadia from 1728 until his death in the early 1780s. Gopal is harder to pin down.
- Against: Gopal’s name does not appear in Bengali writing before the nineteenth century. Two great poets lived on Krishnachandra’s patronage, Bharatchandra Ray and Ramprasad Sen, and neither of them mentions a jester called Gopal.
- For: In 1926 Nagendranath Das, who said he was descended from Gopal’s family, published Nabadwip-Kahini, which gives Gopal a birth name, Gopalchandra Nai, and a family of napits, barbers. (Which makes the trip to heaven funnier still.)
- Undecided: The literary historian Sukumar Sen left the question open, and others argue that the court’s records were simply lost.
Our own view: there may well have been a quick-witted man at Krishnachandra’s court, and stories gathered around his name the way stories do. Either way, Gopal is exactly as real as Bengal needs him to be.
If you go to Krishnanagar
- The Rajbari, the palace of the Nadia Raj family, whose most famous festival is Jagaddhatri Puja.
- Ghurni, the neighbourhood of Krishnanagar famous for its clay modellers, where you will find Gopal in clay along with everything else.
- Sarpuria and sarbhaja, the layered cream sweets Krishnanagar is known for. Do not tell the sweet-seller you only came for the smell.