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The Comedy of Contact: Satire, Incongruity, and the Grotesque Sacred in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s The Hapless Prince

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Upamanyu Chatterjee’s novella The Hapless Prince follows Hariram, ruler of the fictional princely state of Bhawanipur, through the last years of British paramountcy. The book falls into two linked movements: a first half built around a single crowded day of visitors — a barely disguised Aurobindo Ghose, the Resident and his Political Officer, a would-be assassin turned informant, a busload of Hariram’s old English school friends, and a second half given over almost entirely to the prolonged stay of one of those school friends, William G., whom the townspeople outside the palace gradually turn into a living god. Hariram turns out to be that same joke grown up and crowned: his old schoolmates still call him Hurree Singh, and the novella’s comedy keeps returning to the gap between the man and the caricature he was assigned as a boy. This paper argues that Chatterjee’s comic method, mechanical repetition, sudden collision of incompatible frames of reference, the grotesque body brought into contact with the sacred, and a narrator who tells outrageous events in the flat cadence of court record, is inseparable from that inherited joke. Reading the novella in the order it unfolds, from the choreography of a single royal morning to the raft where William-jee is worshipped for his belching, the paper traces how comedy exposes the instability of monarchy, empire, sainthood, and the fiction that first fixed Hariram’s place in all three.
DOI: 10.24113/tcbehd88
Language: English
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7222735530
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