“Maharaja Nandakumar: The Gallows of Power”, My Ind Makers, Aug 11, 2026.

“On 5 August 1775, in Calcutta, Maharaja Nandakumar was hanged.

He was nearly seventy.

His official crime was forgery. His place in history, however, was secured by something far more consequential. Only months before his execution, Nandakumar had accused Warren Hastings, the most powerful British official in Bengal, of accepting bribes and abusing public office. Soon afterwards, Nandakumar himself was arrested, tried before the newly established Supreme Court at Calcutta, convicted under an English statute and sentenced to death.

The sequence was so extraordinary that it became one of the most enduring controversies in the history of British India.

Was it justice? Political retaliation? Or the frightening consequence of a colonial legal order whose institutions were still taking shape while its power was already expanding?

Nearly two and a half centuries later, the case still resists a simple verdict.

Before he became the man known in British records as Nuncomar and in history as Maharaja Nandakumar, he was Nanda Kumar Ray, a son of Bengal’s old administrative society.

Born around 1705 at Bhadrapur, in present-day Birbhum, he came from a Bengali Brahmin family bearing the surname Ray. His father, Padmanabha Ray, was associated with revenue administration, and Nanda Kumar followed that path. The personal name of his mother has not been securely preserved in the surviving historical record—a curious documentary silence in the life of a man whose final days were recorded in extraordinary detail……………..”

Read the full article at My Ind Makers.