The claimant's case rested less on documents than on the accumulated recognition of thousands — tenants, relatives, servants, and townspeople who swore the ascetic's body, gait, and marks were the prince's. Chatterjee shows that in this instance popular, collective identification generated a social fact so weighty that colonial courts had to adjudicate it rather than dismiss it.
Establishing who a person 'is' required translating intimate, embodied familiarity — how a wife, a sister, or a servant knows a man — into the depersonalized, verifiable standards a court will accept as proof. Chatterjee argues these two registers of knowing an identity do not map onto each other, so the law must manufacture certainty where ordinary life relied on tacit recognition.
Reading a single sensational lawsuit as a dense event rather than mere anecdote exposes how colonial rule fused Western procedural rationality with local kinship, caste, and property relations. The case becomes a vantage point from which the contradictions of modernity in a colonized society — between universal legal norms and particular social worlds — can be observed in operation.