Bishen Chand Kapoor

Overview

Bishen Chand Kapoor was born on 7 February 1921 in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, the son of B. Ram Ghulam Kapoor, a poorly paid railway clerk. At about ten months, when he could barely talk, he was heard saying ‘pilvit’, and as his speech developed he described a life in Pilibhit, a town about 50 kilometres away where his family had no connections. He said his name had been Laxmi Narain, spoke of a man he called his ‘uncle’, Har Narain, and said his father had been a zamindar, a wealthy landowner. At about four, passing through Pilibhit by train, he demanded to get off, saying he used to live there ¹.

Ian Stevenson considered the case unusually strong, chiefly because a lawyer from outside the family wrote down many of the boy’s statements before any were checked ¹².

The previous life

Laxmi Narain was the only son of Har Narain, a rich and charitable landowner of Pilibhit who spoiled him. After his father’s death he spent freely on food, fine clothes, alcohol and women. He was devoted to a courtesan, Padma, and is said to have shot dead a man he saw leaving her rooms, after which the case was hushed up. He moved to Shahjahanpur and died there of fever and lung trouble on 15 December 1918, aged 32. By 1926 the family money was gone and their large house was partly in ruins ¹.

The written record and the visit to Pilibhit

In June 1926 K. K. N. Sahay, a Bareilly lawyer, wrote down what the boy said: that Har Narain was his uncle, that he was a Kayastha (a different caste from his own family) from the Ganj quarter of Pilibhit, and that he had died unmarried at twenty. He described a two-storey house with women’s quarters and a shrine room, his love of wine, rohu fish and dancing girls, schooling to the sixth class at the government school near the river, and a neighbour, Sunder Lal, with a green gate, a sword and a gun ³¹.

On 1 August 1926 Sahay, the boy’s father and his brother Bipan Chand took him to Pilibhit. He recognised Sunder Lal’s gate, its green paint faded, and the ruined house of Har Narain, showing where a collapsed staircase had stood. In an old photograph he pointed out Har Narain and a boy on a chair as himself, which first established that Har Narain had been Laxmi Narain’s father. At the old school he pointed out the river from the roof, and two former classmates confirmed the room he picked for the sixth class. He played tablas (drums) his father said he had never seen, and when pressed by the crowd he named Laxmi Narain’s mistress as Padma ¹.

Back in Bareilly, Laxmi Narain’s mother questioned him. He spoke of kite contests with Sunder Lal, of throwing away her pickles because they had worms in them, of working for the Oudh Railway and of his servant Maikua, and she became convinced he was her son. Before the visit he had also said he had set up a Muslim watch dealer in business in Pilibhit, and people there confirmed that Laxmi Narain had lent such a man 500 rupees to start out ¹.

Investigation

Sahay published the case in 1927, mostly from letters he had sent to a newspaper within a month of the visit ³. Stevenson began work in 1964, interviewing the brother and his wife, while Professor P. Pal took a long statement from the father, then 82. Stevenson later interviewed the sister and met Bishen Chand in 1969, 1971 and 1974, but never interviewed anyone who had known Laxmi Narain ¹².

Of 46 statements in Stevenson’s list, Sahay had written down 21 before any checking, and 15 of these were confirmed; the rest were unverified rather than wrong. Only two were clearly mistaken: the quarter of the town and the age at death. Calling Har Narain ‘uncle’ was half right; Sahay noted that a man in the boy’s own neighbourhood was known to everyone as ‘Uncle’ Har Narain ²¹. The killing and other details came from family members decades later, and Stevenson accepted that sceptics might see them as embellishments, though a lawyer’s diary showed that in 1918 he had defended Laxmi Narain in a criminal case arising from an incident at Padma’s house ².

Behaviour

Between about three and seven Bishen Chand behaved like a spoiled rich young man. He mocked his family’s poverty and tore off cotton clothes, demanding silk. In a strictly vegetarian household he ate meat secretly elsewhere, and at about five his sister caught him drinking the family’s medicinal brandy. He boasted of the killing and had a quick temper. He used Urdu words his family did not use, and his brother said he could read Urdu before being taught ¹.

He became deeply attached to Laxmi Narain’s mother, preferring her to his own and visiting her often until he was fifteen. When relatives with whom Laxmi Narain had fought a lawsuit offered him money, he refused it, saying they had wanted his blood ¹.

Assessment and later life

Stevenson acknowledged one possible normal route: Laxmi Narain’s maternal uncle lived in Bareilly, about two kilometres from Bishen Chand’s home, and his mother visited there. But he argued that neither the family nor Sahay can have known this, or they would have gone to these relatives instead of travelling to Pilibhit, and that the boy began too young to have picked up so much unnoticed. He regretted that nobody had looked into this route at the time, and could see no motive for parents to encourage a son who boasted of a murder and scorned their poverty ¹².

The memories began to fade at about seven; by 1969 Bishen Chand recalled only the killing. He became an excise officer and kept eating meat outside the home. In 1944 he recognised Padma when she walked into his office and fainted after embracing her; that evening he took a bottle of wine to her home, and she broke it and sent him away. He married at 25, and by 1969 saw his poverty as payment for Laxmi Narain’s misdeeds ¹.