Overview
Jasbir, son of Girdhari Lal Jat, was born at the end of 1950 in Rasulpur, a village in Muzaffarnagar District, Uttar Pradesh. In the spring of 1954, aged three and a half, he appeared to die of smallpox. As it was late at night, his uncle and other villagers advised waiting until morning to bury him, and some hours later his father noticed the body stir. The boy slowly recovered, and when he could speak clearly again, weeks later, he seemed a different person: he said he was Shankar’s son, from Vehedi, and wanted to go there.1
The man he claimed to be, Sobha Ram, died about three and a half years after Jasbir was born, so Jasbir seemed to take on the identity of someone who had died after his own birth rather than remember a life lived before it. It is a classic example of what are now called replacement cases.1
The Brahmin boy
Jasbir now refused to eat with his family, saying he was a Brahmin and they were of a lower caste. A Brahmin neighbour cooked for him for about a year and a half, with food his father supplied. When the family slipped him food she had not cooked he found out, and under family pressure he gradually gave in. His father said he also began using the higher-caste words for ‘house’ and ‘clothes’. He spoke of having a wife and children until teasing made him keep quiet.1
He said that during a wedding procession a man who owed him money had given him poisoned sweets, that he became dizzy, fell from the chariot he was riding in and died of a head injury. Asked in 1961 what happened after the death, he said a sadhu, a holy man, had advised him to ‘take cover’ in Jasbir’s body.1
Identification
His father tried to keep the matter quiet, but the special cooking became known to the village Brahmins. In 1957 Shyamo, a Brahmin woman from Rasulpur who had married into Vehedi, about 20 miles away, came on one of her rare visits and Jasbir greeted her as his aunt. She told her husband’s family and the Tyagis in Vehedi. Shankar Lal Tyagi’s son Sobha Ram, aged 22, had died in May 1954 after falling from a chariot on the way back from a wedding, as Jasbir described, though his family had known nothing of poisoning or a debt. Sobha Ram’s father and other relatives then came to Rasulpur, and Jasbir identified them and their relationships to Sobha Ram.1
A few weeks later a man from Vehedi set Jasbir down near the village railway station and asked him to find the Tyagi quadrangle, the family’s men’s meeting place. He walked straight to it, about 200 yards away, with a crowd following behind, and later led the way to the Tyagi home from another house by a different route. During some days in the village he called Sobha Ram’s grandfather ‘Rai Sahib’, as he had been known, greeted a cousin as ‘Gandhiji’, a nickname from his large ears, and picked out the family’s fields. He went home with great reluctance.1
Statements and discrepancies
Stevenson listed 39 statements and recognitions: 12 made before any contact between the families, 15 to or about Tyagi visitors in Rasulpur and 11 on the first visit to Vehedi. Before contact Jasbir mentioned a culvert in his village, which Rasulpur lacks, and said the chariot was drawn by a white ox and a black one; one of Sobha Ram’s brothers remembered both as white. Later he named Sobha Ram’s son, mother, sister, wife and mother-in-law, described a well half inside and half outside the house, unique in the village, and said he had left money in a black coat, which was found where he said, though accounts of the amount differed.1
The poisoning was never confirmed. The Tyagis had no idea whether Sobha Ram ate any sweets, only that he had taken betel, though they became suspicious after hearing Jasbir. Stevenson withheld the name of the man Jasbir blamed.1
Investigation and assessment
Ian Stevenson interviewed thirteen witnesses in both villages in the summer of 1961 and returned in 1964 with new interpreters, seeing most of them again and some new ones; he lists 21 people in all. Dr L. P. Mehrotra later found that the bride’s family had recorded the wedding as 21 May 1954, close to the Tyagi family’s written record of Sobha Ram’s death on 22 May. There was no record of Jasbir’s apparent death, which the best testimony placed in April or May 1954.1
The villages lie off the main roads, and both families said they had known nothing of each other. Stevenson found only a few people with links to both, chiefly Shyamo and her husband, who had not been to Rasulpur for five years before 1957, and a Rasulpur friend of Jasbir’s father who had once known Sobha Ram but denied discussing him. He saw no motive for fraud, since the claims disrupted both families and isolated Jasbir in his own, and found the witnesses consistent three years apart. He thought telepathy through some go-between would stretch the idea almost beyond known examples and would not explain Jasbir’s strong identification with Sobha Ram. He did not count anything Jasbir himself told him as evidence.1
Later life
In 1961 and 1964 Stevenson found Jasbir withdrawn and lonely in Rasulpur and happiest in Vehedi, where he shared a cot with Sobha Ram’s son. His own family, afraid of losing him, limited the visits and would not let him meet Sobha Ram’s widow.1
When they met again in 1971 Jasbir had left school and was helping his father farm. He still visited Vehedi every few months, the Tyagis consulted him on the marriages of Sobha Ram’s children, and he said his memories had not faded. He refused food cooked in clay pots, wore the sacred thread of the upper castes and gave his name as ‘Jasbir Singh Tyagi, son of Girdhari Lal Jat’. The man he accused had paid him 600 rupees, which Stevenson took as a sign that the man believed Jasbir was Sobha Ram, not as an admission of guilt.1