Overview
Ramoo and Rajoo Sharma (in full Ram Narain and Shesh Narain Diwedi) were twin boys born in August 1964 into a Brahmin family in Sham Nagara, a village of about a hundred people in Farrukhabad District, Uttar Pradesh. Their father was an Ayurvedic physician. At about three the twins ran off towards the railway station, saying they were going home. Soon afterwards they touched the feet of a stranger passing through, a sign of respect, and when scolded said they knew him. He came from Uncha Larpur, about 16 kilometres away, and the boys began to say they had been twins there: Ramoo had been Bhimsen and Rajoo had been Bhism Pitamah.1
They described how a neighbour they had quarrelled with had pretended to make peace, invited them to a house in the village of Kurri, offered them milk and then had them seized by a crowd of men and strangled. Word reached Uncha Larpur, and relatives of the dead twins, other villagers and even some of the accused men came to see them.1
The previous lives
Bhimsen and Bhism Pitamah Tripathi, born in Uncha Larpur in 1935, farmed family land with their older brother Chandra Sen. Bhimsen had been to school up to the sixth class; Bhism Pitamah had not. Both were married with children. Known as strong and brave, they had several disputes with neighbours, the last over a boundary dike with men of Kurri, who then invited them to a house there to settle a money matter. They were last seen alive on 28 April 1964, and their bodies were found tied with ropes in a well on 2 May. The police concluded they had been strangled, but the post-mortem could find no cause of death in the decomposed bodies, and nine men were tried and acquitted.1
What is known of the killing is secondhand, from what reached the family after the killers began to talk openly: a corrosive liquid was thrown in the twins’ eyes, one broke free but was caught again, and both were pinned down with lathis, heavy bamboo poles held at each end, while a cot post was pressed on their necks.12
Investigation
Ian Stevenson heard of the case in November 1971 at the police station in Gursahaiganj. Dr L. P. Mehrotra took statements in both villages in July 1972, and Stevenson interviewed the families in October 1972 and March 1973, when he also studied the trial records. Erlendur Haraldsson and Mehrotra interviewed the twins’ teacher in 1973, and Satwant Pasricha joined further interviews in 1974. Thirteen people were interviewed in all. Nothing was written down before verification, and the twins never went to Uncha Larpur; all checking happened when people from there came to Sham Nagara, probably from 1971.1
Statements and recognitions
Stevenson listed 34 statements and 8 recognitions, many made by both boys together. Their first statements gave the correct names, the village, a brother called Chandra and a licensed gun hanging in an inner room. Some were wrong: Chandra Sen denied there was also an unlicensed gun, and studying to the sixth class was true only of Bhimsen. The bodies were found in a well as the twins said, though tied rather than in a sack. The murder details could only be compared with hearsay, and on one point they differed: Rajoo said Bhimsen had broken free, while Chandra Sen had heard it was Bhism Pitamah. During a visit from the dead men’s family the twins named two men who were among those tried.1
Ram Devi, the dead twins’ mother, and the boys’ teacher said the twins recognized her, her daughters and grandsons without prompting, but their father said she had asked leading questions, such as whether she was their mother, and Stevenson felt this weakened those recognitions. A friend of the dead men said the boys called him ‘dada’, as the twins had.1
Birthmarks
Their mother and uncle said the boys were born with lines across their abdomens that looked like cuts. In October 1972 Stevenson found five narrow streaks of darker skin, about 2 millimetres wide, across Ramoo’s abdomen and lower chest and two on Rajoo’s. Among more than 200 birthmarks he had examined in these cases, he had seen none like them. The police report described rope marks on the bodies but nothing on the decomposed abdomens.12
In 1975 Stevenson gave equal weight to the ropes and the lathis as a match for the marks. Re-reading the police report and Chandra Sen’s account for Reincarnation and Biology, he judged the lathis much more likely. When Pasricha and Dr Nicholas McClean-Rice photographed the twins at 19 in 1983, Ramoo’s marks no longer showed, while Rajoo’s looked stronger, perhaps only because of better lighting. Blood tests then showed the twins were not identical.2
Behaviour
The boys showed something of the dead twins’ bravado. When a man from Uncha Larpur taunted them, they rushed at him saying God had made them small but they could still ‘devour’ him. They called the dead men’s sons ‘sons’ and told them to rebuild the family house, and they wept on meeting Ram Devi. Their family, believing that children who remember past lives die young and fearing the acquitted killers, beat them to make them stop and told them to deny their memories to strangers.1
Assessment and later life
Stevenson was satisfied that the families had not known each other: the villages lie on opposite sides of the main road, had no marriages between them and shared only a market town. The twins’ mother said she had heard of the murder before they were born, though their uncle denied that news of it had reached the village. Stevenson did not think a passing traveller could have told the boys so much without the family knowing, and noted that the family sought no publicity and tried hard to silence them; a family afraid of the killers, he argued, would hardly invent such a case.1
By March 1973 the twins, nearly nine, were behind at school and had begun to mix up details: Ramoo called Bhimsen’s son a brother and said they had been stabbed, which nothing supported. Stevenson did not see them after 1974.12