Overview
Sumitra Singh was born, probably in 1968, in Ahmedabad, where her father, a Thakur from a village in Etawah District, Uttar Pradesh, worked in a textile mill. She never went to school, but an older cousin who brought her up for some years taught her to read and write a little. At about thirteen she was married to Jagdish Singh of Sharifpura, a village in Farrukhabad District, and in December 1984 she had a son.1
Early in 1985 she began having trance-like spells, sometimes saying the goddess Santoshi Ma had possessed her. In July she predicted she would die in three days. On 19 July she lost consciousness, her pulse and breathing seemed to stop, and her family began to mourn. With no doctor present, the investigators reported only the villagers’ belief that she had died. When she revived, after about five minutes by her in-laws’ estimate, she knew no one; after a day she said she was Shiva, a woman murdered by her husband’s family at Dibiyapur, and asked for her two children.1
Shiva
Shiva Tripathi was born on 24 October 1962 and grew up in Etawah, where her father, Ram Siya Tripathi, a Brahmin, lectured at a college; she took a BA. At about eighteen she married into a family at Dibiyapur, 55 km east of Etawah, and had two small children. On the night of 18 to 19 May 1985, after a quarrel in which she told an uncle she had been beaten, she died. Her body was found between the rails at the station next to Dibiyapur, damaged only at the head, and was cremated hastily before her father could arrive.1
The in-laws said she had thrown herself in front of a train. Her father accused them of murder; her husband and father-in-law were arrested and released, and a judicial inquiry was still running in 1987. Stevenson and his colleagues suspended judgement on whether it was murder or suicide.1
Identification
Sumitra’s in-laws made no attempt to check her story. A rumour reached Dibiyapur through a neighbouring village, and Ram Siya Tripathi heard it about a month later. He first met Sumitra at Sharifpura on 20 October 1985. She had been told that ‘her father’ had come, but she called him ‘Papa’, wept, and gave two pet names, one of which, Shiv Shanker, had not appeared in the press. Shown an album, she named the people in a family photograph taken eighteen years earlier, saying of the young Shiva ‘This is me’, and identified Shiva’s sister-in-law as the woman who had hit her with a brick. Her father said this removed his last doubts.1
When she first visited Etawah, Ram Siya tried to mislead her by saying her mother was among a group of women; she insisted she was not, went into the house and found her. She named one uncle as ‘Ram Naresh of Kanpur’, knew a bearded uncle by his voice, and at another town greeted a childhood friend of Shiva’s as ‘Jiji’. She first called one relative the father of Shiva’s uncle Arvind, then corrected herself to the father of Arvind’s wife. Of seventeen people in the photographs she named twelve at once and three after hesitation, and missed two. In all she recognized 23 people, eight of whom she had not seen in photographs first.1
Investigation
Satwant Pasricha began interviews in November 1985, within weeks of newspaper reports. She, Ian Stevenson and Nicholas McClean-Rice worked together in early 1986, and Stevenson and Pasricha returned three times up to October 1987. They interviewed 24 members of the two families, the main ones at least twice, and 29 other people about possible contact between the communities.1
Newspapers in Etawah had reported Shiva’s death and some family names, and copies reached the area: the headman’s brother at Sharifpura had read of it. The investigators therefore discounted any name that had been in print and left her account of the brick and the staged suicide as unverified. They counted 19 items that had not been published, among them a yellow sari, Shiva’s watch and the box it was kept in, her two colleges, her children’s pet names and the names of her brothers, sisters, uncles, an aunt and a nephew.1
Changed behaviour
Sumitra did not recognize her husband, her in-laws, her own father or the cousin who had raised her, and by her own account refused to tie the rakhi thread on her brother. Taken to the fields to relieve herself, she said that at home there was a latrine indoors, which was true of both Shiva’s homes. She insisted on being called Shiva, addressed her husband formally as ‘Thakur Sahib’, wore her sari differently and put on sandals, and for a time looked down on her Thakur in-laws. She read and wrote Hindi far more fluently and wrote often to Shiva’s family. In time she accepted her husband and son. Apart from a few hours in 1986, the Shiva personality was still in charge in October 1987.1
Assessment
Stevenson, Pasricha and McClean-Rice ruled out a hoax by Sumitra alone and saw no plausible team: Shiva’s in-laws, who knew the facts, had every reason to want her silent, and Ram Siya Tripathi pointed out that he gained nothing. The neighbouring village through which news travelled had no marriages with Sharifpura and little contact, and they doubted that spoken information could let her recognize people in old photographs. They weighed a secondary personality with extrasensory powers, but thought possession, or a kind of reincarnation, the most plausible reading, without asserting it dogmatically. They called it a case of the possession type.1
Parmeshwar Dayal of an Allahabad foundation reported the case independently in 1988 as parkaya pravesh, ‘entering another body’. He describes Sumitra as wholly illiterate and says she knew Shiva’s father by his voice. A handwriting expert he consulted judged that letters written by Shiva in 1983 and 1985 and one written by Sumitra in 1986 were probably by the same hand. He also records her story of being taken to Yama, god of death, and sent back for seven years.3 Antonia Mills and Kuldip Dhiman revisited the case in 2009, after Sumitra’s death in 1998, and published a posthumous longitudinal study.2