Overview
Sunita Chandak was born in about 1974 in Verni Kotha, India, one of twin girls. Her parents said that at four she began telling them she came from a village called Belgaon and begging her father to take her there, though he had never heard of it. She found fault with her mother’s cooking, saying food should be served as it was in her village, and her father thought the dishes she wanted pointed to the cooking of a nearby region. Asked for more, she said her village had a temple but no school, a river running past it and hills close by.1
The search
Her father asked a local journalist, Padmakar Joshi, for help. Joshi found 28 villages called Belgaon in the region, nine of which seemed to fit. Her parents tried three of them over the following months; at each she said this was not the place. Joshi then published her story, adding that she had spoken of a sister named Sumitri and said she had never worn a sari. He took the second point to mean she had died as a child, since grown women in Indian villages wore saris but young girls did not.1
A reader from one of the six remaining Belgaons wrote that his village had all the features she described, and that a family there had lost their first daughter young and had a second daughter called Sumitra. The dead girl was Shanta Kalmegh, born in 1945, who had died before she was six, in about 1950.1
Visit to Belgaon
Sunita was five when, in the winter of 1979, the family made the journey of about 90 miles, with several changes of bus, to this Belgaon. On entering the village she paused briefly, then said ‘This is it.’ Villagers who saw the visit said she went on to make many identifications, among them recognizing the Kalmegh house and taking Shanta’s mother by the hand as her mother.1
Several of her remarks concerned things that had changed since Shanta’s death. She said the house had once had a raised platform in front; there was none by then, but Shanta’s father and uncle said there had been one in Shanta’s time. Inside, she pointed to a brick wall the family said was built after Shanta died, and to a spot where an altar had stood. Taking a glass, she walked to a nearby house and showed where a window for buying milk had been, which the nephew of the former milk seller confirmed. At a neighbour’s she said his father used to write at a desk on a certain spot and that her father had taken her there, and the neighbour said his father, a local official, had filled in documents at that very place. Passing the school, which did not exist in Shanta’s time, she said a grocery store had stood there; the village headman said it had been knocked down fifteen years earlier to make way for the school.1
Investigation and assessment
Joshi was the first to investigate, and Indian skeptics accused him of making up the facts for his own gain. Ian Stevenson did not rely on Joshi’s report but, on an earlier trip, went back and interviewed other first-hand witnesses. The journalist Tom Shroder, who travelled with Stevenson on a later visit, wrote that because Sunita had been surrounded by a crowd from the moment she arrived, Stevenson discounted recognitions such as the house and Shanta’s mother, which onlookers could have prompted, and gave more weight to remarks that were spontaneous or held detail that cues could not supply.1
Shroder noted that even the stronger items had a weakness: every confirmation rested on memories of a girl who had died almost thirty years before. The sister’s name and the sari, however, had been published before Shanta’s family came forward. Shanta’s family accepted Sunita, and she formed a lasting bond with them.1
Later life
Shroder met Sunita, then 24 and married, with Stevenson and Satwant Pasricha at her husband’s family home several hours east of Nagpur. She called her father her ‘Verni Kotha father’, as distinct from her ‘Belgaon father’, and said she saw that family on special occasions. She still remembered playing with her younger sister but said she now thought much less about that life, having found what she wanted.1 Stevenson found that most children’s memories of a previous life fade as they grow older, though some keep a few.2
Her twin sister, Anita, never spoke of a previous life. Stevenson offered to pay for blood tests in Bombay to learn whether the twins were identical, but the family declined. Sunita said she was more interested in a second past life she had begun to recall at seven or eight, as a much-loved only child in a cement house within sight of railway tracks, whose family had a cloth shop. She could recall no names, and agreed when Satwant Pasricha suggested trying hypnosis on a later visit.1