Overview
Swarnlata Mishra was born on 2 March 1948 in Shahpur, in the Tikamgarh District of Madhya Pradesh, the daughter of M. L. Mishra, who worked in a district schools office. When she was between three and three and a half, her father took her on a trip to Jabalpur. On the way back through Katni, about a hundred miles from anywhere the family had lived, she asked the driver to turn down a road to ‘my house’, and later said they could get much better tea at her house nearby 1.
Over the next few years she told her brothers and sisters, and to a lesser extent her parents, about a life as a member of a Pathak family in Katni. Her father doubted her and made no attempt to check for more than six years 1.
Identification
In July 1958 a professor in Chhatarpur, R. Agnihotri, invited Swarnlata and her father to his home to talk about her memories. Learning that his wife came from the Katni area, she asked to see her and said she had known her; she also reminded her of a wedding they had attended where they had trouble finding a latrine. This gave her father his first confirmation, and in September 1958 he wrote down some of her statements 1.
In March 1959 the Indian researcher H. N. Banerjee spent two days with the family, noted nine of her statements about the Pathak house and then went to Katni, where he said her descriptions let him find the house without help. Neither family had known which Pathaks she meant. Her statements fitted Biya, a daughter of the Pathak family who had married Chintamini Pandey of Maihar, a town north of Katni, had two sons and died in 1939 1.
Investigation and statements
Stevenson spent four days in Madhya Pradesh in 1961, interviewing Swarnlata, her family and members of the Pathak and Pandey families in four towns. He also drew on notes made by Professor P. Pal in 1963, and met the family again in 1971. His table lists 49 statements and recognitions; the first eighteen were made before the families had any contact, and most of those were written down before checking 1.
Her description of the house fitted it as it had been in Biya’s time: white, with black doors fitted with iron bars, a stone-slabbed front floor, and four stuccoed rooms while other parts were less finished, though it had since been enlarged. The family had a car, rare at the time, a girls’ school stood behind the house, and a railway line and lime kilns could be seen from it. There were mistakes. She gave wrong names for Biya’s two sons and a garbled name for the head of the family, and said Biya died of a throat disease, when she had been treated for her throat but died months later of heart disease 1.
Recognitions
In the summer of 1959 members of the Pathak and Pandey families came to Chhatarpur, and Swarnlata then visited Katni, Maihar and Jabalpur. Banerjee had wanted to watch, but the families met without him; her father later wrote that he feared a public failure. Stevenson relied on witnesses’ accounts, which described twenty recognitions of people, mostly made when she was asked to give a name or relationship rather than to say yes or no 1.
Biya’s oldest brother arrived unannounced; after first giving a wrong name, she identified him as her younger brother and called him ‘Babu’, Biya’s name for him. Among eleven men she picked out Biya’s widower and looked bashful, as a Hindu wife would. Biya’s son Murli insisted for almost a day that he was someone else, and tried to pass off a friend as his brother, but she held firm. She would not accept that Biya had lost her teeth, saying she had gold fillings, which Biya’s brothers had forgotten and their wives confirmed. She also told Biya’s husband he had once taken 1,200 rupees from her box, which he said only he and Biya knew, though he recalled a sum 200 rupees different 1.
Songs and dances
From the age of five or six Swarnlata performed songs with dances in a language her family did not know. She attributed them to a second life as a girl called Kamlesh in Sylhet, then in Assam, who died aged about nine; that life was never identified. Professor Pal, a Bengali, identified the songs as Bengali and traced two of them to poems by Rabindranath Tagore 1.
Stevenson found that the family had no radio until she was about eight and no record player, that so far as her father knew she had not been to a cinema, and that they had no Bengali friends; as late as 1963 her parents thought the songs might be Assamese. Arguing that songs and dances are skills that need practice, he counted them among the strongest features of the case. Swarnlata could not understand spoken Bengali, however, so he classed this as recitative xenoglossy rather than an ability to converse 1.
Assessment
Stevenson acknowledged that some public facts about the Pathaks, a prominent family whose house was well known locally, could have reached the Mishras on journeys through Katni, though he found no evidence that they had. In his view the case rested on private details, the recognitions, and her knowledge of how places and people had looked years earlier. He thought a hoax involving the Pathaks most unlikely, found nothing in Mishra’s character to suggest one, and pointed out that a closely supervised girl could hardly have been coached by a stranger 1.
Later life
Among the Pathaks, Swarnlata behaved like an elder sister to men forty years older, and they accepted her as Biya; she took part in the yearly Rakhi ceremony with Biya’s brothers. Unusually, her memories did not fade. In 1971, by then a lecturer in botany in Chhatarpur, she told Stevenson she had forgotten nothing, and she still performed the songs and visited the Pathaks about once a year. She married in May 1973. Her father said that six of his eight children had had some memories of previous lives, though none as detailed as hers 1.