https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/arti ... va-sumitra Shiva-Sumitra
This is the case of a young Indian woman, Sumitra Singh, who appeared to die and then revived, but having apparently lost all awareness of her former personality, and now showing the knowledge, behaviours and personality traits of a quite different woman, Shiva, who had died by violence two months earlier. On visiting Shiva’s family, Sumitra made accurate recognitions of family members, relating to each in the appropriate manner for Shiva. The family accepted Sumitra as Shiva in a different body, and she retained the new identity for the rest of her life. This highly unusual case was investigated by multiple researchers, and has been interpreted variously as one of reincarnation or possession, or both.
Shiva Tripathi
Shiva Tripathi was born on October 24, 1962 to a family of the Brahmin caste. Her father, Ram Siya Tripathi, was a college lecturer. Shiva grew up in the city of Etawah and graduated from college with a BA in home economics. At age eighteen, she entered into an arranged marriage with Chhedi Lal, and moved in with his family in the small town of Dibiyapur, according to Indian custom. The couple had two sons nicknamed Rinku and Tinku.
There was considerable animosity between Shiva and her in-laws. The researchers who first investigated the case speculated that the in-laws were irritated by Shiva’s superior education and more urbane manners.1 However an Indian psychologist, Sri Parmeshwar Dayal, who also investigated the case, wrote that Shiva’s family by marriage considered her dowry insufficient, and often complained about this verbally and in letters.2 Whatever the cause, the quarrel came to a head in late May 1985, when Shiva’s in-laws forbade her to attend an exam (or according to a different source, the wedding of a member of her birth family). On the evening of May 18, Shiva’s maternal uncle by marriage visited the family and was told by a tearful Shiva that her mother-in-law and one of her sisters-in-law had beaten her. He tried to calm matters, to no avail.
The next morning, the uncle heard that Shiva’s dead body had been found on railway tracks at a nearby station. Her in-laws said she had thrown herself in front of a train. Stevenson and his colleagues interviewed the uncle and four other people who said they had seen her body on the morning of May 19, prior to cremation. When discovered, it had been lying between the two rails, and was intact except for an injury to the head. According to Shiva’s sister Uma, she and her husband were the first to see the body: she said ‘the head was bashed and the brains were showing, almost like pulp’.3
The uncle requested that cremation be delayed until Shiva’s father could be brought, but while he was travelling to fetch Ram Siya Tripathi, the in-laws obtained permission from local authorities to cremate Shiva’s body, expediting the burning by adding fuel oil. There were rumours in Dibiyapur that people had seen Shiva’s in-laws carrying her to the railway station under cover of darkness.
By the time Ram Siya arrived at Dibiyapur, his daughter’s corpse was ashes and bone. He reported the death to police, who began an inquiry. Shiva’s husband and father-in-law were arrested but then released for lack of evidence. Her mother-in-law and sister-in-law went into hiding for some months, and were arrested when they returned in 1986. Eventually they too were released due to lack of evidence. Several newspapers ran stories about the death and the murder accusation.
Sumitra Singh
Sumitra was born around 1968, the daughter of a male native of Angad ka Nagla in Etawah District. The family was of the Thakur (warrior/landlord) caste, one level below the Brahmin caste. Her mother died when she was eleven; earlier she was often separated from one or both parents, and lived for eight years with an older cousin in a neighbouring district. Sumitra never attended school but was taught rudimentary reading and writing by the cousin, who had attended school only for a year or two.
When Sumitra was thirteen, her family arranged a marriage with Jagdish Singh of the village of Sharifpura, and moved in with his family. Just as her father had been, her husband was often absent, sometimes for months at a time, pursuing employment in Delhi. After three years of marriage, she gave birth to a boy in December 1984.
A month or two later Sumitra began having episodes of loss of consciousness, or trance, in which her eyes would roll upward and she would clench her teeth. These events varied in duration from a few minutes to a full day. Sometimes she would say afterwards that she had been possessed by the goddess Santoshi Mata, of whom she was a devotee. On two occasions she was apparently possessed briefly by communicating personalities, one a Sharifpura woman who had drowned herself in a well, the other a man from another part of India. Her family sought the aid of local healers, to no avail.
On about July 16, Sumitra predicted that she would die three days later. On July 19, 1985, after an unexplained fever, she lost consciousness and appeared to die. Eyewitnesses agreed that her respiration and pulse stopped and her face drained of blood for at least five minutes. But as her family members began mourning her, she came back to life. However, her identity appeared to have completely changed. She now called herself Shiva Tripathi, and in the coming days and weeks showed such complete knowledge of Shiva’s life and relationships as to convince Shiva’s family that was actually Shiva, living in a different body. (See below, Contact and Recognitions)
Investigations
This case was first investigated by Ian Stevenson and Satwant Pasricha independently, having been brought to their attention in October 1985, when each was sent a newspaper article about it. Their principal method was to interview people who had witnessed Sumitra’s apparent death and subsequent transformation, and members of Shiva’s family. Pasricha carried out a series of interviews in November 1985, and in February and March 1986, Stevenson, Pasricha and McClean-Rice re-interviewed most of the same informants as well as numerous others in Sharifpura, Angad ka Nagla and four other towns and villages in neighbouring districts. In November 1986, February 1987 and October 1987, Stevenson and Pasricha interviewed informants who had not been interviewed before to ascertain that the two families had not had previous contact. Pasricha acted as interpreter and took notes in Hindi, while Stevenson and McClean-Rice took notes in English. Some tape recordings were also made.
The researchers also studied newspaper reports of Shiva’s death and the murder allegation, and viewed the photos of Shiva’s family members whom Sumitra had correctly identified, despite not having known them as Sumitra before the transformation.4
Psychologist Sri Parmeshwar Dayal carried out an investigation concurrently and presented it at a conference in India in March 1987. As well as interviewing Sumitra and the families, Dayal asked people who knew her well to complete a psychological questionnaire and performed a Rorschacht test on her; he also had a handwriting analysis performed on three letters, two written by Shiva and another said to have been written by Sumitra following the transformation.5
Two later attempts at follow-up investigations were made, but in both cases Sumitra and her husband Jagdish Singh could not be contacted. In 2009, Antonia Mills and Kuldip Dhiman learned from the Singh family in Sharifpur that Sumitra had died in 1998 and Jagdish in 2008. Mills and Dhiman were able to obtain two previous unpublished letters written by Shiva and by Sumitra after her changeover; they also interviewed Shiva’s parents, sister, brother and other relatives, Shiva’s husband, son and mother-in-law, and Sumitra’s brother-in-law, sister-in-law and other associates. The purpose of their investigation was to assess the case, learn whether Sumitra had continued to identify as Shiva, and compare the case with other cases both of possession and reincarnation. Mills and Dhiman also revisited Dayal’s handwriting comparison in the light of the two newly-found letters. They published their findings in 2011.6
The Transformation
As Sumitra’s father recounts in a film documentary on Stevenson’s research,7 when Sumitra awakened she appeared not to recognize her surroundings or the people around her. She spoke very little for a day, then began saying that her name was Shiva and she had been murdered by her in-laws in Dibiyapur. She wanted nothing to do with Sumitra’s husband and infant son, but wanted to be taken to see Shiva’s two children. She stated many details about Shiva and her life that the researchers learned from relatives who had been witness to the statements.
Sumitra’s family told interviewers that at this time they had known nothing of a woman named Shiva who had died in Dibiyapur. They first thought that Sumitra had gone insane, then that she was possessed, so they made no attempt to verify the stated facts. According to Dayal, because she was deemed possessed, she was ‘cruelly tortured continuously for a long period by Ohjas [exorcists or spirit healers] for redemption and cure’.8 It was to no avail; she remained in the Shiva persona, apart from a brief re-emergence of Sumitra when she ‘became confused for a few hours and seemed to resume her ordinary personality’9 in autumn 1986.
Intermission Period
Dayal noted that Shiva, once awakened in the body of Sumitra, claimed to have had memories from the intermission between Shiva’s death and her awakening. Sumitra’s father told Dayal that she had told him she had been brought before Lord Yama, the Hindu god of death. She saw people with their feet turned backward being punished according to their karma, some being whipped, some being thrown into boiling water. The goddess Santoshi Mata came to her aid, hiding her under the plank on which Yama sat and feeding her. After some days Sumitra begged for mercy from Yama, who agreed to send her back for seven years.10
Separation Between the Families
Stevenson and his colleagues were careful to ascertain that the two families had not been in contact prior to these events. Dibiyapur and Sharifpura are about 60 miles apart. Shiva’s family likewise maintained that they had known nothing of Sumitra’s family prior to the events. As well as being geographically separated, the two families were of different castes and educational levels, and followed very different lifestyles, one urban and professional, the other rural and agricultural.
However, some information was available in the newspaper reports about Shiva’s suspected murder. Stevenson and his colleagues were careful to compare her statements to these articles in order to identify information given by her that they did not contain.11
Verified Statements
Stevenson and his colleagues counted nineteen correct statements from Sumitra that were not given in any newspaper report. These showed apparent paranormal knowledge of
a particular yellow sari that Shiva had owned
a watch she had owned, and the box in which it was kept in the Tripathi home before she married and moved out
the order in which Shiva’s maternal uncles were born
a pet name for Shiva used by her family
the names of two schools where Shiva had studied
the pet names of Shiva’s two children
the names of two friends
the names of Shiva’s two brothers, two of her sisters, two of her maternal uncles, a maternal aunt by marriage and a nephew
Contact and Recognitions
While visiting Dibiyapur, Shiva’s father Ram Siya Tripathi heard a rumour that his deceased daughter had possessed a girl in Sharifpura. However, it was some three months before he visited Sharifpura, on October 20, 1985, having first had someone check the story; he was further delayed by monsoon rainfall. Sumitra wept when they met, although it cannot be claimed that she recognized him since she had been told he was Shiva’s father.
Ram Siya Tripathi now showed Sumitra some pictures in a photograph album. She correctly identified all six family members in a photograph that had been taken 18 years earlier: Shiva’s parents, grandmother, brother, sister, and Shiva herself. She recognized all five of the Tripathi children shown in another picture, and Shiva’s mother, brother and maternal aunt in a third. Upon seeing a photo of Shiva’s young son Tinku, Sumitra began to cry and asked where Tinku and Rinku were. Upon seeing a photo of Shiva’s sister-in-law, she said, ‘this is Rama Kanti, who hit me with a brick’. This statement convinced Ram Siya Tripathi entirely that Sumitra was his daughter returned. Of seventeen people in eight photographs, she identified twelve without hesitation and three with some hesitation, failing to recognize only two.
Stevenson and colleagues counted as twelve the number of friends and relatives of Shiva that Sumitra recognized without prompting or other cues. They included
Shiva’s maternal uncle by marriage (recognized on the second attempt)
Shiva’s mother, recognized on Sumitra’s visit to Etawah (Ram Siya attempted to confuse her by saying her mother was in a group of women near the house, but Sumitra declared she was not there, found her inside the house and embraced her in tears, as both Shiva’s parents describe in the documentary)12
a second maternal uncle
a third maternal uncle, who had grown a beard after Shiva’s death, whom she identified by name as soon as he spoke, recognizing his voice
Shiva’s nephew
Shiva’s sister
a friend from Shiva’s youth, whom Shiva had not seen in the eight years prior to her death, whom she happened to meet in a different town, and whom she addressed as ‘Jiji’, meaning ‘sister’, a form used by close female friends in India
All told, Sumitra recognized 23 of Shiva’s relatives and friends either in person, in photographs, or both.
Conversely, Sumitra no longer recognized people in her own family: her husband, her nine-month-old son, her in-laws, her father when he visited, the cousin she had lived with for eight years, and the cousin’s husband. She was also confused about places, commenting when told of a field that was used as a latrine, ‘We have a latrine inside the house’, which was true of both homes in which Shiva had lived.
Behaviours
Sumitra’s behaviours changed markedly after her transformation, being appropriate to a high-caste, educated woman – Shiva had been a Brahmin with a university degree – and not at all that of the rural village family Sumitra had been born into. Pasricha noted that Sumitra now wore her sari in a more dignified way and wore sandals instead of going barefoot.13 Sumitra also became an early riser, as Shiva had been.
Sumitra now refused to respond unless she was addressed as Shiva. She also became more formal in the way she addressed other people, including her husband and his parents. On the grounds of her higher caste, she behaved snobbishly towards her in-laws, even asking her husband to wash his plates and utensils while they were visiting a Brahmin home, since he was of a lower caste, whereas she was not.. She refused to participate in an important Hindu ritual in which a sister ties a string around her brother’s wrist, despite her brother begging her to do so.
Sumitra refused at first to be intimate with her husband or acknowledge her baby son, claiming he was a product of Jagdish’s previous marriage. Eventually, however, she accepted the roles of wife and mother, while still insisting she was Shiva. She is reported to have said ‘If I look after this child, God will take care of them [Shiva’s children]. If I neglect this child, would God not punish me?’
Literacy Levels
Prior to her transformation Sumitra’s level of literacy was rudimentary. She had never attended school and was taught only a little reading and writing by a cousin who herself had only one year of primary schooling: she was said variously to have been unable to write at all, or at best to write the occasional letter. Her husband said she wrote ‘a very little, like a child in kindergarten’.14 By contrast, Shiva wrote frequently to her birth family following her marriage. After the transformation, Sumitra’s ability to read and write improved strikingly. Stevenson and his colleagues wrote, ‘We observed her in both these activities and found her able to read and write Hindi with great facility.’ Her letter-writing became frequent, and she often wrote to the Tripathi family, just as Shiva had.15
...
con'd https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/arti ... va-sumitra