This is an example of what Ian innocuously called an anomalous dates case. The dates were anomalous in that the child’s date of birth was before the previous person died. The implication of a child developing memories of a person who died after the child had already been born is that a soul came into a young child and pushed out the soul that had been there before. Or perhaps the souls had an ongoing tug of war. Juta’s family said his behavior had gone back and forth when he was younger, wanting alcohol on some days and not others. Perhaps two souls were battling for supremac
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This meant that they had to manage their daughter, who not only was acting very strangely but was no longer able to converse with them. She spoke a language they didn’t know, and she could no longer understand Marathi, their native language. They initially had to communicate with her using gestures. They found Bengali-speaking people to talk with her and eventually picked up some Bengali words themselves. She said her name was Sharada. She gave many details of what she said was her life in Bengal. Though she apparently thought that life was ongoing, she seemed to come from another time, as she appeared completely unfamiliar with any tools, appliances, or vehicles developed after the industrial revolution. She did not recognize Uttara’s family or friends. Sharada stayed “in control” for several weeks before Uttara returned to her normal personality. But her family was not done with Sharada. She continued to emerge intermittently for years. Ian and Satwant found out that Sharada appeared twenty-three times during the first three years. Most of the Sharada phases only lasted a day or two, but some were much longer, including one that went on for seven weeks.
In addition to discussing various locations in Bengal, including five obscure villages, Sharada gave the names of a number of people she said were her family members. The names were traced to a family that lived in West Bengal in the early nineteenth century. The names and relationships she gave for her father and six other male members of the family all matched a male genealogy of a family that was discovered. This genealogy had been published sixty-five years before in a Bengali magazine with a local circulation, but as Uttara had never visited that state, Ian and Satwant were confident she had never seen it. Since it only included the names of the men, they did not find conclusive proof that Sharada had existed as a real person, but her statements about her family were confirmed. It appeared that Uttara’s body had been taken over by this personality named Sharada, a woman who had lived in another part of the country 150 years before.
Regarding Sharada’s ability to speak Bengali, Uttara and her family said she had never learned it, other than taking a few high school lessons in reading Bengali script from a teacher who himself could not speak the language. One of the researchers’ associates, Professor Pal, had four long talks with Sharada in Bengali, and he and five other native Bengali speakers
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if Ian’s two thousand Asian cases hadn’t convinced people to take a look at the research, studying more was unlikely to do so. I hoped that Western examples might get people’s attention in a way that the Asian ones had not. Though they are harder to find, some of them have proved well worth the effort.
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