The Former Life of Shanti Devi

EXPLAINING LIFE’S MYSTERIES June 21, 2009
By Stephen Ellis

Nobody asked me, but…

The subject of having lived before should be of prime importance to everyone. It gives credence to most religious beliefs that life will continue in the hereafter. It also strongly supports my numerous explanations of the immortal soul or “aura” we all have.

There are innumerable cases of past life recollections that can and have been verified and documented. The problem is that the world is full of skeptics who will use any means available, including “sophistry” to try and disprove these claims because claims of reincarnation are contrary to their own imbued religious beliefs.

Of all the hundreds of past life cases that I have studied, the case of Shanti Devi stands out as the most documented, provable instance of having lived before. What makes this so, is that Shanti Devi never lost her memory of her past life. The details of this case have freaked-out a lot of non-believers. In almost all past-life cases, the subject only has flashes and/or very vague memories of his/her past life. Detailed memories can frequently be brought out through hypnosis. Not so with Shanti Devi:

People hear of many cases of reincarnation these days, but in the early 1930s, information about a girl born in a little-known locality of Delhi, who a claimed to remember a past life, was considered great news indeed. The girl at first was known only to the local people, but gradually news of her spread all over the country and finally all over the world. It was natural that the world should wonder about the authenticity of her story.

On January 18,1902, a daughter was born to a family named Chaturbhuj, residents of Mathura, India. Her name was Lugdi. When Lugdi reached the age of 10, she was married to Kedarnath Chaube, a shopkeeper of the same locality; a practice often followed in India in the early 1900s.

When Lugdi became pregnant for the first time, her child was stillborn following a Cesarean section. For her second pregnancy, the worried husband took her to the government hospital at Agra, where a son was born, again through a Cesarean on September 25,1925. Nine days later, however on October 4, Lugdi’s condition deteriorated and she died at 10 A.M.

One year ten months and seven days after Lugdi’s death, on December 11,1926, a daughter was born to Babu Rang Bahadur Mathur of Chirawala Mohulla, a small locality of Delhi. The girl was named Shanti Devi.

Shanti Devi spoke very little until she was four years old. When she did start talking, she alarmed everyone in her family by telling them, "This is not my real home! I have a husband and a son in Mathura! I must return to them!"

This was India in the 1930s, so instead of taking their daughter to a psychiatrist for a dose of Ritalin, her parents told her, "Forget your past life. You're with us now." But Shanti Devi wouldn't give up. She talked about her former family to anyone who would listen.

One of her teachers at school, out of curiosity, sent a letter to the address Shanti Devi gave as her "real home" in Mathura, inquiring if here had been a young woman who had died there not too many years ago. To his astonishment, the teacher soon received a reply from Shanti Devi's previous husband, admitting that his young wife, Lugdi, had passed away some years previously, after giving birth to their son. The details Shanti Devi had given to her present family and teacher about her old house and members of her previous family were all confirmed in intricate detail.

This launched the most thoroughly researched investigation of a case of reincarnation in modern history. Everyone got into the act, including Mahatma Gandhi, several prominent members of the Indian government, and a team of scientific researchers.

The team of scientific researchers, working under stringent conditions to ensure that Shanti Devi couldn't possibly be getting her information from any other source, accompanied the little girl to Mathura.

On her own, she was able to lead them to her previous home, and correctly described what it had looked like years earlier before its recent refurbishing. She was also able to relate extremely intimate information, such as extramarital affairs of family members that no one, outside the family, could possibly have known.

In an attempt to trip-her up, when Shanti made her first visit to her former home, the research team hired an actor to pretend to be her former husband while her former husband pretended to be one of the onlookers in the crowd. Shanti immediately saw through the fraud and identified the man who had been her former husband recalling to him some intimate details of their personal life together that her former husband, in complete amazement, acknowledged.

The award-winning Swedish journalist, Sture Lonnerstrand, spent several weeks with Shanti Devi later in her life, recording her story and verifying information about the famous government investigation.

To those of my readers who still have doubts, I can only repeat what I’ve said many times: “If you don’t believe something, no amount of proof will ever convince you. If you do believe something, no proof is necessary.”

If you have any memories of a past life…confusing or not, write to me at stebrel@aol.com. Together we may find out something about your forgotten history.

As I said…nobody asked me.