In the 70s of the last century, the famous researcher of reincarnation Ian Stevenson met a woman who could speak an old dialect of Bengali that existed 150 years ago.
Modern Bengali is 20% of English loanwords, Bengali professor P. Pal explained to Stevenson. But this woman had long conversations with Professor Pal, not using a single English word. However, her speech contained many words from Sanskrit, as was inherent in the Bengali language of the early 19th century - a hypothetical period of her past life.
She spoke completely fluently, as if she had grown up in West Bengal, a region of which she had many memories. She was born and raised in Nagpur, her mother tongue was Marathi, she also spoke some Hindi and English.
When this Uttara Khuddar was 32 years old, a new personality named Sharada began to appear in her. Before that, Khuddar did not talk about past lives. She holds a Master's Degree in Public Administration and English and has also worked as a visiting lecturer at Nagpur University.
Sharad's new personality did not speak any language that Khuddar knew. She did not recognize Khuddar's relatives and friends. She was puzzled by many things invented after the industrial revolution. The Huddar family did not know Bengali and were unaware of the traditional food and other things that Sharada asked for.
Stevenson and his staff spent several weeks researching the Huddar case. They checked places in Bengal that she remembered, some of which were in what is now Bangladesh. Her descriptions were true.
She gave the full names of her family members, including her father's name, Brahanat Chattopaydhai. When Stevenson was able to locate the genealogy of the Chattopidehye family, Sharada described the house where they lived. She correctly named five members of her family, including her father and grandfather. This family lived in the 19th century, which corresponds to the period described by Sharoda.
Stevenson said: “In this region, only males are listed in the genealogy. Since there are no female names there, we cannot verify if Sharada actually existed. But the data of the male genealogy and its description of male relatives does not seem like a coincidence."
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Stevenson wrote the report "Preliminary Report on an Unusual Case of Reincarnation and Xenoglossia." It was published in the Journal of Research of the American Society of Parapsychology in July 1980. Xenoglossia is the ability to speak or write in a language that a person is unfamiliar with.
As a child, Khuddar was very afraid of snakes. Her mother says that when she was pregnant, she repeatedly had a dream of being bitten by a snake on the leg.
Sharada remembered that in her seventh month of pregnancy, she was picking flowers, and she was bitten on the leg by a snake. She lost consciousness, but at the same time does not say directly that she remembers her death. At this time she was 22 years old, "she does not realize that it has been a long time," says Dr. Stevenson.
Sharada possessed the body of Huddar for several days or weeks, the Huddar family began to notice that these periods correspond to certain phases of the moon. Huddar and Sharada have no recollection of each other's actions, so Stevenson thinks it may sound more like an obsession than a memory of reincarnation.
“The amnesia that characterizes each personality is more like an obsessional syndrome than reincarnation,” he writes. ― This suggests that Sharada is an incorporeal person, she has the characteristics of a real person who lived and died at the beginning of the 19th century. Almost 150 years later, she reappeared and took possession of Uttara's body."
He continues: “But other details correspond to reincarnation. First, Uttara had a phobia of snakes when she was a child. Secondly, she has an interest and sympathy for Bengal and Bengalis."
Uttara's father supported the Bengalis, he believed that they defended themselves well from the British, he also participated in the Indian national movement. She could have picked up an interest in Bengal from her father. In high school, she learned a few words in Bengali. The person who taught her did not speak Bengali himself, and used a pronunciation characteristic of the Marathi language.
According to Stevenson, there is no evidence that she could take enough time to master it perfectly, let alone the ability to speak without an accent. The fact that she spoke an antiquated version of Bengali that existed 150 years ago is important proof along with her accurate knowledge of the culture and food of that region.