A sati and a murder

This time, the story that made the policymakers take notice of Mahoba is that of a woman in her fifties, Charan Shah, who performed sati by jumping into the funeral pyre of her husband.

It was in March last year that I had visited Mahoba chasing yet another tale: The story of Ram Shree, thevillagewoman who along with her brother and father killed her relatives. Shree was the first woman to have been given a death sentence after Independence. Shree’s Tingra gaon, in Mahoba district, was surrounded by fields on all sides. There was no way to get there except by walking through miles and miles of wheat crop.

In fact, one has to get there before sunset. The only guiding light after sunset is the moon or a lantern as there is no electricity in the village.The villagers of Tingra live in an altogether different world. Their only source of news about the outside world are old newspapers that the village pradhan gets every time he goes to town. When I visited the Mahobakanth police station, the men on duty told me that murders due to property disputes were very common. “People kill for one bigha of land.

There’s no law here. The villagers make their own laws. The netas rarely ever visit the area. Policemen hate to be posted here.”

Even the police station makes do without electricity. Once thesun goes down, lanterns are brought out. In fact, the Mahobakanth police station is located 12 km from Tingra village and the policemen don’t attend calls after dark. They wait for the sun to guide them in their work.

No wonder, no one came to rescue Charan Shah when she jumped into the pyre last week in Satpurwan village of Mahoba district. Once Shah sat on the pyre, everybody watched her with folded hands and allowed her to become a sati, claim newspaper reports. The police reached the spot much later. The villagers now visit the spot to worship "sati mata Charan Shah". It was no different last year. Villagers then spent their evenings narrating tales about Ram Shree. They often debated whether Ram Shree did the right thing.

Shree had apparently killed her relatives because they had tortured her and beaten her up mercilessly. Women wondered whether taking revenge was an unjust act and why the court had anything to do with happenings in their village.

In no time, Ram Shree became a living legend. Whenthe Supreme Court swapped her death sentence for life imprisonment, taking pity on her one-and-half-year-old daughter, the villagers believed the Goddess had come to her rescue!

Ram Shree’s stories have now been replaced by tales glorifying Charan Shah. Thousands of people are rushing to the sati sthal to perform puja and offer prasad. Tales of Shah’s devotion for her tuberculosis-ridden husband have suddenly caught the villagers’ attention.

For a people obsessed with the villagewomen’s “extraordinary tales”, there’s new food for thought. Perhaps these tales are the only connecting link between Mahoba and the rest of the country. Both Ram Shree and Charan Shah have build bridges between the mainstream and the periphery, bridges that may not necessarily span into a future touched by modernity.