The Reincarnation Story of Uttara Huddar: The Marathi Author Who Had Recurring Memories of a Past Life Lived 150 Years Ago

Do you believe in reincarnation, and that a soul after death travels and takes another physical body?Uttara Huddar, born on 14 March 1941 at Nagpur Maternity Hospital in the western state of Maharashtra, could speak fluent Bengali, even though her native language was Marathi. She had an uneventful childhood, though she was known to have a phobia of snakes.In 1974, at the age of 32, Uttara suddenly began speaking fluent Bengali and was unable to speak Marathi. An unmarried woman in her present life, she started claiming that she was Sharada Chattopadhyay, a married woman who had lived 150 years earlier. Uttara even began dressing like a married Bengali woman. She suddenly stopped recognising her birth parents and other family members from her present life.Uttara

seemed to have gone back to a life that nobody knew about. She gave details of places in Bengal with which she claimed to be familiar.A report by Ian Stevenson and Satwant Pasricha, titled A Preliminary Report on an Unusual Case of the Reincarnation Type with Xenoglossy, stated that, "Two events that occurred in late 1973 and early 1974 may have stimulated the emergence of Sharada. First, Uttara was practising meditation with breathing exercises that induced to some extent an altered state of consciousness. (Uttara had, however, practised meditation earlier without any noticeable change of personality and certainly with no effect like the appearance of Sharada.) Second, Uttara met a man to whom Sharada, after her emergence, strongly attracted."For several weeks she lived as Sharada and then returned to the personality of Uttara. The episode kept repeating, with her switching between both personalities.Initially her Maharashtrian parents could not identify the language she was speaking until someone familiar with Bengali recognised it.According to reports, when Uttara transformed into Sharada, she felt a sensation on her head that she described as ants crawling. She would say that her father’s name was Brajanath Chattopadhyaya and her mother’s name was Renuka Devi. She also spoke of a stepmother called Anandmoyee and said that she had been brought up by her maternal aunt, Jagatdhatri. She would apply sindoor and said that she had been married to Vishwanath Mukhopadhyaya at the age of seven. "Her tastes in food were closer to those of Bengalis than to those of Uttara’s family or of Uttara in her normal condition. Sharada requested various foods that are specialities of Bengal, but eaten little or not at all in Maharashtra," wrote Stevenson and Pasricha.Interestingly, her phase as a Bengali woman would end after a ritual aarti. She also recognised a man from her present life as the one she had been married to in her claimed past life and would become excited on seeing him. Once she returned to her present life as Uttara, she would never remember her time as Sharada. She knew about places such as Bardhaman and the Hansheshwari Temple at Bansberia, as well as Kalighat Temple and others.It was a life of mystery and fascination that nobody could explain. Yet in her present life as Uttara she became an author of many Marathi books. Her first anthology of poems, Akash Garbha, was published in 1983. Her life reveals that perhaps some stories are not meant to be solved, only witnessed. It reminds us that the mind still holds mysteries we have yet to understand.