The wealthy heiress who was buried alive by her husband, in a crime that shocked India

Shakereh Khaleeli was “rich and beautiful” and came from one of the most aristocratic families in the South Indian state of Karnataka. But in 1991, the wealthy heiress disappeared without a trace, as if she had suddenly disappeared.

For three years, her second husband, Murali Manohar Mishra – better known as Swami Shraddhananda – made up fantastic stories about her whereabouts.

In 1994, his remains were exhumed after being found under a courtyard of the couple’s luxury home in the city of Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore). Shakereh had been drugged, placed in a wooden coffin and, as it turned out, buried alive..

In 2003, a court found Shraddhananda guilty of murder and sentenced him to death, a verdict later upheld by the Supreme Court. The courts recognized that he went after Shakere and married her because of his wealth and assets worth billions of rupees.

During the appeals process, the Supreme Court called the case “the vile greed of a man combined with the malice of the devil” but commuted his sentence to life imprisonment “without the possibility of abatement”. Last week, the same agency refused to consider his request for parole.

The sensational crime that shocked India 30 years ago is the subject of a new web show streaming on the Amazon Prime Video service called “Dancing on the Grave”named after the alleged dance parties that Shraddhananda organized in the courtyard where his wife was buried.

Filmmaker Chandni Ahlawat Dabas of Indian production company Today Originals Production explains that the ‘what, how and why’ surrounding this crime still seems unbelievable.

“Even though 30 years have passed, we felt this was a crime that needed to be told because it’s still so mysterious even today,” he adds.

While the series about the murder, and the killer, doesn’t answer all the questions, it’s still captivating and captivating has received a lot of attention in India.

“Loving and friendly”

The first two episodes of the four-part series explore Shakereh’s life.

She was the granddaughter of Sir Mirza Ismail, a high statesman who served as the dewan (or prime minister) of the principalities of Mysore, Bangalore, Jaipur and Hyderabad, known for building several historical buildings and monuments. Shakereh was married to the brave diplomat Akbar Khaleeli and was the mother of four girls..

Her relatives describe her as “a wonderfully exuberant person” who “loved vintage cars, very sociable, very loving and sweet”.

But in the mid-1980s, he met Shraddhananda and his life took a drastic turn.

Imran Qureshi of the BBC Hindi Service, who was working for the BBC at the time.Times of India in Bangalore and featured in the documentary series, says that “the murder shocked people mostly because of the way she was killed, the fact that she was buried alive.”

The crime “also became a topic of conversation because Shakereh had married a man like Shraddhananda after divorcing her first husband,” she notes.

Newspaper clippings from that time Shraddhananda is described as a dropout from a poor family, a “false guru” and an “errand boy”. that he ingratiated Shakereh by “helping her solve some property problems” and “exploiting her illusion of having a child by claiming he had magical powers”.

The relationship reportedly started to unravel shortly after their 1986 wedding and all the two often argued, mainly over money matterswhich led to Shraddhananda conspiring to execute his wife in that gruesome manner.

But despite being found guilty by a total of eight judges from the District Court, Supreme Court and Supreme Court of India, his lawyer insists the evidence against him is circumstantial at best. Shraddhananda himself still appears in the web series in denial of his crime.

Platform

Some have questioned the show as providing a platform for a convicted murderer, but Patrick Graham, a British filmmaker from Bombay who co-wrote and directed “Dancing on the Grave,” defends the decision to give Shraddhananda’s version so much screen time.

“I think it’s really important that we hear his side of the story, especially since we’ve never heard from him in the last 30 years. In addition, it gave us valuable insights into Shakereh’s personality,” he told the BBC.

Graham explains that they visited the prison with his team because wanted to know how someone like Shakereh could have been influenced by Shraddhananda.

“But we also got under his influence at first, believing there were more levels to this story, although none of us had any doubts about his crime by the time we finished talking to him.”

He notes that they entered “carefully not to give the impression that he wanted to intimidate this little, frail, old man. But as we learned more about the story and interacted with him more, we realized that he had an agenda, that he was manipulating us, that he was weaving a story.”

“The more time we spent with him, the more it became clear to us that his feelings weren’t genuine, and towards the end we tried to have a harder conversation with him,” says Graham.

And that, according to him, has resulted a “tirade” from Shraddhananda in which he “insisted that he was innocent and that he was treated badly”.

In most true crime series, the criminal is projected as “a genius,” says Graham.

“But it was very clear that I didn’t want to do that. Of course Shraddhananda had certain gifts, one of which was to make people believe him.”

But in the end, he couldn’t make the Indian courts believe he was innocent.