Shankaritya Kanpatimar: The procedural failures that helped a serial killer

An account of India's most dangerous serial killer who struck people at night in their deep sleep and remained elusive for years

India’s Most Dangerous Serial Killer: Shankariya Kanpatimar

by Rakesh Goswami

Published by Ebury Press

216 pages ₹399

  Rakesh Goswami’s true-crime book on Shankariya Kanpatimar, the man who killed nearly 70 people in Rajasthan, Punjab, and Haryana over a period of 18 months in the 1970s, is an account of the killings, the police investigation that followed, and the conviction of this serial killer. 

  Shankariya received the moniker Kanpatimar because of his modus operandi — he killed his victims by striking them on the side of their heads. Shankariya came from a family of agricultural labourers living in Sri Ganganagar in Rajasthan and displayed a propensity for crime from a young age. After being repeatedly caught for crimes such as theft, his family disowned him. As he graduated to becoming a history-sheeter and spent time in jail, he turned from being a petty thief to a killer who ruthlessly murdered his victims for the purpose of stealing. He often struck at night when his victims were in deep sleep and in many cases, his victims were sadhus, although he also killed householders for money as well as for revenge. Mr Goswami’s focus in the book is to provide not just an account of Kanpatimar’s crimes but also of the way he was caught and convicted after months of terrorising people in Rajasthan. This makes India’s Most Dangerous Serial Killer: Shankariya Kanpatimar less an analysis of the criminal’s mind than an account of his crimes and the police and legal machinery that worked to arrest and sentence him. 

Mr Goswami points out in the introduction that the information available about Shankariya is meagre and often inaccurate. He also gives a short account of what got him interested in the case and how he painstakingly gathered information from various sources such as “police records, FIRs, newspaper reports and interviews with police and prison officers”. Mr Goswami merges reporting with recreating the scenes and events as they unfolded, but he leans more towards reportage than recreation. In a way, this works well for the narrative, which is more fast-paced when the writing style chooses reportage over reconstruction. This is especially true of sections where he tries to recreate the moments of the victims before the killer strikes. 

What makes India’s Most Dangerous Serial Killer read like a serious true-crime account is the way it situates the crimes and crime-solving in a larger socio-political perspective. As readers, we get an insider’s view as well as a critique of the police procedure and investigation alongside the immense pressure under which the police often function. Through the portrayal of the police officers in charge of the case, their theories, and their attitudes towards the officers who didn’t belong to their team, Mr Goswami also brings to light how a lack of open-mindedness and a misplaced belief in one’s own theories provided Shankariya the opportunity to commit more murders. 

He also suggests that the police became lax during periods of lull between the crime sprees, congratulating themselves on having cracked the case when they arrested a gang they suspected was behind the killings. Other times, they relax because they were certain that they had scared the killer away. One of the reasons for this attitude despite the terror of Kanpatimar in the area, Mr Goswami argues, was that almost all the victims belonged to economically weaker backgrounds and had no one who could pressure the police into continuing the search for the killer. 

The biggest strength of the book, however, lies in its refusal to sensationalise either the crimes or the criminal. Instead, it adopts a more sober and realistic view of the events, using meticulous research and reporting to convey the heinousness of the crimes. For instance, Mr Goswami provides details from the post-mortem reports of some of Shankariya’s victims. This creates a much more gruesome effect than any sensationalist writing. He also goes into detail of the court cases and the judgements sentencing Shankariya to death. At times, though, the detailed accounts and extracts from the reports and judgments derail the pace of the narrative, which becomes more of interest to the specialist than the lay reader. 

Mr Goswami’s focus on the socio-political machinery surrounding Shankariya’s crimes instead of peering into his psyche means that Shankariya doesn’t turn into the larger-than-life figure that many serial killers tend to become in popular culture and memory. He remains the diminutive “undersized man” looking at whom people struggled to believe that he had taken 70 lives. On the flip side, the man feels as elusive to the readers as he was to the police for a long time because there is no way to truly know the man or his motivations. Perhaps in a world that has enough books glorifying serial killers, this is not such a bad thing. 

---

 

The reviewer is an independent writer and translator