Fearing 'Curse', No Woman Gives Birth in This MP Village. It Has Been 400 Years
The women of Sanka Shyam Ji village of Rajgarh, situated 130 km from Bhopal, must cross the village and give birth outside if they wish theirs and their child’s well-being. Though there are no written rules, but women are not allowed to give birth here.
Rajgarh, Madhya Pradesh: Villagers in this Madhya Pradesh hamlet have not seen a woman give birth to a child in the last 400 years. Locals blame it on a “curse” and say if a woman were to give birth to a child in the village, then the child or the mother will either die or be deformed.
The women of Sanka Shyam Ji village of Rajgarh, situated 130 km from Bhopal, must cross the village and give birth outside if they wish theirs and their child’s well-being. Though there are no written rules, but women are not allowed to give birth here.
"Ninety percent of the deliveries take place in hospitals, and in case of emergency, deliveries take place just outside the village where a room has been built for this purpose," said the sarpanch of the village, Narendra Gurjar.
Even during rains, women are taken outside the village for child birth, he said.
The curse, he says, was set upon this village when a woman disrupted a temple construction.
The elders of the village claimed that when the temple was being built during the 16th Century, a woman started grinding wheat. This distracted the construction work, and out of anger, Gods cursed the village, saying that no woman would be able to give birth in this village.
The villagers though deny this to be a superstition. They say they have witnessed that when some accidental deliveries took place, the child was either deformed or died. To tackle emergencies better, the villagers built a room outside the village for child deliveries.
An elderly man from the village says that no one drinks alcohol or eats meat in this village, and that's a blessing from God on their village.