WHITE FAKIR ROMANCE

Evening Star, Issue 19804, 1 March 1928, Page 10

WHITE FAKIR ROMANCE

ENGLISHMAN WHO WAS JILTED CREMATED ON HILLTOP Jilted by a girl when he was a young man, an English schoolboy lett home, ienounced his race, and became an Indian fakir or holy man. This is the story now revealed lor the first time of Charles do Russet, known as the Leopard Fakir, who has died in India alter one of the strangest careers on record. Do Russet, who was cighty-livc years of age, was a well-educated Englishman, and on his mother’s side a descendant of an ancient Irish family. His grandfather was an English adventurer who went East and became attached to the Court of Ondh. Fifty years ago he had a love affair with an English girl. She broke off the engagement, and Dc Russet gave up his race and became a Hindu. He adopted the name of Bawa Must Ram Sadhi, and he was the guardian of the Monkey Temple on Jakko, near Simla, familiar to readers of Kipling, He lias died at the Monkey Temple, and he has been cremated on the hilltop outside the shrine. His cousin, Mr C. W. Crosbie, oi Northampton, lias given an extraordinary account of his meeting with the man who renounced his race. In 1895 when Mr Crosbie was a boy at his father’s house at Rookee, in India, “Bawa Must Ram Sadhi ” paid them a visit. “NO WOMAN MUST TOUCH ME.” Says Mr Crosbie; “There appeared the extraordinary .sight of a man walking up the drive completely clothed from head to foot in leopard skins, wearing a mitre of the same material, aoorned with peacock’s feathers, and emblazoned in gold with the legend, ‘Charles William de Ressette, now Baba Musth Ram.’ “ He bad a staff in his right hand, a fakir’s irons in his left, and as he advanced every Hindu prostrated himself, and even the Mohammedans bowed and salaamed in reverence. “ When he was introduced to my mother as her long-lost nephew she went forward to embrace him, but he stepped away in horror, and pleaded, ‘Please do not defiie me. No woman must touch me.’ “His eyes had an unnatural, brilliancy, and he spoke as one inspired. He refused to sleep under our roof, and spent the night in the coachhouse, where he prepared his own iood (secretly left there), and he bathed in a weir in our grounds.”