WHITE FAKIR

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20108, 29 March 1928, Page 5

WHITE FAKIR

A LOVER’S TRAGEDY JILTED MAN TURNS HINDU. Jilted by a girl when he was a young man, an English school boy left home, renounced his , race,, and became an Indian fakir or holy man. This is the ! story now revealed for the first time of Charles de Russet, known as thc Leoparc* 1 akir, who has died in India after one of the strangest careers on record. De Russet, who was 85, was a well-educated Englishman, .and on his mother's side a descendant of an ancient Irish family. His grandfather w'as an English adventurer who went East and became attached to the Court of Oudh.

1 ifty years ago he had a love affair with an English, girl. She broke off the engagement, and De Russet- gave up his race and became a Hindu. He adopted the name of Bawa Must Ram Sadhi, and he was the guardian of thc Monkey Temple on Jakko, near Simla, familiar to readers of Kipling. He has died at the Monkey Temple, and he has been cremated on the hilltop outside the shrine. His cousin, JXLr C. W. Crosbic, of Northampton, has given an extraordinary account of his meeting with thc man who renounced his

In 1895, when Mr Crosbic was a boy at his father’s at Roorkee, in India, Bawa Must Ram Sad;hi pa«d them a visit, says Mr Crosbic: "There appeared thc 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, adorned with peacock’s feathers, and emblazoned in gold with the legend, ( Charles William de Resette, now Baba Must Ram.’ He had a staff in nis right hand, a fakir’s irons in his left, and as he advanced evc*y Hindu prostrated himself, and even thc Mohammedans bowed and salaamed in reverence.

* f When he was introduced to my mother as her long-lost nephew site went forward to embrace him, but he stepped away in horror, and pleaded, ‘Please do not defile 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 coalhouse* where he prepared his own food, (secretly left there), and he bathed in a well in our grounds.”