Swami Shraddhanand’s Dancing on the Grave review: Engaging crime docuseries that will run a shiver down your spine

Language: English and Hindi

Director Patrick Graham’s Dancing on the Grave explores how a saffron clad, Swami Shraddhananda, the pathological liar enters a rich household of a diplomat only to steal them. Dancing on the Grave follows the story of the ‘Richmond Road case’ in Bengaluru from the early 1990s. Shakereh Khaleeli was found dead in her own courtyard. Dancing on the Grave is a compelling watch and definitely one of a kind docuseries which is tight and crisp. It’s a story about a godman who buried his wife alive.

Shakereh was married to a renowned diplomat and they were parents to four beautiful girls. She later separated from her husband and within six months of her divorce she married Swami Shraddhanand (Murali Manohar Mishra). Swami Shraddhanand belonged to a different strata of society and was basically living through Shakereh’s ancestral wealth. After marrying Shakereh, Shraddhanand transferred the entire property to his name and started selling it off in bits and pieces. He started living a life which he would have never thought of had he not married Shakereh. This decision of Shakereh marrying Shraddhanand estranged her from her family seemingly because of the conception that she had married ‘below her status’.

Shakereh had inherited a lot of property from her mother Gauhar Namazie. She was buried alive after Shraddhanand laced her morning tea with sedatives. Shraddhanand was an errands-running boy with the erstwhile family of Begum of Rampur, UP, who through his clever maneuverings and his ways of impressing people with his soft mannerisms, had risen to the rank of an accountant of the former royal household. He was handling their tax and property matters. Shakereh, who was earlier married to her cousin, a well-known IFS officer and she generally accompanied her husband to all his postings.

It was when Shakereh’s husband, Akbar Khaleeli was transferred to Iran as a diplomat, she decided to stay back with her four daughters’ in her Bengaluru home. She met Shraddhanand during a family visit to the Begum of Rampur in Delhi in 1982. Shraddhanand, who is said to have a degree in law, by then, had developed some knowledge in property and tax matters of the former royal estates. And his entrance into Shakereh’s life by pretending to love her and care for her is when the blunder started. Shakereh was vulnerable and that is when Shraddhanand tried to manipulate and trap her. And that was the beginning of the end of Shakereh’s beautiful family life.

The story of Amazon Prime’s Dancing on the Grave will get into your head and make you think over it again and again. What if Shakereh would have gone with her diplomat husband to Iran, what if she wouldn’t have met Shraddhanand and then married him?

Rating: 3.5 (out of 5 stars)

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