“There are two chapters to Auto Shankar’s life,” says senior journalist A Kamaraj, who as a young reporter spent months interacting with the notorious criminal hearing his story, “He was one man before he became an auto-driver, and an entirely different person after he became an auto-driver. That is when he became a true criminal.” But if there was to be a third chapter in his life, it would be his final days at the Salem central prison.
There are several versions of what kind of a person he really was, and whether he was a victim of his times or the villain of his era. His final days were also marred by the duplicity which defined his life, he confessed to his crimes and yet did not want to pay the price for it. “It seems that even as the noose was tightened around his neck at the Salem prison, he told officers that someone will call and stop his execution,” says journalist Babu Jayakumar. On April 27, 1995, he was hanged to death at the prison in Salem.
Death Certificate of Auto Shankar
Prior to his death, while languishing in jail and waiting for the black warrant, Shankar took a trip down memory lane narrating his experiences to the public through the pages of a Tamil magazine. Just as word got around that Shankar was to spill the beans, a case was filed by police officials to restrain him. Several police officers and influential politicians were said to have been in cahoots with his criminal enterprise. The court ruled against the plea and the series did see the light of day, and created a sensation in those days. The anecdotes were thrilling and had an element of high drama.
His narration of his tragic childhood - of a father who elopes with a woman with all the wealth that the family had despite having two wives, his mother was the second wife, and then his mother eloping with a man to whom she worked for - in a poignant fashion was perhaps aimed at seeking some sympathy, but it did convey the social context of his crimes.
Born in Vellore as Gowri Shankar, he even picked up habits like smoking and doing drugs even in school. After he came to Chennai he had to first beat up a grocery shop owner who not only refused to give him a kilo of rice on credit to feed the hungry family but also engaged a policeman to beat him up. After the humiliation at the hands of the policeman, he went back to the shop, as he narrated, and bashed up the grocer besides ransacking the shop. Since the frightened shop owner did not go the police again, he realized his potential and in retrospect he saw that as the moment that made ‘Auto Shankar’, the criminal.
Gist of Auto Shankar case as recorded in police archives
After his incarceration, Shankar also converted to Christianity and started reading the Bible. He claimed that reading passages from the Bible gave him peace of mind. He even quoted Biblical verses in his autobiography and cited as a favourite passage the one in which Jesus Christ says, ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her’. An angry mob had produced before Jesus a woman caught red handed committing adultery. They sought his verdict according the laws of Moses to stone her to death. It was then Jesus who said those words to the crowd, which later silently dispersed, sparing the woman.
But Auto Shankar was not spared.
This article was produced by TNM Marquee in association with ZEE5.