A 27-year-old man belonging to a traditional village circus troupe died allegedly due to suffocation after a stunt he had performed many times, where he would emerge after being buried alive in a sack for three days, went wrong in Haryana's Nuh district, police said on Wednesday.
Deepak, a resident of Gaunchi village in Faridabad, was unresponsive when his associates tried to pull him out of the pit where he had been lowered and covered with a mound of soil under a "live Samadhi" act, a performance popular in rural areas here.
During the investigation, it was revealed that Deepak entered the pit on July 23 and died of suffocation inside it. He was rushed to the hospital, where doctors declared him dead, a senior police officer said, adding that further investigation is underway into the circumstances of his death.
According to the police, Deepak's family are traditional performers who move from one village to another, and he too had been participating for around 15 years. They had camped on a vacant plot in Khori village in the Tauru area of Nuh district.
Before the burial act, Deepak performed a series of cycling stunts to entertain the crowd.
His finale was a "live Samadhi" where Deepak was placed into a sack, lowered into a specially dug pit and covered with mounds of soil.
According to local sources, such performances were commonplace, but the duration would vary -- from a few hours to a day or two.
His brother had, however, stopped the risky performance.
There has been plenty of speculation on how the performer survived, with some claiming airways and oxygen were secretly provided to the individual.
"Preliminary investigations suggest suffocation under the soil as the likely cause, but the final picture will only become clear after the post-mortem report is received", Inspector Rajesh Kumar, SHO of Tauru Sadar Police Station, said.
Nuh District Commissioner Akhil Pilani said that such stunts are illegal and the administration would examine how such a life-threatening event was organised without permission.
(With inputs from PTI)