The Bone Factory: India's Underground Trade in Human Remains

Manoj Pal: Dom and Cadaver Deflesher

It is pitch black and raining when I first meet Manoj Pal: a man who makes his living defleshing rotting cadavers. I am a hundred kilometers outside of Calcutta in a small village called Purbasthali where police confiscated more than 100 bright white human skeletons. The bones they found were on their way along a two hundred year old pipeline for human remains. The smugglers route begins on the banks of Indian rivers and ends in the sacred halls of medicine in Western countries. The skeletons Pal prepared could have fetch as much as $70,000 on the black market.

Manoj Pal is grunt labor for the industry. As part of the dom, or grave tending, caste his job is the most grim. Day and night he recovers bodies from a nearby cremation ghat. He binds the corpses in mosquito netting and soaks them in the river for a week. When the bodies are waterlogged and mostly consumed by fish and stray dogs he scrubs off the remaining flesh, dumps the bodies in a boiling solution of caustic chemicals and lets them dry in the sun.

Before he was arrested Pal's boss, Mukthi Biswas would sell bones to a medical supply company in Calcutta called Young Brothers for a few thousand rupees. From there the bones were wired together into free hanging skeletons and sold both domestically and abroad.

I spent three months piecing together the path that human bones take from Calcutta to the Western world for WIRED magazine. I found suppliers and buyers in well respected companies and universities across the United States. When I brought this to the attention of police in Calcutta they told me that they do not view grave robing as a serious crime. On the rare occasions that the police catch a grave robber, they mostly just let them off with a slap on the wrist.

The bone business dates back to colonial times when British doctors needed a steady supply of human skeletons to stock anatomy classes in England. Before they had set up a reliable system for preparing human skeletons on a mass scale there was an extreme shortage of bones available for study. It drove some British doctors to rob graves in their own neighborhoods. Some cemeteries were so notorious for skulduggery that there were frequent fist fights between grieving families and shovel-carrying medical students.

A bag of leg bones confiscated on the Bhutan Border

But with the advent of colonialism doctors began to look to Calcutta for fresh body supplies. By the mid 1800's Calcutta Medical College was sending hundred of bodies abroad every year. The trade continued to flourish until the 1980s. At its peak every aspiring doctor in the world bought a box of bones along with their first year's medical textbooks for about $300. Calcutta was exporting more than 60,000 skeletons a year making it a multi million dollar business.

But it couldn't last forever. In 1985 rumors began to surface that the bone dealers had run out of skeletons in Calcutta's graveyards and were killing children for their skeletons. Child skeletons are rarer than adult skeletons and fetched a higher price on the market. A man was arrested for exporting more than 1,500 child skeletons. A member of the legislature accused him of murder and put the nail in the coffin for the legal industry. By 1986 exports had all but stopped. The 13 original bone exporters all seemingly shut their doors. Medical schools in the West began relying on model skeletons for their anatomy instruction needs.

What no one knew was that at least one company was still exporting human bones. They had rekindled factories across West Bengal and had clients all over the world.

The most active bone exporter is Young Brothers. It's a medical supply company that sits between one of Calcutta's most active morgues and its largest cemetery. In 2001 neighbors complained that the warehouse stank like the dead. Some people reported seeing bones drying on the roof. When the health department chief Javed Ahmed Khan heard the reports he raided the facility and found bones boiling away in cauldrons and export invoices for orders all over the world. It was proof that the business was violating the export ban. But when Khan took the case to the police the owner of Young Brothers, Vinesh Aron, only spent one night in jail. The case was thrown own over a jurisdictional dispute and the business given a subtle nod that it could continue.

Since then Young Brothers has been more discreet about its business affairs, but it hasn't exactly shuttered his doors. In October I met Aron's in law in yet another medical supply company in Chennai. He told me that Vinesh Aron is the only man in the family with "guts". To prove it he pulled a fetal skull off the shelf and offered to sell it to me for $400.

In the meanwhile bones are still being smuggled though illegal channels in Singapore and Paris. I found a reseller in Canada who says that he still sells Indian bones across North America.

For more about the global trade in human bones check out this month's issue of WIRED magazine in a story called "Inside India's Underground Trade in Human Remains". I have also produced a shorter radio segment for NPR titled "Into the Heart of India's Underground Bone Trade".

For more photos of the bone cache check out these two galleries: mine and NPR's

National Geographic: Inside the Body Trade

National Geographic Explorer just aired an hour long documentary on the global market for human body parts. In the program they interviewed a Chinese doctor who helped remove organs from executed prisoners and transplanted them into foreign medical tourists. It also documented the painful lives of people awaiting organ transplant in the United States and flew out to Chennai to interview the donors and brokers who have made this coastal metropolis the worlds most famous organ farm. I worked with the documentary team for a month and helped coordinate the India piece of the puzzle. My job was to locate a donor and a broker who could give a personal look at the kidney trade. Much of the research I did was based on the WIRED News series that released in May. Here's a clip from the documentary.



What isn't mentioned in this clip, but is talked about in the larger documentary is that Mallika isn't only the victim of a predatory broker and corrupt medical institution. Her son is a victim as well. A year after her surgery her son Kannan came down with a bad case of jaundice that destroyed his kidneys. Unable to giver her remaining kidney, now she has to watch her son suffer and possibly die because he has no way of getting a donor organ.

The program aired on November 11th and 15th at 8:00 PM. But I'm sure you will be able to catch a rerun some time.

And you didn't catch it: The "National Geographic Safe House" in Chennai was my apartment.

Did a Comet Cause the Great Flood?

In January I flew back to the United States to interview a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (where they designed the nuclear bomb) who says that he has found evidence that 5000 years ago most of humanity was almost wiped out when a comet smashed into earth and caused a global cataclysm. Years of painstaking research have led Bruce Masse has compiled a list of creation myths around the world that mention floods and fire that he says actually record a historic event. According to Masse the Biblical tale of a great flood that nearly wiped out humanity is actually the same event as a South America myth that mentions fire falling from the sky and nearly ending life on that continent. He has tracked similar myths in India, China, Africa, Europe and Austrilia. But what sets Masse apart from just some another guy with an interesting tale to tell is that he has involved the broader scientific community to corroborate his claims. Now members of a team on three continents have gone through geologic data and core samples from the bottom of the ocean to locate a crater off the coast of Madigasgar that just might be ground zero for the beginning of this age of civilization. Everything before that, argues Masse, is just ash.

My story appears in this month's issue of Discover Magazine. Excerpt below:

The serpent’s tails coil together menacingly. A horn juts sharply from its head. The creature looks as if it might be swimming through a sea of stars. Or is it making its way up a sheer basalt cliff? For Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, there is no confusion as he looks at this ancient petroglyph, scratched into a rock by a Native American shaman. “You can’t tell me that isn’t a comet,” he says.

In Masse’s interpretation, the petroglyph commemorates a comet that streaked across the sky just a few years before Europeans came to this area of New Mexico. But that event is a minor blip compared to what he is really after. Masse believes that he has uncovered evidence that a gigantic comet crashed into the Indian Ocean several thousand years ago and nearly wiped out all life on the planet. What’s more, he thinks that clues about the catastrophe are hiding in plain sight, embedded in the creation stories of cultural groups around the world. His hypothesis depends on a major reinterpretation of many different mythologies and raises questions about how frequently major asteroid impacts occur. What scientists know about such collisions is based mainly on a limited survey of craters around the world and on the moon. Only 185 craters on Earth have been identified, and almost all are on dry land, leaving largely unexamined the 70 percent of the planet covered by water. Even among those on dry land, many of the craters have been recognized only recently. It is possible that Earth has been a target of more meteors and comets than scientists have suspected. . .

Continue reading on Discover's website here.

Can a tattoo stop a bullet?

Today NPR is running a story a trip I took to Thailand last week where I searched out several famous tattoo artists who have mastered the art of Sak-Yant. The tattoos they put on people's back are said to be able to stop bullets. At the end of one interview with Ajarn Sua blessed me. Then he took out a standard issue box cutter and started slashing away at my arm saying that his blessing had protected me from harm. When I left there were lots of cat-like scratches on my arm, but no blood.

Click here to listen to the NPR story

Click here for more photos

For centuries Thai soldiers have covered their bodies in protective tattoos called Sak Yant. Today, the ancient ritual is booming and thousands of people, in Thailand and beyond, are flocking to master artists to have the powerful designs inked on their bodies.

The Wat Bang Pra Buddhist temple, about 30 miles west of Bangkok, is one of the most highly esteemed locations for Sak Yant. Dozens of monks and master artists, who have spend years perfecting the art, can be found there.

One afternoon, a group of men – many already covered head to toe with tattoos — discuss, in the courtyard, how best to use the canvas of their skin. The dirty, dilapidated campus, covered with cobwebs, may not immediately invoke an aura of prestige, but these Sak Yant devotees are less interested in the buildings than the designs that will soon cover their bodies. Many have traveled from far reaches of Thailand. A tattoo from this temple, they say, can protect them from danger or even death.

Chakkrapad Romkaew, one of the devotees, says that his first tattoo altered his outlook on the world, made him braver and encouraged him to become a soldier. His back is covered in elaborate geometric patterns and Buddhist prayers. In a week he's being sent to the south of Thailand as part of an anti-terrorist squad. He wants to get another tattoo so, he says, he will be more fully protected before the bullets begin to fly.

"There are so many dangers waiting down there," he says. "Before I got a tattoo, I never wanted to be a soldier. But when they got into my skin, my desire to be a soldier got stronger."

The Process

Master artist Ajarn Sua prepares to place a tattoo on the young soldier by sharpening a two-foot-long needle. Often, the tattoo is simply a series of dots created when the needle passes through the skin. After the pattern has been drawn, the monks rub ink into the wound and say a prayer to empower the charm hidden inside the tattoo.

There are hundreds of traditional designs, many of which revolve around animal figures. One of the most powerful, according to the tradition, is a tiger that spans the whole of a person's lower back. An unprepared person can suddenly find that their whole life is turned around after being inked, a monk named Suntotn Prapagaroe explains.

"If a person has a tiger spirit, he will act like a tiger. He cannot control himself, the spirit controls him," Prapagaroe says. "He will spread his hand like this, and roar."

Although the tattoos may ultimately protect believers from suffering, pain is an inherent part of the process.

"It's like being jabbed by a needle a thousand times," says Paul Davies, a British Internet entrepreneur who also has come to the Wat Bang Pra temple for a tattoo.

Modern Technologies

Not all Sak Yant masters rely on the traditional needle methods. The master Ajarn Sua, who has a studio just north of Bangkok, says that a number of people coming to him for tattoos have urged him to adopt the electric tattoo needle.

Modernization does not necessarily mean canceling out tradition, however. After inking one man's back, Sua places his hand over the man's face and forces his head backwards. He draws a ritual knife across his neck and then stabs him lightly in the back.

"No person with this tattoo will ever be hurt by bullets or knives," he says.

The Parlor to the Stars

Although Sak Yant has existed for thousands of years, it began to expand in new directions several years ago due to one extremely famous devotee: Angelina Jolie. In 2004, the actress flew to Bangkok to meet with venerated tattoo master Ajarn Noo Kanphai, who placed a large tiger on her lower back — and a string of Thai script on her left shoulder.

Ajarn Noo's studio — known as the parlor to the stars — contrasts sharply with the Wat Bang Pra temple. Simple worn walls are replaced with photos of high rolling Thai celebrities and American CEOs. One recent afternoon, two well-known Thai comedians and an actor from the Cannes film hit Om Bhat waited for designs.

Tattoos, Kanphai says, can give a person courage to face the difficulties of their life. They can multiply wealth and protect from harm. "Many people have come to me with drug problems, but after I give them a tattoo, the problems go away," he says. A tattoo can really change your life."

REQUEST: Need Matrimonial Detective Stories

I'm working on a story about arranged marriages in India and need stories from people who have hired a private detective to do a background check on a prospective spouse. There are lots of stories of people who fake their backgrounds on websites like Bharatmatrimony.com and Shaadi.com to either get dates, marry a second spouse or other sorts of shenanigans. I need to speak with anyone who has hired a detective (whether or not the prospective spouse was in the end ok or not). The story will appear on the radio and in print. I can change names if people want their identities protected. You can contact me via e-mail at sgcarney@gmail.com or via phone at +91-9380185773

So please, forward this on to whomever you know.