NEW DELHI: A college professor in southern India refused to be parted from his dead mother and kept her embalmed body in his house for 21 years until he himself died at the weekend, a report said on Wednesday.

Syed Abdul Gafoor, a professor of English literature in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, kept the body of his mother Rahmat Bi — who died in 1984 — at his ancestral home in Siddavata, the Pioneer newspaper said.

“Everybody knew that he had kept the embalmed body of his mother at home. There were protests and complaints, but he remained adamant,” M. Prabhakar Reddy, a government official in Siddavata, was quoted as saying.

He said another official, Dinesh Kumar, had visited Gafoor in 1992 and tried to convince him to bury the body, but failed.

“This is my house and nobody has any right to intervene,” the professor was quoted as telling Kumar.

Gafoor was devoted to his mother, with whom he lived while working as a professor in the 1980s in neighbouring Tamil Nadu state, the paper said.

When she died there, he brought her body to Siddavata where he kept it embalmed in a glass showcase in his home.

Though it evoked strong reactions from his family members and neighbours, Gafoor stuck to his decision.

“He was so eccentric that he did not allow anybody else to even look at the glass casket in which the body was kept,” said Syed Noor, Gafoor’s nephew.

“In the large ancestral home he lived in one room and the body was kept in another,” he said.

It was only when Gafoor passed away at the weekend that his relatives performed the last rites for both mother and son. They were buried next to each other in the graveyard at a local mosque.

“We fulfilled the last wish of our uncle. He had told us that his mother’s body should be buried only after his death,” said Noor.—AFP