India's Most Dangerous Serial Killer: Shankariya Kanpatimar | True Crime Account by Rakesh Goswami | Indian Crime History - Softcover

Goswami, Rakesh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143477099 ISBN 13: 9780143477099

Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2026

Synopsis

Shankaria Kanpatimar was hanged in the Jaipur Central Jail on 15 May 1979. In eighteen months, he murdered nearly 70 people across Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana- making him India’s first recorded serial killer. He committed crimes in the most “brutal and dastardly fashion” , while the motive of killings being theft. He entered his victim’s house naked, killed with whatever object lay at hand, eat, smoked bidis, bathed and left only with the cash he found. In one of the murders, he managed to find only two rupees in the house. He came to be known as Kanpatimar for the striking similarity of his murders where all his victims were hit on their temples or kanpati in Hindi. Deeply researched and drawn from police files, FIRs, contemporary reportage and interviews, this book reconstructs both the killings and the world that enabled them. Told in the most truthful and unsparing voice of Rakesh Goswami, Sharkaria’s story of how a petty thief turned into a dangerous serial killer, reveals a deeper moral rot.

About this title

About the Author

Rakesh Goswami is a professor of journalism and course director of English Journalism programme at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi. He has earlier been the regional director of IIMC’s Northern Regional Centre at Jammu. He has been a journalist for 20 years, working across the electronic and print media before taking the plunge into academics. He has worked with Hindustan Times, Lucknow; Channel 7 (later rechristened as IBN7 and now called Network18India) and Times Now as the Rajasthan bureau chief in Jaipur, and Chief of Bureau of Hindustan Times in Rajasthan. He has co-written ‘Operation Bazooka: The true story behind the hunt for a dreaded UP gangster’ with IPS Rajesh Pandey.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Random House India
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0143477099
• ISBN 13: 9780143477099
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256