Trivikrama Mahadeva (Kannada: ತ್ರಿವಿಕ್ರಮ ಮಹಾದೇವ) (29 September 1962 – 14 July 2022)[1] is the name of an undertaker in the city of Bangalore, India who ferries unclaimed bodies and organizes their funeral.
Once in Bangalore, the pair spent some days outside of Victoria Hospital, not knowing the procedure to get admitted until they elicited the help of a ward orderly by giving him the rest of the jewelry.
Mahadeva fondly started to call the man Thatha (which means grandpa in Kannada), a relationship which led him to his present career.
He had a horse-driven cart that helped him in ferrying bodies, and he operated in relative obscurity until the Kannada magazine Sudha discovered him and published a story about his life.
In 1982, while burying the remains of people who had died when the Gangaram's building crashed in Bangalore, he slipped and fell into the grave and was covered by a heap of bodies.
[4] In 1991, he was selected to ferry the body of Sivarasan, one of the people responsible for planning the assassination of the former Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi.
[4] Mahadeva lived in poverty and was even forced to sell his horse and cart as well as his Chief Minister's gold medal to raise money to pay off some debts.