Swami Chandraputra

"Swami Chandraputra" is the alias used by Randolph Carter after his mind is trapped in an alien body. (: "Through the Gates of the Silver Key") He appears in H. P. Lovecraft's stories "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" and "Out of the Aeons".
== 'Through the Gates of the Silver Key' ==
In "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", co-written with E. Hoffmann Price, Chandraputra takes part in the settlement of Carter's estate at the New Orleans home of Etienne-Laurent de Marigny, with whom he has corresponded. The swami claims to be "an adept from Benares with important information to give" about Carter's disappearance. (Benares, now known as Varanasi, is considered the holiest city in Hinduism.)Wikipedia, "Varanasi".
Chandraputra's peculiar appearance is described--he isnon-committal in age—lean, and with a dark, bearded, singularly immobile face of very regular contour, bound with the turban of a high-caste Brahmin and having night-black, burning, almost irisless eyes which seemed to gaze out from a vast distance behind the features.,,, In general attire he was the normal European civilian, but his loose clothes sat peculiarly badly on him, while his bushy black beard, Eastern turban, and large white mittens gave him an air of exotic eccentricity.He later reveals that this face is a mask; what lies behind it is shocking enough to kill Carter's cousin Ernest Aspinwall when he catches a glimpse of it.
Chandraputra speaks in a "queerly alien voice":His speech had an oddly forced, hollow, metallic quality, as if the use of English taxed his vocal apparatus; yet his language was as easy, correct, and idiomatic as any native Anglo-Saxon’s. At the meeting at de Marigny's house, he recounts what happened to Carter--revealing at the end that he and Carter are one and the same. In his travels with the Silver Key through the Ultimate Gate, Carter learned that he had and will exist in a multiplicity of forms throughout time and space. He becomes one of these forms, the wizard Zkauba on the distant planet Yaddith, thousands of years in the past. In this "clawed, tapir-snouted" form he is "rugose, partly squamous, and curiously articulated in a fashion mainly insect-like yet not without a caricaturish resemblance to the human outline." After struggling for control of this body with the "Zkauba-facet", Carter uses one of Yaddith's light-envelopes to return to Earth--traveling through time as well as space, aiming to arrive as close to the time that he departed from in 1928.
As it happens, he returns to Arkham in October 1930. Using the disguise that he had prepared (and gold brought with him from Yaddith), he adopts the Chandraputra identity and moves to Chambers Street in Boston's West End, where he works to decipher a parchment that will allow him to return to human form. The Zkauba persona is kept repressed, first through a drug brought from Yaddith, and when that runs out, through force of Carter's personality. On the rare occasions when Zkauba takes control, he is "generally too dazed to undo any of Carter’s work", and is only able to "frighten a few people and create certain nightmare rumours among the Poles and Lithuanians of Boston’s West End."
After his true identity is acknowledged and his alien face revealed to Aspinwall, Chandraputra/Carter/Zkauba escapes by means of de Marigny's clock. As of 1933, none of these identities had reappeared in public.
== 'Out of the Aeons' ==
Chandraputra makes a cameo appearance in "Out of the Aeons", ghostwritten for Hazel Heald, as one of the visitors to the Eriadnus mummy at the Cabot Museum. The narrator Richard Johnson writes:I recall one very strange character who appeared during November—a dark, turbaned, and bushily bearded man with a laboured, unnatural voice, curiously expressionless face, clumsy hands covered with absurd white mittens, who gave a squalid West End address and called himself “Swami Chandraputra”. This fellow was unbelievably erudite in occult lore and seemed profoundly and solemnly moved by the resemblance of the hieroglyphs on the scroll to certain signs and symbols of a forgotten elder world about which he professed vast intuitive knowledge.
==References==
Category:Extraterrestrial Characters
Category:Alter-Egos/Characters Incorporated From the Real World
Category:Characters Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works