A 19-year-old girl chopped off her tongue inside a Shiva temple as an offering to the god at Jhar village in Bargarh. She did so to invoke the god’s blessings to marry the person she desired instead of the match fixed by her parents.

She was found by the temple priest lying in the temple with blood on her face.

“I was shocked to see her lying on the temple floor in the morning. She was bleeding from her face. She had chopped her tongue with a blade and offered it to the god,” priest of the temple Basudev Mohapatra told TOI.

Villagers rushed to the temple when the news spread and tried to take her to the hospital but she refused. “We tried to take her to the nearby hospital but she refused to go anywhere,” villager Narayan Meher said.

The girl was not willing to marry the match fixed by her parents because he was much older than her. She was interested to marry a younger boy.

Source: The Times of India, image from Flickr