On a chill February day in 1983, a 20-year-old young woman known as Phoolan Devi—literally, Flower Goddess—walked out of the forested ravines of the Chambal River valley and handed over her gun. She bowed to images of Gandhi and the goddess Durga and surrendered herself to the Chief Minister and Chief of Police of Madhya Pradesh state in central India. The cheering crowd of 8,000 people gathered that day—journalists; politicians; some 300 cops; and others from across the dry, impoverished center of the world’s largest democracy—knew Phoolan Devi as a hero, a bandit, a murderess, and a goddess long before they saw her in the flesh. Phoolan Devi, India’s celebrated Bandit Queen, was not a woman, but a legend.

Born to a low-caste household in 1963 in a village on the banks of the sacred Yamuna River in the vast north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Phoolan Devi was, by the time of her surrender, wanted on 22 counts of murder and another 26 counts of kidnapping and looting. At 31, after a decade in prison, she became the subject of a major Bollywood film, Bandit Queen, which she criticized and which, as Arundhati Roy pointed out in a two-part evisceration called The Great Indian Rape Trick, calcified a problematic version of her life (and its meaning) into accepted fact. Four years after that, she was elected to her first term in India’s parliament, the first low-caste woman to hold that distinction. In 2001, at the age of 37, while serving her second term, she was shot dead in front of her home in Delhi for still-unknown reasons.

Hers is not a life overburdened with hard facts. In making the fictionalized epic Bandit Queen, filmmaker Shekhar Kapur said, “I chose Truth, because Truth is pure.” In reality, the only nonfiction account of Phoolan Devi’s life is the book by Mala Sen on which the film is ostensibly based and which itself contains several divergent, and often contradictory, versions of Phoolan’s life. The Kapur film, rather than capturing the complex realities of Sen’s book, portrays Phoolan Devi as a noble victim. In an interview for Mary Anne Weaver’s excellent 1996 essay for The Atlantic, Phoolan Devi said the film showed her “as a sniveling woman, always in tears, who never took a conscious decision in her life.” She was a symbol of womanhood scorned and avenged, not a human being.

When the Iranian documentary filmmaker Hossein Fazeli first heard about Phoolan Devi five years ago, he was shocked to learn that no documentary had ever been made about her life. “I have a lot of respect for Kapur and I think he’s a very interesting filmmaker, but I think Bandit Queen is a bad film; it gets a lot wrong,” Fazeli told me recently. “At the time it was made, there were a lot of rumors and legends and not a lot of facts.” Not much has changed—if anything, Phoolan Devi’s legend has grown since her death—which is why Fazeli has already spent countless hours interviewing family members and prominent intellectuals across North India, a process he hopes to complete once he’s secured sufficient funding, in part through

The Movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtLX2Cz_1pA

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In conversation with Fazeli, noted Delhi-based journalist Purnima Tripathi says, “We put our goddesses in frames and install them somewhere. If those goddesses were to step out of those frames and speak out, we would stop worshipping them.” Phoolan Devi, after a short life of speaking out loudly, has been securely placed in her frame. “She was a fighter,” Tripathi says, “not a larger-than-life Bandit Queen, not an outstanding politician, but a woman who refused to go down because of adversity in her life.”

The window of opportunity to remember that woman, rather than the legend she became, gets narrower every day.

Bollywood became particularly enamored of the subject of highway bandits

It’s not hard to understand how Phoolan Devi became an icon; her story—as a woman, and especially as a poor, low-caste woman—is sensational and singular, but also tragically paradigmatic.

Phoolan Devi’s first rebellion comes at the age of ten when she confronts an uncle and cousin who, she learns, had stolen her father’s land by falsifying village land records. She publicly taunts and humiliates them; in return, she’s beaten unconscious with a brick. A year later, at the insistence of the same uncle, Phoolan Devi is married off to a 45-year-old widower in a distant village in exchange for a cow and bicycle. A few days later, she comes home. A year after that, she’s returned to her husband, stays a few months, then comes home again. For his 1981 essay “Phoolan Devi, Queen of Dacoits,” Khushwant Singh, another legend of Indian letters, spoke at some length with Phoolan Devi’s family and reports that, when Phoolan Devi comes home the second time “her mother describes her as being ‘filled up’—an Indian expression for a girl whose bosom and behind indicate she has had sex.” He continues, “A girl leaving her husband brought disgrace on the family. ‘I told her to drop dead,’ said her mother. ‘I told her to jump in a well or drown herself in the Jamuna.’” At the age of 12, Phoolan Devi was considered ruined.

She spends her early adolescence in the village grazing the family’s buffalo and takes up with the son of the village headman. She develops a reputation for promiscuity and is sent away to her sister’s home in a nearby village, where she and her distant (and married) cousin, Kailash, start an affair, a dalliance reportedly built on mutual flirtation and seduction. She runs off with him to be married but he returns to his first wife not long afterward. Phoolan Devi goes home. On Jan. 6, 1979, she was arrested for stealing from the home of the same uncle who had repeatedly wronged her, the only arrest in her brief, eventful life (much of Singh’s account of her early life is based on the deposition she dictates to the police at that time). In retribution, the cousin who had beaten her up years before burns her father’s crops. Released from prison two weeks later, she attacks the cousin with a rock.

Fed up, the uncle orchestrates a kidnapping by one of the many bands of armed robbers—known by outsiders as dacoits, or bandits, and amongst themselves as baagees, or rebels—that patrolled the Chambal Valley. In her interview with Fazeli, Phoolan Devi’s younger sister, Choti Devi (Little Goddess), recalls “my sister jumped from the roof to run away, but the bandits caught Shiv, my brother. Then she returned and said, ‘leave my brother, I will come with you.’”

https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2017/indias-bandit-queen/

What happens next forms the crux of the Phoolan Devi legend. On Aug. 13, 1980, Lal Ram and Shri Ram Singh murder Bikram, kidnap Phoolan Devi, and lock her away in a Thakur village called Behmai where they—and, presumably, many others—repeatedly gang rape and publicly humiliate her over the course of three weeks. She is, at this point, 17 years old. One night she manages to escape, joins a new gang, and convinces its leader to help her take revenge. On Feb. 14, 1981, she leads the gang into Behmai (or so the commonly accepted story goes; Phoolan herself contests this version of events) and demands that the villagers turn over the brothers. They claim never to have seen them. She has 30 men marched to an embankment and, when they still don’t cooperate, orders her men to shoot. Twenty-two of them die. She becomes the most wanted person in India, with a $10,000 price on her head. To this day, Fazeli says, villagers in Behmai are skeptical of anyone entering town with a camera, certain that he or she will be sympathetic to Phoolan Devi whom they still view (understandably) as a cold-blooded murderer.

Two years later, she surrenders to the police under carefully drawn conditions. She demands that her gang members get no more than eight-year sentences, that her family members who have been jailed because of her be released, and that her own cases be tried only in special courts in Madhya Pradesh to protect her from retribution from angry Thakurs, the caste that, in effect, ran Uttar Pradesh. She spends the next 11 years in jail.

By the time she dies in a pool of her own blood on a leafy street in New Delhi 18 years later, the legend of Phoolan Devi, the avenging goddess, has already taken form.

Enjoyable read

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She looks like an Apache warrior.