“I alone knew what I had suffered. I alone knew what it felt like to be alive, but dead.”
-Phoolan Devi
Phoolan Devi, India’s ‘Bandit Queen’ came to rise in 1981, when she murdered twenty people who tormented her when she was younger. The heroic Phoolan Devi’s journey began on August 10, 1963, in a small village near the Yamuna riverbank in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Phoolan had to face the consequences of being a poor, lower-caste, Indian girl. She was married off at the tender age of eleven, to Puttilal Mallah, who was already in his thirties. She was verbally and sexually abused, but with great difficulty, returned to her parent's home. A wife leaving, or being abandoned by her husband was considered taboo, and Phoolan was marked as a ‘disgrace’ by her family. Some people claim that Phoolan was kidnapped into a gang of bandits, while others felt that she fled to escape her cruel life. According to her autobiography, she stated “Kismet ko yehi manzoor tha (It was fate)”, which brought her to a gang of bandits.
Being the only woman in the gang, she was sexually assaulted by many dacoits, as well as the gang leader, Babu Gujjar. One night, a gang member, Vikram Mallah shot Babu Gujjar in the head and took Phoolan as his lover. On Phoolan’s order, he forbade anyone else from touching her. However, a few months later, Vikram Mallah was shot in an encounter.
With the help of her village friend Man Singh, they formed a new gang and carried out a series of vicious raids and robberies. She marched to Behmai Village in February 1981 along with her gang and dragged her oppressors, and ordered for them to be killed. The Behmai massacre created havoc within the nation. Police sent out troops for her arrest, and for two years, Phoolan was on the run. Phoolan finally decided to surrender to The Indira Gandhi government, but only on the conditions that she had an assurance that there would be no imposition of the death penalty on any member who surrenders and that the prison term for the other members of the gang should not exceed eight years. She also demanded that a plot of land must be given in her name and for her family to be present to observe her surrender ceremony.
Phoolan Devi was charged with almost forty-eight crimes, including dacoity, robbery, and murder. Her trial was delayed for around eleven years and she was ultimately released on parole in 1994a. Phoolan later went on to contest elections from the Mirzapur constituency in Uttar Pradesh. She stood for the elections as a member of the Samajwadi Party, whose government had withdrawn all cases against her, and released her from prison. On 25th July 2001, Phoolan Devi was attacked by three masked gunmen. She was hit on her face, chest, and arm several times and was declared dead by the time she was brought to the Ram Manohar Lohia hospital in New Delhi. The chief suspect later surrendered to the police claiming he had attacked her to avenge the men she had brutally murdered during the Behmai attack. Purnima Tripathi, a notable journalist from New Delhi said “In India, even today, numerous people define femininity as total submission”. Maybe Phoolan Devi did not change the morals and ethics of womanhood in India, but she did cause a stir in the minds of men, by retaliating to the atrocities that she went through.
