Phulan Devi

Phulan Devi was born in a small village in Jalaun County (District) of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh ^[3] . She was the fourth child in a family belonging to the Mallah caste (boatmen) ^{[4] [5]} .

Father Phulan owned a 1- acre (0.4 hectare) plot of land on which the Nim tree grew, and hoped that thanks to this he could give his daughter in marriage, having accumulated money to pay the dowry ^[6] . When Phulan was eleven years old, her grandparents died, Uncle Bihari became the head of the family. He, by deception, took possession of the inheritance, leaving the girl's family in poverty. After the death of his uncle, his son Mayadin declared himself the head of the family ^[7] . Taking advantage of the absence of Father Phulan, he chopped down a tree Nim and sold it, leaving the money to himself ^[8] . Although her father decided only on a mild protest, Phulan was not going to retreat in front of her cousin. She taunted him and publicly called him a thief. ^[6] Together with her older sister, she staged a sit-in. Even after Phulan was hit with a brick, she did not give up. In an attempt to get rid of her, relatives agreed to marry an eleven-year-old girl to a man named Lal Putti, who was over 30 and lived several hundred kilometers ^[1] . Phulan later claimed in his autobiography that he had a "very bad temper."

Husband Phulan mistreated his young wife and raped her. She ran home several times, but each time the girl was returned to her husband for severe punishment. In the end, Putti Lal drove out his wife and she returned to her father’s house ^[8] , becoming an outcast in her native village. Despite all this, Phulan still did not want to come to terms and continued to accuse Mayadin of theft. She even went to court, but lost the case. ^[8]

In 1979, Mayadin accused Phulan of theft and got her arrested by the police for three days. In prison, the girl was beaten and raped. ^[8] Having been released, she further avoided her native village, feeling pain from her helplessness.

In 1979, Phulan was abducted by a gang of Babu Gujar. There is a version that Mayadin paid the bandits for the abduction of his sister ^[7] . The girl liked the leader, but Vikram Mallah, the second man in the gang, who belonged to the same caste as Phulan, stood up for her. One night, when Babu was trying to rape a girl, Vikram killed him and took over the gang. Phulan fell in love with this man who defended her and she became the second wife of Vikram. The gang plundered the village where the first husband of Phulan lived. In front of the villagers, Putti Lala was dragged out of the house and beaten half to death, leaving him lying on the road almost dead, with a note as a warning for older people marrying young girls.

Phulan Devi became not just the wife of Vikram, but she herself began to participate in gang robberies in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh . Basically, the gang robbed the villagers from the upper castes, abducted rich landowners with the subsequent demand for ransom for their release, and also committed railroad robberies. After each crime, Phulan Devi visited the temple of the Hindu goddess warrior Durga and thanked her for her protection ^[5] . Between the crimes, gang members hid in the gorges of the Chambal River in the Dholpur district of neighboring Rajasthan .

Some time later, the brothers Sri Ram and Lala Ram, belonging to the highest caste of Thakur, returned to the gang. They were outraged by the assassination of a gang leader by a member of a lower caste ^[8] . Sri Ram began to harass Phulan, but Vikram forced him to apologize to the girl, which led to tensions between the new leader and the brothers. In response, during the robberies, Sri Ram began to beat and insult the Mallahs. This caused discontent among the Mallah bandits, many of whom left the gang. At the same time, Sri Ram attracted thakuras to the gang. Vikram proposed dividing the gang into two, but Sri Ram refused. Soon after, Sri Ram and other thakura gangs tried to kill Vikram and Phulan, who managed to escape. However, later Sri Rama got his way, killed Vikram, and Phulan kidnapped and locked him in the village of Behmai ^[5] .

In Behmai, Phulan was repeatedly beaten and raped. ^[8] Three weeks later, with the help of local residents from the lower castes, she managed to escape along with two other Mallahs who were in the Vikram gang. Phulan, together with Man Singh, an associate of Wickram, gathered a gang from the Mallahs and committed a series of brutal robberies in North and Central India, the victims of which were mainly representatives of the higher castes. Some say that Phulan only robbed people of higher castes and shared her prey with lower castes, but Indian authorities insist that this is a myth ^[1] .

Seventeen months after escaping from Behmay, Phulan returned to the village to take revenge. On February 14, 1981, she and the other bandits entered the village dressed as police officers. Local thakur at this time preparing for the wedding. The bandits demanded that the kidnappers of Phulan, first of all Sri Ram ^[9] , be extradited along with all the values ​​in the village. There is no detailed information about what exactly happened, but, as they say ^{[ who? ]} , Phulan was able to identify two men who had previously raped her. Unable to find all the kidnappers, she ordered her bandits to collect all the young thakurs and shoot them. Twenty-two men were killed, most of whom did not participate in her abduction or rape. Later, Phulan Devi claimed that she herself did not kill anyone - all the killings were committed by members of her gang ^[5] .

After the Behmai massacre, U.P. Singh, Chief Minister of the State of Uttar Pradesh, resigned. ^[10] The authorities organized several large-scale raids that did not produce any result. Phulan Devi herself became famous throughout India, having earned the nickname "Queen of the Bandits" in the Indian media ^[1] . The popularity of the bandit queen led to the fact that in the markets in the state of Uttar Pradesh they began to sell Phulan dolls dressed as the goddess Durga.

For two years, the police could not capture Phulan Devi. In the end, the government of Indira Gandhi decided to start negotiations. By this time, Phulan's health condition had deteriorated significantly, and most of her gang members were dead. In February 1983, she decided to surrender to the authorities. However, Phulan said she did not trust the police of Uttar Pradesh and was ready to surrender only to the police of Madhya Pradesh . She also insisted that she lay down her arms only in front of a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi and the Hindu goddess Durga ^[11] . She set other conditions for the authorities, in particular, to confirm the abolition of the death penalty and to sentence other gang members to no more than eight years in prison.

An unarmed police chief met Phulan and escorted to Bhind , where she laid her rifle in front of the images of Gandhi and the goddess Durga. In the city, she was met by the chief minister of the state of Madhya Pradesh, Arjun Singh, about 10,000 people and 300 police officers, to arrest Phulan and other gang members.

Phulan Devi was charged with 48 crimes, including 30 charges of banditry and kidnapping. Contrary to the promises of the authorities, the “Queen of Bandits” spent 11 years in prison. All this time the investigation went. During this period, she was operated on for ovarian cysts , receiving an unnecessary hysterectomy . As it was later reported, the doctor who performed the operation said that “there is nothing to produce new Phulan Devi” ^[12] . Only in 1994, the government of Uttar Pradesh, led by the socialist Malayam Singh Yadav, withdrew all charges against Phulan Devi. Wishambar Prasad Nishad, the leader of the Nishadha fishery community, played a large role in her release.

Upon her release, Phulan decided to go into politics, wanting to protect women and representatives of lower castes. In 1996, she was successfully elected to the lower house of the 11th Parliament of India from the Mirzapur constituency in Uttar Pradesh as a candidate for the regional Socialist Party of Uttar Pradesh Samajwadi. After the 1998 election , she lost her seat in parliament, but in 1999 returned to Lok Sabha and remained a deputy until her death.

On July 25, 2001, Phulan Devi was shot dead by three masked armed men near her bungalow in New Delhi . The killers were shot five times, three times in the head and twice in the body, after which they fled from the scene in a Maruti car ^[2] . Phulan was taken to the nearest hospital, where she died. The main accused of her murder was Sher Singh Run, nicknamed Pankaj, and later he surrendered to the police ^[13] . He claimed to have killed Phulan Devi in ​​order to avenge the massacre in Behmai ^[14] .

Police were accused of incompetence in the investigation of the murder. ^[15]

In 2014, Sher Singh Ran was sentenced to life imprisonment ^[16] .

In 1994, Shekhar Kapoor made the film “The Queen of Bandits” about the life of Phulan Devi, based on the 1993 book Mala Sen “The Indian Queen of Bandits: The True Story of Phulan Devi” ( India's Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi ) ^[17] . Phulan Devi was unhappy with the film, believing that he did not accurately convey her story, and fought for the ban on showing the painting in India. She even threatened to burn herself if the film was not withdrawn from rental. In the end, Phulan withdrew her objection after being paid £ 40,000. ^[17] The film brought her international recognition. Later, the Indian writer Arundati Roy , known for her left-wing views, in her article The Great Indian Rape Trick accused Kapoor of exploiting the image of Phulan Devi, as well as of distorting her life and its meaning ^[18] .

Although Phulan was illiterate, she, with the help of foreign authors Marie-Theres Kuni and Paul Rambali, released her autobiography entitled “ The Bandit Queen of India: An Indian Woman's Amazing Journey From Peasant to International Legend ) ^[19] .

• Virappan

Books about Phulan Devi

• Richard Shears, Isobelle Gidley. Devi: The Bandit Queen. - Allen & Unwin, 1984. - P. 258. - ISBN 978-0049200975 .
• Mala sen India's Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi. - Pandora / HarperCollins, 1991 .-- 254 p. - ISBN 978-0002720663 .
• Phoolan Devi, Marie-Thérèse Cuny, Paul Rambali. I, Phoolan Devi: The Autobiography of India's Bandit Queen. - Little, Brown And Company, 1996. - 472 p. - ISBN 978-0316879606 . .
• Roy Moxham. Outlaw: India's Bandit Queen and Me. - Random House UK, 2010 .-- 214 p. - ISBN 978-1-84604-182-2 .
• Phoolan Devi, Marie-Therese Cuny, Paul Rambali. The Bandit Queen of India: An Indian Woman's Amazing Journey from Peasant to International Legend. - Guilford, Connecticut: Lyons Press, 2006 .-- 512 p. - ISBN 978-1-59228-641-6 .
• N. Pugazhendhi. Phoolan Devi / Coimbatore in Tamil translated from Malayalam.
• John Arquilla Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits: How Masters of Irregular Warfare Have Shaped Our World. - Ivan R. Dee, 2011 .-- 336 p. - ISBN 978-1-56663-832-6 .

Other sources

• Karen Gabriel. Reading Rape: Sexual Difference, Representational Excess, and Narrative Containment // Narratives of Indian Cinema / ed. Manju Jain. - Delhi: Primus Books, 2009 .-- P. 145-166.
• Mary Anne Weaver. India's Bandit Queen. A saga of revenge — and the making of a legend of 'the real India' . The Atlantic (November 1996). Date of treatment January 26, 2018.
• Peacock, J. Sunita. Phoolan Devi: The Primordial Tradition of the Bandit Queen // Transnationalism and the Asian American Heroine: Essays on Literature, Film, Myth and Media / Lan Dong. - McFarland, 2010. - P. 187–195. - 239 p. - ISBN 978-0786446322 .

• A collection of links related to Phoolan Devi (the page is quite old, and many of the links are broken).
• Biography in short
• The phoolan devi murder
• Crime Library article on Phoolan Devi