''PHOOLAN DEVI: A VILLAINIOUS HEROINE''

Phoolan Devi was not just a bandit queen. She was also a righteous Daku, villainous heroine(villanious, because of the mode she resorted to) and much more. Her story will prove that. She overturned her powerlessness with brute of power. She withstood horrendously oppressive circumstances, was the victim of systemic structural injustice and she not only survived to tell the tale, but she came out on top.  She was born on August 10, 1963 in the Mallah community of boats(wo)men in village Ghura Ka Purwa, Jalaun District, which lies in the stretch of Bundelkhand towards Kanpur.(In 2006, the Ministry of Panchayati Raj named Jalaun as one of the most 250 backward districts of India).They were treated as inferior and slaves, because of their caste.(In various parts of the country, the Mallah community is included either under the OBC or the SC category. She lost her innocence at a very young age in the face of village iniquities. Narratives that celebrate her extraordinary courage and resilience often trace the first outward manifestation of her spirit to an incident when she was around 11 years of age. While the details are unclear — some reports say she was fighting for a piece of land unfairly usurped by her cousin, some others say it was to protest this cousin’s decision to chop off a Neem tree that stood on their land — she is said to have staged a dharna against what she believed was wrong, against members of her own family.  On the following accounts, she gained the reputation of a trouble-maker, and that the family sought to get rid of her. They(especially her mother and Phoolan's cousin) got 11-year-old Phoolan married to a man who was at least 23, though most accounts state he was 30. Unhappy in her marriage, she returned to what was once home.

Soon, after her marriage, her husband raped her(rape, because she was only 11 then, and under 18 years of age) and repeatedly harassed her. She went to her Maayka, and soon, her family started observing the rebellion streak in her. Once, she was working as a labour in the construction of a house. The contractor refused to pay the wage to her, subsequently in the night, she demolished the structure. At he age of 15, she was gangraped by a group of henchmen. Later, she was abducted by a gang with the insistence of a dacait group. While it is unclear whether she was abducted by a gang that she was forced to be a part of or whether she walked into one of her own accord, it is widely believed that the incident compelled her to resort to violence and become a dacait.  When Vikram Mallah – the man who assumed reins of leadership after murdering the previous leader Babu Gujjar supposedly because he physically harassed Phoolan – was murdered by a rival, upper-caste faction of Thakurs, Phoolan was abducted and locked up. In Behmai, she was gangraped for close to three weeks. It is important to note here that Phoolan herself never spoke of the incident. When Phoolan did eventually escape, she formed and headed her own gang only to return to Behmai on 14 February, 1981. In what is sometimes referred to as the Behmai massacre, she rounded up 22 Rajput men of the village, and had them all killed. She became an overnight sensation and talk of the village and the region. It would not be wrong to suggest that Behmai massacre was a turning point in her life. Apparently this is the day she started being referred to as Phoolan Devi, the honorific Devi suggesting the respect, awe and fear she commanded from this time onwards. While this act made Phoolan Devi a target of upper caste anger –  (Her assassination in 2001 was a result of that), it was also perceived to be an act of retribution and one that sought to redress not just the wrongs Phoolan has to endure, but those many injustices that lower castes, and lower-caste women in particular had to face on a daily basis. The next two years, Phoolan spent on the run from the police. Legend also has it, that this time she looted the rich and redistributed the plunder among the poor, but apparently, this is a version that has never received any confirmation.

Phoolan was devastated after running from one place to another, from police and the Thakurs. She  then decided to surrender to the police but on certain conditions. She was not to be awarded a death penalty. In addition her family was to be given a piece of land. She had suspicion on UP police that she would be killed by them, so she decided to surrender in front of MP government, instead of her state. Her appearance at the surrender ceremony in a red bandana made headlines around the world and gave her a desi Che Guavra sort of celebrity. She surrendered infront of Arjun Singh,  and thousands had flocked the ground just to catch a glimpse of her. She then spent 11 years in jail, infact her jail wardens in Gwalior began charging Rs. 10 each from curious gawkers for a viewing. At the end of her sentence, she was cleared of all 48 charges she was put behind bars for. After two more years – in the duration of which Shekhar Kapur’s film on Phoolan’s life called The Bandit Queen was released to widespread acclaim and without her consent, and against which Phoolan sought a restraining order – the Samajwadi Party gave her a ticket to contest from Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh's eastern hamlet, which had garnered the reputation for being a battleground for dacaits entering politics. She won the elections to enter the Lok Sabha. She won her second term in 1999. In Parliament, she was a natural for the journalists, who flocked to her like bees to honey. She was assassinated as a sitting MP at her residence in Ashoka Road in Delhi in 2001 – a crime for which Sher Singh Rana was convicted in 2014. His motive was to avenge the massacre at Behmai. It would not be wrong to suggest that gunfire of Behmai hit her back and her life was ended by a hail of bullets in the heart of country's most protected enclave i.e. Lutyen's Delhi. In addition to her work as a lawmaker, Phoolan had also set up the Eklavya Sena, which was to help teach self-defence to members from lower caste communities. No outlaw could capture imagination of India like her. There was something special about her. 

Presley:"As a Parliamentarian, she fought for women’s rights, an end to child marriage, and the rights of India’s poor. In a Che Guevara-type revision of history, though, Devi is remembered as a romantic Robin Hood figure, robbing the rich to help the poor, and not as a politician working to enact structural change in India’s social hierarchies.”
Yes, we need to recognize her spirit and commemorate it. While the intention of this piece is not to hold up individual exceptionalist acts as the solution to trump structures that marginalize and tyrannize, Phoolan Devi is an example that needs to be told and retold because the woman’s heroism defies most narrative arcs that our caste-patriarchy needs most to survive.  As she had told her biographers:

“Sing of my deeds
Tell of my combats
How I fought the treacherous demons
Forgive my failings
And bestow on me peace.”