Phoolan Devi
Phoolan Devi | |
---|---|
Head and shoulder photograph of woman smiling past camera | |
Member of Parliament for Mirzapur | |
In office 1996–1998 | |
Preceded by | Virendra Singh |
Succeeded by | Virendra Singh |
In office 1999 – 25 July 2001 | |
Preceded by | Virendra Singh |
Succeeded by | Ram Rati Bind |
Personal details | |
Born | Phoolan Mallah 10 August 1963 Jalaun, Uttar Pradesh, India |
Died | 25 July 2001 New Delhi, India | (aged 37)
Manner of death | Assassination by shooting |
Political party | Samajwadi Party |
Spouses |
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Parents |
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Occupation | |
Phoolan Devi (10 August 1963 – 25 July 2001) popularly known as the Bandit Queen, was an Indian bandit and politician, who became a Member of Parliament before being assassinated. She was a Mallah woman who grew up in poverty in a village in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where her family was on the losing side of a land dispute which caused them many problems. After being sexually abused repeatedly and married off at the age of eleven, she joined a dacoit group, becoming its leader. Her gang robbed higher caste villages and held up trains and vehicles. She became a heroine to the lower castes for being a Robin Hood figure who punished her rapists and evaded capture by the authorities. Phoolan Devi was charged in absentia for the 1981 Behmai massacre, in which twenty Thakur men were executed, allegedly on her command; afterwards the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh resigned and calls to capture Devi were amplified. She surrendered two years later in a carefully negotiated settlement and spent eleven years in Gwalior prison, without facing trial.
Phoolan Devi was released in 1994 after her charges were set aside, then she became a politician, standing as a Member of Parliament for the Samajwadi Party in 1996. She lost her seat in 1998 then regained it the following year; she was the incumbent at the time of her death in 2001. She was assassinated outside her house by Sher Singh Rana, who was eventually convicted for the murder in 2014. At the time of her death, she was still fighting against the reinstituted criminal charges. Phoolan Devi's worldwide fame grew after the release of the controversial 1994 film Bandit Queen, which told her life story in a way she herself did not approve of. Her life has also inspired several biographies, and her dictated autobiography was entitled I, Phoolan Devi. There are varying accounts of her life because she told her story in different ways.
Early life
Phoolan Devi was born on 10 August 1963, in the village of Gorha Ka Purwa in Jalaun district, Uttar Pradesh, India.[A][2]: 42 [3] The land is filled with gorges and ravines, making it suitable for dacoits (bandits) to roam freely, and is crossed by the Yamuna and Chambal rivers.[4]: 244 Her family was poor and from the Mallah fisherman subcaste, which lies towards the bottom of the Hindu caste system in India, Mallahs being of the Shudra varna.[B][2]: 57 [7] Phoolan Devi's family survived by collecting dung cakes to burn as fuel and growing chickpeas, sunflowers and pearl millet.[2]: 32–34, 57 [8]
![Hand-made parcels of manure laid outside in the sun to dry](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4f/%28A%29_cow_dung_cooking_fuel_cakes_being_produced_at_Chunar%2C_Uttar_Pradesh_India.jpg/220px-%28A%29_cow_dung_cooking_fuel_cakes_being_produced_at_Chunar%2C_Uttar_Pradesh_India.jpg)
Phoolan Devi's mother was called Moola. Devi had four sisters and one brother; her father Devidin had one brother, who had a son called Maiyadin. Phoolan Devi's uncle and his son (her cousin) stole land from her father by bribing the village leader to change the land records. Her family was compelled to live in a small house on the edge of the village; the uncle and son continued to harass the family and to steal their crops, aiming to drive them away from the village.[2]: 31 At the age of 10, Phoolan Devi decided to protest against the injustice by going to the disputed land. With her older sister Rukhmini, she sat in a field and ate the chickpeas growing there, saying the crop belonged to her family. Maiyadin ordered her to leave, and when she did not, he beat her into unconsciousness; the village leader then decreed that her parents should also be beaten.[2]: 32–35 [9] In 2018, Phoolan Devi's mother told The Asian Age that she was still fighting to regain the land which Maiyadin had stolen from the family.[10]
Following these events, Phoolan Devi's parents decided to arrange a marriage for her. She was married to a man called Puttilal, who offered ₹ 100, a cow and a bicycle as a dowry. According to the version related by Sen it was agreed that Phoolan Devi would live with him after three years had passed, but less than three months later Puttilal came back and took her away.[2]: 44–45 He was three times her age; she refused his sexual advances and later became sick. When her parents came and collected her, they took her to a doctor who gave a diagnosis of measles.[2]: 45–46 [11] For a wife to leave her husband was scandalous; preying on Phoolan Devi's parents' fears of disgrace, Maiyadin offered to ensure that Puttilal took her back if they signed a document. The family was illiterate and the parents were warned that it contained a clause giving Maiyadin legal rights to their land, so they refused to sign. Instead, her mother sent Devi to stay with a distant relative in the village of Teoga, where she met her recently married cousin Kailash, who ran errands for dacoits (also known locally as bahghis). They became close and had an affair, which resulted in Phoolan Devi being ordered by his wife to go back to her own village.[2]: 46–48 [9][12]
When Phoolan Devi was back in Gorha Ka Purwa, the second son of the village leader became infatuated with her, and when she did not reciprocate his affections, he attacked her.[2]: 49, 51 Again, Phoolan Devi needed to leave the village and Maiyadin pressured the family to ask Puttilal to take her back, which he did; in the meantime, he had taken another wife who enjoyed mistreating her. After several years, Puttilal abandoned Phoolan Devi beside the river and she again returned to the parental home.[2]: 52–53 In January 1979, Maiyadin destroyed the family's crops and began to chop down a neem tree on their land. When Phoolan Devi threw stones at him and wounded his face, she was arrested by the local police and detained for one month.[2]: 60–61 She later told The Atlantic that she was arrested because Maiyadin accused her of robbing him.[9] Her biographer Mala Sen asked if she had been raped at the station, and Phoolan Devi replied "They had plenty of fun at my expense and beat the hell out of me too".[2]: 60–61 [13] Sen notes that it is common for victims of sexual assault to avoid or repress talking about what happened to them. Sen also observes that from the mid-1970s onwards, Indian feminist groups were recording many instances of women being attacked and murdered by men.[2]: 55, 61 [9] The director of the Women's Feature Service commented that "quite often rape is used as a method of control and punishment to keep women in their place".[14]
Banditry
Bandit Queen
In July 1979, a gang of bandits led by Babu Gujjar attempted to seize Phoolan Devi from her family's home, for reasons she explained in multiple ways.[C] Gujjar took her as his property and raped her repeatedly. His second in command, Vikram Mallah, became fond of Devi; he killed Gujjar and became leader of the gang.[9] He trained Phoolan Devi to use a rifle. Over the following year, the gang robbed trains and vehicles, and looted higher caste villages, sometimes disguising themselves using stolen police uniforms.[4]: 247 [8] Vikram Mallah and Phoolan Devi fell in love.[15]: 332 The gang lived in the ravines, constantly moving between places such as Devariya, Kanpur, and Orai.[2]: 113 and when they returned to punish Puttilal, Devi beat him up.[2]: 99 As news of her exploits spread, she became wildly popular with the poor, who called her Dasyu Sundari (Beautiful Bandit), and she was celebrated by most of the Indian mainstream media as a Robin Hood figure, who robbed from the rich to give to the poor.[11][16][17] She was seen as an incarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga, and a doll was produced of her in police uniform wearing a bandoleer.[11][18]
The crime spree was interrupted when a former leader of the gang, Shri Ram Singh, was released from prison together with his brother Lalla Ram Singh. They were Thakurs and thus a higher caste than the rest of the gang; when they rejoined the gang a power struggle ensued, which ended when Shri Ram murdered Vikram Mallah.[9][19] Without Vikram Mallah's protection, Phoolan Devi could not escape from Shri Ram, who took her to the remote village of Behmai where she was repeatedly raped by Thakur men (Thakurs being a subcaste of the higher Kshatriya caste); in a final indignity, she was forced to collect water for him from the well whilst naked, in front of the villagers.[2]: 57, 125–126 [9] The rapists included Chheda Singh.[20]
Behmai massacre
Phoolan Devi managed to escape and formed another gang with Man Singh.[2]: 137 [9] They lived on wild berries and produce stolen from cultivated fields.[2]: 183 The following year, she returned to Behmai with her gang on 14 February 1981. Speaking through a loudhailer, she demanded that the villagers hand over Shri Ram and Lalla Ram, then her gang went from house to house looting valuables.[2]: 150–151 [15]: 324 When the two men could not be found, twenty-two Thakur men were lined up at the Yamuna river and shot from behind. Two survived and twenty died. The Behmai massacre led Thakur farmers to pressure Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to impose the rule of law. When she was later arrested in 1983, Phoolan Devi claimed that she had not been present at the time of the shooting.[16][2]: 150–151 This was confirmed by the evidence of the two men who survived, who stated that they had not seen Devi and that a man called Ram Avtar was giving orders.[2]: 159 By other accounts, such as that of journalist Khushwant Singh, it was Devi who put the men to death.[15]: 324 For Dalits, Phoolan Devi was to be celebrated for fighting back against her abuse by men of a higher caste, and when she eluded capture by the authorities her fame grew.[21] The killings prompted the resignation of V. P. Singh, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.[22] It was later clarified that the dead men were composed of seventeen Thakurs, one Muslim, one Dalit and one Other Backward Class; Phoolan Devi was charged in absentia with forty-eight crimes, which included kidnapping, looting and twenty-two murders.[2]: xiii [23]
Surrender
After the massacre, Phoolan Devi remained on the run. She was nearly caught by the police on 31 March 1981, and had to shoot her way out.[15]: 335 Her mother was held for five months in Kalpi prison to pressure Devi to give herself up.[8] In 1983, Phoolan Devi surrendered to the authorities after long negotiations led by Rajendra Chaturvedi, a police officer from Bhind. Dressed in a police uniform and still armed with a Mauser rifle, she bowed before representations of Durga and Gandhi, then prostrated herself in front of Arjun Singh, chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, with 8,000 people watching.[9] Phoolan Devi had set conditions regarding her surrender, which included the following: no death penalty for anyone from her gang; a maximum custodial sentence of eight years; no use of handcuffs; being imprisoned as a group; being imprisoned in Madhya Pradesh and not Uttar Pradesh; her family being given land with their goat and cow; and her brother getting a government job.[9] She and seven men, including Man Singh, surrendered.[2]: 215 Mala Sen records that the male journalists gathered in Bhind to watch her surrender were unimpressed with her plain appearance.[2]: 218
Phoolan Devi was charged with the forty-eight crimes.[24] The gang was incarcerated at Gwalior. Despite the promise she would not spend more than eight years in prison, Phoolan Devi spent over ten years on remand.[15]: 322 During this time, she had tuberculosis and was diagnosed with two stomach tumours.[8] Whilst receiving hospital treatment, she received a hysterectomy without her consent.[7] The others, including Man Singh, agreed to trials in Uttar Pradesh and were all acquitted, but Phoolan Devi refused to make a deal and remained convinced she would be murdered if she went there.[9]
Political career
Charges against Phoolan Devi were dropped in 1994 by order of the central government of Mulayam Singh Yadav, from the Samajwadi Party.[25] After her release from prison, she joined the Samajwadi Party and in the 1996 general election, took a seat in the Lok Sabha as a Member of Parliament (MP) for Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh.[26] She won with a majority of 37,000 and had over 300,000 votes in total. She was not the only illiterate MP, joining others such as Bhagwati Devi and Shobhawati Devi.[8] Phoolan Devi campaigned with limited success for the rights of women and to provide better amenities for the poor.[4]: 251 She told author Roy Moxham "I want to bring hospitals, schools, electricity and clean water to the poor in the villages. To stop child marriage and to improve life for women."[8] Mallah people were happy to have someone of their caste representing them in parliament for the first time, and she was generally popular among Other Backward Classes. She visited her constituents in their villages and listened to their concerns.[27][28]
The Kanpur district court set aside Yadav's pronouncement, a decision upheld by the Allahabad High Court.[29] In 1996, Phoolan Devi lost her Supreme Court appeal to have the charges dropped. The following year, the court approved a request from Uttar Pradesh to arraign Devi on charges related to the Behmai massacre. She did not attend the court date in Kanpur, to the outrage of the widows of Behmai; after several months of legal machinations, the Supreme Court ruled that Devi did not need to be jailed before trial.[8] She lost her seat to the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate in the 1998 elections, then regained it the following year. She was holding the position at the time of her death, at the age of 37.[7][8] The criminal charges against her remained open.[29]
In culture
Phoolan Devi married Umed Singh in 1994; he was a fellow Mallah from West Delhi.[30] They appeared together in a film, called Sholay Aur Chingari (Blazing Fires and Sparks).[25] Together with her new husband, she became a Buddhist, aiming to evade the Hindu caste system. They attended a ceremony at Deekshabhoomi in 1995.[4]: 251 [31] Moxham reported that she then renounced Buddhism.[8]
The 1994 film Bandit Queen was loosely based on Mala Sen's biography; it was directed by Shekhar Kapur and starred Seema Biswas as Phoolan Devi.[12] After it received acclaim at Cannes Film Festival, Kapur asked for permission from the Central Board of Film Certification to screen the film at cinemas in India. Phoolan Devi attempted to block the release, commenting "It's simply not the story of my life".[2]: 254 [9] She was supported by the feminist and novelist Arundhati Roy, who wrote a critique of the film entitled The great Indian rape trick.[12] In his 2021 autobiography Farrukh Dhondy, the former commissioning editor at Channel 4, described how he rushed to Delhi in order to get Umed Singh to persuade Phoolan Devi to drop her complaint.[32] When Phoolan Devi discovered Singh had taken this payment, they became estranged, before later reconciling.[8] A court case was brought against screening the film by lawyer Indira Singh and Arundhati Roy at the Delhi High Court.[25] Ultimately, Phoolan Devi received £40,000 from Channel 4 and dropped the complaint.[7] She dictated her autobigraphy I, Phoolan Devi which was published first in French in 1996 and then in other languages, including English, Japanese and Malay. The income from book sales supported Devi and enabled her to pay her legal fees.[8]
Assassination
Assassination of Phoolan Devi | |
---|---|
Location | New Delhi |
Date | 25 July 2001 13:30 (UTC+5.5) |
Attack type | Murder |
Deaths | Phoolan Devi |
Injured | 1 |
Perpetrators | 3 unidentified gunmen |
At 13:30 on 25 July 2001, Phoolan Devi was shot dead by three unknown assailants outside her house at 44 Ashoka Road in New Delhi.[26] She was shot nine times, and her bodyguard was hit twice; he returned fire as the attackers escaped by car. She was rushed to Lohia Hospital and was pronounced dead on arrival.[26] All business of both houses of Parliament was adjourned for two days, and the funeral took place in Mirzapur.[8] Umed Singh commented "No one likes it when someone, especially a woman, from the lower classes rises and makes a name for herself" and her lawyer Kamini Jaiswal stated "This murder is the result of caste conflict."[33][34]
Days after the murder, Sher Singh Rana was arrested and claimed he had shot at Phoolan Devi, saying the assassination was revenge for the Behmai massacre.[35] Rana was a political activist from Uttaranchal who at first struggled to convince police that he was present at the scene of the crime.[36][37] He escaped from Tihar Jail in 2004 and was recaptured two years later.[38] In August 2014, Rana received a life sentence for murder, with ten other co-defendants being acquitted.[39][40] Two years later, he appealed his sentence to the Delhi High Court and was set free on a personal bond of ₹50,000 (equivalent to ₹72,000 or £750 in 2023) and two sureties of the same amount by Justice Gita Mittal. He was required to not interact with Phoolan Devi's family and to report to the police every six months, whilst also informing them where he stayed and what mobile telephone number he was using.[41][42]
In August 2001 Umed Singh announced before Phoolan Devi's terahvin had occurred that he was setting up a trust to administer the properties she owned; he was immediately denounced by her sisters and mother, who claimed he was trying to steal her investments worth ₹2.5 crore (equivalent to ₹10.0 crore or £1 million in 2023). Devi's sister Munni alleged that Umed Singh knew the murderers and challenged his alibi. She said that Umed Singh was abusive towards Phoolan Devi and that her sister had tried at least twice to divorce him.[43][44] Phoolan Devi's first husband Puttilal also made a demand for her properties since they had never officially divorced.[45] Munni Devi again claimed in 2018 that Devi had been murdered on the order of Umed Singh and argued that Sher Singh Rana had been framed by a government conspiracy.[46]
Legacy
Phoolan Devi's fame throughout India continued to grow after her death, and the controversy surrounding the Bandit Queen film had already ensured that she was globally famous; she has become a legendary figure, alongside other outlaws such as Ned Kelly, Sándor Rózsa and Pancho Villa.[19][47] Her life has inspired biographies by Roy Moxham, Mala Sen, and Richard Shears and Isobelle Gidley, and novels by Irène Frain and Dimitri Friedman.[1][8] A graphic novel entitled Phoolan Devi, Rebel Queen was published in 2020 by Claire Fauvel .[48] Scholar Tatiana Szurlej notes that the facts presented in these biographies often contradict each other despite coming from interviews with Phoolan Devi herself, and questions whether Devi forgot elements or adapted her account to suit her changing circumstances.[1] In 1994, Arundhati Roy commented that Phoolan Devi "is suffering from a case of Legenditis. She's only a version of herself. There are other versions of her that are jostling for attention."[49] Media theorist Sandra Ponzanesi states Phoolan Devi is an example of a Third World postcolonial subject who is aware of the racist and patronising Orientalist attitudes that First World analysts have of her.[19]
Several films have been made about her life. Ashok Roy made the 1984 film Phoolan Devi in Bengali and followed it the next year with a Hindi version entitled Kahani Phoolvati Ki (The story of Phoolan).[50]: 23 Bandit Queen came out in 1994, and in 2019 Hossein Martin Fazeli was developing a documentary entitled Phoolan.[2]: 254 [12][51] In 2022, Farrukh Dhondy announced that he was making a web series about her life told from the perspective of Rajendra Chaturvedi, the person who arranged her surrender.[52] Phoolan Devi has been represented in fine art by painters such as Rekha Rodwittiya. Her life has also been commemorated by folk singers, making her into a mythical outlaw figure.[53] Shirish Korde wrote an opera called Phoolan Devi: The Bandit Queen which premiered in 2010 at the Tsai Music Centre at the University of Boston.[54]
The court case concerning the Behmai massacre began in 2012; of the twenty-three people facing charges, sixteen (including Devi) were dead by 2020. Of the seven remaining suspects, three were on the run (including Man Singh). A verdict was expected in January 2020 and then delayed because important case documents had been lost.[55] The last witness died the following year, and since the presiding judge had been transferred, the case began again in 2022.[56][57] In 2023, another suspect died, leaving only two people on trial.[58]
In 2018, the NISHAD Party laid claim to Phoolan Devi's political legacy, saying that it would build a statue of her in Gorakhpur because the Mallah subcaste forms part of the Nishad caste.[10] Three years later, in 2021, in order to mark twenty years since the assassination, the Vikassheel Insaan Party proposed to place statues of her in 18 districts of Uttar Pradesh. In Unnao and Varanasi, the local authorities blocked the installation of the statues.[23] Tributes were paid to her by Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, Chirag Paswan of the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) and Tejashwi Yadav of Rashtriya Janata Dal.[28][59]
Selected works
- Devi, Phoolan (1996). Cuny, Marie-Therese; Rambali, Paul (eds.). I, Phoolan Devi: The autobiography of India's Bandit Queen. London: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 978-0-316-87960-6.
See also
Notes
- ^ Given names vary between texts, such as: Gorha Ka Purwa and Gorhapurwa; Vikram and Vickram; Putti Lal and Puttilal.[1]
- ^ Indian society is divided into four castes or social classes. From top to bottom these are: Brahmin (priests), Kshatriya (warriors), Vaishya (traders) and Shudra (labourers).[5]: 194 Underneath these four classes are the Dalits, also known as the untouchables.[6]
- ^ According to Weaver, "What followed remains obscured, for Phoolan's own accounts have varied significantly",[9] Snyder says her "uncle orchestrates a kidnapping by one of the many bands of armed robbers [...] that patrolled the Chambal Valley",[12] Sen says Devi received a letter from the dacoits, went to the police who refused to help her and then was taken away by Babu Gujjar,[2]: 67–69 Szurlej writes that "she became embroiled in a conflict with her rich relatives, who arranged for bandits to kidnap her"[1]
References
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- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa Sen, Mala (1991). India's Bandit Queen: The true story of Phoolan Devi (Revised and updated 1995 ed.). London: Pandora. ISBN 978-0-04-440888-8.
- ^ "Phoolan Devi birth anniversary: An exceptional journey of the Bandit Queen". CNBC TV18. 10 August 2022. Archived from the original on 28 November 2022. Retrieved 28 November 2022.
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- ^ Peacock, J. Sunita (10 January 2014). "Phoolan Devi: The primordial tradition of the Bandit Queen". In Dong, Lan (ed.). Transnationalism and the Asian American heroine: Essays on literature, film, myth and media. Jefferson, North Carolina, US: McFarland & Company. pp. 187–195. ISBN 978-0-7864-6208-7.
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Further reading
- Frain, Irène (1993). Devi (in French). Paris: France loisirs. ISBN 978-2-7242-7375-5.
- Pugazhendhi, N. (1984). Phoolan Devi (in Tamil).
- Shears, Richard; Gidley, Isobelle (1984). Devi: The Bandit Queen. London: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 978-0-04-920097-5.
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