Phoolan Devi: Bandit Queen

Warning: This story includes mentions of rape so if you do not want to read it please just skip it. 

Phoolan Devi was known as the Bandit Queen. She lived in Uttar Pradesh in India from 1963 to 2001. She was born in a village called Ghura Ka Purwa and she had one older sister and two other siblings who died as children. Her family was very poor, and she lived with her grandparents, uncle, aunt, cousin, and her parents. The three men of the house worked to support all the others.

When Phoolan was eleven, her grandparents died and her uncle became the head of the family. He arranged a marriage for her with a man who was twenty-three and lived a few hundred miles away. He abused her, so she ran back home, but they sent her back to him and then she ran back home again. Her husband’s family said maybe she should just stay home for a while before going to live with her husband. When she turned sixteen, her parents went to her husband’s parents and said that it was time to take her in. They didn’t want to but they did.

Phoolan ran away again. Her husband must have sucked. This time his parents said she was not coming back. They gave her parents the dowry back and then later Phoolan explained that her husband was a “very bad character”. He must have truly been evil because a wife leaving her husband was a surefire way to become a complete outcast in Indian society.

Anyway, so it was 1979 and Phoolan was an outcast and didn’t have much going on in her life. She fell in with a group of bandits. It’s unclear if she joined because she wanted to or because she had to, later she said it was “the dictate of fate”. Once she joined the gang, the leader wanted to have sex with her and she wasn’t into it. He tried to rape her and then the second in command guy, Vikram, saved her. He ended up killing the guy in command (Babu Gujjar) and became the leader of the gang instead.

 

 

Phoolan and Vikram became lovers. The gang attacked the village of Phoolan’s husband, where she dragged him outside and stabbed him, leaving a note warning other older men not to marry young girls. The husband didn’t die, but he had a long scar running down his stomach for the rest of his life. Phoolan learned how to use a gun and began becoming an active gang member. Usually the gang would kidnap rich people for ransom, attack villages where rich people lived, and robbing flashy cars. It was a very Robin Hood kind of life. Phoolan was the only girl. After each robbery, she would visit a temple and thank the Goddess for protecting her.

 

 

A few years later, two brothers who used to be part of the gang before Phoolan joined were released by jail and they were super pissed when they found out their old leader, Babu Gujjar, was dead. They yelled at Phoolan and she yelled back and then one of the brothers slapped her and Phoolan said he touched her boob and Vikram yelled at the brother and told him to apologize. The brothers were not happy, especially because Vikram and Phoolan were lower caste and they and Babu Gujjar were all upper caste.  However, they all stayed in the gang, but tensions were high.

Whenever the gang looted a village, the brothers made sure to attack and insult the people of that village who were of the same low caste as Phoolan and Vikram. A lot of those caste members left the gang, and a bunch of higher caste people joined the gang. Vikram suggested they split the gang in two, one of the lower caste and one of the higher. The brothers said no. There was also dissent in the gang because Vikram had an actual wife back home and some of the gang members didn’t like that he was sleeping with Phoolan too. The tension came to a head and in the fight that ensued, Vikram and Phoolan had to flee. Vikram was later found and shot dead. Phoolan was taken to a village that was the home to the brothers and others of the upper caste.
Phoolan was locked in a room and beaten and raped for almost a month. Her old gang member friends, including a man named Man Singh, and a villager who belonged to the same caste as her helped her escape. Man Singh and Phoolan joined a new gang, where they became leaders and partners in crime (not romantically – he was like a brother to her). They kept on targeting upper caste and rich people.

Seven months after she had escaped from the asshole brothers, Phoolan went back to the village with her new gang dressed as a police officer. She commanded that the bad guys be brought forward, but only two were around cause the rest had gone to the city to find work. I guess you can only be a bandit for so long.

Anyway, Phoolan didn’t care. She hated the whole caste and all the people in the village, so she had her men line up every man belonging to that caste. They were all shot dead by her men. Phoolan claimed that she herself never shot any of them. The massacre led to public outrage, but the poor people in the area idolized her. Phoolan began to call herself the Bandit Queen. The police started looking for her. Two years went by as Phoolan continued her activities, evaded capture, and became a local legend.

Phoolan wasn’t doing too well, health wise, and a lot of her gang friends were dead. In February of 1983, she agreed to surrender to the police, but not from her district, from the neighboring one. She said she would lay her arms down not to the police but to the pictures of Gandhi and Durga. She also gave some conditions: that none of the members of her gang that surrendered should be killed, a plot of land should be given to her, none of the gang members should have more than eight years in jail, and her whole family should be escorted to see her surrender. Her demands were followed, in front of a crowd of ten thousand people and three hundred police.

 

 

Phoolan was charged with forty-eight crimes and her trial was delayed for eleven years, during which time she remained in prison. She had health problems, and was released in 1994 and pardoned. All cases against her were withdrawn which was, to say the least, a public controversy. They made a movie about her life and even though she’s portrayed as a heroine in it, she said it was inaccurate and hated it. She threatened to set herself on fire but didn’t go through with it. Two years after her release, Phoolan decided to run for office. She ran as the party that had dismissed the charges against her. She served as an MP for two years, lost her seat in the next election, but won the one after that. She wrote a book about her life – she was illiterate, so she dictated it to authors Marie-Therese Cuny and Paul Rambali.

 

 

In 2001, Phoolan was shot dead by three masked men outside of her house in Delhi. The men fled the scene, and then the suspect surrendered to the police, saying he killed her for revenge for the upper caste men she killed in the village years before as revenge for her rape. The man was sentenced to life in prison.

Another female bandit turned politician was inspired by Phoolan, her name is Seema Parihar, you can read about her here. See you next week!