Arundhati Roy, The Great Indian Rape (1994), SAWNET -The South Asian Women’s NETwork.John Arquilla, Insurgents, Raiders and Bandits: How Masters of Irregular Warfare Have Shaped Our World (2011), Ivan R Dee, Inc.
Instead, the film was limited to a one-dimensional plot of sexual politics amid caste warfare, and Phoolan was reduced to something almost inhuman after a lifetime of rape and beatings.
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Kapur could have better applied his artistic license with a more versatile approach to plot and character. Hers was a life made in spite of, not because of, the tremendous events that marked it. This is a woman who not only dared to rise above her rank in a deeply patriarchal society but also went on to command her own army and become an outlaw for 48 counts of crimes including murder, kidnapping and banditry. Too often, she’s shown only as the meek victim, mostly of rape by upper-caste men, and rarely as an aggressor or leader. The film depicts banditry in excess but fails to show Phoolan’s active role in it. In fact, the real Phoolan Devi fiercely contested the depiction of her life and attempted to get the film banned in India. Moreover, she was neither sold into marriage nor raped as many times as depicted in the film. He was also instrumental in abetting her kidnap by a gang of bandits which aided her journey to banditry. Her cousin Mayadin cooked up a story that landed a young, spirited Phoolan in jail for questioning her relative’s take-over of her family land¹. In reality, Phoolan’s troubles with the law began on grounds of family disputes over farming land. After a protracted run from the law in the deep ravines of the Chambal region, Phoolan finally surrenders after negotiating her terms with the police.
Her infamy grows and she becomes India’s most wanted outlaw. She teams up with Man Singh (Manoj Bajpai) to form a new gang and returns to the village to gun down all twenty-two Thakur men associated with her earlier attack. A battered Phoolan takes refuge with her cousin Kailash (Saurabh Shukla) before deciding to take up banditry in her own right. Soon after, Vikram is killed in a coordinated attack by Thakur Shri Ram (Govind Namdeo) and Phoolan is abducted, brutally gang-raped by Thakurs and paraded naked to an entire village. Vikram replaces Gujjar as gang-lead and helps Phoolan exact revenge from her husband. This bond soon turns into gratitude and love when Vikram shoots Gujjar dead after catching him raping Phoolan. While on the run as their hostage, she develops a bond with a sympathetic bandit named Vikram (Nirmal Pandey). Thereafter, the village Thakurs secure her bail by bribing a gang of bandits led by Baba Gujjar to kidnap her. An angry Phoolan goes to the police for justice and, in return, is arrested, beaten and raped while in custody. A few years older now, when she refuses the advances of a group of young Thakur (high-caste) men, the local governing council banishes her from her village. Unwanted sexual advances continue to be heaped on Phoolan (Seema Biswas). Eventually, Phoolan runs away and returns to her parents’ home where she’s chastised for leaving her rightful place as a married woman but is nevertheless allowed to stay. Her husband beats and rapes his 11-year-old child bride even as his mother listens in from another room. At her new home, she’s outcast by higher-caste villagers and treated not unlike a slave around the house. The film begins with an adolescent Phoolan, born to a poor low-caste family, being sold into marriage with a man three times her age in exchange for a cow and an old bicycle. I say “supposedly” since the film opens with “This is a true story” but then proceeds to tell a story which doesn’t hold up to external accounts of her life, as mentioned most notably in Phoolan Devi’s biography India’s Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi by Mala Sen from which the film is adapted. Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen is, supposedly, a tribute to the life and times of Phoolan Devi, an Indian outlaw who left a trail of terror in the Chambal Valley in central India during the early 1980s. I decided to revisit this uneasy terrain by finally watching the film in hopes of channelling my outrage. As I grappled with the news, I recalled a film about a similar heinous incident which sparked considerable controversy and folklore during my childhood in India. The recent horrific gang rape of a young woman in New Delhi shook something in all of us.
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