She became the subject of great fame and notoriety
throughout India as the leader of a violent gang of dacoits
(bandits) who terrorized their upper-caste oppressors and
eluded authorities for years until their surrender in 1983.
Phoolan Devi became a popular cult figure, a vigilante
liberator and a symbol of empowerment for the lower-castes
of Bihar.
Phoolan Devi, also known as the "Bandit Queen" was born into
a poor, lower-caste, rural family in the northern Indian
state of Bihar. Throughout her life, she has endured extreme
caste and gender oppression including beatings, rape and
sexual abuse under the power of upper-caste landowners, the
state-police and her first and second husbands.
What gave Phoolan and her gang the most notoriety was the
killing of twenty upper-caste men in 1981. The dacoits had
initially planned to rob the upper-caste villagers, however,
upon arrival, Phoolan recognized the village as the home of
two men who had gang-raped her and murdered her lover. She
ordered her men to search the village for the culprits,
eventually 24 upper-caste men were rounded-up. On her
orders, the gang opened fire on the men, leaving 20 of them
dead in the "largest massacre by a dacoit gang in modern
Indian history."
After an intense 'womanhunt' for Phoolan Devi and her gang,
the Bandit Queen case became such a political embarrassment
that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi told law enforcement
officials that if they couldn't catch Phoolan, they should
cut a deal with her, on her terms, to ensure her surrender.
She agreed to surrender on the condition that she would not
be hanged, that her men serve no more than eight years in
prison, that her brother be given a government job, that her
father be given a plot of land and that her entire family,
along with the family cow and goat, be escorted by police to
her "surrender ceremony".
Her surrender in February 1983 had an air of regality to it
as she marched onto a stage before thousands of cheering low-
caste supporters. After bowing before portraits of Mahatma
Ghandi and Durga, the Hindu goddess of strength, she bent
down in a gesture of respect and propriety to touch the feet
of the chief minister, and turned over 25 bullets and her
gun. Her dramatic surrender made front-page headlines
internationally.
Popular Indian filmmaker, Shekar Kapur brought Phoolan
Devi's story to international audiences with his
controversial film, The Bandit Queen. Critics of this film,
including Phoolan Devi herself are outraged at Kapur's claim
that the film is the "true story" of the Bandit Queen.
Phoolan and others also take offense to the sensationalized
portrayal of the "Bandit Queen" as a temperamental, spiteful
woman driven by revenge. One reviewer describes the film as
a "never-ending series of rapes and the mindless violence of
a one-dimensional Rambo-lina on a righteous rampage." Others
protest that Kapur's film caters to stereotypical,
Orientalist notions of Indians held by Western audiences.
Phoolan Devi is outraged that a fictionalized account of her
life has been simulated and commodified for mass
consumption, passed off as a "true story". Meanwhile, she
was paid a mere pittance by the filmmakers and was never
even consulted during the filmmaking process.
Furthermore, the filmmakers had refused to let Phoolan have
a copy of film before its release. Finally, she appealed to
the Delhi High Court who subsequently passed an order that
she be provided with a copy. However, it took months for the
filmmakers to comply with that order.
On the subject of why he had not met with Phoolan Devi prior
to the filming of her "true story", director Shekar Kapur
stated on more than one occasion that he did not feel the
need to meet Phoolan Devi after he began making the film
since it might interfere with his "conception" of Phoolan
Devi. Interesting logic, considering that he is promoting
his film as the "true story" of the Bandit Queen, rather
than a fictionalized one, or one "based on" a true story.
He even makes the incredibly arrogant and absurd claim that
he made the film from the point of view of Phoolan Devi
herself, a woman he had never even had a conversation with.
In an interview, Kapur commented: "I made it from the point
of view of an oppressed, low-caste woman," as though an
upper-caste man could in some magical, omniscient way, ever
really know and understand the experiences of gender and
caste oppressed women.
In writing about cultural and film studies, anthropologist
Terence Turner states that, "All attempts to describe or
document the behaviour of human subjects are under an
obligation to seek their consent, not to conceal from them
the purposes of the documentation, and not to use the said
documentation in ways that may foreseeably be damaging to
them." The director of the Bandit Queen knowingly violated
every one of these ethical codes.
Michel Foucault writes about how all representations are by
their very nature insidious instruments of surveillance,
oppression and control-both tools and effects of power.
Judging from Phoolan Devi's feelings about the film, she
would likely concur with Foucault. She says that the rape
scenes in the film are tantamount to her being raped again
in public. In an open letter to the director of the Toronto
Film Festival in 1994 she writes "If this film had been
about the rape and humiliation of your daughter, your wife,
your mother . . . would you have shown it . . .?"
Phoolan feels that the simulation and representation of her
brutal and repeated rapes on film are an extreme invasion of
her privacy. She asks, "I would like to ask you and your
audience what you would feel if you knew that the most
private and humiliating moments of your life were being
screened for other people's entertainment. Without your
permission, without you having been shown the film . . .."
She requests "the public of Toronto not to participate in
[her] humiliation." Indian feminist, Madhu Kishwar, comments
that "The filmmakers would not have dared taking such
liberties with the story of her life if she were not a poor
and illiterate woman."
The Bandit Queen's director missed an excellent opportunity
to expose and raise awareness about the gender and caste
oppression which the lower-castes face on a daily basis to
an international audience. A film about Phoolan Devi's life
could have served as an excellent vehicle for such exposure,
taking her story beyond India's borders to an international
audience.
Instead, the film was based on the simple, stereotypical
"hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" formula which
overlooked the complexities of Phoolan's actions in favour
of a shoot-'em-up, action-packed adventure of an outlaw
woman on the run, peppered with shocking scenes of violent
rape and revenge.
Ahmad Saidullah comments that "This male-constructed dynamic
of female sexuality, this 'look' which mirrors others in the
dominant discourses on women as victims, transports The
Bandit Queen to the paternalist 'symbolic order' of Indian
and Western film traditions."
Subaltern theorist, Ashis Nandy, discusses the stereotypical
images of womanhood found in Indian culture. He describes
one such stereotype used in commercial (popular) Indian
films as one in which the woman is seen "as an unreliable,
seductive, primal being who tends to act out her passions,
particularly her destructive impulses."
Like all good popular filmmakers, Kapur has modeled the
heroine of his film on this stereotype, portraying Phoolan
as an angry, vengeful, violent and temperamental woman
possessing an aggressive form of sexuality. As one reviewer
writes, "Seema Biswas plays the role of Bandit Queen with
great emotion, ranging from anger to anger."
Kapur fails to address issues crucial to Phoolan's life
such as the caste system's injustices to Phoolan, her family
and her community. Nor is there any examination of why it
was that Phoolan mistrusted the police or legal system in
her village. (They had been bribed by her cousin Maiyadin
who had basically stolen Phoolan's father's small plot of
land).
Phoolan Devi is also angered at how the film barely touched
on issues of land ownership. She asks, "This is a 'true
story' when my cousin Maiyadin, the major nemesis of my
life, isn't even in the film? There's absolutely no mention
of my family's land dispute." Phoolan feels that the root
cause of her family's misery was her father's brother and
her cousin Maiyadin, who cheated her family out of their
legitimate share of the land and pushed them into poverty.
However, Phoolan Devi's story is not unique in terms of the
gender and caste oppression which she endured, or in terms
of land rights issues. Her brutal treatment in the hands of
upper-caste men mirrors the ugly experiences which plague
lower-caste women in many rural Indian villages-an important
issue which was explored only superficially by director
Shekar Kapur.
Phoolan Devi and other Dalit (Untouchable caste) women say
that it is common for women to be simply grabbed and raped
or otherwise sexually abused by upper-caste men. These
incidences are testimony to the lowly status and casual
disregard of the human dignity of Dalit women in Bihar.
Govind Kelkar writes that"It is common practice to
force a Dalit, agricultural labourer woman to have sexual
relations with a Rajput landlord. If the woman declines,
her husband, brother or father is implicated in false
criminal cases."
One incident which was much-reported in Indian newspapers
describes how a Dalit woman was stripped by upper-caste men,
paraded naked through her village, then gang-raped and
killed. An offshoot of this horrific incident was the Dalit
Sena Women's Wing, a militant vigilante group who have been
trained in the use of guns and are stationed in a number of
villages throughout Bihar. Also, Phoolan Devi recently
started the Eklavya Sena, a group formed to teach lower-
caste men and women the art of self-defence.
"Dalit women have suffered large-scale neglect under the
feudo-patriarchal rule of landlords. Nevertheless, they have
showed an unparalleled militancy and strength in fighting
landlord oppression and in struggling for improved wages and
their right to land and other resources," writes Kelkar.
Though atrocities committed against Dalits are occasionally
reported in the Indian press and government documents,
convictions are very rare. Despite the thousands of cases
reported by the Indian government, Amnesty international,
Asia Watch, and even the Indian press, little action is
taken. The complicity of government officials and
politicians in some of these killings and other human rights
violations, though reported, remains uninvestigated by the
government.
The atmosphere which allows these violations to occur is
similar to that of terrorist-affected areas. Under the
ostensible reason that security forces are countering
militant activities, the state and central authorities have
permitted the use of Draconian legislation and have
tolerated numerous human rights abuses.
The lower castes include various classes of peasants and
agricultural labourers. Many of them possess small parcels
of owned or rented agricultural land, but they still must
engage in some wage labour in order to survive. Dalit women
in agricultural labour families perform as many days of wage
labour as men, in addition to being completely responsible
for the household and childcare work. They are paid only 60
to 70 per cent of what men earn for the same work, the only
exception being harvesting work, in which both men and women
are paid equally.
The government in Bihar has been criticized for its
repressive acts and its neglect of the people's welfare.
Due to the concentration of power and land in the hands of a
small group of very powerful upper-caste men, land reforms
and other rural development programmes lobbied for by the
lower castes in Bihar remain largely unimplemented.
Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, the government makes
policies and programmes on paper only. Peasant movement
activists are the ones who actually translate these plans
into action. Women, like men, have fully and fearlessly
participated in both the struggles for higher agricultural
wages and in the land struggle. Yet, a full recognition of
their role is denied to them.
The participation of Dalit women has been crucial to the
struggle for land rights. They participate both directly and
indirectly in battling landlords and police, stealing arms
from them (often recieving bullet wounds in return), they
protect and shelter peasant movement activists, and so on.
Some of these women have been killed by landlords or the
police, many of them still remain in jail.
In addition to their struggle against caste and gender
oppression from upper-caste men, these women are faced with
patriarchal treatment within the peasant movements. Poor
Dalit women belonging to the Bihar Disan Samiti movement
objected to this, stating that "We were there in harvesting
the fields. We were there in carrying ploughs and in
snatching arms from the zamindar's goondas. We fought for
our rights and actively participated in the land struggle.
Why, when the land is distributed, do we not get our
independent right to land?"
Women's exclusion from the possession and control of land is
the basis of their subordination and dependence on men in
rural India. Despite the overwhelming patriarchal and
structural barriers to keep them "in their place",
resistance by Dalit women's groups is on the increase. Their
task, however, is an immense and daunting one since their
oppression is so deeply entrenched in Indian society.
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