The queen is dead
"Police investigating the murder of Phoolan Devi have no shortage of suspects. During her 38-year journey from the bottom of India's caste ladder to parliament - via murder, robbery and prison - she made plenty of enemies"
Luke Harding on the Robin Hood of Madhya Pradesh (Report by Guardian, a day after Phoolan Devi's assassination)
The Ultimate Indian Feminist, Phoolan Devi |
No one
is quite sure how long the assassins had been waiting. As Phoolan Devi -
India's most famous ex-outlaw - arrived back at her leafy Delhi bungalow at
lunchtime yesterday, she would scarcely have noticed the green Maruti
discretely parked outside. Nor did she spot the three masked gunmen who sprung
from the car. Devi had just reached her front gate when the first shot smashed
into her, followed by four more. Three shots hit her in the body but two struck
her directly in the head. As she crumpled to the ground, her security officer
returned fire. But it was not much of a contest: within seconds he too had been
shot.
The three mysterious
killers, their job complete, sped off in their Maruti, before dumping the
vehicle nearby in Connaught Place, Delhi's busy commercial hub. They then made
their escape in a black and yellow auto-rickshaw, a strange mode of transport
for a gang of ruthless killers. As Devi lay quietly on the ground, bleeding to
death, dark monsoon clouds gathered overhead. She died before reaching
hospital.
It was, all in all, an unconventional assassination, but then Devi - celebrated
as India's Bandit Queen - had led an unconventional life. Though she would not
have chosen it, the manner of her death yesterday was strangely appropriate for
a woman who used to compare herself to the bloodthirsty Hindu goddess, Durga.
In her 38 years, Devi had come a long way from the wild Chamba river valley in
Madhya Pradesh, where she was born, to Ashoka Road, the genteel and verdant
scene of her murder. Here, she had been living the life of a respectable Indian
MP. Last night it was not clear whether it was her relatively new career as a
politician that had been responsible for her death - or her old incarnation as
a ruthless and avenging bandit.
As relatives and friends poured into hospital to pay their final respects,
detectives in Delhi were last night drawing up a list of suspects. The list,
sources indicated, was extremely long.
Members of Devi's Samajwadi party were already heaping blame for her killing on
the murky politics of Uttar Pradesh, the enormous state she had represented as
an MP since 1996. The Samajwadi party is the main challenger to the rightwing
Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party, which leads India's fractured
coalition government. But the real reason for her assassination is more likely
to lie in Devi's earlier career as a bandit - and in particular her spectacular
massacre of 22 upper-caste villagers back in 1981, an act that was to secure
her instant notoriety. However, her greatest crime lay not in the killings per
se, many believe, but in the fact she had dared to challenge India's rigorous
and ancient caste system.
For the lower castes Devi - whose career was immortalised in the film Bandit
Queen by Shekah Kupar - was India's answer to Robin Hood. But for the
land-owning classes, or thakurs , she was a dangerous threat to the immutable
social order. To understand her story, you have to return to the Chambal river
valley, and to its surreal landscape of giant ravines, twisting fissures, and
wild jungle. The valley has a reputation as a haunt of armed robbers or dacoits
. As dusk falls across the valley's villages, armed men emerge from the
shadows, demanding money or valuables from unfortunate travellers who cross
their path. It was into this lawless milieu that Devi was born in 1963, the
second daughter of a low-caste illiterate farmer.
The place of her birth, Gorha Ka Purwa, is little more than a collection of
conical mud huts on the banks of the sluggish Yamuna river; it features on no
map. At the age of 11, Devi's father sold her into marriage to a man three
times her age. He got a bicycle and a cow in exchange. Eventually she ran away
after being abused and humiliated. But her family were less than delighted by
her return. As an errant married woman, the villagers shunned her. They also
accused her of bathing naked in the river, and of louche behaviour. Finally,
her cousin had her arrested by the police after she objected to the fact he had
stolen most of her father's tiny patch of land. In custody the police officers
repeatedly raped and abused her.
Though her story was a miserable one, it was by no means unique - and Devi
later pointed out that many other lower caste women in India had suffered a
similar experience. What made her story so remarkable is what happened next.
Like most good myths, some of the details remain blurred and Devi herself was
fond of obfuscation. But there seems no doubt that at the age of 20 she was
kidnapped by a dacoit gang leader, Babu Gujar. He led a group that roamed the
valley's impenetrable ravines. Gujar molested her for 72 hours before he was
dramatically shot dead by his lower caste subordinate, Vikram Mallah. Devi
promptly became Mallah's mistress. Over the next year, across an area of 8,000sq
miles, the pair did a virtuoso impression of Bonnie and Clyde.
They blew up trains, ransacked upper-caste homes, and carried out a series of
kidnappings and murders. For the first time in her life Devi was happy. But
this blissful state did not last. "There was a loud noise, the sound of a
bullet being fired," she later recalled. "Vikram sat up suddenly, and
I thought the police had surrounded us. I reached for our rifles but they had
been removed. Then, Vikram fell forward." Two ex-gang members, Sri Ram and
Lala Ram, had shot Mallah dead. They were incensed that a lower-caste villager
should have become leader of their gang.
Worse was in store for Devi: she was tied up and taken to the remote village of
Behmai, where a succession of upper-caste thakur men raped and humiliated her
over a period of several days. In a final indignity they paraded her naked
around the village. But after escaping and joining another dacoit gang, Devi
decided to carry out a singular form of lower-caste retribution.
Several months later, she came back to Behmai, dressed this time in a khaki
coat, blue jeans and wearing bright lipstick. A Sten gun hung from her
shoulder, and in her hand she carried a battery-powered megaphone. Devi called
all the villagers out and asked them to hand over Sri Ram and Lala Ram.
"If you don't hand them over to me, I will stick my gun into your butts
and tear them apart. This is Phoolan Dev speaking. Jai Durga Mata [Victory to
Durga, the Mother Goddess]," she allegedly said. The two men could not be
found. And so Devi rounded up all the young men in the village and stood them
in a line before a well. They were then marched in single file to the river. At
a green embankment they were ordered to kneel. There was a burst of gunfire and
22 men lay dead.
For the next two years, Devi avoided capture as her fame grew. Lower caste
villagers, for whom she became a heroine, called her Dasyu Sundari (Beautiful
Bandit). "Phoolan's two great gifts are rabid cunning and fatal charm - an
irresistible combination and a great achievement in a woman who is so
brutal," Sunil Sethi, an Indian critic, said.
Two years later, and four years after she began her career as an outlaw, Devi
decided to give herself up. On a bitterly cold evening in February 1983, she
and 12 followers emerged out of the ravines. Madhya Pradesh's then chief
minister greeted her, together with an adoring crowd of 8,000 supporters.
Most were surprised to discover that India's most infamous woman criminal was,
in fact, less than 5ft tall. Devi was to spend the next 11 years in the Central
jail in Gwalior, a pleasant enough north Indian town famous for its towering
hill fort. She described the experience as akin to "rotting". In
jail, she was befriended by the writer Mala Sen, whose account of her life,
Bandit Queen, would eventually metamorphose into the film that made her
internationally famous in the 1990s.
After her release in 1994, Devi then set about reinventing herself once again.
She got married, converted to a form of Buddhism and entered politics, forming
a new political party for the lower castes.
Politics, though it brought the privilege of parliamentary immunity, was a far
duller profession than being a dacoit , it turned out. In recent years, Devi
was rarely mentioned in the newspapers. Until her assassination yesterday, she
had been leading a life of relative obscurity and calm.
She was, perhaps, settling down. Her last major controversy involved Kapur's
film Bandit Queen, which she sought to have banned. "It's simply not the
story of my life, so how can they claim it is?" she told Mary Anne Weaver
of Atlantic Monthly magazine. "In the film I'm portrayed as a snivelling
woman, always in tears, who never took a conscious decision in her life. I'm
simply shown as being raped over and over again." Rape, she added, was a
fact of life for lower-caste women across the subcontinent, who were regarded
by the rich as their "property".
It is likely to be some days before the mystery of her death is finally
unravelled. Police in New Delhi have a few clues. They have a number plate
CIM907. They are checking the Maruti car used by the assassins for finger
prints. One of the killers was shot in the melee, and all hospitals in Delhi
have been put on alert for anyone wandering in with suspicious gunshot wounds.
Yesterday, a deep oval pool of blood could still be seen outside Devi's house,
beneath a gold-plated sign which read: "Phoolan Devi MP (L/S) (Lok
Sabha)." Soon, though, the monsoon rains will wash the blood away, as the
woman who shook up a subcontinent vanishes further into myth.
https://www.theguardian.com/g2/story/0,3604,527406,00.html
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