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