A few years ago, I went to the village where Phoolan Devi grew up. In her house, a marble statue of hers had been placed as an ode to a woman who wandered the ravines of Chambal and allegedly killed upper-caste men who had once raped her.
Phoolan Devi’s marble cast is an image of hers in a saari with folded hands. That’s an imposed one that has been moulded by the male gaze. But Phoolan Devi was a Dalit woman in fatigues, with a gun sliding from her waist and a red bandana tied around her forehead. In this village, which is off the main road and next to the river, the population mostly consists of Mallahs. Here, she is revered as a goddess. In the village beyond the river, where the killings of Thakurs happened, she is a murderer. People of both the villages still don’t meet each other.
In her village, there are songs they sing as an ode to her. In an account by Mary Anne Weaver in a 1996 article in the Atlantic on Phoolan Devi’s surrender in February in 1983, she writes how Phoolan Devi was “draped in a brown wool blanket, topped by a vibrant red shawl, led a group of men, twelve in all, through the ravines of the Chambal River Valley in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. A .315 Mauser hung from her shoulder, swinging against her hip; a long curved dagger was tucked into her belt; a bandolier covered her chest.
When Phoolan Devi surrendered in the village of Bhind, many journalists wrote about their “disappointment” when a small and stout woman, who was dark-complexioned, came forward. She had been imagined as the “daredevil dacoit queen”, the “black beauty of the bandit world”, or the dasyu sundari (dacoit beauty). A journalist at India Today back then described her as “drab-looking, highly moody, childishly petulant, and disastrously short-tempered girl on a rampage.”
Phoolan Devi spent eleven years in prison without a trial and was released in February 1994 after Mulayam Singh Yadav, the newly-elected chief minister of Uttar Pradesh at the time, directed lawyers of the state to withdraw all charges against her. Two years after her release, she won the Lok Sabha elections from Mirzapur on Samajwadi Party ticket. She won again in 1999, but was killed outside her home in New Delhi at the age of 38. But songs have immortalised her. She remains in the collective memory as a woman in fatigues who dared to fight caste oppression.
