How dreaded dacoit Phoolan Devi became an irresistible legend

It’s hard to imagine a time when Phoolan Devi was not an icon.

Ever since news spread in the early 1980s about the “Bandit Queen”, the only woman dacoit in the Chambal Valley, Phoolan has made the headlines and fired the imagination of writers and filmmakers.

In addition to her own autobiography, there are at least three biographies of Phoolan, a graphic novel and a biopic.

Interest in the outlaw who roamed the Chambal valley in a khaki police uniform, a double sash of bullets around her chest and a crimson-red cloth around her forehead while looting villages and avenging attacks by members of the dominant castes has been rekindled by the premiere in Toronto on September 16 of a movie by Richie Mehta titled Phoolan.

Illiterate and outspoken, aware of her talismanic power, Phoolan Devi waged a lifelong battle to have her voice heard. Many have spoken on her behalf. Many have put words into her mouth. Phoolan herself muddied the waters by offering contradictory accounts of her horrific experiences.

However, most depictions of Phoolan have some things in common: casteist prejudice, misogyny and generalised ignorance about her circumstances. To revisit Phoolan’s intensely eventful life is to be reminded of all that was done to her – and all that she refused to ignore.

‘The lightning for others’

Phoolan Devi was born in 1963 in a village in Uttar Pradesh, into a dirt-poor family from the Mallah community, a group that is classified among the Other Backward Classes.

“In my village, they say that when the demon Kans strikes with lighting at the birth of a baby girl and kills her, she will rise up in the sky to become the lighting in her turn,” Phoolan declares in I, Phoolan Devi: The Autobiography of India’s Bandit Queen, based on conversations with Marie-Therese Cuny and Paul Rambali. “The demon struck me with lightning, and I became the lightning for others.”

Phoolan was married at the age of 11 to a cruel man nearly 20 years older than she was. She fled the marriage, only to earn a reputation of being promiscuous, disobedient and rebellious.

Her formative years were pockmarked with caste slurs, custodial rape and sexual violence by upper-caste men. Her entry into dacoity was not voluntary. She had been kidnapped by Babu Gujjar Singh’s gang on the orders of her uncle, who had been locked in a property feud with her father.

Phoolan spent four years as a dacoit, rising from Gujjar’s brutalised hostage to a prized member of her gang. She participated in raids on wealthy families and businesses alongside her lover Vikram Mallah.

After surrendering to the authorities in 1983, Phoolan spent 11 years in prison. She was elected to Parliament in 1996 but that could not protect her from being assassinated in 2001.

Phoolan Devi signs in as a Member of Parliament in 1996 as her husband, Umed Singh, looks on. Photo by Ravi Raveendran/AFP.

Phoolan Devi was not the original Bandit Queen. That was Putli Bai, back in the 1950s.

In 1972, seven years before Phoolan rose to prominence, journalist Taroon Coomar Bhaduri (the father of the actor Jaya Bachchan) translated his Bengali book about dacoity into English. Chambal: The Valley of Terror explores the history of baghi (rebel) culture and police operations against the outlaws.

Bhaduri lists the circumstances that encouraged banditry in the ravines of the Chambal, which run through Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh: “Soil erosion, fragmentation of holdings, pressure on land, a predilection for vendetta, communal support to bandits and other factors of a social nature”.

Reading Bhaduri’s descriptions of Putli Bai, similarities with Phoolan Devi’s life are evident. A dancer, Putli Bai too had been kidnapped, by a dacoit named Sultan. After giving birth to a girl, Putli Bai returned home, but, like Phoolan, she was raped in custody by policemen. They were trying to find Sultan.

Putli Bai left her daughter with her family and went back to the ravines, this time to fight alongside Sultan and his men. After Sultan was killed by a member of a rival gang, Putli Bai took another man as her lover, and then another one – choices probably steeped in pragmatism rather than romance.

She died in a shootout with the police in 1958, at the age of 29.

Bhaduri quotes an appraisal of Putli Bai in the police records: “Her cruelty and ruthlessness will be forgotten, but what will be remembered is the fearless courage of this woman, who endured much and suffered much, but lived her own life as the gang leader of a desperate band of outlaws.”

However, there was a major difference between Putli Bai and Phoolan, as Mala Sen notes in her magisterial biography India’s Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi.

“Although there have been other women bandits who made their mark on the history of the Chambal Valley, none of them have lived to speak of the experience,” Sen writes. “Phoolan Devi is the sole survivor.”

Seeing and not seeing Phoolan

The mythos around Phoolan was initially built on opacity. Nobody knew what she looked like.

Until 1983, Phoolan had not actually been photographed. The police sketch of Phoolan was based on one of her sisters, who didn’t resemble her. The anonymity helped Phoolan evade arrest.

The police and media feasted on juicy tales of a ravishing seductress with a raging sex life – what else could an unattached woman who lived in the wild among men have been?

Mala Sen quotes a ludicrous eye-witness account that appeared in a profile of Phoolan in Esquire magazine: “She was nearly six feet tall, believe me, at least, and her hair was the colour of dried blood. I swear to you, on the head of my son, a night with that woman would be like drinking the most delectable deadly poison.”

In 1982, journalist Khushwant Singh, never having laid eyes on Phoolan, wrote his own profile, in which he reiterated that Phoolan was a “sexpot” with a “full bosom and rounded buttocks”, a woman who “bathed in the presence of the men” from her gang.

“There is no way of finding out the exact number of men she murdered or was laid by,” Singh declared.

When Singh met Phoolan’s sister, he found her to be “uncommonly attractive”, adding, “If Phoolan Devi is anything like her… she must be something.”

Singh and other journalists had become fixated on Phoolan because of the Behmai massacre on February 14, 1981. The village in Uttar Pradesh was the site of one of the most harrowing episodes in Phoolan’s life.

In August 1980, Phoolan had been gang-raped and paraded nude over several days in Behmai on the orders of two upper-caste brothers, Sri Ram and Lala Ram. They had recently killed her partner, Vikram Mallah.

Vikram, an OBC like Phoolan, had emerged as her protector after she was forcibly recruited in his group. Sri Ram and Lala Ram resented Vikram’s leadership of a gang that they had helped set up. After killing Vikram, they abducted Phoolan and displayed her as a gruesome trophy of their power.

Phoolan managed to escape from Behmai and formed a new gang with another dacoit, Maan Singh. In 1981, the gang went back to Behmai to hunt down the Ram brothers. They did manage to find Phoolan’s tormentors, the story goes, but they gunned down 20 others instead.

Behmai resident Ram Singh shows the name of his uncle on a plaque commemorating the villagers allegedly murdered by Phoolan Devi and her gang in 1981. Photo by AFP.

Phoolan denied being in Behmai during the massacre and attributed the killings to another dacoit. But her name became inextricably linked with Behmai.

The political fire singed her. The media was outraged by the outlaw who “wears jeans” and “carries a sten gun, which she can use with great accuracy, and without any mercy”, as she was described in Sunday magazine.

Behmai triggered Phoolan’s surrender two years later. Already, Rajendra Chaturvedi, the Superintendent of Police of Madhya Pradesh’s Bhind district, had been negotiating with Chambal’s leading dacoits, among them Malkhan Singh, to lay down arms.

The handlebar-moustached dacoit surrendered in 1982. He would become the subject of Malkhan: The Story of a Bandit King, a book written by Kalyan Mukherjee and Brijraj Singh and photographed by Prashant Panjiar.

Panjiar and the writers would meet with Malkhan Singh in a prison in Gwalior, where Phoolan and her gang were also housed later.

“After Behmai, a lot was written about Phoolan,” Panjiar told Scroll. “That’s what got us started on our own dacoit book. People had written about her in a fantastical manner. But when reporters finally met her, she was extremely abusive. The same press that had romanticised her damned her right away. It wasn’t her fault. It was theirs.”

The media illusions about Phoolan were shattered on February 12, 1983, when Phoolan arrived in Bhind with her gang to renounce dacoity. The assembled journalists were disappointed – disgusted even, Mala Sen writes.

Phoolan, a Times of India journalist whined, was “dark and short-statured” and “could easily be missed in a fish-market crowd”. The “Dasyu Sundari” or Beautiful Bandit who was rumoured to have made men “dizzy with desire” was nowhere evident.

What the media scrum saw, but also didn’t, was a scrawny teenager, terrified of being killed in a police encounter, Sen said.

Phoolan was rude to the reporters and they turned on her. The alliterative headlines changed from “Avenging Angel” to “Mistress of Murder”, “Bandit Brat” and “Neurotic Nymphomaniac”.

Phoolan also lashed out at the photographers waiting to get a glimpse of her. Sondeep Shankar, who snapped rare photographs of Phoolan at her surrender, was taken aback by her appearance.

“I had heard and read so much about her,” Shankar said. “But she was a little girl. She was so small. She was also very aggressive. I was carrying three cameras. She grabbed one and it broke.”

The morning after the surrender, Phoolan had calmed down somewhat. “I travelled with her in a bus, and she opened up a bit,” Shankar said. On Shankar’s request, Phoolan climbed on to the roof of the bus to greet with folded hands the crowds that had gathered to see her – an iconic moment in Phoolan Devi iconography.

In her autobiography, Phoolan tears into the media for how she was portrayed: “I was described as a monster…They said I was stupid and ugly, not any kind of Bandit Queen at all. If I had had my rifle they would have found out what kind of queen I was!”

Phoolan Devi with a bodyguard and supporters during a political campaign in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh, in 1996. Photo by Ravi Raveendran/AFP.

But in person, Phoolan was quite different, as photographer Prashant Panjiar learnt when he met her in the Gwalior jail, where she was sharing a cell with Maan Singh.

“She was actually a scared person,” he recalled. “She wasn’t this big fearless heroine.”

Phoolan was “very troubled and lonely”, Panjiar added. “Because people had romanticised her from the beginning, nobody realised that she was a vulnerable young person who reacted in a way that was natural.”

‘A kind of female Heathcliff’

The reassessment of Phoolan Devi was a consequence of a series of books, starting with Mala Sen’s India’s Bandit Queen, which is based on conversations with Phoolan in prison and rigorous reportage.

A Deputy Inspector-General of Police in Gwalior vividly described Phoolan to Sen as “an elemental woman, a kind of female Heathcliff”. Rajendra Chaturvedi, the policeman who negotiated Phoolan’s surrender, declared, “She was the most unpredictable woman I have ever met – in my whole life!”

The woman whom Sen and others met in prison was worried about the presence there of Malkhan Singh and his gang. Phoolan was also incensed that some of the conditions she had set before her surrender had not been fulfilled.

Lawyer Kamini Jaiswal represented Phoolan in her legal battle. “She had been in jail for several years without any trial or a court order to keep here there,” Jaiswal told Scroll. “That was wholly illegal. The government was going against the conditions of surrender.”

Phoolan had wanted to surrender with Vikram Mallah, she says in her autobiography. “Instead, Vikram died and I became a spirit searching for vengeance, with nothing left to lose, because I too had died with him.”

During the initial days of her incarceration, the prison staff charged visitors money to see her, Phoolan writes: “They even had group rates in the first week.”

The dreaded dacoit received bizarre marriage proposals in prison and after she was released in 1994, including one from a retired Army officer who was a widower with children, Roy Moxham says in Outlaw: India’s Bandit Queen and Me.

Moxham was among the international writers who became fascinated with Phoolan. He wrote a letter to Phoolan in June 1992, while she was in Gwalior. She replied, setting off a friendship that lasted until her death.

Phoolan had sent Moxham a photo that showed a “cheerful-looking woman with a round face and a broad smile”. When he met her, he found “a much smaller woman than I had imagined”, who was “less than five feet tall”.

She had lost even more weight in prison, the result of tuberculosis and persistent gynaecological problems. Yet, “she smiled a lot”, Moxham recalls. “She must have, I thought, tremendous inner strength.”

In prison, Phoolan could finally be reunited with her family. Her incarceration also set her on the path to politics, which gave her legitimacy and protection from her legal woes – at least for a while.

While still in jail, Phoolan stood as an independent candidate for a Parliamentary bye-election in Delhi in 1992. (She was among 125 candidates, and polled only 753 votes, losing to the Congress party’s Rajesh Khanna).

Bandit Queen – the film

In 1994, Phoolan was released. She got married again, to Umed Singh, an acquaintance of one of her political contacts. Phoolan joined the Samajwadi Party. She was elected twice as a Member of Parliament from Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh, in 1996 and 1999.

Sondeep Shankar, who was present at Phoolan’s surrender, went on to photograph her many more times, including on her first day in Parliament. “She was beaming and very chatty,” Shankar recalled. “She was no longer a little girl.”

The year Phoolan got married was also the year that Shekhar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen, adapted from Mala Sen’s book, came out.

Seema Biswas in Bandit Queen (1994). Courtesy Kaleidoscope Entertainment/Film Four International.

Bandit Queen was a cause celebre, and not only because of its abundant profanity and sexual explicitness. Although Phoolan had been paid a fee for her participation, questions swirled about whether she had consented to the scenes in which her character, played by Seema Biswas, is shown as being repeatedly raped, paraded nude and having sex with Vikram Mallah. Had Phoolan actually understood the scope of the project?

The film opens with the words “This is a true story.” In her eviscerating essay The Great Indian Rape Trick, the writer Arundhati Roy pointed out, “If it weren’t the ‘Truth’, what would redeem it from being just a classy version of your run-of-the-mill Rape n’ Retribution theme that our film industry churns out every now and then? What would save it from the familiar accusation that it doesn't show India in a Proper Light? Exactly Nothing.”

While Mala Sen had written a book that was “full of ambiguity, full of concern, full curiosity about who this woman called Phoolan Devi really is”, Shekhar Kapur “blundered through her life like a Rape-diviner”, Roy says. “Rape is the main dish. Caste is the sauce that it swims in.”

The sequences of sexual assault led to litigation instigated by Phoolan against Kapur and his producers. The Indian censors too balked at the scenes of rape and nudity. Bandit Queen was eventually released with cuts in India in 1996, after Phoolan and her husband reached a financial settlement with the producers.

Nirmal Pandey and Seema Biswas in Bandit Queen (1994). Courtesy Kaleidoscope Entertainment/Film Four International.

Bandit Queen had been commissioned by Farrukh Dhondy at the British TV network Channel Four and produced by Bobby Bedi. (Dhondy had been previously married to Mala Sen.) Even though Sen is credited as the writer, Dhondy in his memoir claims that he rewrote key scenes.

“Bandit Queen was the most famous film I didn’t write,” Dhondy says.

Among the scenes he says he wrote was the one of Phoolan being repeatedly raped and paraded in Behmai. “I included this in the screenplay because Phoolan Devi herself had given a vivid description of the horror she had been subjected to, and I wrote the scene following her account precisely,” Dhondy writes. “The scene as Shekhar had it shot was, for all the horror of the reality, filmed with a subtlety that made it shocking but far from pornographic.”

For years, Kapur’s Bandit Queen has been held up as the definitive Phoolan Devi biopic. Even the lawyer Kamini Jaiswal praised the movie.

“It was a wonderful production,” she said. “The feeling I got was that what Phoolan did [in terms of her revenge] was much less than what she suffered. The film made my stomach turn. Watching it on a big screen made everything seem different.”

Bandit Queen, by casting Seema Biswas in the lead role, created a misleading image of Phoolan as a fully formed adult rather than a wispy teenager. That happened again the next time Phoolan appeared as a character on screen.

Abhishek Chaubey inserted Phoolan into his bandit drama Sonchiriya (2019) even though his film is set in 1975 and Phoolan was 12 years old at the time. She is played by Sampa Mandal.

Sampa Mandal in Sonchiriya (2019). Courtesy RSVP Movies.

“Growing up in the 1980s, Chambal was sort of represented by Phoolan,” Chaubey said. “The old baghis [rebels] of yore had passed on. Phoolan became emblematic of Chambal in the way other dacoits were in their time. She lived an absolutely dismal life. But what she did with what she got is amazing. So writer Sudip Sharma and I included her in Sonchiriya even though it was an anachronism.”

Seema Biswas’s performance in Kapur’s Bandit Queen cast a long shadow, Chaubey observed. “More than the real person, Seema has become the reference for Phoolan,” he said. “Seema was iconic in the film, like a force of nature. Sampa brought a lot of her own personality into her performance.”

One of the things that Richie Mehta’s Phoolan gets absolutely right is Phoolan’s height and size. Set in 1981, the film recounts a siege by the security forces of a village that Phoolan and her gang are visiting. She is depicted as a dauntless fighter and a leader of men, with a strong sense of justice and empathy for other victims of abuse.

Phoolan (2026). Courtesy Namah Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios.

Sneha Kumari, who plays the bandit beautifully, has the appropriate stature. Kumari hails from Jalaun, which is near Phoolan’s village, and is well-versed with the lore about Phoolan.

“We have always known her as a brave woman,” Kumari remarked. “Even today, whenever a woman takes a stand for herself, we call her Phoolan. Through the film, I got to know her much better.”

The enduring image

There’s at least one more Phoolan project in the works, by Iranian-Canadian director Hossein Martin Fazeli – a feature-length documentary that’s also titled Phoolan.

Fazeli embarked on the film around 10 years ago, after watching a documentary on women activists around the world. Phoolan was among those featured. “When I looked at the TV screen, I saw this petite woman surrounded by these huge guys with guns,” Fazeli said. “I couldn’t believe my ears.”

Despite the books about her and Kapur’s Bandit Queen, Fazeli realised that a comprehensive documentary on Phoolan’s legacy had not yet been made. As Fazeli embarked on the film, Phoolan came to him in a dream.

Fazeli said, “She pointed her gun at me and said, are you going to make this movie or not? I told her yes, I would, and she smiled back, lowered her gun and went back to the darkness from which she had come.”

Fazeli travelled to Phoolan’s village in Uttar Pradesh, where he met her mother Moola Devi and other members of her family. “There was a fair in the village, it was four o’clock and the flowers were blooming, so we decided to call her Phoolan,” Moola Devi says in a clip from the unfinished film.

Fazeli also met Maan Singh, Rajendra Chaturvedi (who has since died) and one of the survivors in Behmai.

“Anyone who was touched by Phoolan as a person still feels emotional about her,” Fazeli said. “She was very mythical when I started, and the more I went ahead, the more physical and human she became. I challenge anyone to show me another story that’s similar to this story.”

Maan Singh. Courtesy Hossein Martin Fazeli.

That was a decade ago. The production has been stalled for a variety of reasons but Fazeli hopes it will be completed someday. “I want people to watch the film and say if she could do it under her circumstances, I can do it under mine,” he said.

The bloody end

On July 25, 2001, Phoolan Devi was assassinated outside her official residence in Delhi. She was 37. Her killer, Sher Singh Rana, said that he had killed Phoolan to avenge Behmai.

In a statement in the Lok Sabha after Phoolan’s death, the Union Minister for Home Affairs, LK Advani, stated, “…Hers was also a life that showed the inner struggles of a woman who wanted to transcend her past.”

Roy Moxham’s intimate memoir captures Phoolan’s life after she became a politician. Moxham observed at close quarters Phoolan’s dynamic with her husband, relatives and various hangers-on.

She had put on weight, unable to resist the snacks and sweets that were constantly being pushed her way. “Her manner was more assertive, her tone was more commanding,” Moxham writes. She had a Great Dane named Jackie, after the actor Jackie Shroff.

Moxham had telephoned Phoolan from Canterbury a week before her death. “She sounded cheerful,” he writes. Then she was gone.

In another Phoolan biography, Devi, The Bandit Queen, Richard Shears and Isobelle Gidley write about a businessman in a guest-house reading a news report of a woman “dressed in khaki with a red scarf round her head and calling herself Phoolan Devi” who “has been plundering villages in Bundelkhand”.

A waiter begs to differ. “This is another woman dacoit,” he declares. “An impostor using her name. There will only be one Phoolan Devi.”

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