Phoolan Devi: Divine Dacoit

On the day she was mourned, all were out on the streets,
to grieve or just bid her adieu…
The passing of a legend, the new Goddess Shakti,
the beautiful and bold Bandit Queen.

- R. W. Fullilove [1]

Phoolan Devi, India’s Bandit Queen, was not born into royalty or deity, but into the lowest caste of India in the village of Gorha Purwa in Uttar Pradesh. Not only was she part of a very poor family, but she was also female in Indian society. These two factors, poverty and gender, seemingly destined her to a life as an outlaw, an idealistic warrior for the demoralized and downtrodden and, finally, a legend.

Director Shekhar Kapur attempted to explore these aspects of Phoolan Devi’s life in his 1994 film, Bandit Queen. However, his efforts proved woefully ham-fisted, mean-spirited, and lurid. Moreover, he missed an opportunity to reveal through Phoolan’s story the mistreatment and subjugation of rural, low caste women in India. As Amy Laly notes in her review, he created a film that is “essentially a never-ending sequence of rapes and the mindless violence of a one-dimensional Rambo-lina on a righteous rampage.”[2] Not only is Bandit Queen a bloodbath replete with gratuitously violent rape scenes, it is also factually inaccurate and leaves the audience wondering who Phoolan Devi really was. Combine that with the controversies the film garnered – which included Phoolan’s legal challenge to have it banned and the Indian government’s objection to its explicit sex, language, and nudity – and Kapur only produced a self-indulging mire when he created his own version of the Bandit Queen.

While considering Kapur’s motivation in making this film, it is interesting to note that he did not see a reason to consult with Phoolan, insomuch that he stated that “he did not feel the need to meet Phoolan Devi after he embarked on the film because that would interfere with his ‘conception’ of Phoolan Devi,” according to film reviewer Madhu Kishwar.[3] Without at least speaking with Phoolan, Kapur was free to conjure his own version of the Bandit Queen, which resulted in portraying her as a hardcore, ruthless killer set out to avenge every man who raped her or was at least present while she was being raped. He claims that the film is based on The Goddess of Flowers, the diaries Phoolan Devi dictated while she was in prison, but he apparently selected with prejudice the parts of Phoolan he wanted and reinvented the rest as needed. As Arundhati Roy explains, according to “Shekhar Kapur's film, every landmark - every decision, every turning-point in Phoolan Devi's life, starting with how she became a dacoit in the first place, has to do with having been raped, or avenging rape. He has just blundered through her life like a Rape-diviner.”[4]

Rather than a rape-diviner, though, Kapur sees himself as a man getting in touch with his feminine side through the Bandit Queen. Addressing how he shot the excruciatingly long gang rape scene – which lasts for almost three minutes on the screen – Kapur writes this on his blog:

“I merely locked myself in a room and tried to imagine what being raped was [like]. I went into myself and realized that the body, the mind and the soul must escape the body to escape the utterly humiliating and defiling act … When I was filming I kept throwing up because I was recalling the emotions that I was experiencing imagining myself being raped.”[5]

Truly, the revolting scene evokes the need for gastrointestinal cleansing (not to mention the need to take a shower) as Phoolan is repeatedly smashed, smacked, punched, and hideously violated by man after man who enter her barn-like cell. They reduce her to less than an animal and, even after this torture, she is forced to draw water from the village well, stripped bare and morally destroyed, while men watch and jeer.

Before the film gets to this nasty scene, 11-year-old Phoolan is traded by her parents to a man for a rusty old bike and a starving cow. The child bride is subsequently raped by her 33-year-old husband in a dark and seedy scene described by Laly as “disingenuous.” It’s her first rape, one of many to come. Unwilling to live in his household, Phoolan runs back home, where she is not easily received. She has “taken her life into her own hands. Now she’ll be blown like a leaf,” her father says. She’s not really as light as a leaf blowing in the wind, though, as Kapur continues with his heavy-handed depiction of her.

The story jumps forward to Phoolan as a teenager, apparent fodder for the higher caste Thakur boys. “She must be itching for a fuck,” they say as she passes by. When she fights off the headman’s son, he accuses her of trying to trap him, shouting, “She’s like a bitch in heat. Break her bones.” She’s beaten in the village streets and forced to leave Behmai by a tribunal that rules she is “bad for our boys.” Rapes number two and three occur when Phoolan is arrested for returning to the village and the police brutalize her in jail.

After that, the violent sex seems to connect scene to scene. Phoolan is kidnapped by evil bandit Babu Gujar who rapes her again and again, until Gujar’s next-in-command, Vikram, kills him while Gujar openly defiles her. Phoolan and Vikram become lovers, although, at this point, one wonders how she could ever willingly allow a man to touch her. The agonizing gang rape arrives next at the hand of another evil bandit Sri Ram, but not before she retaliates for her first rape by beating with wrathful conviction the ever-loving crap out of her husband. That vengeance is carried forward when she returns to Behmai with her gang of dacoits on February 14, 1981 to avenge herself again by murdering 22 men in the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. By this time in the film, the raping is over, but more blood is shed until Phoolan finally surrenders after a lengthy flight from authorities.

Kapur begins the film with this quote from Manu Smriti, a book of Hindu religious scripture: “Animals, drums, illiterates, low castes, and women are worthy of being beaten.” Instead of producing a film that disputes this belief, Kapur actually reinforces it. Because he has convinced himself that his film embodies the “unadulterated truth”,[6] then the merits of his art and talent cannot be argued. “If it were a work of fiction,” notes Roy, “if the film-makers had taken the risk that every fiction writer takes, and told a story, then we could begin to discuss the film…[i]ts artistic merit, its performances, its editing, the conviction behind its social comment.”[7]

Folklore and historical accounts alike tell us that Phoolan Devi “had a larger-than-life image,”[8] “the subject of great fame and notoriety throughout India…a popular cult figure, a vigilante liberator and a symbol of empowerment for the lower-castes of Bihar,”[9] who eventually was elected to the Indian Parliament as a representative for lower caste constituents. But one cannot see that Phoolan Devi in Kapur’s film. Furthermore, her association with Hindu deity, her fight for the return of family land, and her admiration of Mohandas Gandhi are all lost because in “the film there is very little else to Phoolan’s life except rape and beatings,” as Kishwar notes.[10] Indeed, by the film’s end, one is left feeling beaten up and downright sore.

Notes

[1] Fullilove, R. W., The Ballad of the Bandit Queen, composed September 30, 2001
[2] Laly, Amy, Bandit Queen Film Review, Planet Bollywood, http://www.planetbollywood.com/Film/banditQn.html , originally published in International Examiner, Seattle, Washington

[3] Kishwar, Madhu, The Film Bandit review, Manushi, September-October 1994, no. 84, pp. 34-37
[4] Roy, Arundhati, The Great Indian Rape Trick I, August 22, 1994, http://www.sawnet.org/books/writing/roy_bq1.html
[5] Kapur, Shekhar, The Gang Rape Scene in Bandit Queen, Shekhar Kapur’s Blog, August 1, 2006, http://www.shekharkapur.com/blog/archives/my_files/bandit_queen/

[6] Ibid

[7] Roy, Arundhati, The Great Indian Rape Trick II, September 3, 1994, http://www.sawnet.org/books/writing/roy_bq1.html
[8] Tripathi, Purnima S., The end of Phoolan Devi, Frontline, India’s National Magazine, Vol. 18, Issue 16, August 4 – 17, 2001, http://www.flonnet.com/fl1816/18161180.htm
[9] Aujla, Angela, Caste as woman: izzat and larai in Northern India, The Peak, Simon Frasier University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Volume 96, Issue 9, June 30, 1197, http://www.rediff.com/search/2001/Jul/25ter2.htm
[10] Kishwar, Madhu, The Film Bandit review, Manushi, September-October 1994, no. 84, pp. 34-37

References

Bruno, Anthony, Phoolan Devi – the Bandit Queen of India, The Crime Library, http://www.crimelibrary.com/gangsters_outlaws/cops_others/phoolan_devi/index.html

Fullilove, R. W., The Ballad of the Bandit Queen, composed September 30, 2001

Kapur, Shekhar, The Gang Rape Scene in Bandit Queen, Shekhar Kapur’s Blog, August 1, 2006, http://www.shekharkapur.com/blog/archives/my_films/bandit_queen/

Kishwar, Madhu, The Film Bandit review, Manushi, September-October 1994, no. 84, pp. 34-37

Laly, Amy, Bandit Queen Film Review, Planet Bollywood, http://www.planetbollywood.com/Film/banditQn.html , originally published in International Examiner, Seattle, Washington

McAlister, Linda Lopez, Bandit Queen, a film review on "The Women's Show"
WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL, July 22, 1995

Pinch, William R., The Bandit Queen, The American Historical Review, Vol. 101, No. 4 (Oct., 1996), pp. 1149-1150

Roy, Arundhati, The Great Indian Rape Trick I, August 22, 1994, http://www.sawnet.org/books/writing/roy_bq1.html

Roy, Arundhati, The Great Indian Rape Trick II, September 3, 1994, http://www.sawnet.org/books/writing/roy_bq2.html