17. The Child Bride Who Told Her Husband to Bugger Off, and Became an Outlaw
Phoolan Devi was born in 1963 in Utter Pradesh, India, into a lower caste family that ranked barely above the Untouchables. The lot of lower castes – especially of impoverished lower caste girls like Phoolan – was rough, as she learned all too soon. From early on, Phoolan resisted injustices. At age ten, she defied an uncle who wanted to cut a tree on her father’s tiny land plot. She organized her village’s girls to conduct a sit-in, and they resisted efforts to remove them by force. The sit-in only ended when Phoolan was knocked out unconscious with a brick.
When she turned eleven, Phoolan’s family married her to a man in his thirties, who abused her physically and in other unthinkable ways. She fled several times, but her family returned her to her husband each and every time. The marriage finally ended when Phoolan was sixteen. For a wife to leave her husband was a serious taboo in Phoolan’s neck of the woods, and she became a social outcast. Her prospects grim, the teenaged Phoolan fell in with and joined a gang of rural bandits. One of her first acts as an outlaw was to visit vengeance upon her abusive ex.
