4. India’s Dangerous Bandit Queen
Famous – or infamous, depending on whether viewed from the perspective of admirers or detractors – Indian bandit queen 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 no bed of roses, as she learned all too soon. She did not simply accept it, however, and from early on, Phoolan gained a reputation for her willingness to stand up to oppressors and resist injustice.
When she was ten-years-old, Phoolan defied an uncle who wanted to cut a tree on her father’s tiny land plot, and organized her village’s girls to conduct a sit-in. They resisted efforts to remove them by force, and their sit-in only ended when Phoolan was knocked out unconscious with a brick. At age eleven, Phoolan’s family married her to a man in his thirties, who abused her physically and sexually. She fled several times, but her family kept returning her to her husband until the marriage finally ended when Phoolan was sixteen.
