3. A Social Outcast Turned Bandit
For a wife to leave her husband was a major taboo in Phoolan Devi’s neck of the woods. So when she ditched her abusive husband, she became a social outcast. Her prospects grim, the teenaged Phoolan fell in with and joined a gang of rural bandits. She was the only female in her outlaw outfit, and the gang’s leader decided to take advantage of her and make her his concubine. He took to assaulting her, until another bandit stepped in, killed him.
Her assailant’s killer took over the gang, and soon, he and Phoolan became lovers. Once she had established herself as a bandit in her own right, one of her first acts as an outlaw was to visit vengeance upon her abusive ex. So she swept into that unworthy’s village at the head of a group bandits, to exact payback. She dragged her ex out of his house, gutted him with a knife, and pinned a note to him, in which she warned men not to marry little girls.
