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.
After she took care of her ex, Phoolan Devi became known as more than just a dangerous outlaw. She earned a reputation as a Robin-Hoodesque figure, who robbed from the upper castes and shared her loot with the impoverished. That phase of her life ended when an internal gang struggle ended with the murder of her lover, and his replacement as gang leader by two upper caste brothers. They seized Phoolan and imprisoned her in their out-of-the-way home village, Behmai. There, she was assaulted by many men, and was subjected to sundry humiliations such as being paraded naked around the village.
She eventually fled, but vowed to come back and pay her tormentors back, with interest. She formed a new bandit crew, this one exclusively of lower castes like her. On the evening of February 14th, 1981, several months after her escape, Phoolan returned to Behmai at the head of her gang. She demanded that the villagers produce the brothers who had imprisoned her, but they could not be found. So she demonstrated just how terrible a mistake the villagers had made to mess with such a dangerous woman, with an epic vengeance that rocked India.
Phoolan Devi lined up about two dozen of the village of Behmai’s young men, whose numbers included some who had assaulted her, and ordered them killed. What came to be known as the Behmai Massacre rocked India. A massive manhunt was ordered, but Phoolan evaded her pursuers, helped by the region’s poor, who saw her as a heroine. Two years after the massacre, tired of life on the run, Phoolan negotiated a surrender for herself and the remnants of her gang.
After her release from prison, Phoolan Devi went into politics and became a women’s rights activist. India Times
As more than 10,000 people watched, she and her followers laid down their rifles, and were taken into custody. A villain to some, a heroine to others, Phoolan was kept in pretrial detention for eleven years, until the charges were finally dismissed and she was released in 1994. She became a women’s rights activist, and in 1995, one year after her release, she was elected to India’s parliament. Her eventful life was cut short in 2001, when a man who sought vengeance for the upper caste men killed by Phoolan assassinated her as she exited her Delhi home.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
