The press is fascinated by her boldness, by the way she disguises herself as a policeman, by her practice of befriending young girls and interrupting the weddings of children.īut her life is not a fairy tale, and after Vikram is killed by jealous upper-caste bandits, her existence becomes increasingly desperate. (One of the phrases that keeps being repeated is, "She's a woman - and low caste.") Soon the leader of the area's gangs allows her to run a gang of her own. As a bandit, she takes her place beside men in a society that refuses to believe a woman is capable of such a thing. Vikram accepts her behavior because he understands it.Īnd then comes the part of her life that made Phoolan Devi famous. She has been hurt for so long by men that, although she wants to kiss and hold him, she keeps tearing away to strike at him. "Even women." Their first "love scene" (if that is the right term) is extraordinary in its sadness. "I don't buy people to win their respect," he says. Finally divorced, she has less status than ever before, is framed for a robbery, and her bail is offered by upper-caste men who expect sexual favors as their reward.ĭevi is by now in her later teens or early 20s, and is played by Seema Biswas as a woman of violent rages and deep wounds.īy the time she is kidnapped by a gang of bandits, she has already become such an outsider that this is a move up in society - especially when she is befriended by Vikram ( Nirmal Pandey), the only man in the gang (or in the movie) who treats her with respect. When she flees back to her parents, they will not take her, because her "place" is with her husband.
Devi is forced into sex by her 33-year-old husband while still a child, as her mother-in-law listens in the next room. (Caste is sometimes a matter of small privileges everyone in the village draws water from the same well, but the higher castes have a pulley that makes it easier.) Practices that are crimes in much of the world are accepted practices, apparently, in this area. Torn weeping from her mother's arms, she was used by her husband as a beast of burden, and taunted by the higher castes of the village where she now lived. One of six children from a poor family, she was married at the age of 11, to a man who gave her parents a cow, and threw in a bicycle.
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