Another St. Valentine's Day Massacre
On
Phoolan Devi wearing bandit gear
She and her band of dacoits had spent the night in the nearby hamlet of Ingwi. As morning broke, Phoolan, her close lieutenant Man Singh, and Baba Mustakim, a fellow dacoit leader, planned their attack on Behmai. Most of Behmai’s population was thakurs, the land-owning caste and the second highest in the Indian system. Sri Ram was a thakur, and though he had once been allied with Phoolan and Vikram, he had always looked down upon them because they were mullahs, the fishermen’s’ caste and one of the lowest.
Though just a teenager, Phoolan Devi had been victimized by the caste system her entire life, treated as either a servant or a sex object. Because she was so outspoken in her objections to the men who oppressed her, she had been frequently beaten, bound, imprisoned, and raped. A dacoit gang had kidnapped her from her village, but she soon became one of them, showing that she could be as ruthless and bloodthirsty as any man. But unlike the other bandits who infested the northern states of
Dacoit gangs have a long history of preying on travelers and looting villages in the northern states of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, which borders on
But Phoolan Devi was unique. She was an idealist who sought to right the wrongs of society. She was also a passionate woman who had never known love or respect until she met Vikram Mallah. She swore never to rest until she avenged his murder. Now, after months of searching for Sri Lam, she had finally found him.
One of her men had learned that he was hiding out in Behmai, and she was determined to capture him there. She and the other bandit leaders decided to split their force into three units. One would take the direct path to the village and attack head-on while the other two would lie in wait on the flanks. When the villagers fled from the frontal attack, the flanking units would intercept them and isolate the Ram brothers. Sri Ram, after all, would not be hard to spot, Phoolan reasoned. He had distinctive red hair, a red beard, and bloodshot red eyes. To her he was the devil incarnate.
The Neem Tree
Phoolan Devi's father Devidin
A Neem tree
Phoolan's cousin Mayadin
While Phoolan’s parents were away for a night, Mayadin sent a crew of workers to cut down Devidin’s prized Neem tree and sell the wood, taking the proceeds for himself. When Devidin returned to find his tree gone, he did not protest. After living so many years under his brother’s subjugation, he knew the futility of trying to fight back. Phoolan was stunned and appalled by her father’s passivity.
In Indian society, a woman would never dare challenge a man, no matter how offensive his behavior, but Phoolan Devi was fearless, headstrong, and provocative. Though only ten years old, she already had a reputation for promiscuity and was known to bathe naked in the river in broad daylight, unconcerned with who might be watching. She confronted her cousin and demanded that he compensate her father for the Neem tree. He tried to ignore her, but she taunted him in public, called him a thief, and staged a sit-in on his land with her older sister. Mayadin finally lost his patience and struck the impertinent girl with a brick, knocking her out cold.
The beating did not silence her. She continued to harangue Mayadin, demanding justice. To get rid of the little nuisance, Mayadin arranged to have her married to a man named Putti Lal who lived several hundred miles away. Putti Lal was in his thirties; Phoolan was eleven. Her reputation for promiscuity was totally unfounded, and after she was married, she had no idea what was expected of a wife. Fearing his “snake,” as she called his penis, she refused to have sex with him. Since he already had another wife, he accepted Phoolan’s refusal and relegated her to household labor. She was so miserable she ran away from her husband’s house and walked home. When she arrived in her village, her family was horrified. A wife simply did not abandon her husband, they believed. It was unheard of. Phoolan’s mother, Moola, was so ashamed, she told her daughter to go to the well and jump in to kill herself. Phoolan was so confused and distraught she contemplated it.
In time, Phoolan recovered her sense of self and rejected her family’s condemnations. She continued to challenge Mayadin, taking him to court for unlawfully holding land that should have been her father’s. In court she seldom contained her emotions, and her dramatic outbursts often left the courtroom stunned.
In 1979 Mayadin accused Phoolan of stealing from his house. She denied the accusation, but the police arrested her anyway. While in custody, she was beaten and raped repeatedly, then left to rot in a rat-infested cell. She knew that her cousin was behind this injustice. The experience broke her body but ignited her hatred for men who routinely denigrated women.
In July of that year a gang of dacoits led by a notorious bandit leader named Babu Gujar set up camp outside Phoolan’s village. The people of the village naturally feared for their lives and their property. Babu Gujar was apparently told of Phoolan Devi’s stubborn impertinence because he sent her a letter in which he threatened to kidnap her or cut off her nose, a traditional punishment for women who got out of line.
What happened next is the matter of some debate. Phoolan herself has given conflicting accounts of the event. The dacoits took her from her village and brought her into the rugged ravines. As Mary Anne Weaver writes in her article “
Tall and unusually thin with a pale complexion and long black hair, Vikram Mallah admired Phoolan since he first set eyes on her. In her autobiography she recounts her feelings about her rescuer: “I felt strange—happy but still frightened. A man had touched me softly, he had stroked my hair and touched my cheeks... I felt I could trust him, something I had never felt about a stranger or a man before. Gradually I stopped sobbing, and my tears dried. If I stayed with him, perhaps I would be happy: no more beatings, no more pain, no more humiliation.”
Bonnie & Clyde
Back from Heaven
Vikram was Phoolan’s mentor in the ways of the dacoits. She learned how to use a rifle and started carrying one wherever she went. She dressed in the khaki, pseudo-police uniform that the bandits favored, and for once in her life, her bold and fearless behavior was valued as Vikram showed her how to kill, steal, and kidnap for profit. Traveling an 8,000 square-mile area of jungles, ravines, and sandy ridges, their gang raided upper-caste villages and looted trains and bus convoys.
Statue of the goddess Durga
Their life together was a romantic dream filled with adventure, derring-do and tender intimacy, not unlike the extravagant, popular, Indian films Phoolan came to love. Vikram took her to her first movie, and she instantly became enraptured with the spectacle and splendor—as well as the bombast—of “Bollywood” cinema. Vikram bought her a cassette recorder, and she cherished listening to the soundtracks from her favorite films.
But like Bonnie and
Vikram’s “guru” in crime was Sri Ram, an older bandit who had run with Babu Gujar until his arrest. Vikram had spent time in prison with Sri Ram and was an eager pupil. Vikram’s sentence was shorter than Sri Ram’s, so when he got out, he scraped together 80,000 rupees to bail out Sri and his brother Lala Ram. After Sri was released, Vikram invited him to join his gang, telling his men that Sri would now be their leader. But many of Vikram’s bandits were leery of the change in administration. Sri Ram was a high-caste thakur while most of them were from lower castes. Suspicion and mistrust were inevitable, and Phoolan shared these feelings. Though the gang stayed together, they split into two factions: Vikram’s men and Sri Ram’s men.
Some time after Sri Ram’s return, Phoolan and Vikram were invited to a wedding in a remote village. The poor frequently invited them to wedding ceremonies, and Phoolan would often give money to impoverished parents who did not have proper dowries. On this occasion, Phoolan, Vikram, and their men were preparing to hike to the village. At the last minute the Ram brothers and their men decided to join them. They set off after dark, marching by torch light.
Along the way they stopped at the edge of field where a man was selling melons. As Vikram was taking his first bite of melon, Phoolan heard two gunshots nearby. She looked to Vikram, but he had dropped his melon and had collapsed to the ground. He had been shot twice in the back. Phoolan suddenly realized that Sri Ram was not with the pack. He had fallen back and was still in the field. Though she didn’t actually see it, Phoolan had no doubt that he was the one who had shot her lover.
She ran to Vikram. “There was blood bubbling out of his back, his clothes were burnt, and there was a stink of sulfur,” Phoolan says in her autobiography. But despite the severity of his wounds, Vikram never lost consciousness. Phoolan tied a cloth around his torso to staunch the bleeding. He was taken to a doctor who, after examining him, declared that it would be too risky to remove a bullet which had lodged next to his spine. The doctor did what he could, but he doubted that Vikram would survive. Rumors spread through the region that Vikram had already died, and for the moment police efforts to locate him were suspended.
After a period of recovery, Vikram defied the doctor’s prognosis and was able to get out of bed and walk. With Phoolan by his side, he slipped back into the jungle and returned to his gang. Oddly, despite Phoolan’s firm but unproven belief that Sri Ram had fired the shots, Vikram would not sever ties with the old bandit because Sri Ram still owed Vikram money for bailing him out of prison. Though weak and in pain, Vikram was now determined to get back to business. He had a rubber stamp made that proclaimed, “PHOOLAN AND VIKRAM ARE BACK FROM HEAVEN”, and he stamped it on the doors of the wealthy “like a curse.”
The gang picked up where it left off, raiding and looting through the
Sometime later Phoolan was roused from a deep sleep by the “deafening explosion” of gunfire. “My head was spinning as though I had been drugged,” she wrote of the incident. She reached for her gun, but she was groggy and lethargic. Vikram whispered to her, “Phoolan. It’s him. The bastard shot me...”
She looked up and saw the shadowy figure of Sri Ram holding a gun. Phoolan was confused and disoriented. She smelled something that made her nauseous. Then she realized what it was, chloroform, which the gang kept on hand for kidnappings. She later learned that Sri Ram and his men had chloroformed Vikram and his contingent to prevent retaliation.
Sri Ram and two of his men picked her up and hauled her out of the tent. She tried to fight back as best she could, but Sri Ram clubbed her with his rifle butt, knocking her to the ground. She was stripped naked and tied up. They carried her to the river and tossed her into a rowboat. As the boat pushed off the shore, she could see Sri Ram’s face looming over her.
“Why didn’t you kill me, too?” she asked
“Oh, you can still be a great deal of use,” he said with a smirk.
She could hear the oars cutting through the water and feel the rain on her body. She tried to fight the effects of the chloroform, but she couldn’t make sense of what was happening to her. Where are they taking me? she wondered. What is the red-eyed devil going to do to me?
"They Passed Me from Man to Man."
Phoolan Devi's I, Phoolan Devi
They beat her and cursed her. In the days that followed, Sri Ram took her to other villages, Phoolan couldn’t remember how many. “I was paraded in front of the villagers. Each time, Sri Ram called me a mallah whore. He said I was the one who killed Vikram and, hurling me to the ground, told the villagers to use me as they pleased.”
Phoolan Devi after three weeks of torture
That night an old Brahmin came to her rescue, quietly releasing her from the shed where she was kept and sneaking her out of Behmai in a bullock cart. He took her to the jungle where she wandered until she was found by a shepherd woman who nursed her back to health. But her hatred for the Ram brothers, especially Sri Ram, was the one wound that would not heal. When she was well enough to travel, Phoolan began to plot her revenge.
Eventually she joined a gang of dacoits made up of men from the gadariya caste, but she wasn’t interested in working for another master. She stayed only long enough to kidnap two wealthy merchants and earn 50,000 rupees in ransom. She wanted to start her own gang.
Another dacoit leader, a Muslim named Baba Mustakim, offered to help her when he heard of the indignities she suffered at the hand of Sri Ram. Mustakim offered to give her ten of his own men to start her gang, and she could pick whomever she wanted. Man Singh was one of the men she selected even though she initially found his appearance “frightening.” He was tall and bearded, and he wore his black hair to his shoulders. “Deep lines ran across his heavy brow; he had a penetrating gaze and the nose of an eagle,” she recalls in her autobiography. He was the most experienced bandit in Baba Mustakim’s gang, and so he became Phoolan’s lieutenant (and later her lover). Man Singh gave her the red cloth to tie around her head to symbolize her quest for revenge. With a formidable gang behind her, the hunt for Sri and Lala Ram began in earnest.
Phoolan Devi, the self-anointed Queen of the Dacoits, led raids throughout Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh where she was also the self-appointed avenger for women’s rights. Whenever she heard of a rape, a forced abortion, or the coerced suicide of a disgraced woman, Phoolan took it upon herself to punish the men responsible. “Whenever I heard of it, I crushed the serpent they used to torture women. I dismembered them.” She tracked down a particularly lecherous old thakur who tortured women and had sex with young boys and animals. “His serpent first, then his hands, then his feet... I cut them off.” Her gang was “sickened” by her blood lust, but her act of retribution was performed before a picture of the goddess Durga, and Phoolan Devi felt thoroughly justified doing it.
As the gang terrorized village after village, Phoolan’s focus remained on the Ram brothers. She interrogated villagers, desperate for any information that would lead her to Sri and Lala. On several occasions these leads brought her close, but every time she thought she had them cornered, they managed to slip away. Finally, she received information that Sri Ram and his gang were hiding in Behmai, the thakur village where she had been treated like a dog. She led her gang to the outskirts of Ingwi, a nearby village, and set up camp. She was eager for revenge, but she was also determined not to let her targets get away again. This time she would be patient and come up with a foolproof plan.
The plan she and her gang came up with—a frontal attack by one third of their force with two flanking groups waiting for anyone who tried to flee—did not yield the results Phoolan had hoped for. Thakur villagers did flee from the attack, but the Ram brothers were not among them. The flanking forces converged on the village and searched everywhere for their targets, but the Ram brothers couldn’t be found. Phoolan was losing her patience. She grabbed a bullhorn and made a declaration from the town square. As reported by Mary Anne Weaver, the bandit queen shouted, “...I know that Lala Ram and Sri Ram are hiding in this village. If you don’t hand them over to me, I will stick my gun into your butts and tear them apart. This is Phoolan Devi speaking. Victory to Durga the Mother Goddess.”
Her men ransacked the village as she waited by the well where she was forced to fetch water for Sri Ram. After an hour her men returned and reported that the Ram brothers were not there. Phoolan refused to believe that they had slipped away. She was convinced that the villagers were hiding them. She ordered her bandits to round up all the young thakur men and bring them to the town square. The bandits lined up the thakurs, and Phoolan dressed them down, threatening to “roast” them alive if they did not tell her the truth. She punctuated her threats with blows to the men’s groins with the butt of her rifle. The thakurs pleaded their ignorance, but this only enraged Phoolan more. She ordered her men to march the thakurs to the river where they were forced to kneel on the banks. Gunfire from multiple weapons shattered the air. Bodies keeled over and fell lifeless into the mud. When the shooting stopped, 22 of the 30 young men were dead.
The Bandit Queen Surrenders
The massacre at Behmai was the most heinous crime ever committed by a dacoit gang in the history of modernPhoolan and her gang went into hiding, but when she learned that the authorities had arrested and imprisoned her parents—in effect holding them hostage—she decided to negotiate for her surrender. Over a period of nearly a year, she haggled over the terms of her surrender with Rajendra Chaturvedi, the police superintendent of the district of Bhind. With the cunning of a criminal defense attorney, she hammered out a deal that guaranteed that she and her gang would surrender in Madhya Pradesh and would never be extradited to Uttar Pradesh where Behmai was located. Her other demands included that she would be tried for all of her crimes at once and in Madhya Pradesh; that she and her gang would not be handcuffed; that if convicted, they would not be hanged; that they would spend no more than eight years in prison; and that the prison would be an “A-class jail.” She also wanted portraits of Durga and Ghandi displayed when she surrendered. Furthermore, she insisted that the authorities force her cousin Mayadin to give back the land he had taken from her father; that they resettle her parents in Madhya Pradesh on government land; and that they guarantee a government job for her little brother. The government agreed to it all.
On a February evening in 1983, almost two years to the day from the massacre at Behmai, Phoolan Devi emerged from the ravines with her gang and finally turned herself in. It was a spectacle worthy of a movie. A crowd of 8,000 cheered for their Robin Hood, the Bandit Queen of
Phoolan Devi in her bandits garb at her surrender
Phoolan Devi in jail after her surrender
Phoolan Devi after her release
Phoolan Devi with husband Ummed Singh
As for Sri Ram, the red devil whose merciless torture of Phoolan had caused the massacre of the thakurs at Behmai, Phoolan had the satisfaction of receiving a note before her surrender from Lala Ram, Sri’s brother. Lala had informed her that her archenemy was dead. Lala himself had killed Sri in a dispute over a woman.
Photo Gallery
Phoolan often wore a military-style khaki jacket, denim jeans, and zippered boots. Her dark, straight hair was cut short, ending at her neck. A wide red bandana-the symbol of vengeance- was tied around her head, covering her hairline and brows. She carried a Sten rifle and a bandolier across her chest.
Phoolan Devi's father, Devidin, worked as a sharecropper and was considered cursed for having had four daughters.
In her autobiography, I, Phoolan Devi, she recalls that the Neem tree's trunk was so large, she and two of her sisters together could barely encircle it with their arms. The valuable timber that could be derived from the tree was, in effect, the family's nest egg. Phoolan came to love that tree for its beauty and majesty and would often rest under its shade.
After his father's (Phoolan's Uncle) funeral, Mayadin went to his uncle Devidin and told him that he was now the elder of the family and would be accorded all the respect that position deserved.
Vikram took over as leader of the dacoit gang which had kidnapped Phoolan, and he and Phoolan became lovers. It wasn't long before Vikram and Phoolan were as notorious as Bonnie and Clyde.
Phoolan Devi was motivated by the spirit of the goddess Durga, and before and after every raid she would find a temple and pray to Durga for strength and success.
After Sri Ram murdered Vikram he, and other villagers beat and tortured Phoolan Devi for over three weeks until she was rescued by an old Brahmin man.
When Phoolan Devi surrendered she was wearing a khaki uniform and a red shawl. A wide red bandana was tied around her head, covering her brows. She carried a .315 Mauser rifle on her shoulder, a curved dagger in her belt, a full bandolier across her chest, and a small silver statue of the goddess Durga in her breast pocket.
Ultimately the authorities disregarded the terms of the surrender agreement, and Phoolan Devi spent more than eleven years in prison without trial, more than any of her gang members.
After her release from prison in February 1994. Heavier and rounder than she had been when she was known as the Bandit Beauty, Phoolan Devi announced that she would run for a seat in the Indian Parliament's lower house, promising to be a strong voice for women and for the poor.
Police were suspicious of Sher Singh Rana's (he admitted to the murder of Phoolan Devi) connections to Phoolan's last husband, Ummed Singh, who was reportedly upset with Phoolan's threats to cut him out of her will.
Munni Devi, Phoolan Devi's sister
Bibliography
Burns, John F. “Bandit Queen Returns, as Angel of the Oppressed.” New York Times,Burns, John F. “
Devi, Phoolan. I, Phoolan Devi.
McCord, Andy. “The Bandit Queen Runs.” The Nation,
Sahay, Tara Shankar. “Dacoit-Turned-MP Phoolan Devi Shot Dead in
Sen, Mala.
Tripathi, Purnima S. “The End of Phoolan Devi.” Frontline,
Weaver, Mary Anne. “
