Monday Musings: Phoolan Devi again

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By Amitabh Srivastava, Edited by Adam Rizvi, The India Observer, TIO: When Coincidences Bridge Stories: Arundhati Roy, Bandit Queen, and Memory

It was one of those coincidences that catch you off guard — although, by definition, coincidences are rare.

I’ve been racing through Arundhati Roy’s new book Mother Mary Comes to Me. Some friends advised me to go slow, but I prefer to form my own judgments — even about controversial figures. Roy, of course, is not one of them, though her critics often believe otherwise.

Yesterday, I reached the section where she recounts how she, along with noted lawyer Indira Jaising, attempted to halt the release of Bandit Queen in the Supreme Court. The 1994 film by Shekhar Kapur — based on the life of Phoolan Devi — was, according to Roy, a violation of a woman’s trauma, commercializing her suffering. She articulated her objections in her now-famous essays The Great Indian Rape-Trick, published in Outlook and Frontline.

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By then, Roy had already won the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things. Her words carried weight — enough to unsettle governments. She even spent a day in jail for challenging state narratives. But that is another story.

This morning, almost as if on cue, I opened The Indian Express to find a retrospective on Bandit Queen: its three National Awards, its Cannes acclaim, and how it launched the careers of Manoj Bajpayee, Saurabh Shukla and cemented Shekhar Kapur’s international status. And, of course, Seema Biswas — the National School of Drama actor who embodied Phoolan Devi with unforgettable intensity and agreed to that now-infamous full-frontal scene.

I was a film critic then. I remember taking my wife to see the film during the India International Film Festival at Delhi’s Regal Cinema — tickets courtesy Sidheshwar Dayal, the hall’s owner, now long gone into history. Within five minutes, the barrage of abuses on screen was enough to make us instinctively glance toward the exit. But it was an assignment; we stayed, watching the brutality inflicted on Phoolan — and her brutal retribution.

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Even then, my feelings were conflicted. The atrocities she endured were undeniable. Yet, the commodification of her pain — the selling of rights, the deals allegedly negotiated by her partner Umed Singh, the lucrative biography that followed — felt troubling. She was released from prison on health grounds, a suspected cancer diagnosis that vanished from the narrative once she reentered public life.

What stung journalists in Delhi even more was what came next: Phoolan Devi, once a feared bandit, emerged as a Lok Sabha MP from the Samajwadi Party, with a sprawling government bungalow near Parliament. We wondered: was this the democracy imagined by our founding leaders — where someone with blood on their hands shared the stage with ministers while we reporters dutifully took notes?

Then came her assassination — shot outside her official residence in 2001. Sher Singh Rana, a young man from Uttarakhand, claimed responsibility in the name of caste revenge. At the time, I was reporting for Hindustan Times in Dehradun and remember the tense days that followed.

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Rana evaded police, planned a dramatic surrender at the Dehradun Press Club, and was stopped only because an Aaj Tak reporter tipped off the DGP. Jail couldn’t contain him for long either — his escape reminiscent of Charles Sobhraj’s. Rana later went on to write his own narrative, portraying himself as an avenger, even traveling through Pakistan and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to collect soil to build a temple for Prithviraj Chauhan.

After revisiting both Roy’s account and my own memories, I still don’t know where to firmly place my sympathies. Phoolan Devi’s life remains a tangle of injustice, vengeance, survival, politics and myth-making. Arundhati Roy stands firmly in her corner. I am still searching for where I stand.

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And that’s alright.

In a democracy, opinions must differ. Otherwise, we are only echoing each other — not thinking.

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Curated by Humra Kidwai

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