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Located at the intersection of gender and caste oppression, women in rural India have for centuries generated their own coping mechanisms of compromise and challenge. Phoolan Devi has come to symbolise an extreme, not necessarily of oppression but certainly of contestation. When pushed to the edge of a terrorised life, she opted to cross over into a career of terror herself as a bandit leader, avoided capture for about three years, and became a figure of legend and fantasy until her voluntary surrender, which was followed by a long prison term. The symbolism and mystique survive in the on-going myth-building despite her subsequent reincarnations as a respectable married woman and a Member of Parliament that have won her a measure of social and political acceptability.
Phoolan the person remains an enigma amid some of the enduring myths surrounding her, including her reification as an icon of subaltern agency in Shekhar Kapur's film Bandit Queen ( 1995), a story of oppression and revenge plotted neatly on the grid of gender and caste. Until recently, the average Indian's knowledge of Phoolan Devi came from her constructions in the print media over the years-that she was the product of the arid, rocky Chambal Valley which straddles the States of Uttar Pradesh (UP) in north India and Madhya Pradesh (MP) in central India, and which has historically been the cradle of dacoits or armed bandits as well as thugs; that she controlled the area with her daring exploits, murdering, looting and occasionally playing Robin Hood (all in the region's accepted tradition for bandit gangs), eluded the two State governments until she was persuaded to surrender voluntarily (again in the region's accepted tradition) in early 1983; and that she was subsequently forced to serve a long prison term. The woman behind all this publicity assumed a recognisable shape only after her release in 1994, followed by public appearances, television exposure and entry into politics.
As one of the rare women bandit leaders, Phoolan inevitably became a legend larger than life-long supposed to be an all powerful Amazonian beauty-who inspired numerous articles, two internationally known `biographies1 and at least two little noticed Hindi films. When Kapur's Bandit Queen burst on the film world in 1994, winning acclaim at the Cannes and...