The Bandit Queen of India; An Indian Woman's Amazing Journey from Peasant to International Legend

by Phoolan Devi with Marie-Therese Cuny and Paul Rambali

• ISBN13: 9781592286416
• ISBN10: 1592286410
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2006-08-01
• Publisher: Lyons Press

Summary

She was born in India to the lowest caste, a group with few rights and even fewer prospects. Enduring cruel poverty, Phoolan Devi survived the humiliation of an abusive marriage, the savage killing of her bandit-lover, and horrifying gang rape to claim retribution for herself and all low-caste women of the Indian plains. In a three-year campaign that rocked the government, she delivered justice to rape victims and stole from the rich to give to the poor, before negotiating surrender on her own terms. Throughout her years of imprisonment without trial, Phoolan Devi remained a beacon of hope for the poor and the downtrodden. In 1996, amidst both popular support and media controversy, she was elected to the Parliament. On July 25, 2001, Phoolan Devi was shot dead in Delhi. The identity of her killers is unknown, but it is thought that they may include relatives of villagers killed by her gang nearly twenty years ago. For over a decade millions have found the power and scope of Phoolan Devi's myth irresistible. Here is the story of her life through her eyes and in her own voice.

Author Biography

Marie-Therese Cuny has written or co-written over fifty books. She lives in Paris.

Paul Rambali is a Paris-based British journalist. He makes documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4, and Canal Plus. He is the author of It's All True: In the Cities and Jungles of Brazil.

Excerpts

(from the Introduction by Paul Rambali... a synopsis of how she came to be the Bandit Queen):

"She was made to suffer a series of terrifying ordeals as a result of a dispute between her father and her uncle over a meager scrap of land, a heritage that meant the difference between dignified survival and pitiful serfdom. With a child's keen sense of fairness, Phoolan cried to see her father wronged, but her tears invoked only contempt and this in turn fired her rage. Instead of meekly going to the well with the other girls, she pleaded before the village elders; she grew into a nuisance, a troublemaker said her uncle. To get her out of the way, he had her married off soon after her eleventh birthday, a common enough fate for pre-adolescent girls in rural India. But Phoolan was not meek like them; she fled her husband--a fat, middle-aged man who kept his child-bride in a dark hut--and returned to her village, only to be treated as a pariah, a loose woman. Her anger wouldn't abate, and her protests at the shame the village heaped upon her became increasingly irksome to the villagers. Finally, her uncle paid to have her abducted by a gang of local bandits to dispose of as they pleased. She was only saved from death when one of the members of the gang fell in love with her."

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Excerpted from The Bandit Queen of India: An Indian Woman's Amazing Journey from Peasant to International Legend by Phoolan Devi
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