The angry little girl accompanied by a frightened older sister marches into her uncle’s hora field where the two of them hang around with a combative air, munching hora nuts and plucking flowers (combatively). Their cousin Maiyadeen, a young man in his twenties, orders the children off his premises. Phoolan refuses to move. Instead this remarkable child taunts him and questions his claim to the land. She was special. She is beaten unconscious with a brick.
Phoolan Devi’s first war, like almost every dacoit’s first war, was fought for territory. It was the classic beginning of the journey into dacoitdom. But does it have rape in it? Nope. Caste violence? Nope. So is it worth including in the film? Nope.
According to the book, her second protest, too, has to do with territory. And it is this (not the sexual harassment by the village louts, though that happens, too) that lands Phoolan Devi in jail and enters her name in the police records. Maiyadeen, the book says, was enraged because the property dispute (thanks to Phoolan’s pleas to the village panchayat) had been reopened and transferred to the Allahabad High Court. As revenge he destroys Devideen’s (Phoolan’s father) crop and is in the process of hacking down their Neem tree when Phoolan intervenes and throws a stone at him. She is attacked, trussed up, and handed to the police. Soon after she’s released on bail, she is kidnapped by dacoits. This too, according to Phoolan’s version (up to this point, there is no other version), is engineered by Maiyadeen as a ruse to get her out of his hair. Maiyadeen does not figure in the film.
Already some pretty big decisions have been made. What stays, what goes. What is highlighted, what isn’t. Life is Rape. The rest is just details.
We then see Phoolan in the ravines, being repeatedly raped by Babu Singh Gujar, the Thakur leader of the gang she has been kidnapped by. Vikram Mallah, the second-in-command, is disgusted by his behavior and puts a bullet through him. According to the book, the killing happens as a drunken Babu Gujar is threatening to assault Phoolan. In the film he’s actually at it, lying on top of her, his naked bottom jerking. As he breathes his last, Phoolan blinks the blood out of her eyes and looks long into the eyes of her redeemer. Just so that we get the point.
After this we are treated to a sequence of After-rape romance. The touching bits about the first stirrings of sexual desire in a much-raped woman. The way it works in the film is If-you-touch-me-I’ll-slap-you-but-I-really-do-want-to-touch-you.
It’s choreographed like a dusty dance in which they rub against each other, but whenever he touches her she swats his hand away, but nevertheless quivers with desire. It is such a crude, obvious, doltish depiction of conflict in a woman who is attracted to a man but associates sex with humiliation. It’s not in the book, so I’m not sure whose version Shekhar has used. From the looks of it, probably Donald Duck’s.
Vikram Mallah and Phoolan Devi become lovers. While the book and the film agree that he was her one true love, the book does not suggest that he was her only lover.
The film does. She has to be portrayed as a One-Man Woman. Otherwise who’s going to pity her? So it’s virtue or bust. One lover (a distant cousin) is eliminated completely. The other (Man Singh) is portrayed as what used to be known in college as a Rakhi-brother.
From all accounts, Vikram Mallah seems to have been the midwife of Phoolan’s birth into dacoitdom. He supervises her first act of retribution against her husband Puttilal. The film shows him bound and gagged, being beaten by Phoolan Devi with the butt of her gun, whimpering and crying with remembered rage.
At having been raped. In the Retribution bits, she is allowed a little latitude. Otherwise, (as we shall see) none at all.
But there’s a sly omission here. According to the book, according to Phoolan Devi herself, there were two victims that day. Not one.
The second one was a woman. Vidya, Puttilal’s second wife.
The film hasn’t told us about a second experience Phoolan has with Puttilal. The time that Maiyadeen forced her to return to Puttilal. Phoolan arrived at her husband’s house to find that he had taken a second wife. Vidya harassed and humiliated Phoolan and eventually forced Puttilal to send her away. Her humiliation at Vidya’s hands is more recent in Phoolan’s memory. Phoolan, in her written version, says she wanted to kill them both and leave a note saying that this will be the fate of any man who takes two wives. Later she changed her mind and decided to leave them alive to tell the tale. She beat them both. And broke Puttilal’s hands and legs.
But what nice woman would do that? Beat up another woman? How would you feel sorry for someone like that?
So, in the film, Vidya is dumped.
Phoolan’s affair with Vikram Mallah ends tragically when he is shot. She is captured by his Thakur killers, gagged, bound, and transported to Behmai. The stage is set for what has come to be referred to as the “centerpiece” of the film. The gang rape. It is the scene by which the film is judged. Not surprisingly, Phoolan herself is reticent about what happened. All she says is “Un logo ne mujhse bahut mazaak ki” (Those people behaved badly with me). She mentions being beaten, humiliated, and paraded from village to village. She mentions another woman dacoit, Kusuma, who disliked her and taunted and abused her. (Of course, there’s no sign of her in the film. It would only serve to confuse the Woman-as-victim moral arithmetic.)
Since Phoolan isn’t forthcoming, it is the vivid (vicarious) account in Esquire by an American journalist, Jon Bradshaw, that has been enlisted to structure this scene.
Phoolan screamed, striking out at him, but he was too strong. Holding her down, the stranger raped her. They came in one by one after that. Tall, silent Thakur men—and raped her until Phoolan lost consciousness. For the next three weeks Phoolan was raped several times a night, and she submitted silently turning her face to the wall… she lost all sense of time… a loud voice summoned her outside. Sri Ram ordered Phoolan to fetch water from the well. When she refused, he ripped off her clothes and kicked her savagely… at last she limped to the well while her tormentors laughed and spat at her. The naked girl was dragged back to the hut and raped again.
Whatever Shekhar Kapur’s other failings are, never let it be said that he wasn’t a trier. He did his bit, too. He locked himself up in a room—the door opening and closing as one man after another strode in—imagining himself being sodomized!!! After this feat of intersexual empathy, he arrives at some radical, definitive conclusions. “There is no pain in a gang-rape, no physical pain after a while,” he assures us. “It is about something as dirty as the abject humiliation of a human being and the complete domination of its soul.”
Thanks, baby. I would never have guessed.
It’s hard to match the self-righteousness of a filmmaker with a cause. Harder when the filmmaker is a man and the cause is rape. And when it’s the gang-rape of a low-caste woman by high-caste men … Don’t even try it. Go with the feeling.
We see a lot of Phoolan’s face, in tight close-up, contorted into a grimace of fear and pain as she is raped and mauled and buggered. The overwhelming consensus in the press has been that the rape was brilliantly staged and chilling.
That it wasn’t exploitative. Now what does that mean? Should we be grateful to Shekhar Kapur for not showing us the condition of her breasts and genitals? Or theirs? That he leaves so much to our imagination? That he gave us a tasteful rape? But I thought the whole point of this wonderful film was its no-holds-barred brutality? So why stop now? Why the sudden coyness? I’ll tell you why. Because it’s all about regulating the Rape-meter. Adjusting it enough to make us a little green-at-the-gills. Skip dinner, perhaps. But not miss work.
It’s us, We-the-Audience, stuck in our voyeuristic middle-class lives who really make the decisions about how much or how little rape/violence we can take/will applaud, and therefore, are given. It isn’t about the story. (There are ways and ways of telling a story.) It isn’t about the Truth. (There are ways around that too. Right?) It isn’t about what Really Happened. It’s none of that high falutin’ stuff. It’s good old Us. We ma
ke the decisions about how much we would like to see. And when the mixture’s right, it thrills us. And we purr with approbation.
It’s a class thing. If the controls are turned up too high, the hordes will get excited and arrive. To watch the centerpiece. They might even whistle. They won’t bother to cloak their eagerness in concern like we do. This way, it’s fine, it’s just Us and our Imagination. But hey, I have news for you—the hordes have heard and are on their way. They’ll even pay to watch. It’ll make money, the centerpiece. It’s hot stuff.
How does one grade film-rapes on a scale from Exploitative to Nonexploitative? Does it depend on how much skin we see? Or is it a more complex formula that juggles exposed skin, genitalia, and bare breasts? Exploitative, I’d say, is when the whole point of the exercise is to stand on high moral ground and inform us (as if we didn’t know) that rape is about abject humiliation. And, as in the case of this film, when it exploits exploitation. Phoolan has said that she thinks they’re no better than the men who raped her.
And they’ve done it without dirtying their hands. What was that again? The complete domination of the soul? I guess you don’t need hands to hold souls down.
After the centerpiece, the film rushes through to its conclusion. Phoolan manages to escape from her captors and arrives at a cousin’s house, where she recuperates and then eventually teams up with Man Singh who later becomes her lover (though of course the film won’t admit it). On one foray into a village with her new gang (one of the only times we see her indulging in some non-rape-related banditry), we see her wandering through a village in a daze, with flaring nostrils, while the men loot and plunder. She isn’t even scared when the police arrive. Before she leaves she smashes a glass case, picks out a pair of silver anklets, and gives it to a little girl. Sweet.
When Phoolan and her gang arrive in Behmai for the denouement, everybody flees indoors except for a baby that is for some reason left by the well. The gang fans out and gathers the Thakurs who have been marked for death. Suddenly the color seeps out of the film and everything becomes bleached and dream sequency. It all turns very conceptual. No brutal close-ups. No bestiality.
A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. The twenty-two men are shot. The baby wallows around in rivers of blood. Then color leaches back into the film.
And with that, according to the film, she’s more or less through with her business. The film certainly is more or less through with her. Because there’s no more rape. No more retribution.
According to the book, it is really only after the Behmai massacre that Phoolan Devi grows to fit her legend. There’s a price on her head, people are baying for her blood, the gang splinters. Many of them are shot by the police. Ministers and chief ministers are in a flap. The police are in a panic. Dacoits are being shot down in fake encounters and their bodies are publicly displayed like game. Phoolan is hunted like an animal. But ironically, it is now, for the first time, that she is in control of her life. She becomes a leader of men. Man Singh becomes her lover, but on her terms. She makes decisions. She confounds the police. She evades every trap they set for her. She plays daring little games with them. She undermines the credibility of the entire Uttar Pradesh police force. And all this time, the police don’t even know what she really looks like. Even when the famous Malkhan Singh surrenders, Phoolan doesn’t.
This goes on for two whole years. When she finally does decide to surrender, it is after several meetings with a persuasive policeman called Rajendra Chaturvedi, the superintendent of police of Bhind, with whom she negotiates the terms of her surrender to the government of Madhya Pradesh.
Is the film interested in any of this? Go on. Take a wild guess.
In the film, we see her and Man Singh on the run, tired, starved, and out of bullets. Man Singh seems concerned, practical, and stoical. Phoolan is crying and asking for her mother!!!
The next thing we know is that we’re at surrender. As she gives up her gun, she looks at Man Singh and he gives her an approving nod. Good girl! Clever girl! Good Clever Girl.
Phoolan Devi spent three and a half years in the ravines. She was wanted on forty-eight counts of major crime, twenty-two murder, the rest kidnaps-for-ransom and looting. Even simple mathematics tells me that we’ve been told just half the story. But the cool word for Half-truth is Greater Truth. Other signs of circular logic are beginning to surface.
Such as: Life is Art.
Art is not Real.
How about changing the title of the film to: Phoolan Devi’s Rape and Abject Humiliation: The True Half-Truth? How about sending it off to an underwater film festival with only one entry?
What responsibility does a biographer have to his subject? Particularly to a living subject? None at all? Does it not matter what she thinks or how this is going to affect her life?
Is he not even bound to show her the work before it is released for public consumption?
If the issues involved are culpable criminal offenses such as Murder and Rape—if some of them are still pending in a court of law—legally, is he allowed to present conjecture, reasonable assumption and hearsay as the unalloyed “Truth”?
Shekhar Kapur has made an appeal to the Censor Board to allow the film through without a single cut. He has said that the Film, as a work of Art, is a whole, and that if it were censored it wouldn’t be the same film. What about the Life that he has fashioned his Art from? He has a completely different set of rules for that.
It’s been several months since the film premiered at Cannes. Several weeks since the showings in Bombay and Delhi. Thousands of people have seen the film. It’s being invited to festivals all over the world. Phoolan Devi hasn’t seen the film. She wasn’t invited.
I met her yesterday. In the morning papers Bobby Bedi had dismissed Phoolan’s statements to the press—“Let Phoolan sit with me and point out inaccuracies in the film, I will counter her accusations effectively.” What is he going to do? Explain to her how it really happened? But it’s deeper than that. His story to the press is one thing. To Phoolan it’s quite another. In front of me she rang him up and asked him when she could see the film. He would not give her a definite date. What’s going on?
Private screenings have been organized for powerful people. But not for her. They hadn’t bargained for this. She was supposed to be safely in jail. She wasn’t supposed to matter. She isn’t supposed to have an opinion. “Right now,” the Sunday Observer says, “Bobby Bedi is more concerned about the Indian Censor Board than a grumbling Phoolan Devi.”
Legally, as things stand, in Uttar Pradesh the charges against her haven’t been dropped. (Mulayam Singh has tried, but an appeal against this is pending in the high court.) There are several versions of what happened at Behmai. Phoolan denies that she was there. More importantly, two of the men who were shot at but didn’t die say she wasn’t there. Other eyewitnesses say she was. Nothing has been proved. Everything is conjecture.
By not showing her the film but keeping her quiet until it’s too late to protest (until it has been passed by the censors and the show hits the road), what are they doing to Phoolan? By appearing to remain silent, is she concurring with the film version of the massacre at Behmai? Which states, unequivocally, that Phoolan was there. Will it appear as though she is admitting evidence against herself? Does she know that whether or not the film tells the Truth it is only a matter of time before it becomes the Truth? And that public sympathy for being shown as a rape victim doesn’t get you off the hook for murder?
Are they helping her to put her head in a noose?
On the one hand, the concerned cowboys Messrs Bedi & Kapur are so eager to share with us the abject humiliation and the domination of Phoolan Devi’s “soul,” and on the other they seem to be so totally uninterested in her. In what she thinks of the film, or what their film will do to her life and future.
What is she to them? A concept? Or just a cunt?
One last terrifying thing. While she was still in jail, Phoolan was rushed to hospit
al bleeding heavily because of an ovarian cyst. Her womb was removed. When Mala Sen asked why this had been necessary, the prison doctor laughed and said, “We don’t want her breeding any more Phoolan Devis.”
The state removed a woman’s uterus! Without asking her. Without her knowing. It just reached into her and plucked out a part of her! It decided to control who was allowed to breed and who wasn’t. Was this even mentioned in the film? No. Not even in the rolling titles at the end.
When it comes to getting bums on seats, a hysterectomy just doesn’t measure up to rape.
First published in Sunday, August 22, 1994.
THE GREAT INDIAN RAPE-TRICK II
I’ve tried. but I’m afraid I simply cannot see another point of view on this whole business. The question is not whether Bandit Queen is a good film or a bad film. The question is, should it exist at all? If it were a work of fiction, if the filmmakers had taken the risk that every fiction writer takes, and told a story, then we could begin to discuss the film—its artistic merit, its performances, its editing, the conviction behind its social comment, and so on. If this had been the case, I, as the writer of films that have been infinitely less successful, would not have commented.
The trouble is that Bandit Queen claims nothing less than “Truth.” The filmmakers have insured themselves against accusations of incompetence, exaggeration, even ignorance, by using a living human being.
Unfortunately, to protect themselves from these (comparatively) small risks, they had to take one big one. The dice were loaded in their favor. It nearly paid off. But then, the wholly unanticipated happened. Phoolan Devi spoiled everything by being released from prison on bail. And now, before our eyes, in delicious slow motion, the house of cards is collapsing.
As it folds softly to the floor, it poses the Big Questions. Of Truth. Of Justice. Of Liberty.
My Seditious Heart Page 88