No stigma is attached to being a dacoit; in their own territory they are known as bagis or rebels. Hindi movies, notably the box-office hit of all times Sholay (Flames), in which the hero is a dacoit, has added romance to the profession of banditry. It is said that a song entitled: ‘Shall we kill you or shall we let you go’ is Phoolan Devi’s favourite.
Dacoit gangs are well-equipped with automatic weapons, including self-loading rifles mostly acquired through raids. A police note on anti-dacoity operations records that Jalaun district which includes Behmai has fifteen gangs of between ten to thirty members each operating in the area. Phoolan Devi and her current paramour, Man Singh Yadav, have fifteen men with them. In the last six months the police have had ninety-three encounters with dacoits in which they killed 159, captured 137; forty-seven surrendered themselves. 439 still roam about the jungles and ravines, hunting and being hunted.
I sat on the parapet of the village well on the same spot from where Phoolan Devi had announced her arrival in Behmai a year-and-a-half earlier. In front of me sat village men, women and children and the police escort provided for me. An old woman wailed: ‘That Mallahin killed my husband and two sons. May she die a dog’s death!’ A man stood up and bared his belly which showed gun-shot scars; another bared his buttocks and pointed to a dimple where a bullet had hit him.
‘Can any of you tell me why Phoolan Devi came to this village and killed so many people?’
No one answered.
‘Is it true that Lal Ram Singh and Shri Ram Singh were in Behmai?’
A chorus of voices answered: ‘No, we have never seen them.’
‘Is it true that a few months before the dacoity they had brought Phoolan Devi with them, raped her for several weeks before she managed to escape?’
‘Ram! Ram,’ protested some of them. ‘We had never seen the Mallahin in this village before the dacoity.’
‘Why then did she ask for the two brothers? How did she know her way about this village?’
No one answered.
‘You will not get anything out of these fellows,’ said the inspector of police to me in English. ‘You know what these villagers are! They never tell the truth.’
I gave up my cross-examination and decided to go round Behmai. I started from the village shrine with the Shiva trident, came back to the well and then to the embankment where she had killed the twenty men. I went up a mound where the police had set up a sentry-box from which I could get a bird’s-eye view of the village, the river Jamuna and the country beyond. The police sentinel on duty who had been in the village for several weeks volunteered the following information: ‘Sir, I think I can tell you why Phoolan Devi did what she did. You see that village across the Jamuna on top of the hill? It is called Pal, it is a Mallah village. Mallahs used to come through Behmai to take the ferry. Thakur boys used to tease their girls and beat up their men. I am told there were several instances when they stripped the girls naked and forced them to dance. The Mallahs appealed to Phoolan Devi to teach these Thakurs a lesson. She had her own reasons as well. Her lover Bikram Singh had been murdered by Thakurs Lal Ram Singh and his twin brother Shri Ram Singh. And they had kept her imprisoned in this village for several weeks, raping and beating her. She managed to escape and rejoin her gang.’ She also suspected that these fellows have been informing the police of her movements. It was revenge, pure and simple.’
~
‘For every man this girl has killed she has slept with two,’ said the superintendent of police in charge of ‘Operation Phoolan Devi’. The police estimate the number of men slain by her or one of her gang in the last year-and-a-half to be over thirty. If that is so, Phoolan Devi could claim mention in the Guinness Book of World Records for sex without payment. There is no way of finding out the exact number of men she murdered or she was laid by. But it is certain that not all the killings nor the copulations were entirely of her choosing. On many occasions she happened to be with bandits who went trigger happy; and being the only woman in a gang of a dozen or more she was regarded by them as their common property. She accepted the rules of the game and had to give herself to them in turn. It was more being resigned to being raped than itching for sex like a nymphomaniac.
I was able to reconstruct Phoolan Devi’s past by talking to her parents, sisters and one of her lovers, and cross-checking what they told me with a statement she made to the police on 6 January 1979, the first and the only time she was arrested. This was in connection with a robbery in the house of her cousin with whom her father had a dispute over land. Some stolen goods were recovered from her. She spent a fortnight in police custody. Her statement is prefaced by a noting made by the officer. He describes her as ‘about twenty years old; wheatish complexion, oval face short but sturdily built’. Phoolan Devi stated: ‘I am the second daughter of a family of six consisting of five girls. The youngest is a boy, Shiv Narain Singh. We belong to the Mallah caste and live in village Gurh-Ka-Purwa. At the age of twelve I was given away in marriage to a forty-five-year-old widower, Putti Lal.’ Then she talks of her second ‘marriage’ to Kailash in Kanpur. The rest of her life-story was given to me by her mother, Muli. ‘Phoolan Devi was too young to consummate her marriage and came back to us after a few days. A year or two later we sent her back to her husband. This time she stayed with him for a few months but was unhappy. She came away without her husband’s permission, determined not to go back to him.’ It would appear that she had been deflowered. Her mother describes her as being ‘filled up’—an Indian expression for a girl whose bosom and behind indicate that she has had sex. It would appear that she had developed an appetite for sex which her ageing husband could not fulfil. Her parents were distraught: a girl leaving her husband brought disgrace on the family. ‘I told her to drop dead,’ said her mother. ‘I told her to jump in a well or drown herself in the Jamuna; we would not have a married daughter living with us. Putti Lal came and took away the silver ornaments he had given her and married another woman. What were we to do? We started looking for another husband for her; but it is not easy to find a husband for a discarded girl, is it?’ she asked me. Phoolan Devi kept out of her parents’ way as much as she could by taking the family’s buffaloes out for grazing. She picked up a liaison with the son of the village headman. (In rural India such affairs are consummated in lentil or sugarcane fields.) The headman’s son invited his friends to partake of the feast. Phoolan Devi had no choice but to give in. The village gossip-mill ground out stories of Phoolan Devi being available to anyone who wanted to lay her. Her mother admitted: ‘The family’s pojeesun (position) was compromised; our noses were cut. We decided to send her away to her sister, Ramkali, who lives in village Teonga across the river.’
It did not take long for Phoolan Devi to find another lover in Teonga. This was a distant cousin, Kailash, married and with four children. Kailash had contacts with a dacoit gang. He gives a vivid account of how he was seduced by Phoolan Devi: ‘One day I was washing my clothes on the banks of the Jamuna. This girl brought her sister’s buffaloes to wallow in the shallows of the river. We got talking. She asked me to lend her my cake of soap so that she could bathe herself. I gave her what remained of the soap. She stripped herself before my eyes. While she splashed water on herself and soaped her bosom and buttocks she kept talking to me. I got very excited watching her. After she was dressed, I followed her into the lentil fields. I threw her on the ground and mounted her. I was too worked up and was finished in no time. I begged her to meet me again. She agreed to come the next day at the same time and at the same place.
‘We made love many times. But it was never enough. She started playing difficult to get. “If you want me, you must marry me. Then I’ll give you all you want,” she said. I told her I had a wife and children and could only keep her as my mistress. She would not let me touch her unless I agreed to marry her. I became desperate. I took her with me to Kanpur. A lawyer took fifty rupees from me, wrote something on a piece of paper and told us that we were man and wif
e. We spent two days in Kanpur. In the day time we went to the movies; at night we made love and slept in each other’s arms. When we returned to Teonga, my parents refused to take us in. We spent a night out in the fields. The next day I told Phoolan Devi to go back to her parents as I had decided to return to my wife and children. She swore she would kill me. I have not seen her since then. But I am afraid one of these days she will get me.’
‘What does your Phoolania look like?’ I asked Kailash. ‘I am told her sister Ramkali resembles her.’
‘Phoolan is slightly shorter, lighter skinned and has a nicer figure. She is much better looking than Ramkali.’
‘I am told she uses very bad language.’
‘She never spoke harshly to me; to me she spoke only the language of love.’
Phoolan Devi had more coming to her. A few days after she had been turned out by Kailash, at a village fair she ran into Kailash’s wife, Shanti. Shanti pounced on Phoolan, tore her hair, clawed her face and in front of the crowd that had collected abused her: ‘Whore! Bitch! Home-breaker!’ What was known only to a few hamlets now became common knowledge: Phoolan was a slut. As if this were not enough, the village headman’s son who was under the impression that Phoolan was exclusively at his beck and call heard of her escapade with Kailash. He summoned her to his house and thrashed her with his shoes. Thus at the age of eighteen Phoolan found herself discarded by everyone: her parents did not want her, her old husband had divorced her, her second ‘marriage’ had come to naught, she had been laid by men none of whom was willing to take her as a wife. It seemed to her that no one in the world wanted to have anything to do with her. She had only two choices before her: to go to some distant city and become a prostitute, or kill herself. There were times she considered throwing herself into the well.
Unknown to her there was someone who had taken a fancy to her. This was young Bikram Singh, a friend of Kailash and member of a gang of dacoits led by a man called Babu Gujjar. Bikram Singh had seen Phoolan about the village and heard stories of her performance in the lentil fields. One afternoon he came to Gurh-Ka-Purwa with some of his gang and bluntly told Phoolan’s parents that he had come to take away their daughter. Phoolan was adamant. ‘I will talk to you with my sandals,’ she said spitting on the ground. Bikram hit her with a whip he was carrying, Phoolan Devi fled from the village and went to stay with her other sister, Rukmini, in village Orai. It is there that she heard that there was a warrant of arrest against her and Kailash for the dacoity in the house of her cousin. The man who took her to the police station raped her before handing her over. She spent a fortnight in gaol. When she returned home, Bikram came to see her again. He threatened her: ‘Either you come with me or I take your brother Shiv Narain with me.’ Phoolan was very attached to her only brother, he was just eleven years old and studying in the village school. After some wrangling, she agreed to go with Bikram.
Kailash describes Bikram Singh as fair, tall and wiry. Bikram was obviously very taken by Phoolan. He had her long hair cropped. He gave her a transistor radio and cassette recorder as she was inordinately fond of listening to film music. He bought her a khaki shirt and jeans. He taught her how to handle a gun. She proved a very adept disciple and became a crack-shot.
For the first time in her life Phoolan felt wanted by someone. She responded to Bikram’s affection and began to describe herself as his beloved. She had a rubber stamp made for herself which she used as letterhead in the letters she had written for her. It reads: ‘Dasyu (dacoit) Sundari (beauty), Dasyu Samrat Bikram Singh Ki Premika’ (Beloved of Bikram Singh, emperor of dacoits).
Being ‘the beloved of Bikram’ did not confer any special privileges on Phoolan. Whether she liked it or not, she had to service the rest of the gang. At the time the leader happened to be Babu Gujjar, a singularly rough customer. He had his own way of expressing his superiority over his gang. He liked to have sex in broad daylight and in front of the others. So Phoolan Devi had to submit to being ravished and brutalized by Babu Gujjar in public. When her turn came to be made love to by Bikram, she complained to him about the indignity. By then Bikram had developed a strong sense of possession over Phoolan Devi. He did not have the courage to admit it, but one night while Babu Gujjar was asleep, he shot him in the head. Bikram Singh became the leader of the gang and at Phoolan’s insistence forbade others from touching her. There wasn’t much resentment because the gang soon acquired another woman, Kusum Nain, who happened to be better-looking than Phoolan Devi. Kusum, a Thakur, attached herself to the Thakur brothers, Lal Ram Singh and Shri Ram Singh. The two women became jealous of each other.
Despite her many unpleasant experiences with men, Phoolan Devi did not give up her habit of cock-teasing. She sensed that her full bosom and rounded buttocks set men’s minds aflame with lust. Nevertheless she persisted in bathing in the presence of the men of her gang. One gangster, now in police custody, who had known her as well as Kusum Nain and Meera Thakur (other female dacoits since then slain) vouches for this: ‘The other girls were as tough as Phoolan but they observed certain proprieties in the company of men. They would go behind a tree or bushes to take a bath; not Phoolan; she took off her clothes in front of us as if we did not exist. The other girls used language becoming to women; Phoolan is the most foul-mouthed wench I have ever met. Every time she opens her mouth she uses the foulest of abuse: bhosreekey, gaandu (bugger), madarchod, betichod (daughter-fucker).’
The inspector of police has in his files a sheaf of letters written to him on behalf of Phoolan Devi. They are a delightful mixture of the sacred and the profane, of high falutin Hindi and sheer obscenity. The one he read out to me began with salutations to the Mother Goddess, under her printed letterhead: ‘Jai Durga Mata. Dacoit Beauty, Beloved of the Dacoit Emperor Bikram Singh.’ The text ran somewhat as follows:
Honourable & Respected Inspector General Sahib, I learn from several Hindi journals that you have been making speeches saying that you will have us dacoits shot like pye-dogs. I hereby give you notice that if you do not stop bakwas (nonsense) of this kind, I will have your revered mother abducted and so thoroughly fucked by my men that she will need medical attention. So take heed.
It is more than likely that Bikram Singh, besides keeping Phoolan Devi exclusively for himself, also claimed his right as the leader to enjoy the company of Kusum Nain as well. This irked the Thakur brothers. They left Bikram’s gang and looked out for an opportunity to kill him. On the night of 13 August 1980, they trapped and slew Bikram Singh. It is believed that the murder was committed in Behmai and the Thakurs unceremoniously kicked Bikram’s corpse before it was thrown into the river.
Lal Ram Singh and Shri Ram Singh kept Phoolan Devi in Behmai. They brutalized and humiliated her in front of the entire village. One night, on the excuse of wanting to relieve herself, Phoolan Devi managed to vanish in the darkness. She crossed the Jamuna to the Mallah village, Pal. From there she got in touch with the Muslim gangster Baba Mustaqeem and pleaded with him to help her avenge the murder of Bikram Singh. Mustaqeem agreed. This is how she came to Behmai on the afternoon of 14 February 1981.
~
Gurh-Ka-Purwa is idyllically situated on hill slopes that dip into the None river on one side and level out on the sands of the Jamuna on the other. The headman’s double-storeyed house overlooks the None. Alongside it are rows of mud huts with brick-tiled roofs which face the Jamuna. One of the meanest looking is that of Devi Deen and Muli—Phoolan Devi’s parents. Apart from cooking utensils and charpoys, all they have is a pet partridge in a wicker cage. At the time I went to see them they had their younger married daughter, Ramkali, visiting them and two unmarried girls with them. Their only son Shiv Narain was at school. The family have got used to the limelight that Phoolan Devi’s exploits have focussed on them. ‘One crowded hour of glorious life’, is to them ‘worth an age without a name’. They have been visited by pressmen, photographers and many others who come to whet their curiosity. Old Muli now varnishes her nails and when
a visitor comes wears whatever silver jewellery she owns. Ramkali wears lipstick and rouge and knows how to strike poses like a film star. She is an uncommonly attractive young woman with large almond-shaped eyes which she uses like side-winder missiles, a full bosom and slender waist. If Phoolan Devi is anything like her—and most of those who have seen both the sisters are of the opinion that she is better-looking then Ramkali—she must be something.
Not a Nice Man to Know Page 7