The following morning, with her family, the members of her gang, and her lover and gang co-leader, Man Singh, gathered about her, Phoolan climbed the wooden steps of a twenty-three-foot-high dais, shaded by an awning of red, green, and yellow cloth. Not even the police had a photograph of her. Of course, nobody knew who Phoolan Devi was, and none of us had ever seen the Bandit Queen before. We chatted and exchanged stories every bit of incidental lore was taken down. Thus when her impending surrender at a lavish public ceremony was announced, nearly all the foreign journalists based in New Delhi (some seventy of us in all), accompanied by an equal number of Indian journalists, television-crew members, human-rights officials, feminists, and socialites, rushed to the village of Bhind. "Sometimes she sleeps with them first, before she bumps them off." The imagination of an entire nation had been captured by Phoolan. "For every man this girl has killed, she has slept with two," a police inspector told me at the time. But none was more romantic-or roguish-than Phoolan. For eight centuries India's dacoits have been imbued with roguish romance. Villagers admired them as daring buccaneers movies portrayed them as misunderstood rebels with a cause. Like dacoits before her, she and the various gangs to which she had been attached had roamed the rough wild country of the northern states of Uttar and Madhya Pradesh, pouncing on wayfarers like highwaymen of old. She was known as the Beautiful Bandit, the Goddess of Flowers, the Bandit Queen. In one incident, two years earlier, that became known as the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, she was said to have murdered twenty-two men. Nearly 300 policemen waited at the other end, some six miles away.įour years had passed since Phoolan Devi first entered the ravines she had a price of $10,400 on her head, and a score of murders and more than thirty cases of kidnapping and dacoity, or banditry, to her name.
Other than Chaturvedi, only the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh-the state's highest elected official-knew that she would be coming out of the ravines that night.
A man of medium height, in his middle years, he had painstakingly negotiated her surrender over a period of nearly a year. He was unarmed, at her insistence, although dressed in his uniform. From time to time she glanced back at Rajendra Chaturvedi, the police superintendent of the district of Bhind. Unmappable, twisting fissures rising as high as 250 feet, they were perfectly suited as dark, hidden passageways. The ravines were so narrow in some places that she could touch the walls on either side. 315 Mauser hung from her shoulder, swinging against her hip a long curved dagger was tucked into her belt a bandolier covered her chest. Early one evening in February of 1983-a bitterly cold evening, as she remembers it now-Phoolan Devi, draped in a brown wool blanket topped by a vibrant red shawl, led a group of men, twelve in all, through the ravines of the Chambal River Valley in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
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