Copyright 1991 Guardian Newspapers Limited  
The Guardian (London)

September 19, 1991

LENGTH: 395 words

HEADLINE: Books: Vengeful times in Chambal Valley

BYLINE: By AFSHIN RATTANSI

BODY:

India's Bandit Queen, by Mala Sen (Collins Harvill, pounds 15)

PHOOLAN Devi in cur rent media parlance would be classed as a yob or a hooligan. Mala Sen's beautifully crafted biography not only lights up the paths to crime but also picks out the stuff Indian nightmares are made of.

In 1981, Phoolan Devi, 24 years old, was charged with 48 criminal offences including 22 counts of murder. She was said to have slaughtered 22 high-caste Hindu men at Behmai, Uttar Pradesh, in revenge for her being gang-raped and her lover being killed. It was an act of vengeance that led some to worship the Bandit Queen of India as a reincarnation of Kali, the goddess often represented as maneater, quaffing men's blood as she protected the outlawed of society.

Sen, who in her research befriended Devi herself, spoke to an officer policing the Chambal Valley, the area of Madhya Pradesh patrolled by Devi's gang. He quoted from The Waste Land when asked to describe it. You get the picture.

She was brought up in a parched village, carrying the burdens of being low-caste, poor and a woman. A fairy-tale evil uncle conspired to steal her family's land and Devi was married off to a pervert for a cow and a goat. It's a tragically common story that has been repeated over the millennium and flogged to death by Bombay film producers. But Devi didn't get the fanfared white horse. Instead she decided to chart her own dharma, or fate, and vowed to kill as many men as possible from the landowning class and to take from the rich and give to the poor.

Mala Sen, a bit of a bandit herself when fighting for workers in this country, has written up a great story that emphasises the cultural over the psychological. Where a Norman Mailer - or even a Ridley Scott - might have homed in on how gang-rape causes a woman to pick up a rifle, Sen takes it for granted and expands on the tradition of banditry since the Delhi Sultan and the Moghuls.

The end of the book sees Phoolan Devi in prison hearing of how the terms of her surrender, in which she negotiated the protection of her family, are being broken against a chaotic backdrop of warring local and central government. Sen tells a ripping yarn that ought to be read by corrupt Indian politicians holidaying in Zurich as well as by the girls who watch drummer boys in our own little caste-war in Belfast.