Every day, in
some neglected corner of this subcontinent, a Devi is born to fight against the
society that denies her.
Phoolan Devi — perhaps the most popular Indian woman of the late twentieth and
early twenty-first century — was struck down by bullets from an unknown
assassin’s gun. When I read the news in the papers, I stood bewildered. Why was
the trigger of a gun still required to send her into eternal exile, after she
had already been “killed” a thousand times over in public imagination? Dead was
that Phoolan Devi, who in truth had been nothing more than a woman from an
unlettered, backward caste in a society fractured by India’s caste hierarchies.
And yet my concern is not merely with Phoolan’s death, but with the writing of
this essay itself. Why should I hesitate to write on Phoolan Devi? At least a
dozen biographers have already written her life in book form; many others
contemplate doing so. To write on her is to stir a cauldron of sex, violence,
and love — a khichdi of sensations that the marketplace rewards handsomely. But
my trouble lies elsewhere. Let me recount a living episode, and the matter will
be clearer.
Twice before I
had written nine-column essays on Phoolan Devi. Once, I submitted a piece to
the editorial desk of a daily newspaper. It was duly published. But when I
opened the paper and cast my eye on my own text, I was struck dumb. Anyone
writing on a famous figure must inevitably repeat pronouns — “she,” “her,”
“hers.” In Bengali, we have the beauty of using pronouns that carry gradations
of respect. A person may be “Tini” (he/she with
honor), or “Se” (he/she in
common tone). We alternate between “Tanr” and “Tar” as the rhythm
requires. But in my published piece, every pronoun I had written for Phoolan —
“Tanr” (her, with
respect), “Tanke” (to her), “Tini” (she) — had been
editorially degraded into “Tar,” “Take,” “Se.” Even verbs were
flattened: “Korechen” became “Koreche,” “Thakten” became “Thakto.” In short, the
editorial policy was: when writing of the criminal Phoolan, no respect must be
afforded in grammar. Whether the editors were Chatterjees or Chakrabartys
mattered less to me than the deeper implication. Why is it that ministers with
chargesheets, chief ministers convicted of corruption, MPs and MLAs with blood
on their hands, Bollywood stars who have killed, underworld dons — all are
still granted the dignity of the honorific pronoun — but not Phoolan Devi? If a
former chief minister can be called “Tini” even when
convicted, why not Phoolan? Even in death, she was denied this honor.
I had watched
at least ten television interviews of Phoolan Devi. I was horrified at the
nature of the questions hurled at her — always about her family, her sex life,
her body. The same Indian press corps that never dared ask Nehru about Lady
Mountbatten, never dared question Indira Gandhi on her personal intimacies,
thought nothing of humiliating a backward-caste woman with vulgar
interrogations. The very name of “interview” was turned into molestation. Can
we even imagine today that Sonia Gandhi, Sushma Swaraj, Geeta Mukherjee,
Jayalalithaa, Mayawati, or Mamata Banerjee would ever be asked such questions?
In my eyes, Phoolan Devi deserves no less respect than these illustrious women
— indeed, in a misogynist Indian society, she towers above them. And even if
she were not “great,” could that ever justify the mockery, the obscene gossip,
the stripping of dignity across television channels and newspapers? The
character of our media is here revealed as the naked truth of Indian society
itself.
Such was the
society into which Phoolan Devi was born — utterly bereft of dignity. At the
age of eleven she was raped; by thirteen she was married off to a man four
times her age. Then the dacoits of Chambal shared her like loot, keeping her as
their mistress in turns. What choice did she have but to take up the gun as her
only path to freedom? In a Manu-worshipping, patriarchal, caste-ridden social
order — what other form of protest was open to her? Could she have chosen
education? But in a remote village where every man was illiterate, what chance
had a girl for true schooling? Indians know well how remote education is for
such women. Non-violence or romance was never her path. To retaliate against a
casteist and patriarchal order, Phoolan had no option but to seize arms and
teach the self-proclaimed guardians of society a lesson in their own language.
Yet when
Phoolan rose, when she struck back, when she carved dignity for herself — she
found no escape from her birth. From one perverse order she fell into another:
the cynical world of politics. Leaders of caste-based parties used her
popularity as electoral fodder. Even in death, the manner of her funeral
revealed the truth: that dacoit Phoolan or MP Phoolan, the caste-bound woman or
the public figure, had always been used and violated by society — but in
politics she was used far more cynically than ever in life.
Biographers
filled page after page with rape scenes; filmmakers stripped her naked for the
screen, only to pay her hush money later; politicians raised her like a
sacrificial effigy before their secular chariots. Again and again I thought:
our Manu-worshipping society raped MP Phoolan far more than it ever raped
dacoit Phoolan. In politics, she was a puppet in the hands of India’s
high-caste elite, exploited for Dalit votes and women’s votes alike. Did
Phoolan consent to her own exploitation? Perhaps. For the fight with the
Thakurs of Behmai, fought with guns, was far easier than the battle with
political predators, which required guile and manipulation beyond human
endurance. And above it all lay the vulnerabilities of ordinary human nature.
We have seen in
Indian politics that leaders from the underprivileged classes, when they rise
as the voice of their people, are gradually ensnared in the net of political
corruption. They are first made helpless puppets, then willing practitioners of
the same rotten culture. Lalu Prasad, Bangaru Laxman, Shibu Soren, Babulal
Marandi, Mayawati — all are blazing examples. In Phoolan’s case, politics did
not grant her such heights, but had she lived longer, her fate would likely
have been the same. One question troubles me still: why did dacoit-queen
Phoolan, after seven years of imprisonment without trial, choose not to become
a social reformer, but instead a political figure? After selling her
autobiography, she had no shortage of money. The answer is simple: politics
needed Phoolan to serve its ends, and Phoolan needed politics to escape the
hypocrisy of the justice system.
From time to
time we hear that in India, rape is punished more severely than murder. If that
is so, why was Phoolan, the murderer, put on trial — but the society that raped
a Dalit woman every day, in every necessity of life, never brought to the dock?
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