The sun was about to rise as Phoolan Devi woke Man Singh, having decided that all other options had run out. The surrender ceremony could not be avoided or postponed. Chaturvedi was right. Nothing else was possible. Two buses were waiting in the compound of the Rest House, together with a fleet of police jeeps that wee to escort them to Bhind. She tucked her jumper into her jeans for warmth, put on her new shoes and picked up her red shawl. Man Singh was rinsing his mouth out and splashing his face with cold water in the adjoining bathroom, unimpressed by the comparative luxury of their surroundings, despite years of sleeping rough in the ravines. These things didn’t seem to matter to him, whereas Phoolan always examined anything that was new to her with the curiosity of a child.

“Where are the others?” she asked, adjusting the bandanna on her head. Her entire family was there. Chaturvedi had seen to that.

“Outside,” Man Singh replied. “They put up tents.”

“And my rifle?”

“Under the bed.”

It was then that she remembered his gentle touch and his worried face as he had taken the rifle from her side the night before, and she went to embrace him. “This is it then,” she said, retrieving her. 303 Mauser and examining it to make sure it was still loaded. He nodded.

As Phoolan Devi and Man Singh were about to enter the bus with members of their gang and her family, a photographer was positioning himself for a shot. Phoolan Devi flew at him, snatching at his camera. Man Singh took it from him and was trying to remove the film when Chaturvedi rushed to the man’s rescue, returning the camera to him saying, “Don’t cause any more confusion. Keep out of this.” The photographer fled, grateful that his camera had not been smashed to pieces by this crazy man with long tangled hair and eyes that looked as I they could kill.

Later, from prison, Phoolan Devi recalled “It was 6 a.m. when we started from there. I asked the ticket inspector sitting next to me to stop the bus, since I wanted to speak to the S P. Chaturvedi was in the other bus with Baba Ghanshyam’s gang. The bus came to a halt and the S P came out to meet me. He placed his hand over my head and asked me to be patient and not to worry. I then said that I would only go along with them if my brother, Shiv Narain, was given a government job. He was about fourteen at the time. I said, ‘If you don’t agree I will kill myself.’ So the S P agreed, called my brother out of the bus, put his name in his diary and said he had been admitted into the Madhya Pradesh police force as a cadet. After that we got back into the bus and all the way to Bhind he tried to explain thins to me to calm me down. When we reached Bhind we stopped at some college parade ground and I noticed a stage had been constructed at one end. I saw a crowd of people and was asked to change my clothes. We heard the sound of a helicopter overhead and thee were cries of ‘C M Sahib! C M Sahib!’ I rushed to Chaturvedi and said, ‘So, you’ve lied to me. You said I would surrender to the Mukhya Mantri, Arjun Singh, not to any C M Sahib.’ He explained that C M meant Chief Minister and was the English way of saying Mukhya Mantri and that the man who had just arrived was Arjun Singh.”

At the time of Phoolan Devi’s surrender in February 1983 I was working in London. A friend had been sending me press clippings from India, knowing that her story had fascinated me for some time. I wanted to find out more about her but she was thousands of miles away in an Indian prison and I had no funds for such a venture. It took me more than three years but eventually the money to research her story for a documentary film came through.

The Road to Gwalior

IN AUGUST 1986, I found myself in Bhopal, the capital city and administrative centre of Madhya Pradesh. I had come to seek official permission to interview Phoolan Devi in Gwalior Central Jail, an overnight train journey away to the north, towards Delhi.

It had been a discouraging day. The Chief Minister had changed. Arjun Singh, to whom Phoolan Devi had surrendered, had been replaced by Moti Lal Vora, who belonged to the same Congress Party that still ruled the country, but his allegiance was to another faction within it. His predecessor was his political rival. The Prime Minister in Delhi had also changed: Indira Gandhi had been assassinated and her son Rajiv had taken over. Different forces were at play. The whole political scenario had altered and I was not sure I understood it.

The Chief Minister was diplomatic but unsympathetic to my application to interview the dacoits awaiting trial in Gwalior jail. Grim, unsmiling, terse, he wanted to know my intentions as he concentrated on signing papers from various files, piled high on his desk. I explained hat I was a freelance researcher, that there was nothing “political” in my approach; I merely wanted to understand the nature of such people and to record some details about the lives they had led. He was unimpressed. I felt he was about to deny me permission, but he said he would look into the matter. I thanked him and left. There was not much else I could do or say. After I had waited for hours, getting stiff on a hard wooden bench outside his office, the meeting had lasted less than ten minutes. Many others were waiting to see him, mostly local politicians and businessmen, probably appealing for various favours and contracts.

Outside, sheltering from the sun’s blinding blaze, groups of villagers camped under trees scattered about the compound. Security police lounged around listlessly, their khaki uniforms drenched with sweat. The driver of my hired car had fallen asleep under one of the trees hardly surprising, since temperatures had reached more than 100°F in the shade. I woke him and we returned to the car. It was like climbing into a tin oven. The plastic seats were so hot that he had to find some water and wipe them down with a wet cloth. He wiped the steering-wheel too, which he could barely hold, and told me I was lucky to have met the Minister Sahib. Most of the people squatting in the grounds, he informed me, had been waiting three days or more; they had walked miles from surrounding villages. On the way back to the hotel, past Bhopal’s twin lakes, I began to absorb what he was saying and appreciate my “luck”. I even felt grateful for that awful wooden bench on which I had waited. At least there had been a fan in the room blowing hot air that had seemed little comfort at the time, but a fan nevertheless.

At the hotel reception desk I was handed a telegram from Bombay. It read: “PERMISSION TO INTERVIEW PHOOLAN DENIED STOP SHALL I COME TO GWALIOR ANYWAY QUESTION AIR TICKET CONFIRMED STOP”. I called my journalist friend in Bombay who works for the Times of India. She had interviewed Phoolan Devi at some length shortly after her surrender and had applied to follow up the story in order to introduce me. The jail authorities had refused.

My friend explained: “This makes Phoolan a sort of political prisoner. By rights, by the Indian Constitution, I or any other Indian journalist can petition Gwalior High Court, demanding access to an under-trial prisoner in the public interest.” She went on to say that she couldn’t do this, because her editor would not approve and she might lose her job if she went ahead without his support.

I said that in that case it was not worth the risk but that I would go to Gwalior anyway to try to make contact with Phoolan’s family. I had reached a dead end in Bhopal, so that night I caught a train to Gwalior.

The next morning, drinking coffee in another hotel room, I began to feel despondent, daunted by the task ahead. I was not sure where to begin and my mind was becoming clogged with self-doubt. I spoke the language but did not know the town or anyone in it. I had checked the price of hiring a car or taxi and found it too expensive even to contemplate. I was certain of one thing: meeting Phoolan Devi would take much longer to arrange than I had expected and my money would have to be stretched, if the idea was no to be abandoned altogether. The first thing I needed was transport, so I decided to hire a scooter-rickshaw a three-wheeled taxi built around the framework of a Lambretta, and less than half the price of a car. After some chaotic bargaining outside the railway station, I finally struck a deal with one of the drivers. He looked somewhat suspicious when the first place I asked to be taken was Gwalior Central Jail, which seemed to me the obvious starting-point.

Driving through the town, peering out of the sides of the scooter-rickshaw, I felt dwarfed, my eyes forced up towards Gwalior Fort, which stands high on a cliff like an ancient monolith, dominating the town and its inhabitants. It dates back to around the fifth century A D and is said to have been founded by a minor chieftain, Suraj Sen, influenced by the hermit Gwalipa, from whom the city gets its name.

Over the following centuries, both Hindus and Muslims have ruled from behind its stone walls, even today partially decorated with mosaic tiles of turquoise blue, green and yellow that catch the sunlight and still glitter, creating an impression of tremendous grandeur, despite the contrast of crumbling walls and weather-beaten, broken rock. From a distance, it looks like a fortress city in its own right. Babar, the first Moghul emperor, conquered it in 1528 and it remained in Muslim hands until the collapse of the Moghul empie, after which it returned to the Scindias, the local Hindu royal family. Just prior to the Moghul conquest, Raja Man Singh, the Rajpur ruler o the time, had added to its existing structure and constructed a palace which Babar described as “a pearl among the fortresses of Hind”. It is also reputed to have been the most inaccessible and therefore the most invincible fort in the country.

Below it, vast plains seem to swirl in dust, stretching dramatically for as far as the eye can see. The town’s activity, the movement of people and vehicles, give one the feeling of being pat of an army of ants, numerous but minuscule in significance. In addition, the scooter-driver told me, the city is considered sacred to the memory of the Rani of Jhansi and Tatya Tope who led the first war of independence against the British in 1857.

At the jail, I asked to see the superintendent, a Mr Saigal. I explained that I had just arrived from Bhopal, having met the Chief Minister, who was considering my application to interview Phoolan Devi and other dacoits who had surrendered in 1983. I started questioning him about his experience of them, asking for his own opinions. Flattered at being interviewed by a city woman, probably feeling the self-importance that officials often do, he opened up, much to my surprise, and invited me into an office outside the main prison gates. He asked me a few questions about myself and then began to talk.

He told me that Ghanshyam, who had surrendered at the same time as Phoolan Devi, had escaped from police custody while on a day’s parole and was now dead. He had been shot, ambushed by police informers who had infiltrated his gang a few months after he tried to regroup in the ravines of Uttar Pradesh. The superintendent told me thee was great enmity between Phoolan Devi and Malkhan Singh, which had caused problems in the jail. The two gangs had had to be separated after a fight broke out one night. Members of both gangs had been injured.

Malkhan Singh had been leader of the largest dacoit gang operating in the ravines. With more than 70 men under his command, and sophisticated automatic weapons at his disposal, he had been considered the “Godfather” of the Chambal Valley. He had surrendered to the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh a year before Phoolan Devi, in 1982.

Apparently, his ego was offended. “When he entered jail,” Saigal told me, “hundreds of reporters, thousands of villagers came to see him. But when Phoolan arrived, it was like a flash of lightning.

We had to call in extra police to keep the crowds away from the gates. No one asked to see Malkhan any more. They would stand around for hours just to catch a glimpse of Phoolan through the bars.”