Vikram was dejected and said, ‘Phoolan, there’s no going back now. They wee right about Sri Ram. They said he would cause divisions that would break up the gang and he has done just that. Some have been killed, others forced to run away and he is now the self-styled leader of a gang that is no longer ours. We cannot go back. We will have no allies and this time he will find it easy to kill me if he wants to. We must look or Baba Mustaqeem as soon as I am able to walk at least twenty kos a day.’

“Vikram soon regained enough strength for us to start making our way back to an old hideout where he had left concealed some arms and ammunition, accumulated from previous dacoities. Since only he, Bharat and Madho had known of this, he was sure they would still be there and they were. ‘Without arms’, he said, ‘we can’t even begin to form a new gang and there would be no point in going to Baba like paupers on the run from our own gang’.

“It was raining that day. We had become clever at disguises so no one suspected who we were. Sometimes we dressed as truck drivers, at other times we impersonated officials from various government departments, wearing uniforms that we had gathered from various raids and kidnaps. We camped in the jungle near a village in Etawah, where we had contacts, and lived like that for some time.

“We soon got word that Sri Ram and Lala Ram were looking for us and has sent messengers to our sympathizes in Orai and Devariya, where we had been recently. We also heard that Kusuma had left Delhi, following the news of Madho’s death, and was looking for us in the company of a man called Ujagar who had been a casual member of our gang, the same man Madho had once sent to Delhi to fetch her. Vikram said that before we decided what to do, we should visit our own villages, which would be the last place anyone would be looking for us.

“First, we went to Vikram’s village. Everyone was shocked to see him, thinking he was dead. He was surrounded by well-wishers and enjoyed the attention. He said he had returned after a visit to heaven and he introduced me as his wife. He said, ‘I’m not one to die so easily. I am protected by Kali. Which mother’s son would dare kill me?’ In many ways he had the spirit and bravado of a child! We met his brothers and sisters. His parents were away and his wife lived with his in-laws in another village.

“We left his village, without spending a single night there, and arrived at mine after three or four days. There, too, we got a warm and wonderful welcome. I was nervous of Maiyadin and what he might do, but Vikram went to his house and told him he had a month in which to return the land he had stolen from our family. If he didn’t, he would be shot. If he attempted to leave the village and call the police he would also be shot. We were alone so it was pure bluff but Maiyadin didn’t dare take the risk and I never set eyes on him while we were there. He probably thought the rest of our gang were waiting to ambush him on the outskirts of the village. No one knew how vulnerable we were.

“We left the village and a few days later ran into Sri Ram, who wept and embraced Vikram like a long-lost brother, telling me, ‘Phoolan, you are so brave, so clever, you’ve brought him back to us!’ Vikram believed him and they vowed never to betray each other’s trust and we found ourselves together once again. I asked Vikram what had happened to his earlier plan to meet up with Baba’s gang and Vikram just said, ‘The rivers are swollen. Can’t you see? He’s on the other side of the Gang so we must wait till after the rains.’ By this time I had been with Vikram for almost a year.”

The number of active gangs seemed to have multiplied and the police’s inability to contain the problem became an embarrassment to the Home Ministries of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajastan, from where the gang of Pan Singh Tomar operated, crossing and recrossing the borders of three separate administrative states, flouting all “police nets” that politicians claimed had been set for his capture. His story was making national news, and throughout the Chambal Valley stories were being told of his valour and integrity.

In 1958, Pan Singh Tomar had represented India at the Asian Games in Tokyo, winning a gold medal for his performance in the long-distance steeplechase. He had spent twenty-two years in the Indian army, which had trained and sponsored him. When he retired in 1971 as a subedar (non-commissioned officer), he returned to his village and got involved in a dispute over land on the side of his brother. They killed their enemy and took to the ravines. Much in the way Mansingh had done through the 1940s and 1950s, Pan Singh and his brother Matadin proceeded to wreak vengeance on all those associated with their former enemy. They kept themselves alive by looting villages, dominated by the caste of Gujars to which their enemies belonged. His gang soon acquired the reputation of being the “most dreaded” in the valley.

Pursued for months by police patrols, one day in November 1980 Matadin was shot dead in an encounter, near the village of Pawa, not far from Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh. For several hours, a gun battle raged between the police and Pan Singh, who was determined not to allow his brother’s body to end up in a police mortuary. Eventually, with no hope of any reinforcements reaching them in the ravines, the police retreated. Pan Singh Tomar, it is said, then lifted his dead brother and walked many miles, through Morena, crossing the border into Rajastan, so that he could give him a proper funeral, performing the final rites himself, at Bharatpur. This act of loyalty and tenacity made him a living legend.

Four days later, it is said, Pan Singh’s gang returned to the village of Pawa in search o the informer who had led the police to their hideout. With them was Matadin’s son, Balwant, who was now second-in-command. Unable to find the person they were looking for, they left. A police report states that “the terror-stricken Gujars had fled the village and taken refuge in Gwalior city”. Some months passed and in March 1981 the gang returned. Sughar, the man they wanted, was not in the village but his sixty-year-old father and four other suspected informers were shot dead under the terrified gaze of many witnesses. The gang left a note claiming responsibility and stating their reason.

Many similar events followed this first revenge killing, but what lives in the minds of local people is Pan Singh Tomar’s initial trek into Rajastan, where he cremated his brother. This adherence to prescribed religious ritual, particularly with respect to death, has been deeply felt in all societies but in India it has long been a fundamental obsession. For Hindus, death is accepted within the context of fate, but the soul can never be freed or released from the cycle of life and earthly desire unless the body is correctly handled before being reduced to ashes.

All dacoits, without exception, fear for the fate of their own souls, should their dead bodies end up in police hands. Dom Moraes, the poet and writer who now lives in Bombay, illustrates why. Commissioned by the Madhya Pradesh government to write a book about the state, he describes an event he witnessed while accompanying a police patrol which ambushed a small gang of armed men. I met him in 1986 and we spoke of it, but his account in Answered By Flutes, he told me, was the best record he had of the incident:

“Lajjaram,” said the police officer. He nudged the body, as though he and it were conspirators in its death, with the scuffed toe of his boot. “He was the gang leader.” Each syllable he spoke dropped into the depth of silence that had fallen after the firing, and produced a small echo. Violent action is always succeeded by this silence, and by an accompanying lassitude in which the mind becomes abnormally receptive and sensitized, like a convalescent’s. Every impression then assumes tremendous importance. The ears fill with echoes, the eyes drink distances, the living world is tremulously inhaled till all the shocked senses are healed, and there is a resumption of reality.

We were all, the dead man, the eleven policemen, the General and myself, together on the flat escarpment of Kalapahad, the black hill. Below us was the scrub-filled nallah [rivulet] in which the gang had holed up the previous night. Informers had apprised the police of their whereabouts. In the predawn darkness both ends of the nallah had been bottled up by the armed constables. The only way out was to climb a dry and different watercourse, mailed with rusty scales of shale, to the top of the black hill, where another police party of sharp-shooters had been placed. In the chilly dawn, the dacoit leader heard his name spoken for the last time, when over a loudhailer the police demanded his surrender.

The dacoits had stirred in the nallah scrub, then scattered down the declivity. Three escaped and two were captured. Only Lajjaram himself, rifle in hand, had scrambled up the watercourse to the hilltop. He had blundered blindly into a thicket of bullets, staggered halfway across the hilltop, bleeding as he came, dropped his rifle, thrown up his arms, spun around a pivot of shock and pain, and fallen on his back. He was recumbent now on the black rock in a thick sticky pool of blood. His grimy white vest had been dyed crimson. His checked lungi had ridden up to his crotch. His puny arms and legs were flung wide in an attitude of crucifixion. His tongue protruded from his open mouth: his eyes, also open, showed no pain or fear, only the complete vacancy of the newly and violently dead.

“That’s the way they die,” said the police officer. The dawn sky was cloudy and cool, and farmers were already at their work in the fields below. A glimmer of distant water showed from the Tigra reservoir. Winged things infested the rough pelt of the sky overhead, pilgrim ants were already flocking down the bloodtrail that marked the dacoit’s rush towards death, the blueflies hovered like microscopic helicopters above the open eyes, assessing the possibilities of breakfast. The country rifle he had carried lay near the body, a crude weapon with a chipped wooden stock. A policeman pulled the lungi down or decency and we saw the bandolier of bullets strapped around the skinny hips.

“The gang was a small one,” the police officer told me, “but vicious. This fellow had a high price on his head. Now that he’s dead, the gang is finished. Those who escaped may try and survive on their own, but they won’t last out.” He issued orders: two of the policemen took the corpse by the heels and dragged it away to a waiting halftrack on the slope. It was picked up and thrown into the back, between the seats. Some of the consables climbed in, to occupy these seats, and since the body was in the way, used it as a footrest. The lungi had rucked up once more, but this time nobody bothered to pull it down, or to close the eyes and mouth. The halftrack rumbled slowly downhill.

Later, at Tigra police station, the body was thrown in the dust of the courtyard and photographed from various angles for the official record. Tea was made, and we sipped it inside the station. The corpse was left in the courtyard.

“If no relative claims it,” said the officer, “we shall have to dispose of it ourselves. In the circumstances, it’s unlikely that any relative will.” One of the policemen outside, laughing, placed his foot on the body and suggested that he be photographed in the attitude of a successful shikari [hunter]. The officer ordered him away. “Don’t think too badly of him,” he said to me. “You haven’t seen policemen killed, or any of the atrocities in the local villages.”

Lajjaram, I discovered later, had accompanied Pan Singh Tomar to the village of Pawa where five men had been killed, just three days before his own death. It was March 1981. When I visited the village in 1987 and villagers realized we had come to research the story of baghis for a film, the hut we had been invited into was soon corwded and we were informed hat “the great Pan Singh Tomar” had put their village on the map. Despite all the terror they had no doubt felt in the past, only the legend of the athlete-turned-baghi remained. No one seemed to have heard of Lajjaram.

Religious concerns surrounding rituals in death are so deeply felt that William Sleeman’s cousing, Dr Henry Spry, who was medical officer in charge Saugor Jail in the 1830s, made note of an extraordinary event he witnessed around that time when some 583. Thugs were in custody, with “cartloads more” arriving every day. He says, referring to a group of men who had been sentenced to death:

When morning came, numerous hackeries drew up at the gaol door, taking five men in each.

They looked dreadfully haggard. As one cart was laden after the other,

it was driven away, surrounded by sepoys with fixed bayonets and loaded muskets.

The place appointed for the execution was on the north side of the town of Saugor, about a mile and a half from the gaol.