She was rushed to hospital but died before she could make a statement, according to Rukhmini. Police records say it was suicide, but the reasons for such a suicide are equally mysterious since, like Rukhmini, she loved her husband and had come to Gwalior in order to give Phoolan moral support, with every intention of returning to her husband. Soon after this, Devidin died, his case over the land dispute with Maiyadin still unresolved. Because of her quarrel with her mother and brother, Phoolan Devi was not informed of the event until after the funeral.

By mid 1990, V. P. Singh was Prime Minister of India and the Thakurs of Uttar Pradesh, it appears, gained a new sense of confidence. I arrived in Gwalior in June that year and went to see Rukhmini at the police flats, where she lived in two rooms with her three children, next door to her brother, who had by then married a city-educated young woman called Shoba. I knew of the enmity within the family so did not knock on his door. I was let into Rukhmini’s rooms by her daughter. Usha, who sent her younger brother, Santosh, to call their mother from a neighbour’s flat. “Mausi, [Aunty] terrible things have happened,” the little girl told me. “Mummy will explain.”

I laughed while Rukhmini told her it was safe in Gwalior and had recently given birth to a calf. Trying to draw on her impressions, I asked if she had seen Maiyadin recently.

She spat in the sand and said, “He is the first one she should have killed. Yes, he’s still around, behaving like a bitch on heat chasing Thakurs!” She asked me how we had reached the village and I told her the jeep was waiting for us some six or eight kilometres away. I explained that we had walked from there because the driver had said the road was too rough for him to drive any further. Greatly excited, she asked if she could accompany us back in order to take a ride. She had never sat in any kind of vehicle before. I tried to dissuade her, saying our plans were uncertain and that the jeep was full. Rukhmini nudged me and said, “She’s been alone all her life. Why not? We can manage.” I asked how she would get back to the village. She pointed to the river and said, “I can swim better then Phoolan!”

Later that night, we went to the village of Teoga, Ramkali’s village, downstream across the river. I was introduced to an elderly widow whose nephew owned a cloth shop in Kalpi and was a song writer. She told me he had written a song about Phoolan and other baghis and had been arrested at one of his concerts for romanticizing “badmaashs” (“anti-social elements” according to newspaper reporters in India). I asked if we could send him a message in order to have a concert in the village, offering to send the jeep and the driver to pick him up. She said that would make him suspicious and sent her grandson instead on a bicycle.

Much to our disbelief and amazement, he turned up around eleven o’clock that night, accompanied by three musicians, all of them and their equipment on bicycles. His aunt sent messengers, mostly small children, through the village saying the concert would begin at midnight outside Ramkali’s home.

While the family rushed around making various arrangements, bringing extra bucketloads of water from the well; sweeping their courtyard; I spoke to the musician-composer, who was called Devi Gulam. (He had once helped Moola find a lawyer when Phoolan was first victimized by the police.) I asked him about his name, saying it was an unusual combination “Devi” in Hindu means goddess and “Gulam” in Urdu means slave appearing to be a mixture of male and female, Hindu and Muslim connotations. He shrugged his shoulders humorously and said, “That’s what my mother called me. According to the Hindu scriptures we are all half-man and half-woman; according to present trends, Muslims have been enslaved by Hindus. Anyway, I did not choose my name, it was my mother’s way of thinking and she’s now dead.” As he spoke, in a somewhat distracted manner, he was busy concentrating on what he was doing. He was incredibly meticulous and professional in his manner, setting up microphones that came out of a dusty old suitcase, laying out straw mats for the musicians to sit on, practising chords, turning tribal drums and a harmonium.

By midnight, almost three hundred people had gathered. They sat on the walls and steps of the hut and spread into the alleyways beyond. A loudhailer was brought and musician began to announce the concert, calling out to the whole village, saying he was singing songs of history, songs about baghis. I was given permission to record the concert on my Walkman which was all I had by way o technology. The concert lasted some three hours and there was much coming and going. Quite spontaneously, a group of women collected close to the singers, providing a chorus. Devi Gulam responded by teaching them the words and instructing them when to join in. It was all highly organized in the midst of what seemed to be utter chaos.

The song about Phoolan Devi was half-written and the singer improvised as he went along, interrupting the melody to check facts with me and members of the family who sat nearby. It does not translate well without the music and the chorus of women, but here are a few lines which may give some idea of its spirit:

Phoolan was the one to lead us

When the chieftain Vikram died,

Phoolan took the road to leadership

After Vikram died,

With her rifle by her side.

Then she went to see Mustaqeem

Told the Baba all her woes

Asked Mustaqeem for assistance

In the battle with her foes.

(Chorus)

She was walking tall,

Taunting them all,

Answering the call

After Vikram died,

With her rifle by her side.

Then she went to doomed Behmai

And sent for the enemy Thakur clan.

Though none can say how or why,

People gathered, as if by plan.

(Chorus)

Phoolan’s pain, who can understand it,

Revenge that boiled up in her heart

And made her walk the ways of a bandit?

Soon the shooting would have to start.

(Chorus)

In Behmai the bullets were flying,

Bodies were dropping one by one.

She left her enemies dead or dying,

Walked off all, her vengeance done.

(Chorus)

Throughout the concert, village came forward and placed money in a bowl that had been placed before the musicians; small amounts, loose change and rupee notes. It was the tradition; an unasked-for but accepted fee or the travelling troupe. We contributed larger amounts in a similar manner and go the same ceremonial response as those who had given aluminium coins.

Back in Gwalior a few days later, we sat and listened to the tape in my hotel room. Shiv Narain, who had the best musical ability in the family, transcribed the words and practised to the accompaniment of brass ashtrays and drum beats on a table, much to everyone’s amusement. He said he would visit Phoolan in prison the next morning, with Moola and Rukhmini, to sing her the song. I offered him my Walkman and the tape but he said it was likely to be confiscated. Phoolan, he said, would have to listen to it without the music.

Politics and “Technicalities”

IN FEBRUARY 1993, ten years after she and her gang of seven men laid down their weapons, Phoolan Devi found herself virtually isolated in single cell in Gwalior Central Jail. All the men had been released in accordance with the verbal agreement they had collectively negotiated. The Special Unit of the prison, where she had lived with Man Singh and other members of her gang, was now occupied by others with political clout of one sort or another. They had also inherited the vegetable garden she had so painstakingly cultivated over the years in order to supplement the daily prison diet of dal and ice and to pass time. She had become the last captive of that era of rural banditry. A prisoner to whom neither legal nor constitutional rules seemed to apply; a woman to whom the press no longer had any access as a result of red-tape designed to deter the most determined of journalists. The country had itself undergone violent change following the gruesome and senseless assassination of Rajiv Gandhi on the night of 21 May 1991 in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. In the aftermath of his death, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a hegemonic group who seek Hindu supremacy in the country, had swept to power in both Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, challenging the very foundations of secular democracy.

Against this backdrop, Phoolan was locked in a tortuous battle with the Indian courts in a bid to gain the freedom she had been promised in 1983. As she puts it: “Meri bilkul kuch sunahi nahin ho rahi hai.” [“Absolutely no one hears my case”]. In March 1992 she submitted a petition through the jail authorities to the Supreme Court in Delhi. The bench of judges refused to hear it, saying they Did not understand Hindi despite the fact that Hindi is claimed to be the national language by government decree. The petition, they ruled, should have been submitted in English, and the case was adjourned, with no fixed date for the next hearing.

“Bahana!” (Excuses!) was Phoolan’s response.

In Delhi I met Phoolan’s lawyer, Kamini Jaiswal, a gentle feminist and an advocate of the Supreme Court who had in the past represented the victims of the Bhopal gas disaster. She told me that the petition submitted in March 1993 had been an appeal against extradition to Uttar Pradesh, where Phoolan believed she would be executed or assassinated. She said she had decided to amend the petition, appealing for Phoolan’s release and the quashing of all charges on the grounds that all her compatriots had been freed and that a verbal agreement existed for her to be released after eight years, as had happened with other decoit gangs in the past. The case was listed for hearing on 12 October, then relisted for 5 November but, for “technical and legal reasons”, the amended petition was not heard. Instead the judges considered the earlier petition, which had by that stage been translated into English. They ruled that Phoolan should not be sent to Uttar Pradesh and that she should remain in Gwalior until the central and state governments responded to her petition in writing.

I decided to go to Gwalior in order to explain the situation to Phoolan, who had not been present in court. I began to communicate with her through her sister, Rukhmini, and the first note I received from her read:

You ask how I am. I walk and talk in my sleep. I cannot eat. What more is there to say? The paperwallahs continue to write lies about me. There is an article in the Hindi press which says I am so depressed that I am ready to kill myself. I have not said that to any reporter. Please remember, didi [Sister], if I die in prison it will not be by my own hand. You must tell the whole world that.

She also informed me that Man Singh was living like a fugitive, unable to sleep two nights in the same village or town, except Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh, which offered the anonymity of a sprawling industrial metropolis. A member of their gang had been killed three days after his release from a U P jail. His body had been discovered riddled with bullets in a field on the outskirts of his ancestral village. He had been working on the land allocated to him by the government in accordance with the verbal agreement of 1982-83. She asked me if I could somehow arrange for Man Singh to get a gun licence for self-protection. “If he has a licence, he can come to Gwalior to see me. All Malkhan Singh’s men are armed.”

I explained to Rukhmini that getting a gun licence was not within my power but that I would go and see Malkhan Singh in order to ascertain how he had got his. If it was within Rajendra Chaturvedi’s power, who was posted in Bhopal at the time, I said I could perhaps explain the situation to him. Rukhmini looked extremely apprehensive and warned me of Malkhan’s hostility to Phoolan. She wondered if it would be safe to visit him and stressed that he would not, in any case, give me any information that might assist Phoolan or Man Singh. I said I wanted to interview him about his involvement with the BJP as I had read an article in the Bombay based Sunday Observer which claimed that he had delivered block votes to the party during local elections, after his release from prison. The article had criticized the “strong-arm tactics” used to win such seats.

to be continued...