SUMMARY

 This lauded Indian drama focuses on the life of Phoolan Devi (Seema Biswas), a revered criminal who eventually went on to become a politician.

 The film details the hardships that Phoolan faced in her youth as a female member of a lower caste. Subject to sexual abuse at the hands of numerous men, Phoolan isn’t treated with respect until she falls in with a gang led by Vikram Mallah (Nirmal Pandey). Later, Phoolan forms her own gang and gains a remarkable level of notoriety across India.

There was a time in the early 1980s when Phoolan Devi, who led a gang of bandits in the desolate ravines of northern India, was a movie star. Little girls played with their Devi Dolls, and the media tracked her every move.

One of six children from a poor family, she was married at the age of 11, to a man who gave her parents a cow, and threw in a bicycle. Torn weeping from her mother’s arms, she was used by her husband as a beast of burden and taunted by the higher castes of the village where she now lived. Devi is forced into sex by her 33-year-old husband while still a child, as her mother-in-law listens in the next room. When she flees back to her parents, they will not take her, because her “place” is with her husband. Finally divorced, she has less status than ever before, is framed for a robbery, and her bail is offered by upper-caste men who expect sexual favors as their reward. Devi is by now in her later teens or early 20s. By the time she is kidnapped by a gang of bandits, she has already become such an outsider that this is a move up in society – especially when she is befriended by Vikram the only man in the gang  who treats her with respect. She has been hurt for so long by men that, although she wants to kiss and hold him, she keeps tearing away to strike at him.

And then comes the part of her life that made Phoolan Devi famous. As a bandit, she takes her place beside men in a society that refuses to believe a woman is capable of such a thing. Soon the leader of the area’s gangs allows her to run a gang of her own. The press is fascinated by her boldness, by the way she disguises herself as a policeman, by her practice of befriending young girls and interrupting the weddings of children. But her life is not a fairy tale, and after Vikram is killed by jealous upper-caste bandits, her existence becomes increasingly desperate. As her fame grows, her gang shrinks and her power fades. There has not been an Indian film like “Bandit Queen” before – at least not in my life .Roger Ebert( 1995)