Tags:
Journalism of Courage
It’s a year to the day five bullets tore a hole into the subaltern pin-up that was Phoolan Devi, never to be mended again.
The hole’s wide enough for anyone to crawl through it—her dry-eyed, dreamy-eyed husband, her combative sister, her old-as-sin first husband, the ones in search of a sordid story, the political leeches who sucked on her live skin and then slunk around her corpse for a few hours before crawling away.
And, the ghosts of her life, their hands still stretched out for justice — some from those who still rule them, the others from her.
She was murdered by the mysterious Sher Singh Rana alias Pankaj, who emerged from the mists of Dehra Dun two days after her death to announce, fittingly enough at a press conference, that he had levelled the score.
One Phoolan equals twenty Behmai Thakurs. Justice couldn’t have been done through the courts, it would have to grow an extra leg to crawl from hearing to hearing. So a gun sufficed where a gavel would have. The sidewinder sleeps well tonight.
Which Phoolan is in question here—the resident terror of the Chambal ravines, the Victim Whom Rape Followed or the camera junkie? It’s actually pretty easy to mythologise Phoolan: now when was the last time you heard of a Mallah child being spat on by her cousins, raped by her husband, raped by the police in custody, abducted and raped by dacoits, gang-raped and paraded naked, immortalised in cinema, elected to Parliament… It happens all the time, but never before was there such a grand merger of violence in just one life. The story’s so shocking it has to be part fact and part fiction. The story’s so real that it should never be written again.
Fame, politics, notoriety, domesticity, deliverance. They sat on Phoolan’s portly shoulders like pet bulbuls, always threatening to take flight. You would never forget the badtameezi that made Phoolan a Page 1 Story, you didn’t want to remember her subsequent embarrassments, her political naivete and her hokey marriage. Behmai blood on her hands, her violated body on her soul, the bad dacoit stumbled through the bad world of politics, blurring every image you tried to pin on her.
Fiery, nostril-flaring deadly dacoit? Aah, didn’t you want her, red bandana in all, in Bandit Queen. No wonder Shekhar Kapur didn’t want to make the transition from khaki pants to polyester sari. Responsible MP? That’s a breed rarer than Phoolan herself. Victim? Yes and no: After signing up with civil society, Phoolan played her own cards, however clumsily.
The Phoolan Devi story is dead. What lives on are the shrieks that must have fought through her clamped mouth as she was being raped, so many times. The tears of a torn woman, the blight and backwardness of her people, the violence of caste and elusiveness of justice. And the pin-up, torn but still up there. It’s an original—and will hopefully remain one of its kind.
