Unit 3: Bandit Queen

In 1983, legendary female bandit Phoolan Devi surrendered to authorities.

Director Shekhar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen is based on an account given during her eleven years in prison and covers the years from her marriage at age eleven to her surrender. The years between are filled with rape, violence, gang warfare.

Just how close the movie comes to historical fact is subject to debate. (Phoolan herself sued to keep the movie from being shown in India.) In reviewer Damian Cannon’s words, the film “…doesn’t provide the exact truth but an interpretation which shows what the reality was like.”

I do not think that the director intended Bandit Queen as a “…powerful indictment of Indian society…” as a whole, which is Cannon’s conclusion. Instead, the remote village setting and the surrounding stark hills suggest a world outside of contemporary Indian society.

I do not agree with reviewer Scott Rosenberg’s opinion that Bandit Queen “…is pretty clearly a feminist film…” While it is tempting to regard this as a feminist film, Bandit Queen fights back against such a pat label. Phoolan is marked as someone – some thing - less than others by her caste as well as by her sex and the subject of caste is a much tougher one for a non-Indian and non-Hindu to grasp.

I agree with Damian Cannon that Phoolan Devi is not portrayed as a feminist and that “…her fight back against repression is a personal obsession, fuelled by the white-hot rage of human suffering.”