'A tragic life, a very tragic end'

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, JULY 26. Mr. Shekhar Kapur, director of the controversial film ``Bandit Queen'', based on the life of Phoolan Devi, has expressed surprise why she did not have enough security considering there had always been a threat to her from those wanting to take revenge for the Behmai massacre.

Mr. Kapur, who was criticised by Phoolan Devi for depicting too much overt sex and violence in the film, said her murder was ``a very tragic end to a very tragic life''. In a comment to The Times, he said it was sad this should have happened just when she seemed to be ``getting her life together.'' He believed that the Behmai massacre finally caught up with her. ``There has always been a threat to her from that source. I'm just surprised that she did not have more security.''

His comment came amid a media splash - obituaries in The Times, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph; an editorial in The Times in which she was mentioned in the same breath as Joan of Arc; a special cover story in The Guardian supplement which simply called her ``The Queen''; and personal reminiscences dripping with myths that invested a dacoit-turned-politician with a larger-than-life image.

Field day for media

For the British media, Phoolan Devi's was a quintessential Indian story of untouchability, poverty, violence, criminalisation of politics - the story of a ``journey from the bottom of India's caste ladder to Parliament - via murder, robbery and prison'', as The Guardian put it. The British media had a field day deciding whether to call her a ``Robin Hood'', a plain ``bandit'' or a ``bandit queen'' - a label which, like the film, reduced her to a cliche. A Telegraph correspondent who interviewed her six years ago remembered her in a ``tiger skin saree'' - an ``illiterate, low caste, diminutive woman'' who liked receiving telephone calls but ``could not dial the numbers to make calls herself'' because back in 1995 she still didn't know how to read.

``There was ultimately something childlike about her,'' the correspondent recalled echoing Mr. Kapur's impression of her as someone who had retained her ``earthy innocence''. While his film was about a woman who had had her innocence destroyed, when he met her he found that ``innocence intact''. Some would see that as an acknowledgement that, in the end, Mr. Kapur's ``bandit queen'' was not the same person as Phoolan Devi - an argument she repeatedly raised against the film.

Much of the media comment was dominated by Phoolan Devi's violent past and the shadow it continued to cast over her life. The Times, in a grand gesture, clubbed her with other ``warrior women'' in history. ``India's bandit queen joins the talking points of history'', it said in an editorial declaring ``her death puts her back in the ranks of women who became legends because they lived by the sword, who could not avoid dying by the sword and have had us talking about them ever since''.

For those, however, who saw her in Parliament day after day, the most enduring image is of a Phoolan Devi rushing into the ``well'' of the Lok Sabha at the slightest provocation and refusing to leave until she had made her point. Hacks in the press gallery never complained that she didn't make good copy.

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Section  : International
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